The GT6 Saga - Continued

I never set out to chase grams off the Mazda MX-5 crank pulley - this GT6 rebuild isn’t a Caterham build. The weight saving was incidental. What I really needed was clearance of the engine over the steering rack, and if that meant trimming a pulley, so be it. But I thought: if I’m doing that anyway, I might as well get a lightened one and kill two birds with one billet.

So I went shopping. Pulley number one, ordered from America, looked gorgeous - except it was for the BP6D VVT, not my BP4W non-VVT. A billet paperweight. It now sits proudly on Facebook Marketplace, waiting for the next optimist to make the same mistake.

Still hopeful, pulley number two arrived courtesy of a friend’s suitcase. On paper it looked perfect - lightened and supposedly the answer to my prayers. I left it on the bench, confident it would soon solve my problem, and turned instead to the ugly OEM damper.

That’s when the reality dawned. First I had to shift a crank bolt torqued up like it had been tightened by Thor himself. It took a borrowed Milwaukee impact gun rated at 1,800 Nm to crack it loose. Off came the pulley - and with it my illusions. The grooves weren’t a separate ring at all but part of a one-piece harmonic damper. Which meant my suitcase import wasn’t the solution at all, just a crank-destroying lump of aluminium with marketing spin. Useless, and too expensive to send back.

I had been misled by the 4 small bolts surrounding the main, central bolt. I thought they were holding the sheaves to the damper, but no, they were extractor bolts to aid pulling the entire kaboodle off the crank.

By then I was on the verge of despair. Maybe I’d have to shove the engine further back, which would mean tearing into the firewall and scuttle I’d already fabricated for the coil packs. The thought of undoing all that work was enough to make me wince.

And so I arrived at a more modest, sensible plan. The steering rack mounts have a little give - enough, perhaps, to slide the rack forward just a whisker and give the crank pulley the breathing room it needs. Not glamorous, not shiny, and not yet tested, but it beats wrecking the firewall or gambling the crank on a billet crank destroyer. So the original crank pulley was cleaned up, painted and loosely replaced.

With that resolved in principle, I turned my attention to the exhaust. A trip to Infinity Exhausts had me talking through a custom stainless twin system. The price? £1,800 - not cheap, but properly designed, properly welded, and built to last. In other words, a professional job rather than a box of tubing and hope. The catch is they’re not fabricating turbo manifolds at the moment. Maybe in a year’s time they’ll be back at it, which is probably just as well, because that’s about when I’ll be ready to fit the full exhaust system anyway.

So the pulley saga has ended not with shiny billet wizardry but with the plan to nudge the rack forward. And the exhaust chapter is pencilled in: £1,800 for stainless sanity, with the manifold waiting its turn. If nothing else, I’m learning that this project is a marathon, not a sprint - with more detours than I’d ever planned, and plenty of shiny dead-ends along the way.