Bill Sherwood's Fraser page.

Welcome, from sunny Australia!

My Fraser Clubman

August 2005

IT'S REGISTERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So what happened between when the car was basically ready at the start of the year?
What terrible force could cause such a huge delay in progress?
What possible logical reason could slow things down so much?
Why so many months delay?

The answer is known to any who have dealt with them, and their name is spoken with dread and utter contempt - Queensland Transport - The paper-shuffling section of the government that are responsible for getting cars registered.
It's a long and painful story, but instead of being able to drive my nice new car towards the end of summer I had to spend literally thousands of dollars more, wait many months more, and finally get it ready to run around in the middle of winter.
Why?
They made me do a torsional and beaming test on the chassis. (So how did all the other Fraser's on the road manage to get registered without doing that?)
They made me make samples of the fibreglass panelwork for strength testing. (same question)
They made me do emissions testing. (same question)
They made me provide extensive technical drawings of the chassis, which we had to create ourselves. (same question)
They made a mistake on the VIN, and I had to correct it at my expense.
They made me wait months for the inspection, and then the inspectors made a mistake that made the car fail. (it passed on inspection the next day, after they were corrected)
Why?
Why indeed .....

Anyway, it's registered, on the road, and because of the treatment we recieved from QT I am never going to build another car like this.
Here's some pics & info of the final stages before rego and its first couple of weeks on the road.

Ths is when the car was being tested in the 'lane change and swerving test' at Darlington Park. This test isn't always required, but of course I had to get it done. It involved driving up to a narrow lane, demarked by a series of traffic cones, then swerving from one side to the other at 110km/h.
You can see it still has the ugly roll hoop and is sporting a spare tyre and trade plates to get it to & from the track. There's also the rear bumper-bar.

To get rego the car also needed a front bumper-bar. Here's what we came up with, and it's not a good look. But there's not a lot of other options
And yeah, that delightful roll hoop as well.

This is the car's first outing in public as such, at a Clubbie drive day. This is closer to how the car will look long-term. The main difference will be that the exhaust is going to be a carbon muffler and the pipe will exit out the left hand side, just in front of the left-rear mudguard. Also planned is to have the first ~5cm of the nose painted bright yellow, and that yellow will also flow back along the centre of the car on the bonnet, Lotus style. In the fullness of time a carbon bonnet will also be made.

This is the engine bay as it stands now.
One thing we found from the odd bit of racing is that the VDO pressure senders (oil and fuel) that were mounted on the engine itself vibrated to death very quickly. So we remote mounted them, and you can see them on the back of the alloy block on the scuttle. The loss of the fuel pressure sensor was a close one - The T-piece it was hanging off on the end of the fuel rail also cracked at the same time and spray high-pressure fuel everywhere. Fortunately, it didn't catch on fire.

	Not terribly exciting, but we made a new 3rd brake light for the car, as the one that came in the Fraser kit was damaged when we did the torsional testing. (gee,thanks ...) Adrian Brooke milled it out of a chunk of alloy, and did a superb job. The light is a three LED Hella unit, very small yet very bright.
	On of the strange problems that we came up against was where to put the registration label. That's because there's no windscreen to stick it to, no side windows, not much at all. For a while I just used a motorbike plastic label holder, cable-tied to the roll hoop. It was ugly, and had to go! I came up with the idea of putting the rego label in a pocket in the rear cover. It worked out pretty neat I think.

In June/July 2006 the bottom of the bell housing was cut down to improve the road clearance and also to allow for a long sump guard to be fitted. I'll be adding a photo of the sump guard later, but here's a close-up of the modification of the bell housing of the big 6-speed gearbox. That part of the car was very low and I was very nervous about it catching on something and doing massive damage.

I ran the car at a lap-dash day at Willowbank in late 2005, and managed to get a video camera strapped to the roll hoop. This video (36.0MB) is the car during practice, and it gradually gets faster as the laps go on. I was also going to video a few races, but the fuel pump died in the first one so I didn't really get to race anyway.

More to come as time goes by. But it'll be a lot slower as the pressure is off now.

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