P a g e   T w o

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Freestyle Inboard Pushrod suspension

The pushrod suspension is the normal wide-track (rather than the SV rear and superwide front) and was easy to fit in a day. It was possible to reuse the existing top coolant hose but I sleeved it with the Freestyle connector where it passed the damper mounting tower, to prevent crushing. The old expansion tank was replaced with a new Freelander one (necessary to allow mounting of the damper tower). Even with my very rough and amateur geometry settings the car handles like a go-cart. Caterhams have fantastic handling out-of-the-box but this really is a dramatic improvement. The car grips like it's on the old ACB10s again. Goodness knows what it'll be like after a proper setup. The rising-rate suspension really dampens the front now and there is minimal roll even without the ARB.

Emerald M3DK

The Emerald M3DK is plug compatible with the EU2 series K series. The old ROVER MBE unit was removed, along with the fuel trap. The vacuum tube feeding the fuel trap was blanked off at the throttle bodies. The M3DK was mounted on the bulkhead and the laptop cable was routed through the gearbox tunnel to the dashboard so that the ECU could be programmed in future from the passenger seat. The fan was rewired so that it was controlled by the M3DK instead of the thermo-switch in the top of the radiator - this is much more reliable and configurable.

M3DK-controllable fan: Take a 30amp relay and mount it near the horns. Unplug the fan thermo-switch connectors - plug green/black into relay pin 87, green into relay pin 86. Bridge relay pins 86 and 30. Find the slate wire/blue stripe wire going into the circular engine loom connector under the TBs - the wire terminates here and has no ongoing connection - take a feed from the empty side of the socket and run it to the relay - connect to pin 30. Voila, the fan is now controlled directly by the ECU

Results: Wow. What a difference. The engine revs so much more quickly - it's more like a bike engine now rather than it's previous sluggish character. On the road the car feels much more urgent and the result is the car is quicker under acceleration. The only word to describe it is frantic. The popping and banging is still there on the over-run too (yay!) This is how the car should have been. The bad news is that it now I've had a taste of power and I want more!

 

Frontal changes

The bunny was relocated from the grill to the rollbar. The grill was painted in the car colour. The front of the car now looks a lot cleaner and a bit more purposeful. Some precautionary work was done on the back of the passenger Tillet seat - being an early type, it doesn't have the neck area bracing that the drivers seat has and stress lines were beginning to show where it was over-flexing. A padded strut was fabricated to brace the tillet head against the rollbar:

 

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