“Never work with animals or children” is a simple enough adage that utterly fails to take into account the fact that, somewhere on the child-animal isosurface, you will find engineers.

During their visit to the Engineering Department last week, Intel Studios learned this the hard way. Hoping to record interviews and scenes of work on the car, they were instead confronted with several people whose nocturnal habits left them blinking in the studio lights and asking why there were two suns.

It is 6:30 in the morning and nine bleary eyed engineers emerge from the mists surrounding the Engineering Department, preparing for a journey of epic proportions…

After roughly half an hour of faffing with straps and tarpaulins and raiding the department vending machines for emergency food supplies, the convoy of three cars set off for Jaguar Land Rover’s main site at Gaydon. The intrepid CUERites braved the endless monotony of the A14 and the tumultuous terror of congestion on the M6 to arrive, eventually, about an hour later than expected.

The journey highlights included some exceptionally poor navigating from Oli; also some interesting (and not entirely unrelated) short cuts down winding country roads. Meanwhile, everyone else who wasn’t driving enjoyed a bit of a sleep while the drivers and navigators yelled incoherently at each other about poor communication, deafness, wilful ignorance and the ability, or lack thereof, to find one’s bottom with both hands.

Upon reaching Gaydon, Endeavour was set up in the street inside the main building in full view of Jaguar’s hard working staff:

This weekend we had a close-up of destructive testing, electrical team style. To clarify: this refers to the very careful, delicate removal and disassembly of the motor, followed later by some reconstructive testing – i.e. putting it back together again, with most of its bits intact. This post is not about the accidentally much more destructive testing of the battery’s ability to withstand some wholly unexpected arc-welding, which may be expounded upon once Ed thinks up a viable excuse for why it wasn’t his fault.

Friday morning saw a small gathering of Dan, Lucy and Tom congregate in the centre wing at CUED, with the intent of removing the front wheel (a.k.a. the motor) and tyre. It is worth mentioning that CUER has come down in the world where workshop space is concerned. Gone are the days of nailing together plywood in a freezing room in Bedford; of shifting modelling board by the ton in St Neots; of late-night cargo manifesting in the Hopkinson Lab. All ground underneath the ever-turning wheels of progress, our favourite haunts are now, respectively: a sauna and swimming pool; a machining lab; and a set of partly-built open-plan offices. Affinity and much of the kit from…
Read more →