Steering Wheel Alignment and Exhaust Wrap

Objective:

Started this session by trying to align the steering wheel. This was not important to go on a track day but is one of the pending issues I have. Since I had to remove the side body to wrap the exhaust, this was a good time to also do this.

Some background story on the wheel alignment issue... I have the short steering rack, which means that a small change on the steering wheel position makes a noticeable change on the wheels direction. It has 2,5 turns side to side. When I bolted the steering wheel to the boss, I didn't notice the wheels were not straight and thus the steering wheel was not straight. It came with bad quality allen-key bolts that started to shred still while assembling. Later when I took the car to a shop to be aligned, the guy aligned the steering wheel by adjusting the steering rods. When the car got to the UK Steve considered the current setting dangerous as one of the rods was held by just a couple of threads. He made it safer but the steering wheel got a quarter of a turn misaligned. That is pretty visible in my track day videos.

Unbolting the steering wheel and bolting it back again was out of question. The bolts are shredding and have a bit of rust too. After some fighting with the column turns out I had to set it lose on the u-joint at the middle (the one that links the triangular Sierra part to the cylindrical lower part). Then untighten the connection on the UJ that links to the steering rack. Adjust there and then bolt the upper part again. Not undoing the upper part meant the lower would not budge and even undoing the bolt was not possible.

With the steering aligned, time to wrap the exhaust. The idea is to try to get as much heat as possible out of the engine bay. Also cover as much as possible the exhaust to prevent people from getting burnt on it. These type of cars are not common here so viewers on track days and the likes don't know that they should take care. I bought the fiber-glass exhaust wrap on ebay in November 2014... Has been around for a while. After some fighting got the first pipe done. Started doing the second but it was not looking good so I called it a day.

Before going away checked if the air intake pipes I bought fitted inside the nose cone between the cone and the radiator. Can't fit one, so no change of fitting the two! I'll have to think about a different place to put the pipes on...

Also found a bit of scrap aluminium I had, bent it a bit and mocked up a support for the mobile phone. I have to now clean the part, drill a hole and do a couple other changes to be able to use it. This will allow me to have the phone on a open place so no more problems catching GPS signals because of being on the trouser's pocket as last time. I want my racechrono software to have all the data for nice videos.

Talking of videos, next time I'm on the car I'll try to think of a couple different places to hold the camera to. The idea is to have a different angle per session on the next track day. Avoid having 4 dull videos all looking the same. So far considering, besides the usual rollbar place, to put it hanging from the driver's rear-view mirror (see the suspension working) and to put it on the front grill (close to the floor footage). Lets see if I can make it work.

I have lots of ideas of stuff to do. Just don't have time to follow through it them all...