MartynB

Yeah, I hope Malcolm doesn't have a nervous tic around red Renaults now, he seemed so laid back when I met him That clear red (candy) mid coat is the killer, must be same thickness all over, which is very hard by hand. The Fire Red is looking great though, must get its depth in some other clever way.

Lovely pair of reds! A bit closer to done than when I had my factory visit, which was before the FIRST time they painted it.

Hi Peter, I'll be very interested to see how you get on with that Opt7 kit. With all these LED retrofit options in the OEM projector it's really down to the detail of the "filament emulation" as it were. If it doesn't line up at the right focal point, the beam pattern (which is less than awesome by default) can get noticeably degraded. With baited breath* and crossed fingers... *it's OK, I'm not really holding my breath, take your time

You will also have these bad boys... (front brackets and grommets) What you won't have are the corresponding rear grommets... Drilling/grinding out the holes for those and glueing them in place is the "conversion"

Loving the gold!

You get programmed intermittent rather than fixed. Basically it learns the last cadence you did manually. e.g. you turn on intermittent, turn off, wait 5s, turn intermittent back on. The wipers now wipe once every 5s.

Exactly this. Saw the pic first and that's exactly what came to mind.

I suspect they're trying to keep it from chafing on the steering column, but it looks like it would be pretty easy to reroute and re-ziptie

I'd also recommend MSAR. They're based in London too, with a showroom. Always found them to really know their harness stuff, esp Schroth

They don't at the factory, and it's not a standard PDI item, but any given dealer may have done a treatment. Some products will add a slight gloss or lighten the matte black. I had Gtechniq C1 with EXO on top done on mine. Seems to do a reasonable job of shedding dirt easily and keeping a bead.

Heh, I never made it into the footwell Haven't been driving it in the crappy weather, so haven't felt the need to swap yet. Type 99 should be fine. For ref, though you probably already know... https://wiki.the playground.org/a/Wiper_Variable_intermittent

If the info is of any use, the factory paint guys recommend Concept Go Foam for deep cleaning the matt black soft finish. https://www.spraygunsdirect.co.uk/concept-go-foam-multi-surface-aerosol-foaming-cleaner-450ml.html HTH

I've got the Automotech AS 7630 http://www.automotechservices.co.uk/products/as-7630-mobile-scissor-lift/ I haven't put the Exige up on it yet, but we built the Caterham on it, and I use it to lift that a fair bit. I had to replace the sump in situ, for which it was invaluable. The lift pads are small enough and very position-able so that lifting on the standard lift points should be very easy. Obviously if you need to remove the undertray to do the job, then you probably need to do that first due to overlap. If it looked like the pad would damage the undertray I would add shim pads to localise the load off the tray.

Interesting. Have you found a drop in LED projector replacement or are you intending to use LED "bulbs" in the OEM projector? If the former, I'm very interested, having drawn something of a blank when I looked. If the latter, what makes you think the beam pattern won't be worse than HID? I'm well up for a decent LED solution, having swapped the stock Caterham tea lights for JWSpeaker sealed units (perfect).

I've got a scissor lift and it's much easier to configure, as all the lifting points you position stay in the same configuration as you lift. The quicklift sections must be perfectly parallel for this to happen, so your jacking points need to be pretty much the same width front and rear, or they'd fall outside the lift width. I found this diagram for a similar lift (albeit for Elise - but near enough) so it shows promise...

We'll have to put Fire, Flame and Canyon Reds next to each other and compare.

Yeah, The family of angles on a concave, gloss carbon fibre "spoon" has got to be one of the worst! And yeah, picked up that fine brochure

Speaking of which, the red New Griff now has an interesting wrap...

Hey George. It was nice seeing your images in pride of place on the Tillets stand at Autosport International. Steve Elliot (GM) saw me smiling, so I said "That's George's car isn't it?". Had a good chat, sounds like you had a very productive visit. They're super chuffed with the images. We had a good discussion about getting our B2s in the Caterham retrimmed with removable/swappable back pads, so that Alex, my wife can have a band of extra lumbar support. Sounds ideal.

Did he send you a job offer via InMail for the QA Team?

@Jack I see your logic now. I agree, the behavior is quite similar to a slush box even though there is no torque converter. I think of them rather as two manual boxes with interleaved ratios, because they have synchromeshed gear sets and sliding selectors the same as a H pattern box. Autos use crazy epicyclic (planetary) gearing, rather like a powerdrill, but with loads of clutches to do the selections. Too weird! Sequentials are basically the same as H pattern boxes, but driven off cylindrical cams that actuate the selectors in sequence. The biggest difference really is that they don't use synchromesh, just straight dog to dog engagement. That's why they are so challenging for "utility driving", and why without a good chunk of drivetrain automation (auto blip and flat shift cutting) they require a significant skill from the driver. That VAG DSG swap thread is fascinating. Thanks for the link

That looks fantastic Jonny. Well worth the wait

That was my guess too

Completely with you on the rest, and indeed the first part of this sentence. Have no idea what you mean by the twin clutch being basically an automatic though. Care to elaborate? As in the clutch control is done automatically via electro-hydraulics? I mean that gives you behavior like an auto, but implemented in a completely (and utterly) different way. Dual clutch boxes make a lot of sense, but tend to be a bit hard to package. Autos are just plain weird!

Looks like they've run that through a crappy oversaturate filter. For added worse.