Caterham Blog
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sEVen Conversion – The Victim
Well it’s about time for an update. The victim has been purchased. After searching on and off for a couple of years, not particularly rigorously it must be said, I started looking seriously at the end of the summer (2022) for a “host” car to be the basis for my EV conversion. I’m calling this…
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Putting the EV in sEVen – Index
In this project we’re converting a Caterham Seven Supersport SV from being powered by an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), into one powered by an electric motor and batteries (BEV – Battery Electric Vehicle) This page is an index of articles relating to Putting the EV in sEVen. You can find the whole YouTube playlist here.…
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Putting the EV in sEVen – Introduction
And so it begins… We at the Purplemeanie HQ are quite into the whole eco-mentalist thing, with just about “electric everything” – solar PV, battery for solar, EV car, immersion heater solar overflow etc. So, a petrol Seven has sort of grated on my soul for a while. My 420R is something I’ve always wanted…
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2021 Cadwell Park Track Day – YouTube Behind the Scenes
Aaaannnddd… Here’s another quick behind the scenes post about making my second Lotus Seven Club track day introduction video. If you want some background on what this is all about then this post has it all ( 2021 Castle Combe Track Day INTRO – Lotus Seven Club YouTube Video ), and so I won’t repeat…
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2021 Castle Combe Track Day – YouTube Behind the Scenes
When I joined the Lotus Seven Club leadership team as Social Video lead, one of the tasks I took on was to create introduction videos for the club’s Track Day program. Each year the Lotus Seven Club puts on 8 to 10 track days around various circuits in the UK. There’s a mixture of novices…
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An Evening With Caterham Cars, Lotus Seven Club YouTube Video
Well… I just had to volunteer, didn’t I 😂 As many of you will know, I’m a member of the Lotus Seven Club (lotus7.club) and have recently joined the leadership team with the role of looking after Social Video. This is a digital media role which at the moment is mainly focused on making YouTube…
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200,000 YouTube Views!
So I haven’t posted a great deal on here recently… As some of you may have noticed we’ve not been able to get out much, and that has affected what I’ve been able to do with the car. As we sit here today, in March of 2021, the car actually has no MOT and is…
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YouTube Novice Trackday
Today I finally got to posting my 2018 and 2019 track day experiences as a YouTube video. I’d recorded quite a lot of video at the Rockingham 2018 L7C Novices Trackday, but hadn’t got around to turning it into something fit to be published. After the unexpected success of the build video I was looking…
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Purplemeanie on The Express Website
A quick post to say I got a mention in an article posted to the Express Website: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1362578/classic-kit-car-restoration-vehicle-build-garage The journalist, Luke Chillingsworth, had spotted my build video on YouTube and contacted me for a few comments. The conversation resulted in the article. Here’s a couple of shots from the article.
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Build A Caterham 420R in 30 Minutes – YouTube Video
On July 11th 2020, I uploaded a bit of a longer video to YouTube documenting the build of my 420R from nearly 3 years previously. I’d always planned to do this video, but for the usual many reasons it only got a few hours here and a few hours there since finishing the build in December…
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Softbits for Sevens Boot Cover & G-clamp Hack
Note from Future John: The following post is a better way of doing this… Well, one thing led to another! So… for a while now, like many, I’d ditched the Caterham full-hood and have been using the Softbits for Sevens Half Hood (https://www.softbitsshop.co.uk/the-half-hood-8-c.asp). The half-hood is great, perhaps not as water tight when it’s tipping…
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Lowflying Article – If Only Caterhams Could Talk, June/July 2020
I can’t really blame anyone for this article. Even when I was writing up the ECU work on this blog, I had it in my mind that I’d be able to do a Lowflying article at some time. Then, when Michael Calvert asked members if they could write more articles for the magazine ( because…
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Driving Clifton Suspension Bridge – YouTube Video
This is a quicky… The weather was good and we were coming out of lockdown, so decided to get the car out for its first small run of the year. The Video I took a much longer run to get fuel and out from Bristol to Leigh Woods, Failand and then back into Bristol over…
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Lowflying Article – Nervous Novices, April 2020
It was Brian’s fault! The local Bristol and Bath AR (Area Representative), Brian Hall had suggested my name to the Lotus7.club track-day co-ordinator Simon Maitland. Simon was looking for someone to do a piece in Lowflying (the Lotus7.club monthly magazine) about how good the club’s novice track-days are. Brian knew I didn’t mind putting pen…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 14 : Software Framework mbe.py
This is hopefully a reasonably short post about the software framework I’ve developed to help read sensor data from the MBE 9A4 ECU. The software is written in Python 3 and is available here: Caterham-OBD. However, I’m going to talk about using one file only which is mbe.py. The idea behind mbe.py is to “abstract”…
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ECU Diagnostics – part 13.3 : MBE-ISOTP
SUMMARY We now understand the communications protocol used by Easimap (the Windows software supplied by the ECU manufacturer) and can use it to ask the ECU for whatever data the car has to offer. We can then manipulate the responses we get back from the car and format them to make sense to us. TL;DR…