New hood for the DHC

Today saw another step forward into the 10CR preparations of the DHC. As I expect all kinds of weather during the run it seemed a good idea to me to put a decent hood on the car as the original one was rather ... euhh ... original, so old, torn and starting to fall apart;

Not quite clear in this picture as this was the best side! So when I was over in Britain for La Carrera in June I also paid a visit to S&S Preparations in Bacup and bought a new hood from them. As I didn't fancy putting it on the car myself (it's so easy to make a mess off it) I decided to ask a local car trimmer to do the job. But as he is a rather good car trimmer, he is very busy. So yes he could to do it, but not until the middle of august at it's very earliest. But he did take down my phone number, just in case he had some spare hours to do the job.

So I was rather surprised when he rang me up yesterday and asked if it was convenient for me to bring the car over to him today. Which it was;

Well pleased with the end result as it is a very good fit. Only problem is that the frame itself is much worse than I thought. Which means I'll have to put one of the two spare frames I have lying around on the car. As the hood isn't attached to the frame itself this shouldn't be too much work, we'll see!

Rear damper problems?

Last year I did some work on the suspension of 't Kreng. One of the things that I changed then were the rear dampers. The old but reliable red Koni's Classic's were changed for a new set of adjustable AVO’s. Big advantage of the AVO's over the Koni's lies in the fact that they are adjustable on the car. Also on the AVO's you adjust both in and out going stroke, while on the Koni Classic's only the outgoing stroke is adjusted;

So far so good, although looking at the difference in length between the two I should have been warned! The car was used in anger several times after that without encountering any problems. While driving La Carrera Caledonia in June the rear did bottom out twice on the first day, but nothing worrying. So I stiffened up the dampers two clicks and the problem was solved. As the car performed rather well after that I didn't think much about it until I received an e-mail from a friend a few weeks later.

On my advice he had also ordered a set off AVO dampers for his TR7-V8. But while putting them under his car he found out that the rear dampers were too long. So I did check mine today. First thing to check was for marks where the bump stops had touched the back axle, but there were none! Checking the ingoing suspension stroke I measured 110 mm between axle and bump stop, should be more than enough;

This was confirmed after I removed the rear springs from the car and lowered it onto its bump stops;

Which wasn't possible as you can see, so the dampers are indeed to long. The gap between axle and bump stop is in my case approximate 20 mm. Which gives me an ingoing stroke of about 90 mm. Should be enough for the time being. But I think I will send an e-mail to AVO  in the near future, see what they have to say about it ...

It seems that the adjustable Spax rear dampers have the same problem. As Koni's are shorter they haven't.