Had a few more progress pictures from Dean today, so have decided to post them.
For comparison purposes only, the first picture is of the original supplied 620R harnesses. I specifically wanted these as I really liked the buckle, and also wanted the font of the Caterham wording to be the same as that on the side of the car (some people call this OCD - I prefer to think of it as attention to detail :-)). The reason I've asked for new ones to be supplied is the original ones had issues with the colours as you can see from the picture below:
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Old 620R harnesses looking mostly blue in colour |
The new harnesses have now been fitted, and from the picture below you can see they look completely black and match perfectly. The colour of the paint looks different in the two pictures, but that is because the initial picture was taken with a flash.
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New 620R harnesses fitted and looking perfect. |
Next is of one of the main issues I've had - the infamous 620R seats. Caterham say these are to be kept as a special for 620R customers, and they (CC) didn't want to supply them to me - the long and short of it is, unless you have a 620R you wont be able to get these seats even as aftermarket accessories. This attitude does strike me as a little odd, as I run a business and if a customer wants to buy something and pay for it, we'll sell it to them and make additional revenue... I thought that was what business was all about?
Anyway... I've been fortunate enough to capitalise on communication difficulties and get what I wanted, so I'm very happy indeed. Picture below of the 620R seats in their protective packaging ready for fitting.
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The Caterham 620R seats for my Caterham R500 - confusing or what?!? |
As I wrote on my last post - the 620R seats also have different seat runners with different mounting holes which means some additional drill holes will be made in the lowered floor to accommodate the runners. To fix this Dean's suggested they'll try and put a correctly sized grommet in the existing holes.
I'd been considering the 12v master switch at the time of original order (way back in November 2013!) but decided against it... For some reason I managed to convince myself that I now 'needed' a 12v master switch, so last Wednesday I asked Dean and he said they had time to do it during the rebuild of the car, so the holes for that have been drilled into the scuttle today as can be seen on the picture below:
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Drilled holes ready for 12v master switch fitting. |
And finally... A picture of the car right now - not much left to do by the looks of it and I'm beginning to get the excitement feelings once again.
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Caterham R500 nearing it's second completion. |
The seats situation reminds me of the time I called Caterham to ask what LSD is fitted to the current car and was told that this is "proprietary information that cannot be disclosed".
ReplyDeleteCaterham come across consistently as a miss-managed, unfocused, slapdash company with a great product and SOME great people. Their inability to produce a decent build manual after 50 years of operation sums it all up really...