Time spent: 4h
Cumulative time: 75h
Main activities:  rear wings, purge valve hose

Most of the day was spent sorting out the rear wings, in particular the wing protectors which need to be rivetted onto the front face of the rear wings.

I decided that it is entirely possible to do this ‘offline’ before the wings are fitted (others seem to have done this) and it is a job I can do indoors.

Its actually not that difficult but does include the dreaded (and very final) drilling of holes.  The protector sheets (I have got the standard aluminium ones not the carbon fibre) come with a facing on the polished side which needs to be outwards.

So it’s a matter of putting on the trim to these protectors (on three sides only – not the straight side) and drilling the holes. The trim needs some cutouts to get it to go around the corners.   If this was a piece of wood, I would be drilling and fixing two opposite corners to hold it in position before doing the others.  This doesn’t seem to be the done thing so I stuck with the method in the instructions.  For the first wing, the plate must have moved very slightly after the first fixing so that when I had finished I could see it wasn’t quite straight.  The plate sticks out on the edge next to the car body by a few millimetres.  Bugger.

I thought about drilling out the fixings but realised that it would not be possible to move it sideways by a few mm – if I tried to re-drill the holes, the rivets would just slide around.  In the end I have decided to gently grind off the excess aluminium with my dremmel tool and a file. Took a while and I was really annoyed about messing this up.

So I approached the second wing very carefully.  My wife held it whilst I drilled and rivetted.  And prior to that I had glued the trim in place on the back of the panel. There didn’t seem a need to punch holes in the trim – the drill easily went through the rubber and fibreglass.

Most importantly, we made very sure that the flat edge that meets up with the bodywork was firmly on the table and thus accurately aligned with the inner edge of the wing.

Got a message back from Caterham about the purge hose fitting and they told me that it is the right hose.  I have to judiciously widen it to enable it to go over the fixing.  I decided to try using my soldering iron to soften the hose and then try to widen it with a screwdriver.  This seems to have worked but I am not happy with the outcome and might re-visit this later. Trouble was, I was running out of hose as I had had to cut off split ends many times.