Kw just say they're 'progressive'
http://www.ftdmotorsports.com/?page_id=47
half the parts are from B&Q or Travis Perkins anyway 
the massively retarded timing on overrun seemed to be causing an egt spike. I discovered this when letting off one time, and hovering my foot on the throttle pedal, where I’d be in load cell 2 rather than 1 on 0% throttle. The spike didn’t seem to occur, so I changed the over run values to match the second line of the ign table, all around 30 degrees, and the spike seems to have dropped considerably! Haha.
How have I never heard of this mk2 TT ball joint idea!?!?
Thanks for mentioning it! A quick Google reveals this on the TT forum:
Apparently they give an additional 0.7 degrees of negative camber, Pretty much exactly what I'm looking for to get me towards the 3 degrees I'd like!
Will order a set tomorrow seeing as GSF are doing 35% off this weekend
I’ve thought for a while, that with the splitter and the old rear wing, the side of the car was looking a bit bare. There was a really obvious visual difference at the sides, and it just looked a little strange to me:
When I added the new wing, I thought this suddenly became even more obvious:
So, I needed something to balance it out. Visually more than anything.
The curvy sides of the A3 Sills aren’t ideal from an aero point of view, because due to low pressure created under the car by the splitter, air running down the sides is encouraged to curl round the sills and under the car again, which isn’t what you want.
By adding some form of side below the sill, you can discourage air from getting back in under the car. How effective these are depends entirely on the depth of course, but anything is better than nothing here, and what I’ve done forms part of a larger plan that’ll hopefully become clear in the next few months also.
So – as we all know, I try to do EVERYTHING on a budget, meaning I’ll use materials from unusual sources, and make as much as possible myself.
I recently helped AndyP out with some work on his house, during which we fitted all new fascia boards and soffit boards front and rear. He just so happened to have a 5m length of Fascia board spare, which got me thinking…….
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, I wonder?
A 30 second mock up with some cardboard was all I needed – this confirmed that there was at least possible SOME merit in the idea!
Maybe I’m onto something!
Saturday arrived, and RobinJI came over to say hello, it was quite nice for a change having some help whilst working on the car, and some input to the creation too. Robin as we know is pretty clued up on all thing aero, which is pretty handy at times
I was keen to make sure that where the skirts joined the sills, there was no obvious join is unslightly seam line visible.
It worked out pretty well, that I was able to remove the side trims and grind them back 1-2mm on the back face, to create a slot underneath to tuck the skirt behind.
At the door opening, I was worried it'd still be very obvious with the door open.
We decided to experiment on a spare offcut, and thinned the top edge right down to about 1mm thick:
This slotted in really well and seemed to work nicely, even looking like a proper fit at the transition from door to quarter panel:
Having already taken a few measurements, we knew that the 150mm deep fascia board was going to be too deep. I thought I’d take the chance to chamfer the whole top edge at full height for a test fit though.
I trimmed the top edge right down, and test fitted it:
This worked well
Deep skirts would be more effective in terms of air flow, although they run the risk of potentially looking like a silly ‘hovercraft’ style drift kit, which I was keen to avoid.
With the theory proved, we did some measuring relative to various points on the floorpan, and decided to cut 30mm off the boards to give me a sensible depth skirt for this V1.
These were cut down, and the taper restored to the top edge, then test fitted:
To secure them, as per my sketch a few weeks ago, we made up some ali brackets to mount to the sills:
Which sit something like this:
Last up was a small cut out at the front of each skirt.
Reasons for this were 2 fold: partly to allow jacking access to the chassis rail, and partly to make some attempt at allowing wheel arch pressure to escape behind the wheel. At this point the skirt actually sits higher than the sill line, so hopefully it won’t be trapping too much hot air from the front arches in.
At this point, it rained like hell, and it was getting late, so we gave up for the day. Tori ****** dinner, and we chatted rubbish about cars late into the night over a few beers
Morning came (as it has an irritating habit of doing!), and we were due to meet Jardo, Lewis, Mowgli, and Ash at Loomies for breakfast.
Feeling overly enthusiastic, I got up at 7am, and decided I HAD to have the skirts and wing fitted for our breakfast meet.
Thinking back, I remembered my good friend Duct tape, and set about wrapping the steel wing brackets, and both side skirts entirely in black duct tape to make it look (slightly) presentable.
The pikey wrapped parts were dropped on, and off we went in the torrential rain!
Breakfast meet was great. 6 of us, chatting and talking cars for a few hours over a fry up and a few coffees.
I had a brief drive of Jardos mk2, which was very interesting indeed in the wet, then we parted ways around 11am just as the rain was clearing and the sun was coming out.
Robin and I took a skirt each, and set about wet sanding them down ready for paint. We added a radius on every cut edge to make them look a little more ‘proper’ also.
2 coats of plastic primer first:
Followed by 3 coats of good old satin black!
Job Jobbed.
Next up was the end plates. I wasn’t keen on how the stock ones on the wing looked, and wanted to find a low cost alternative that was easy to work with and easy to form.
I got onto ebay, as you do, and ordered up 2x A4 sheets of 3mm perspex in gloss black:
In hindsight I should probably have gone with 5mm thick stuff, as these are slightly flexy, but that’s not a huge issue and easily changed for about £6.
We drew all sorts of shapes on them, and held them in as many ways as possible, and it was very hard to work out what would be best.
I added a 30mm radius to each corner of the A4 sheet, and they instantly looked better, but still not quite right.
Looking at various pics, and my old wing, I’d tapered the end plates on those, so we gave it a try on these new ones too:
It's really hard to get a feel for how they looked when sat on the drive, so the only real way to tell, was to take it out somewhere more open and get some better pics.
I'll add those when I've had some lunch! my lunch break is almost over now!
All in good time
So, with everything seemingly finished, I topped up the meth tank for the first time in ages, and headed out for a little blast!
I wanted to get a few pics of it out in the open to look at the aero from a proper distance. I found a quite little spot, and took a few snaps:
What is strange, is that no matter what height or angle I take the pic from, any shots from the rear looking forward, make the wing look REALLY high up. You can see from the other pics that it isn't, but the camera somehow doesn't catch the proportions quite right.
The highest point of the whole wing is actually less than 10mm above the highest point of the roof, yet in pics it looks like loads more
Having seen it in the wild I'm much happier with the end plates size and shape now. I think they work pretty well.
I may still buy some 5mm sheet to make some more slightly stiffer ones, but for now at least, I'm happy
One last one just for Dad, as posted previously. There's obviously a running joke that half the car comes from the builders merchants, so I couldn't resist a shot outside my local TP:
on a fairly regular basis
That's awesome thanks! Hopefully they'll do me good then, did you utilise the same fixings that came with the kit? I've seen others have modified to use longer bolts and then a nut on the underside rather then just the threaded plate.Hi Nick,
I installed mine in November 2012.
In Feb/ March 13 I hit an ALMIGHTY pot hole (****** moon crater) on the m25 in roadworks, and shattered a bearing on the left side top mount.
I messaged Robert of Silver Project on the Sunday afternoon, and by Wednesday morning I had a brand new lower plate and bearing, and an additional spare bearing posted over from Poland.
3 years on they're still great and nothing else has broken, despite some fairly severe tyre destroying kerb abuse on my part
For what they cost, I couldn't recommend them enough, and the service I've had from the guys at Silver Project has been fantastic.
I'm able to get -2.4 degrees with lots of added caster, or about -2.6 I'd caster is left stock at the top.
I'm really hoping that when combined with the mk2 TT ball joins that we will have a genuine bolt on solution for over 3 degrees of camber, which would be awesome!
If you're feeling kind, mention me if you're contacting Silver Project
