Pre-build Update #3 – Specification Set, Garage Finished and Line Drawings

Purplemeanie Specification Set

This week we had a couple of trips over to the Williams car showroom. The first trip was to confirm the final specification of the car. We ended up with the following:

• 420 (2-litre Ford Duratec engine tuned to 210bhp)
• R-spec (track specification)
• Series 5 (Wider bodied SV)
• Lowered Floors (2″ lowered floors)
• 5 Speed Gearbox (Williams didn’t recommend the soon to be discontinued 6 speed)
• Full weather windscreen and hood (the R usually comes with the aero screen and that’s not in line with my all-year aspirations)
• 15″ Orcus Wheels (I like the low profiles even though some say the 13″s are better)
• Ventilated Discs and Quad Callipers (you can never have enough braking)
• Heater (again all weather aspirations)
• Leather Seats (found these to be better for my less than perfect lower back)
• Armrests
• Momo Quick-release Steering Wheel (why not)
• Battery Cutoff (will help with battery depletion if left standing for a few weeks in the winter)
• Boot Cover Carbon (finishes the look set by te carbon leather tunnel)
• Carbon Front Wings (should set off the exterior colour better)
• Carpets (can help with internal noise – we’ll see)
• Polished Exhaust (not sure about this one, but was convinced in the end)
• Custom Colour (more on this below)

The second trip to Williams was a couple of days later and was with a number of family members. The guys at Williams were very accommodating to my turning up with an entourage and, as well as letting us wander around freely, allowed me to take a few pictures of one of the probable colour options – Lotus Aubergine…

Garage Completed

For those of you following each episode you’ll remember from the last post that after one coat I wasn’t happy with the epoxy garage floor covering. This week another pack of the Rust-o-leum garage floor kit arrived and it was applied to the floor.

Before putting this second coat on I also took the time to fill any cracks in the concrete floor. The rust-o-leum didn’t cover well with the porous floor and did very badly at filling fine cracks in the concrete. The first coat also showed a number of holes and dents in the original floor. All this was filled and then finally the second coat of rust-o-leum was applied. This time the quoted 25m² coverage given on the can was much closer to being valid. Instead of the full can only covering our 16m², it looked like it would have gone on to do the full 25m².

The final result was much better.

We then left the garage empty for a couple of days just to make sure it was all cured. But even then, putting a kids bike back into the garage caused the rubber tyres to bond to the epoxy and pulled the second coat away with the tyre when we moved the bike. Needless to say, the bike spent the next two days perched on some off-cuts of plywood to make sure that didn’t happen again.

On reflection, perhaps a self-levelling compound prior to any epoxy coat would have given a better overall finish but in the end it’s only a garage and I’m happy with the result.

CAD – Line Drawings

In the down time this week I turned my attention again to the 3D CAD model  of an R500 that I’d bought. I want to try and get a 3D print of the model and have experimented with a number of ways of turning the supplied mesh into a solid body – all to no avail. This needs a rethink since there are a few dozen parts in the model and the hand editing of the mesh that I’ve resorted to so far is proving to be very time consuming.

In the meantime I created a vector line drawing of the front view of the CAD model. I intend to use the line drawing for some promotional material but that’s… for another post. At some point I’ll provide a high resolution PNG and SVG image gallery of the drawing below.

Last week I also talked about working on the project plan for the build. I got a little time to work on that this week but it will now also have to wait for a future post.