caterhambuild

Now front wings are on, time to wire up the repeaters and tidy the headlight wiring in general. It is a good idea before proceeding to test both repeaters actually work. You can do this by plugging green wire into the relevant socket in the headlight econoseal, and earthing repeater against metal on car body. Check it works and is not defective – last thing you want is to do all this then have to fit another one!!

When working on this, apply full steering lock in the direction of the side that you are working on. If you are doing LHS, lock the steering full left, and RHS, lock steering full right. This improves access, and also means when you zip tie the cable into position it will be at the maximum stretch point. If you don´t do this, when you steer, you are going to be stressing the wire.

The repeater has a long green wire which goes through the wingstay, along the upper wishbone and connects to the headlight connections. It has a short black wire with a ring connector on it – this is the earth and will be riveted to the wingstay. You have already applied heatshrink to the first 20cm of the green indicator wire. Now add around 10cm of clear tubing on top of this heatshrunk wire (this is to stop it rubbing against the rivet that will be used to secure the earth to the wingstay).

Push this wire through the wingstay. Unravel a paperclip, and make a small hook in the end. Use this to fish the wire out and pull it through gently. Note that it can be tight with the econoseal terminal still on the wire, but it is possible. Also an option to remove this wire.

Once you have pulled this wire all the way though, slide 4mm 2:1 heatshrink onto the wire, all the way up to the wingstay and preferably a little bit inside. Apply heat, starting at the wingstay, and slowly making your way to the end so now air bubbles form in the heatshrink.

Once cooled, take the smallest grommet from the box, make a hole in it, and slide it all the way up the wire.

As usual grommet is a pain to get into position, but using small pin punch helps.. You may also cut away a little bit of the rear flange

Push another 10cm of clear pipe over the end of the wire – this will protect the wire where it enters the car body.

Again making sure steering on full lock for the side, route the wire across the rear upper wishbone arm and into the car body. Zip tie into position.

The below shows the cabling entering the car body, note positioning of clear tubing. Make sure tubing is zip tied so it doesn´t move.

Now route this cable to the headlight econoseal connector.

Now go back under the wingstay, and get a suitable rivet and a washer. Rivet the earth connection to the wingstay.

Once done, tidy all wires under the wing out of the way with a zip tie.

Econoseal/Headlight Wire Tidy

I took opportunity to smarten up the headlight connectors at this point by trimming to length and applying new terminals. You will need a special crimp tool to do this. You can get the terminals and cone seals on the caterham parts website.

Extract one terminal at a time, cut off the existing terminal, cut to length, strip the insulation and add a cone seal

Attach new terminal using crimper

Terminal done

And reinsert

Finally, connect to the wiring harness and give it a full test!

Wheels back on, car back on floor. Torque front wheel nuts to 85 Nm. Nearly done.

The number plate light bracket is the bracket in the middle at the back of the car. The light has changed since the Caterham manual (v 1.2) – it has been replaced by an LED style light. This new light has a red and a black wire coming from it, but the wiring loom only has one single red/black coloured wire. This does not match the manual, but fitting is quite simple.

The red/black single wire from the car wiring loom needs to be connected to the red wire from the number plate light. The black wire from the number plate light needs to be attached to the car body to earth it. To do this you can use normal 12v connectors, I bought mine seperately as none were provided with the kit.

Cut about half of the wiring away from the number plate light. Add heat shrink. Once done, attach a spade connector to the red wire, and a ring connector the black wire.

On the single red/black wire from the car wiring loom, leave that at its current length, and attach the other end of the spade connector to this wire.

Feed the wires from the light, through the central hole in the bracket for the number plate light, securing with bolts. I swapped out the supplied normal nuts for M5 nyloc nuts (purchased seperately from Westfield Fasteners).

Now undo one of the screws holding the number plate light bracket to the rear body work, and attach the ring connector with the black wire from the number plate light here. Once you have reattached this screw, remove the screw on the other side, and attach a P clip to the car body. This P clip will hold all the wires out of the way in conjunction with a zip tie. Again, P clips were bought seperately and not included in the kit.

Now attach the spade connector (red wire from number plate light) to the connector you fitted on the single red/black wire from the wiring loom. Once done, get a zip tie and pass through the P clip and pull tight to hold all wiring out of the way.

All fitted :

Start with fitting the mounting bracket for the washer bottle so you can do a test run with the wiring for the washer bottle motor and see which route fits. Then remove the bottle, leaving the plate in place, to fit the fuel filler cover.

Washer bottle

The washer bottle is not in the manual. It used to be under the bonnet against the passenger footwell, but got moved into the boot, and it seems the manual wasn´t updated.

Locate the mounting bracket, mine was with the misc bag which contained various parts for the engine plumbing. Open up the hole in the middle of the mounting bracket to 5mm. Remove the relevant bolt holding the rear wing, and fit the bracket before refitting the bracket.

Now place the bottle into the bracket, and see how much slack you have in the cable to power the motor. This will decide if you route this cable out the front or the side of the fuel filler cover.

Fuel filler cover.

Like a lot of stuff, this probably won´t fit into position straight out of the box – offer it up first, but you may need to trim approx. 5-10mm off the top using a dremel. Dry fit IVA trim around the whole cover and see if it fits into place. The cover screws into the boot floor, I opted to screw in to the boot floor and put the carpet on top, so when you take measurements do it with or without carpet as appropriate!

Two items need to come through holes that you will drill in the cover – the clear tubing that transports the washer fluid for the wipers, and the wiring which controls the motor (the black rubber thing on the washer bottle) which pushes washer fluid down that tubing. Be careful here, my wiring was too short to go out the front of the cover and still reach, so do a dry fit first and route as appropriate.

Both wiring and tubing need a grommet, so drill the holes using a 10mm drill bit, but only fit the grommet to the washer fluid tubing hole for now. As usual I used my third party grommets and used pin punches to manipulate grommets into place.

The wiring hole doesn´t have a grommet fitted yet, this is to make the next step easier. Place the cover in the boot, and push the tubing through the relevant hole (in my case at the front). If this is tough, a little bit of Holt´s spray can lubricate it. Now using the terminal extraction tool, make a note of the orientation – which wire plugs into which terminal, and take the plastic plug off the end of the electrical wires which power the washer fluid pump. Then push the wires through the hole in the cover for the wiring, before placing a grommet over the end, as in below picture :

Now push the grommet into position using a pin punch, then reattach the plastic plug to the terminals. Move the fuel filler cover into place, and mark the holes on the boot floor, and drill out with a 3.5mm drill bit. Be very careful not to push too deep – the fuel tank is below! Then screw down with two self tapping screws.

Finally, put the carpet down (you may need to trim around the cover if you are following this approach) and then put the washer bottle into the bracket. Trim the washer fluid tubing to length, leaving a little spare, before hooking up and plugging in the bottle.

The white widget in the plastic washer fluid tubing between the motor and the fuel filler cover is to prevent the fluid seeping forward when braking/jacking car up I believe.

Boot carpet

As with the tunnel side carpets, smooth this out ahead of time and weigh it down with a few heavy books to get it flat. I didn´t glue the boot carpet down in the end. If it does need gluing this is easy to do later, but for now I´d rather have flexibility. As the car is R pack, there is only bottom boot covering. The S Pack includes carpet for the sides of the boot.

Wipers

(Note my wipers were actually defective and replaced in the Post Build Check. The ridges inside the wiper arm were so weak that they all broke off when I tried to use wipers. Apparently this has happened to a batch of wiper arms)

Caution – The wipers move from RHS to LHS – ie the opposite way to how they are shown in the manual!!

Wipers are a very simple mount onto the motors which are protruding in front of the windscreen. You may need to trim the end of the wiper so that it is not too big for the screen. These motors have very small ridges on them that align with the ridges inside the end of the wiper arm. There is then a small clip which holds the wiper arm in place.

Turn wipers on and off again using switch in car while no wiper blades are attached. When you turn them off, the wiper motors will return to the stopped position. Then push the wipers on. Be very careful if you lift these wipers up – they snap back down viciously as the springs are very strong. I did it once on the windscreen and chipped some paint off the edge.

Once you have them mounted, fill the tank in the boot with washer fluid. You can mix the caterham supplied fluid with water (I had spare distilled water so used that) in any proportion you like. The more water, the higher the freezing point. If you go pure washer fluid it will be fine down to -26c but I don´t intend to go out in that! I used approx 70 fluid/30 water, it doesn´t need to be exact. Now check the pump works by hitting the seperate button inside the car for the jets. You may need to adjust the jet positioning – a needle in the jets can help reposition/swivel them to improve aim.

Mirrors

Wingmirrors – there are apparently multiple options for wingmirrors on a caterham, including ones that mount on the doors themselves. The IVA pass mounting point is on the side of the windscreen. You´ll note that once you fix the wingmirrors here, it restricts the travel of the doors somewhat. However, I don´t intend to have the doors on the car that often so it doesn´t really bother me too much – I will probably stick with this point, but may upgrade mirrors later if required.

Each mirror should come with two IVA mounting kits (Caterham part MR06K) and the mirrors themselves are from Ford. Keep one wing mirror box, and place all spare parts from this in that box in case you need them later.

Remove the middle screw from the side of the windscreen and place it in the box in case you decide to change mirror option later. Place the fibre washer onto the mount stud, apply some loctite, and then screw into the screen. Do this on both sides and allow the loctite to set.

Gently offer the mirror mount up to the stud which is attached to the windscreen and see if it fits on. You may find that the hole is not wide enough – due to powder coating or the famous tolerances discussed at length…

If this is the case, you can open up the mirror mount with an 8mm HSS drill bit.

Easiest to do this part before attaching mirrors. You don´t want it too loose, but once you can actually get the mounting arm on the stud, prep the mirrors.

The mirror itself comes attached to the stock stem and can be removed using a T20 torx adapter. There is a ball joint contained in the mirror that this T20 screws into. Be careful if you face the mirror downwards, as the ball joint can fall in. If you can, try to keep the mirror glass facing upwards. Put the stock mount back in the box and then attach to the SVA mounting kit arm – including the mounting . Tighten up with the T20. It can be a bit of a pain at first to get this to bite. You can use pliers to hold the ball joint and stopping it from spinning while you tighten.

Once you have tightened enough to build some pressure, you can remove the pliers and fully tighten up.

Now place the completed assembly onto the mounting stud and tighten up the grub screw with a 2.5mm allen key.

Rear view mirror – simple attach job on the top of the windscreen. Apply some masking tape to the very top of the windscreen frame, then measure from the sides to get the mid point. Clean windscreen with some cleaning alcohol, let it dry, then attach rear view mirror.