Email 4 : Washer Bottle in the Boot

Where’s the washer bottle…

Couldn’t sleep so thought I’d look at the washer bottle and get a sense of what needed to be done.

The build manual talks about fitting the washer bottle in the engine bay. I’d seen the 420R at Williams a few weeks earlier with it mounted on the N/S top chassis member – or at least a bracket that’s just below there.

The problem with this location is that it’s next to impossible to fill up the bottle…

Sigma engined cars have the washer bottle located on the outside of the passenger compartment – in the engine bay. This looks like a good position but with the Duratec engine I have, there isn’t enough room down there.

Now… there’s an argument that says – “who needs a washer bottle in a Caterham 7? You’re only going to be driving it on sunny days”. And I can see where someone might be coming from with that view.

However, I’m hoping to drive the car all year round and it seems to me that a washer bottle that I can make sure is reasonably full is going to be a good idea.

So.. at 2:40AM I started to look at how I should be fitting the washer bottle.

Of course I re-read the manual and had a look at a couple of blogs. Seemed I was going to have to fit it in the engine bay where I saw the 420R at Williams had it.

Then I started to trace the route of the washer pipework from the nozzle on the scuttle, below the windscreen. It goes down, then it goes back. Hmmm… it goes back.

It goes back all the way to the boot and next to the fuel filler pipe there’s a coil of plastic piping that’s ultimately connected to the nozzle up front.

I’d spotted that there was a coil of plastic pipe in the boot but I thought it was someone being over exuberant with something to do with a breather pipe from somewhere.

Note to self… I really aught to spend more time just poking around the car and working out what stuff is and what it might be for.

Ok, so it looks like the washer bottle now sits in the boot.

I went back to the Lotus7.club Blatchat pages and did some specific searches for washer bottle and boot. There was one post from earlier in 2017 and someone responding to say that their factory build 620 had the washer bottle in the boot. They had kindly included some pictures and I could see it was mounted on the off side body work somehow.

I couldn’t find any other images or discussions on the subject so decide to email Derek… from me:

   Next question…

  Looks like Caterham are now fitting the washer bottle inside the boot space and not in the engine bay. Seems like a much better idea.

Any suggestions or photos showing where, and how, a good mounting place would be?

From Derek:

See attached photos.

And here are the photos Derek sent me in an email:

Some text in one of the Blatchat posts also talks about using one of the rear wing mounting holes as one of the fixing points for the washer bottle. I’ll explore that when I get closer to the boot – remember, the build is essentially a process of working from the front of the car backwards. So the boot, and now washer bottle, will come later.