Category: 2024 Summer Holiday to Greece

  • YouTube Novice Trackday

    YouTube Novice Trackday

    Today I finally got to posting my 2018 and 2019 track day experiences as a YouTube video. I’d recorded quite a lot of video at the Rockingham 2018 L7C Novices Trackday, but hadn’t got around to turning it into something fit to be published. After the unexpected success of the build video I was looking…

  • Purplemeanie on The Express Website

    Purplemeanie on The Express Website

    A quick post to say I got a mention in an article posted to the Express Website: https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1362578/classic-kit-car-restoration-vehicle-build-garage The journalist, Luke Chillingsworth, had spotted my build video on YouTube and contacted me for a few comments. The conversation resulted in the article. Here’s a couple of shots from the article.

  • Purplemeanie Site Theme Update

    Purplemeanie Site Theme Update

    After 3 years of using one of WordPress’ older themes, I thought I’d give a newer theme a whirl. From today I’ve switch to the Twenty Twenty theme which is much more mobile friendly and has an integrated search function.  Search Probably the biggest win from this update is the inclusion of an integrated search…

  • Build A Caterham 420R in 30 Minutes – YouTube Video

    Build A Caterham 420R in 30 Minutes – YouTube Video

    On July 11th 2020, I uploaded a bit of a longer video to YouTube documenting the build of my 420R from nearly 3 years previously. I’d always planned to do this video, but for the usual many reasons it only got a few hours here and a few hours there since finishing the build in December…

  • Some People Must Be Watching – Site Stats 60k Views

    Some People Must Be Watching – Site Stats 60k Views

    As we approach 3 years since out kit arrived I thought it would be interesting to share some stats on this website. I created the site for two reasons. Firstly, it was to give something back. I’d looked at many build blogs and learnt so much from them. And I wanted to be able to…

  • Softbits for Sevens Boot Cover & G-clamp Hack

    Softbits for Sevens Boot Cover & G-clamp Hack

    Note from Future John: The following post is a better way of doing this… Well, one thing led to another! So… for a while now, like many, I’d ditched the Caterham full-hood and have been using the Softbits for Sevens Half Hood (https://www.softbitsshop.co.uk/the-half-hood-8-c.asp). The half-hood is great, perhaps not as water tight when it’s tipping…

  • Lowflying Article – If Only Caterhams Could Talk, June/July 2020

    Lowflying Article – If Only Caterhams Could Talk, June/July 2020

    I can’t really blame anyone for this article. Even when I was writing up the ECU work on this blog, I had it in my mind that I’d be able to do a Lowflying article at some time. Then, when Michael Calvert asked members if they could write more articles for the magazine ( because…

  • Driving Clifton Suspension Bridge – YouTube Video

    Driving Clifton Suspension Bridge – YouTube Video

    This is a quicky… The weather was good and we were coming out of lockdown, so decided to get the car out for its first small run of the year. The Video I took a much longer run to get fuel and out from Bristol to Leigh Woods, Failand and then back into Bristol over…

  • Lowflying Article – Nervous Novices, April 2020

    Lowflying Article – Nervous Novices, April 2020

    It was Brian’s fault! The local Bristol and Bath AR (Area Representative), Brian Hall had suggested my name to the Lotus7.club track-day co-ordinator Simon Maitland. Simon was looking for someone to do a piece in Lowflying (the Lotus7.club monthly magazine) about how good the club’s novice track-days are. Brian knew I didn’t mind putting pen…

  • ECU Diagnostics – part 14 : Software Framework mbe.py

    This is hopefully a reasonably short post about the software framework I’ve developed to help read sensor data from the MBE 9A4 ECU. The software is written in Python 3 and is available here: Caterham-OBD. However, I’m going to talk about using one file only which is mbe.py.  The idea behind mbe.py is to “abstract”…