Made up brackets and fitted the main chargecooler body, it's tilted back ever so slightly to make the mounting easier and to help reduce the angles in the pipework. My fears about it hitting the ducting proved not to be realised although I can't get the water tank up quite as high as I'd like. I'm considering cutting a hole in the ducting for the tank lid which will let me raise it up some more but I haven't yet made a firm decision. One thing that Wayne advised was making a small hole in the top of the tank lid to stop any vacuum/pressure forming. In an ordinary cooling system you run it pressureised to raise the boiling point of the water but since the water temp shouldn't go higher than 50C it's not required. I think I've found a nice place to put the pump but I've yet to find somewhere for the control box.
Tried laying up some carbon fibre into my arch protector mould the lay up was pretty easy and it came out of the mould without any trouble but it appears that I failed to apply sufficient resin to get a good finish, even after much rolling. I think that pre-preg CF may be the answer but that requires investment in a fair amount of tools.
Mounted the water pump nice and low direct onto the GRP floor skin around the lower wishbone mounts. This keeps it nicely out of the way and gives good pipe runs. I picked up some 1/2 inch ali tubing today so that will form the basis of the pipework.
Did a couple of revisions of the chargecooler mount, getting it lower in the process. A side effect of this was that I felt compelled to see if there was now room for the oil cooler to sit behind the ducting. After much experimentation I did find a spot for it which leaves the way open to fit a huge pre-rad.
Wired up some more of the dash, what's connected seems to work so far with the exception of the heater blower which I appear to have swapped a couple of wires round on.
Fiddled with oil cooler trying to find a position for it that allowed all the connectors to fit without fouling anything. I think the ultimate answer may be a slightly smaller cooler and forged ali fittings however that's all more money. The reasons for moving it were ease of access and better cooling flow, bearing those in mind the new location may not be the right thing afterall - gah, more decisions.
Wired up some more of the dash, it really is so tempting to whip it all off and replace it with a couple of big IP67 connectors. I mean really tempting. No more distractions though. The heater still isn't right but it's does work, the lights, indicators and washer pump all work too, reverse light and wipers don't though.
Received a 2WD inlet manifold that I ordered, it's the single grubbiest manifold I've seen, the inside was coated with baked on oil, I guess the turbo seals were dodgy on the engine it came off. It's a nice casting but the 4WD definately looks like it should flow better. I spent some time cleaning it up, eventually I'm hoping to use it as a template for a new manifold but that's a project for once the car is on the road.
Another frustrating session in a way, I've got a strategy for the oil cooler now, which is to use a 13row cooler for the oil, mounted above the steering rack, then use the 19 row cooler as the chargecooler pre-rad in front of the radiator. Plumbing is going to be interesting since I need to step up from 1/2BSP to 5/8BSP for the oil cooler and down from 5/8 BSP to 1/2" for the pre-rad. The latter should be easy to do with silicone hose, the oil cooler is more problematic the best solution appearing to be 90° 1/2BSP connector, 1/2" hose, 1/2"NPT, 1/2" dry break male, 1/2" dry break female, 1/2"NPT-5/8 adaptor, -10 hose, 90° 5/8BSP connector.
I've been troubled by a popping fuse while I've been connecting up the electics, this combined with the wierd behaviour of the heater and the non functioning of the reversing light was troubling me. After spending some time with the multimeter I finally tracked down the problem. The T5 box uses a reversing switch which sticks out of the side. This ends up shorting on the panelling that's very tight against it. Tweaking the engine position to fix that is not going to be easy so I'm considering doing without the reversing light and adding a second fog light.
I'd hoped to get the bonnet catches and the remainder of the charge cooler done today but as usual things took twice as long as expected. I made up a bracket for the header tank, it's a really, really tight squeeze and in hindsight a 75mm diameter tank may have been an easier choice. The supplied hose for the system is remarkably good, it's flexible but resistant to kinks, I doubt it would like being used for anything too hot though. I made up a U shaped ali tube to go from the bottom of the tank to the pump but for most of the other connections I think the hose will be just as good. The hose routing is a bit more convoluted than I'd really like but there isn't really a nice way to do it. After much experimentation I think I've also found a routing for the hose from the head to the radiator, this has to turn through 180° and wend it's way around the charge cooler without impinging on the new location for the oil cooler. I won't finally know if it works till everythings on the car.
Wired in the chargecooler's water pump and control box, there is just about enough space for the control box in front of the pump which keeps it well out of the way.
Ater pondering the routing of the oil pipework it occured to me that the thermoblock exits don't actually have to come out of the top since the block is free to spin round, as a result I've started clearing the way to do that. At the same time I'll probably swap the connectors for 1/2BSP ones so that the dry break connectors are a rather easier install.
Disconnected the reversing light wiring since the light is now going to be replaced with another fog light then finished wiring up the dash. Well I say finished but the reality is I can't for the life of me get the heater working as it should. With the switch "off" the fan is on, with the switch in positions 1 or 2 then the fan is off. The heater looks to be ok, the wiring is correctly connected and the switch appears to be ok. So the only possiblity left is that something is amiss between the ends of the wiring. Diagnosing this will take some time so I'm tempted at least in the short term to run it with the switch effectively the wrong way round.
With the dash in place I set about re-fitting the steering wheel and column, first of all lining up the wheels and column so that the wheel should be something close to centered. With the column in place though it became apparent that the wheel was a little too low and the shroud was rubbing slightly on the dash. I've heard that some people have obtained a spacer from westfield but since I have the tools and raw materials I set about fashioning a 6mm spacer from a piece of ali.
While unbolting the rack I remembered quite what a pig it was to fit initially but eventually it was off. The 6mm spacer isn't quite enough though so I'll make another 6mm and a 3mm spacer up tomorrow and try a couple of combinations.
Had the day off work to do play courier of various parts and finished somewhat earlier that expected so got out into the garage. First thing was to finish off the spacers for the steering column. The combined two 6mm spacers combined were a bit too much but the 6 and 3 together seemed to work well and after only a little knuckle bashing and swearing the dash and column were in place.
It's been troubling me that the top of the chargecooler is actually slightly higher than the top of the tank which may give me problems with bleeding air out of the system. As a result I adjusted the lower mounting bracket to move the cooler slightly forward and drop it by around 10mm. This necessitated a new top mount which I fabricated out of a slightly lighter guage of ali. The end result seems good though with the top of the cooler a couple of mm below the top of the tank - still not ideal but a significant improvement.
After doing the chargecooler I looked to find somewhere to mount the horn out of the way of the oil cooler and all the pipework. In the end I settled on a location just beside the chargecooler, it will be slightly muffled here but it keeps everything neat. The wiring needed slight modification since the earth connection is shared between the horn and the temp sender.
No progress on the mystery heater problem other than off is on and that there positions one and two are definately just the same. It just has to be a fault in the loom but I need to work out if there's an easy way to bypass it. If I can't work out a way then I'll just have to live with an inverted switch for the time being. The final thing for the wiring was to look at how to add in the second fog light. Fortunately the loom has an unused wire, even more fortunate is that this happens to be wired into the fog light! Rather than having to lay new wiring I just freed up the reversing light feed from the connector block, covered it with heatshrink and put the spare feed in it's place.
The oil cooler, connectors and a bunch of trim that I'd ordered all turned up today. Unfortunately think only had one of the male-male connectors so I've got to wait before having it'll all be done. The suprising thing is that the 13row cooler weighs substantially less than the pile of connectors required to hook it up! Still replacing all the steel with ali connectors is relatively easy weight loss if I want it later on.
Rummaging around in my pile of aeroquip connectors I discovered a -10 to -8 convertor as well as a couple of ali adaptors. Weighing it all up the steel ones are almost exactly double the weight of the ali ones. I'll use the ali parts as far as possible since I have them.
After putting the new oil cooler in the right sort of place it became apparent that the routing of the top coolant hose to rad could be a lot better and that there was space to route it over rather than under the chassis rail. So off that all came and back on it yet another combination of parts. I also added in the extra bits of ali pipework required to get it to the radiator. With that done I trimmed down the lower ali pipe to give the flexi hose a bit more length to ease the fitting.
Even with the smaller oil cooler and more compact fittings the cooler still needs to be fitted with the connectors pointing downwards. If this was a water radiator this would be a big no-no since the system would never bleed. In an oil system the oil is somewhat thicker, under pressure and is designed to get rid of the froth that the crank whips up so it's not really the problem that you'd think it would be. I made up a bracket for the top of the cooler but the lower one is going to prove somewhat more challenging since it required a bracket that acts in three dimensions. I suspect the only way to do this is to use a pair of right angled brackets joined together.
Still no progress on the heater wiring, it's one of those jobs I keep putting off but which probably won't be nearly as bad once I get started making up a seperate loom for it. The other piece of wiring which has been mystifying me is the fuel guage which has been reading full despite the tank being empty. I had thought that I'd wired up the connections wrong but of course it's a two wire resistance system so the connections don't make any difference. The problem just had to be the sender so I gave the tank a jiggle to make sure that the float wasn't stuck at the top of it's travel - it wasn't, in fact it seemed to be moving freely. The only option seemed to be to whip the sender out and check things out. This is another job I'd rather not have to do since refitting the sender is a nightmare because you have to hold the retaining ring in place inside the tank, while screwing the top ring onto it. Trust me it's a pain. As soon as I got the sender out the problem was obviouse, the contact strip was broken in two! Quite how this could have happened is beyond me so I'll be onto Westfield tomorrow to get them to send out a replacement.
Fitted the replacement lamp lens to convert the reversing light to a fog light, then fitted the drivers side indicator block. With that done I went back to fitting the oil cooler. After thinking about it for a while and experimenting with some pieces of cardboard a plot was hatched for the bottom mount. The first thing to do was to make up a couple of forward runners and then to make up a cross member to mount attach them to. The cross member is 10mm right angled ali rivnutted in place, the runners are 3x10mm ali, again rivnutted in place. The cooler is totally solid now and is absolutely perfectly positioned, I was rather pleased to say the least. The cardboard in the photo is to protect the cooler, obviously that will come off once everything else is done.
It's been troubling me that one of the nylocs used to secure the fan is positioned in such a way that it'll rub on the top radiator hose. The only way to resolve this was to make up a bridging bracket so that the attachments to the ducting were either side of the hose. Somewhere along the line I got a bit carried away trying to save weight with the result that there's now more holes than metal.
Much trimming of ducting and the areas around the nosecone so that I can now fit the nose independantly of the ducting. This substantially improves access and should make life much easier in future. I also made a small cutout in the ducting so that it's possible to fill the header tank without taking the nose off. It should also allow me to raise the tank up a little more in future.
The hoses for the radiator are now done as are the majority of the charge cooler hoses. I've come to the conclusion though that push fit aeroquip hoses are a waste of time. I spent 3 or 4 times longer huffing and puffing on one connection than I would have done with a proper aeroquip fitting.
OK, now I've got the knack of it the push fits aren't quite so bad but aeroquip is much, much better. Using Tim's hoist yet again I eased the engine up and removed the engine mount so I could get at the oil cooler take-off. The plan was to spin it round so that the connectors exited at the bottom. Unfortunately there wasn't quite space but while the thermoblock was out I decided to whip out the port adaptors to see if they could easily be swapped for JIC ones. After a fair bit of time comparing the thread pitch and diameter I discovered that not only was it possible but I already had a pair of the correct aluminium adaptors in my stash. So throwing away the old steel ones I replaced them with the ali ones, I also found in my stash a couple of aeroquip -10JIC connectors but not quite enough to completely kit out the oil system so there'll be another think order going in on Monday.
Discovered another JIC connector in my stash so that's one less to order, all I seem to need now is a -10 straight connector. Hooked up some more of the oil cooler pipework and fastened the take off plate back into place. Because of the access constraints I'll have to leave the engine mount off until the extra adaptor arrives and it's all fitted in place. The chargecooler plumbing has temporarily ground to a halt because I need some 5/8 to 1/2 adaptors, the ones I'd found which seemed to be a bargain turned out to be 1/2 to 3/8 so I'll have to track some of those down.
Finally discovered what was wrong with the heater by testing each component in isolation and swapping dummy parts in and out of the system. The root cause is a faulty switch or more to the point that the contacts have worn so much that it's not making contact where it should be. I can't seem to find a sensible source of the switches at present so I'll talk to westfield tomorrow.
With work at both the front and rear of the car grinding to a temporary halt I decided to work on trimming out the interior. The first thing to do was to fit the crash pad onto the top of the dash, this just clips into place so only took a moment. The next thing was the carpet, I'd ordered 10m of 2" wide velcro and a big pot of glue and ended up using virtually all of it up and I'm not entirely convinced that the glue is going to hold as well as I'd like.
With the carpet in place I decided to fit the handbrake and gear knob which have been safely hidden away for the last year. I greased up the runners on the passenger seat so that they run at fairly smoothly and after filing out the holes in the floor slightly fitted the passenger seat. Then in went the passengers seat belt and the fire extinguisher. All of a sudden it starts looking like a nearly finished car!
I'd left some rubber trim sticking onto the boot box to tidy it up so today I tried fitting the two parts together. Unfortunately there isn't quite enough leeway for the trim to fit in so I'll have to revisit that with a different trimming strategy another day. I can't fit the final part of the boot box till the new fuel sender arrives which hopefully should be tomorrow. In it's absence I trimmed the rear finisher strip to suit the roll bar and fitted that. Fitted the drivers seat and belt, the belts will probably be replaced shortly but will suffice until then.
Refitted the rear wheels after lengthening the loom for the lighting block. While I was there I looped some hose from the tank breather up and then back down to the bottom of the tank. This means that if for some reason you roll the car you won't be leaking fuel everywhere, the ball valve in the breather is meant to stop this but I'm adopting the belt and braces approach.
If you ignore the engine that's half out of the bay it's looking more like the car that rolled into the garage 12 months ago. Yes it really is 12 months although it's only 10 months since I received the new chassis.
Replacement fuel sender has turned up from westfield but they haven't cut it down so that's something I'll have to do myself. Thankfully they've included the diagram that tells you how to do it and exactly what all the measurements needs to be. No sign of the switch or hose connectors that I ordered yet. In my angst at how poor push fit connectors are I decided to buy a big stack of aeroquip connectors that were going cheap so that should keep me in stock for some time to come.
Fitted the sender after cutting it down to size and cleaning up all the plastic swarf (is it swarf on plastic?) which is something that westfield hadn't done which is a bit naughty. After some faffing around I realised that the clamping rings and rubber rings aren't symmetrical and that they'll only fit when the marks are lined up. Once you've got the knack of using the long bolt and a couple of small screwdrivers to hold things in place it's doesn't take too long but it's not a job I care to repeat in the near future.
Fitted the boot box and trimmed some of the edges to neaten it up. Once it's full of stuff it should really look the part, obviously it will never be 100% waterproof but the trim should keep things reasonably dry.
I've been wondering for some time how I'm going to do the pipework from turbo to the chargecooler and from there to the plenum and I've been collecting various bits of pipe and hording them in case they proved useful. Well the stash of pipes seem to have done their job and it looks like I have all the required component parts. I'm using a combination of a solid right angled tube and an original ford pipe for the turbo side and a pair of the original ford pipes with a joiner in the middle for the plenum side. Tomorrow I should get it all trimmed down and fitted, fingers crossed.
Trimmed and aligned all the pipework for the turbo and it all looks reasonably good, I'm going to need to trim the lip on the nosecone a little but that's not unexpected. I just need to the last of my aeroquip connectors to turn up and then I can drop the engine back in place and fasten everything back down. One thing that was shocking was the amount of weld muck inside the pipercross pipework. It's a pretty obvious thing to sort out to maximise power and I started up by cleaning up the welds so that they were close to flush. In the end though I just cut the pipes short of the welds, it really is pretty unforgiveable on a performance part to leave 5-10mm of scraggy overhang to restrict the flow.
The replacement heater switch turned up from westfield and slotted into place neatly fixing that problem. The next big issue is the throttle cable, as you can see in the pictures above the new style pedal boxes are set up for a skinny cable and cable clamp arrangement whereas mine uses the original ford setup. The old pedal box had a tube welded on and a 6mm hole drilled in the pedal so I'll have to make a similar modification to the new box. For now I think it'll be a bolt on arrangement since I don't really want to start hacking at it now.
I've also made up a rudimentary skid plate out of 6mm chequeplate ali which I'll fit on with countersunk bolts. It's a heavy lump of metal but it's far cheaper to replace chequerplate than a winged, shortened and baffled ali sump!
With the arrival of the aeroquip fittings I was finally able to fit the oil cooler pipework and then refit the thermoblock, remote filter housing, engine mount... The engine still isn't bolted back down though but that's an easy job now.
Bolted the engine back down, dropped the ducting in place and finalised the plumbing of all 5 coolant pipes. Did some general tidying up around the engine bay now that all the positions are finalised and the tweaked the turbo pipework lightly to give better clearance. Also adjusted the nosecone slightly to clear the pipework and trial fitted the bonnet.
I've spent a while trying to get the best fit for a turbo heat shield but after a couple more prototypes from cardboard and ali I think I'm about there. I'll have to wait till tomorrow to give it a go and hopefully I'll get some pictures too.
Finished making up the heatshield and very fetching it is too. It's made up of some twin layer heatshield plate with a fibre insert. The compressor end is rivetted to a piece of 40x3mm ali to act as a former and mounting, the other end is capped off by more heatshielding. That end is is again rivetted in palce with large headed rivets and rivet washers. Eventually I'll probably make up something similar, for the air filter along with a cool air feed from a NACA duct.
Next job is going to be to sort out some sort of mounting for the throttle cable. As a diversion I filled up the chargecooler reservoir and set the pump going. It took about 3.5 litres of water which seems about right, when the pump is turned off the fluid does drain down slightly so the reservoir could do with being somewhat higher up but it does self bleed fairly well.
Slight drip from one of the hoses was quickly sorted out the I started making up a thottle adaptor, welding a 1/2 inch steel tube onto some plate which could then be attached as the spacer. After spending an hour or so making it up I offered it up and decided that the job would be done just as well by a simple tubular spacer so I drilled out the hole in the pedal box and made up the appropriate spacer. With that done came drilling the pedal so that the cable can pass through it. The pedal came with a tiny hole which needed to be opened out for my cable. After taking some care to drill it out one drill size at a time I came to the final 11mm drilling. Unfortunately just as the drill went through it caught and ripped at the thin piece of material that was left. I don't think I've sworn quite as much at myself and the car for some time.
Luckily I had my old pedal which is already set up for this sort of cable, so after an hour more of swearing at the split pins and the generally poor access the new pedal was in, the cable attached and the pedal box cover back in place.
Filled the car with oil and coolant, removed the plugs and cranked the engine to help build up some oil pressure. So far no leaks have shown up and 2 bar of pressure was showing on the guage. Once the battery has recharged I'll give it some more cranking then drain the oil and change the filter. Yes it's paranoid overkill but oil is cheap and a rebuilt engine isn't.
More cranking, an oil and filter change, fixed the repeaters and added in a connection to the loom for the high level brake light that I'll be fitting later.
In a fit of impatience tried to start the car this morning, the high pressure pump seems to be feeding the engine but the lift pump doesn't seem to have been activated. Fuel is getting round the system though but nothing is getting to the cylinders. Since both the injectors and the lift pump are controlled by the ECU I suspect that the ECU loom isn't getting power. Grrrr I just love groping at wiring hidden under the dash, really I do. Still at least it should be a nice isolated fault to fix. The difficult bit is going to be tracking it down since I've deliberately made that bit of the loom (the immobiliser section) anonymous to make it more difficult for someone to hotwire.
Phoned around for insurance and despite getting a quote for a shade under 300 quid from adrian flux went with the slightly more expensive quote from MSM. Everyone seems to regard MSM very highly and they seemed to be asking decent questions. It's harder work for me since I need to send them a big pile of documentation but I'd rather do that than have an anoymous and weasely company. Top marks to Dave Spragg at MSM IMO.
Early start this morning to try and get to the bottom of why the engine isn't firing. The root cause seems to be that the ECU isn't getting power. Unfortunately the wiring diagrams are pretty poor and working out how it's supposed to be getting power isn't easy, especially given that the only diagram I have is spread over 4 very faded faxed pages. In the end I've got pretty much nowhere but the fuel pumps are working which is good.
Attempted to fill the brake system but after bleeding a couple of the calipers discovered that the link pipe that I'd replaced was leaking slightly. Replacing the tube and adaptor hasn't helped so the easiest route to fixing it is to get a new caliper, that means no progress on the brakes for at least a day or two.
I did fit some new seatbelts and the new locks to the old bonnet. The new locks are slightly deeper than the old ones so I want to get the positions of the catches just right. Ran out of time to do the catches though. The old bonnet really is embarrasingly tatty but sorting out the new one will just take too long to do now, I just want the car on the road asap now.
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