Looked at fitting the battery and the fit is going to be slightly tighter than I'd anticipated and after looking at the old fastening method decided that it wasn't really satisfactory. As a result I resolved to make a new tray with integral fastenings. So made up a mould for a GRP battery tray and then did a load of wiring jobs that I'd been putting off, namely the new fuel pump relay setup and the frontlighting.
Finished off wiring up the front indicators and lights and opened up the mounting holes for the rear fog and reverse lights. I had toyed with the idea of frenching them in but since westfield countersink them anyway any attempt at frenching wasn't going to look as good as it might. I then went to wire them up and either the wiring isn't how it's supposed to be or I'm going mad, I suspect this question will only be answered with a multimeter and some patience.
Made up the battery tray using the buck I made earlier, I pondered using that to make up a new, mirror smooth buck and thence final product but in the end decided that since most of tray is hidden that once flatted it will look just fine as it is. I still need to fabricate the fastenings but that shouldn't be too hard now that I have the tray made up.
Ordered another set of hoses and the new brakes, full marks to Rally design for being diligent enough to make sure I realised the full implications of the "Race" pads, and then having a manager phone me to double check that I wasn't putting them in maxed up Nova and going to have an accident the first time I used them from cold.
Drew up some specs for the intercooler:
That's the ideal maximum size, Pace" are the obvious people to make it but they're likely to be expensive so I've given the spec to Anglia Radiators who did a fine job of making up the radiator for the tiger to my specification. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
With the aid of a good nights sleep, some good lighting and a condensed table I made up of what should be where I figured out the wiring of the rear lighting. No big mysteries although a couple of wires weren't the colours that are used on current looms. So with the wiring sorted out I fixed the fog and reversing lights.
Finished making up the battery tray and fitted it in place with rivnuts and button head allen screws, which, because the tray is nice and thick I was able to countersink them almost flush. I added a little foam tape and the battery is rock solid.
In preparation for the arrival of the new discs and pads took the hubs and calipers off .
Had an interesting chat to Vibra Technics about engine mounts, since I need to restrict the movement as much as possible of the engine due to the limited clearance on the throttle body. They were rather suprised when I described the westfield setup of a standard ford flat-mounted mount on one side and a 45° one on the other side. It's obvious when you think about it but because one bush is pushing one way and one the other they effectively fight against each other and you end up with bad movements and oscilations. Usually you use either both 45° or both flat, when you do this they balance each other out and things work as they should.
The outcome of this is that they recommend that I re-engineer one of the mounting turrets so I can go for flat mounted cossworth mounts on both sides. The Vibra-technics mounts are roughly 10* stiffer than standard and they believe it will restrict movement down from 20-30mm using standard mounts down to 2-3mm, which is just what the doctor ordered.
The alternative to doing this would be to make a new plenum that moves the throttle body up, eliminating some tortuous pipework and that would free up some more power. While I'd like to do this since it would be fun it would be difficult to get right, there's nothing to preclude me doing it later on but for now the new mounting system seems the right solution.
Nice shiny filler cap arrived from Wesfield, naturally this has to go on the car immediately. The pipe from the tank isn't at the right angle to line up with the filler, it's only a few degrees off but with the combination of cold temperatures (-2C) and stiff rubber hose mean that it's tough to get a good fit. I'm going to have to revisit this once it's warmer.
Adjusted the filler slightly to get it to line up rather better, fitted a big pile of new hoses that arrived from rally design today.
Went to fit the nice new brake disks but discovered that they're drilled for 8mm bolts, of course I'm using 10mm, so onto the pillar drill to ream out the holes. With the holes the right size I could fit then onto the stub axles, next problem is that one side eas rubbing on the supports as it rotates. John had mentioned that he'd had the disks machined slightly to fit and I know that others had mentioned that the upright castings are a bit different.
Rather than machine the disks the obvious solution seems to be to even up the uprights by filing off the extra mm off the edges of the casting. It ended up being very little to remove but doing it a little at time took a fair while.
Looked at the fitting of the intercooler, having seen some absolutely beautiful ones made by Forge while at the autosport show. Best of all they can do ultra-thick cores by combining multiple cores back to back. I spent some time tweaking my model and fitting the alternator, with the belt in place it'd going to be pretty tight to get the pipework around it all. I got to the point of getting the old cooler down from the roof and looking at that for a while which helped me realise that it was a waste at space and that I just need to get my plans right.
Spent some time thinking through the intercooler and inlet options. Ideally I'd like to make up a custom plenum that should realease more power as well as move the throttle body away from the chassis rail. However after fabbing a prototype I came to the conclustion that to get it right it really needs a specialist to do it.
With the plenum mods out for the time being I moved on to looking at the intercooler and how to get sensible alignment and routing or the inlets. In thinking it through and trying to find places to put pipes it occured to me that a plain upright cooler might be easier to package, the maximum size certainly indicates that a larger core may fit, I wouldn't need any complex shrouding and there would be more space to fit the fan, the fan would also help airflow over the enginebay which can't hurt. So all of this sounds overwhelmingly positive. The hitches are that I'm not sure where the air filter would go and that the end tanks will have to be triangular in profile.
No actual work on the car but after some measuring it looks like the new intercooler design may be a goer. Depending on where I put the air filter (through the triangulation and in front of the cooler or over the top of it) I will adjust the height of it but either even in the most pessimistic case it looks like I'll get over 7.5 litres of volume compared to the current 4. If I went up to the maximum I may be able to get as high as 10 litres but I think that's a bit extreme, although having said that the forge RS500 cooler has 14 litres of core!
I'm hoping that even without the fan running because there'll be so much additional volume, even with negligable airflow I shouldn't be any worse off than the old cooler. Switch on the fan and suddenly there will be loads of airflow, twice the volume and thus an immense decrease in inlet temperature.
Reading up on the subject the RS500 cooler will drop a 100C inlet temp down to 40C, the current cooler has outlet temps of 100C. I can't recall the formula for working out the power losses but I think it's of the order of 1% per °C, in which case my 330BHP engine will only be putting out 270BHP when it's working hard!
No work on the car as but some more interesting discussions with John at Vibra Technics. Apparently he was at the autosport show as well and chatted to Westfield at length about their engine mounts. Their attitude was that it seems to be ok in the cars, nobody ever complains and that they achieved type approval with the mounts. To me it all seems a bit daft that they don't make a simple change to their mounts that would cost them no more to make but which would make the solution that much better. You'd imagine that when one of the experts in the field points out a flaw that's downright obvious when you think about it that they'd leap at the chance to fix it. We'll see what happens.
In the mean time though I'm going to rebuild my mounts and if that works out then John is planning to do an upgrade kit for westfields. He did say that the 4x4 cossie mounts are likely to be quite harsh but I don't really think that's too much of a problem, if that does prove to be the case then he has some softer inserts that I can try.
As you can see in the diagram above the mount is mainly metal with only a small rubber insert between the upper and lower bodies. From my initial measurements it will be a drop in replacement on the passenger side but for the drives side there is some substantial engineering required to change from the angled to the flat mount.
This means that I need to make up some new engine mounts, for the turret I think I'm going to use some beefy ali sections that I have lying around since I can overengineer them without having to worry as much about weight as if I was using steel. For the upper mount I'm going to use the existing one as a base and extend that out with a braced bracket to go on top of the mount.
I've been doing some more design work on my new idea for the intercooler and it all looks like it's going to work out. The design is slightly more complicated than the original plan but the actual installation will be very much easier. Detailed designs to follow once I've finished revising them and get ready to make the prototype. For now the headline figures are a core of 320x80x300 to give 7.7ltr of volume compared to the current 4 litres. I've considered a slightly thicker core but it doesn't look worth it for the packaging issues
Engine mounts arrived today, they're an absolute work of art.
I thought I'd try and do a simple diagram to show what's going on with the different sorts of mounts, I don't claim them to be accurate models of the forces but hopefully they illustrate what's going on.
The top two mounts are just fine since the forces are balanced but in the final one rather than providing a neutral platform the mounts are working against each other, with the result that there is a moment of force acting on the engine (ie it's trying to roll over!). Guess which is the westfield official setup.
Lifted the engine out and removed the old engine mounts, the difference between them and the new ones is huge:
The mount for the passenger side just dropped into place so was a relatively easy job to fit, for the other side though I needed to adjust both the arm and make up a new turret. For the turret I used some 4" right angled ali about 3mm thick and welded it into a square tube. The reason for using ali is that I have a lot of it sitting around in the right sort of sizes, it also means that I can grossly overengineer things without them turning into dead weights.
This I then chopped down to the appropriate height and welded to a base plate:
Next I had to look at the arm, this actually proved to be the hardest part of the job to do because the mounting holes on the block are angled backwards at 10°. Of course I need to end up flat so the extension to the arm had to twist round by this amount. The solution to this was to use some 30mm angle iron and bend it in slightly, using the weld seam to make up the differences. I added in section on the other side for strengthening and then another plate from the top of the original section down to the new part.
With a top plate welded onto the turret the finished articles look pretty good:
While the engine was hoisted up I took the opportunity to adjust the throttle linkage, replacing it's original bolt with a 6mm one with a spacer bush. It all seems to work fairly well and should give a little more clearance.
The weight of the new setup seems to be broadly similar to the old one, the mounts from vibra are definately lighter, as is my ali mount, however my modifications to the top half of the mounting are a little heavier. All in all it's probably negligable.
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