Tidying up

On Tuesday, Peter came down for a quick pre-IVA check, on his way back from Up North to pick up his supercharger prototype. We spent some time going over the car, and as a result I have a long list of things to do. A lot of it is simple stuff (cover all wires, rubber covers for all exposed sharp edges, etc), but a few tasks were more substantial.

The most significant of these was making a cover for the wiring on the passenger side - conceivably, a passenger might kick the wiring while flailing around in terror, so Peter felt it would be a good idea to make some kind of panel to cover it. Fortunately I had the old rear panel which didn't fit lying around, so I put aside all thoughts of tendonitis and got out the tin snips.

Panel in progress.

Finished panel in place.

Drilling rivet holes for this panel (they come up from underneath) was, to say the least, inconvenient, but I'm pleased with how it turned out. The passenger view of the car is now a lot more tidy.

With the scuttle off, I also took a long hard look at the dash, and decided to take it out and re-fit it a third time, due to the excessive gaps around the BMW clocks. Getting it out wasn't too bad, although it would have been easier if I hadn't got carried away with using so much of the squirty foam. After much effort with a dremel (note: by far the best attachment for adjusting big holes in fibreglass is the little cylinder of sandpaper), I got a fairly decent fit. There are still gaps around the sides, but they're quite small. I painted the inside of the scuttle black to make the gaps a little less obvious, then sealed the clocks in again.

Waiting for the foam to set.

Dash in place. Note the panel covering up the wiring on the passenger side.

Finally I took a look at the side repeaters. After an hour of reading the IVA manual and browsing the internet, I'm still not certain that my placement will pass IVA - it depends if they test for visibility with the steering at full lock, or not. I think this is where Caterham currently put their repeaters, though, so it ought to be OK.

Side repeaters in place on the front cycle wings.

Last day of retirement

Sadly today is my last day of retirement; tomorrow it's back to work. I didn't quite get the car ready for IVA, which is what I was aiming for, but it's very close. Apart from the silencer, which won't be ready for a week or two, only some minor work on panels and lights remains, probably less than a weekend's worth. I'm happy with that.

Lots of minor tweaks: the front lights are now properly wired up and in place; the under-dash wiring is finished and has been tided up; various panels have been riveted on; the fuel tank is in, with support brackets to stop it shifting around; the rear lights have been fitted, and probably lots of other minor things I've forgotten.

Rear lights in progress.

Today I started out by drilling the holes for fitting the dash. I can't fit it yet because the panel it sits on top of can't be attached until the silencer is in, but it's ready to bolt on when that happens.

Emily then came back from rowing and came to help fit the rear cycle wings.

Cycle wing going on. The observant will notice that this is the drivers-side wing...

This was tricky, as access to some of the bolts was extremely tight. Probably should have done this without the fuel tank in, but we managed. Unfortunately, after getting it on, Emily realised that the wings are not symmetrical, and we'd managed to get them on the wrong way round. Not sure why she couldn't have realised that before we bolted it in... At least we'd only done one wing when we realised. We removed it, and drilled holes in the other wing that lined up with the holes we'd made in the chassis to mount the first wing. Everything lined up reasonably well, so we bolted it in. At this point Emily realised that she'd managed to bolt in the ratchet spanner in such a way that it couldn't easily be removed, so we had half an hour of fun and games fiddling about in a tiny, blind space trying to remove it.

Eventually we got the wings on, and then stuck the rear light clusters on. This was basically easy, except for the lack of reference points from which to measure to get the lights level and in the right place. It didn't help that the garage floor slopes significantly (in both dimensions). Eventually we ended up with this, which I'm pretty happy with:

Rear lights all in place.

Exhaust progress

On Thursday I ventured up North to pick up my shiny new exhaust manifold, and also meet Jason and see how he's been getting on. After meeting Jason's (very cute) dogs, we had a browse around his car - it's making good progress. It's interesting to see the different choices he's made with the car - partly in spec, e.g. the roll cage, flash wheels, etc, but also in how it's put together. The oil cooler setup in particular looks very nice; I don't think it'll have any overheating issues.

The exhaust was sadly only half ready, but at least it was the manifold half - if it had been the silencer half I wouldn't have been able to do anything with it. It came like this:

Exhaust manifold.

After some fairly straightforward fitting, I ended up with this:

Manifold attached.

It sounds great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUjuoWMEXU

Lots of smoke - this is just from the new pipes. It's gone now.

What was less great was getting the steering column to run through the limited space available. It's suppose to run between primaries one and two, but in my case, it was touching primary one. After a full day of faffing, moving the steering column support bracket and the steering rack, I finally managed to find positions where it clears the primary by a full 5 mm, and the chassis rail on the other side by about 1 mm. That will have to do. I also rerouted the clutch hose, as it was running right past one of the primaries and would have got rather toasty.

Loud car is loud

Finally today, all the immobiliser parts arrived, so I set about wiring in the immobiliser. Well, I say all the parts, but actually I still haven't managed to source the plugs, so I had to improvise there.

I found an old computer lead that was near enough the right size - a bit of mangling and it fitted.

Wires going onto the immobiliser.

An old computer lead was a reasonable fit on the key transmitter. I used the bench grinder to cut it down to fit, and it was ideal. For the immobiliser, I didn't bother with a plug and just used bullet connectors on each pin.

Thanks to Peter's wiring diagram, wiring it in was fairly straightforward, and after a few hours, everything was ready. I turned the key and... nothing. I then remembered to swap the ECU to the one that came with the immobiliser and tried again:

It's rather loud.

A few niggles remain - the idle seemed to climb slowly past 2500 rpm (at which point I turned it off) - I guess this is something like the EGR hose not being blocked off, or maybe an ICV issue. I'll have a look at this tomorrow.

Dash progress and mistakes

I spent Friday working on the dash. This ought to have been simple, but in actual fact I made so many errors that it took all day...

Marking up the dash for cutting.

First mistake was using black permanent marker on a white dashboard. After cutting out, I'd stayed just inside the lines with the jigsaw, so I had to spend an hour with the dremel rubbing off the marker. For once, the dremel did a reasonably good job, although there are some off-white bits where the pen smeared.

Cutting the dash out of the scuttle, mistakes two and three.

Mistake two was to cut out the wrong shape. The dash pod is rounded at the bottom corners, but I forgot this when cutting out the curved section, so I'm left with annoying little holes at the bottom corners. I guess I can tidy this up with some polyfiller or something, but it is very irritating to have such a visible mistake.

Mistake number three was less permanent, but took time to correct. I put the dash pod in, then sealed it in with expanding foam while I popped off to buy a hole saw from McKays (mistake number four). I got back, trial fitted the dash, and discovered that the dash pod was at such an angle that it contacted the steering column in such a way that the scuttle sat with an approximately 20mm gap from the chassis...

Fortunately the expanding foam is a good choice for sealing in the dash pod - a few minutes with a screwdriver and I was able to scrape it all out, then pull out the dash pod, and get the jigsaw out again to cut back more of the scuttle. I sealed in the dash with some more foam, and, after it had hardened, it looks like it should all just about fit.

Dash in place and wired in. Some tidying up required.

It looks good in place, although the visibility with the steering wheel attached is not great - the top of the wheel, for me, lines up so it obscures the middle of the dash. Not much I can really do about this. I'll fit some shift lights so I don't need to worry about watching the rev counter, and use the poor visibility of the speedo as my excuse in court.

Finally, I turned to making holes for the switches to go in, but on closer inspection, discovered that the hole saw I'd bought for this purpose requires a mandrel to attach to the drill... so that will have to wait.

The good news: apparently my exhaust should be ready for collection on Monday - looking forward to getting that fitted.

Retirement

Being in the middle of changing jobs, I'm currently enjoying two weeks off work, which means I have lots of time for getting on with the car.

Today was spent sorting out the boot floor. This took ages, as the panels needed quite a bit of adjusting to get a good fit, and I had to make a couple of small panels out of some scrap aluminium. However, the final result is neater than I'd hoped for. There's a bit of a gap around the sides and back, but I've ordered some rubber trim to take care of this.

Small panel in progress.

Boot floor fitted.

I also finished sorting out the cycle wing brackets. One side was straightforward, but on the other, the reinforced part of the bracket was too long, which meant that I couldn't bend it over at the point where I needed to bend it (because the reinforced bit extended to this point):

The good side - note that the round section finishes below the cycle wing.

The bad side - round section extends up too high.

I broke out the angle grinder and the sledge hammer and soon put things right - both brackets are now the right shape.

Also finished some other odd jobs - the steering wheel is now attached to the quick-release mechanism. This was a surprising amount of hassle, but it's all together with a working horn now. Also did a bit more wiring, so the switches will light up properly now.

Panels and wiring

Emily was off rowing all day in a regatta on Saturday (winning her two races), so I got to spend all day in the garage trying to debug the wiring for the lights.

Having figured out the hazard wiring, I spent some time trying to figure out the fog/side/dipped/main beam relationship, and why the various switches didn't do what they should (e.g., main beam came on when the stalk was in the dipped position; dipped never came on; main beam only worked with sides off; etc). Peter kindly spent a long time on the phone helping me out, and we discovered a couple of mistakes in my loom (relays wired up wrong) which got us 90% of the way there. After some more poking around on my own with a multi-meter, I figured out which wires were in the wrong place on the loom, and made some modifications. I now have fully working lighting.

I also looked into the problem of driving the oil temperature guage. Jason generously swapped his M3 dash for my 328 dash (since he's planning to use individual clocks rather than the donor dash, he wasn't fussed about keeping the M3 one), which means that I get an oil temperature guage in place of an MPG readout - much more relevant for this car. On the other hand, the 328 engine doesn't have a sensor for oil temperature, so I had to improvise. The normal place to add it is in place of the sump plug, but that would obviously mean doing a complete oil change, which I've just done - bit of a waste of new oil. Also, it's not necessarily the best place to read temperature (the M3 sensor goes into the oil filter housing). I decided to go with the M3 location, and bought a T-piece off Ebay:

Badly designed T-piece

It looks good, but sadly despite being designed for exactly this application, the threads are the wrong size, the holes are not deep enough, and the plugs won't physically fit in the space available. A bit of messing around with a drill and a tap has hopefully sorted it, although the depth issue might be a problem - I'm not convinced I've got a great seal on one of the senders, so there's potential for a leak here. Hopefully the threadlock will form a good seal. I ground the plugs right back and soldered the senders directly onto the engine loom to get around the space issue; let's hope they don't break too often. I kind of wish I'd spent the £50 and got an M3 oil filter housing, which would have avoided all this hassle.

Today was mostly spent sorting interior panels. The centre tunnel is now fully covered, and I've made a start on the boot. The panel is not a good fit (there's a 10-20mm gap all round the edge), so I think I may need to speak to Peter about this as I think this may be an artefact of his redesign of the rear end. The bit that goes over the fuel filler neck is also not deep enough - I can make up a new section from some aluminium sheet I have spare, but this is a bit of a pain. Cutting up aluminium panels is boring and takes ages, but at least this will be the last time.

Centre tunnel top panel going in...

ECU shenanigans

Finally received the replacement ECU, only to find exactly the same symptoms as before.

I got my laptop hooked up to the engine, and ran a diagnosis on my new ECU, which, according to the seller, did not require an immobiliser. Unfortunately, the ECU disagrees, and says that it can't get permission from the immobiliser to start the car. How annoying.

On further investigation, it turns out that the E36 328 is a bit special in this respect. The 320, 323 and 325 all use an older Bosch ECU, which sometimes comes without an immobiliser, and can be hacked to remove the immobiliser check, if present. The M3 is a later version of my Siemens ECU, and again, can be hacked. The 328, which didn't come out until a few years later, always came with a factory immobiliser, and can't be hacked to have it removed.

So, the only option appears to be to buy a matching ECU, immobiliser and key off Ebay, figure out how to wire in the immobiliser unit, and attempt to return my replacement ECU. Given the unreliability of the seller of the original ECU, I'm not even going to bother with that one.

Very frustrating, but at least there is now a clear route to getting the engine running. Unfortunately it involves a bit of a spend on new immobiliser bits, but that can't be helped. Still looking for some of the parts on Ebay, but they shouldn't be difficult to obtain.

On the plus side: the paint people say they can probably do my car in a couple of weeks time (again, this is a bit more spendy than I was hoping, but I've seen their previous work on Will's car, and it is very good), and apparently the exhaust should be ready around end of next week.

More bodges (not mine)

Things started out fairly well: I hooked up the hoses and poured anti-freeze and water into the radiator. Fairly quickly, however, it became clear that there were a few leaks to contend with. A couple were just jubilee clips that I hadn't tightened enough; one was a blocked off hose that wasn't blocked enough, and, unfortunately, one came from the thermostat housing.

As the car doesn't have a convenient way of draining the system without pulling off a hose, I pulled off a hose and covered myself and the garage in antifreeze. That done, I removed the thermostat housing, to discover some unpleasant things. Firstly, the previous owner, rather than spend £5 on a new thermostat, had just modified his to be always fully open. At this point, I'm not at all surprised. Fortunately, thermostats are cheap, so I bought one, and a new housing while I was at it. Secondly, the previous owner had decided to bodge up a "seal" of sorts with silicone sealant instead of a £1 gasket, hence, I assume, the leak. Thirdly, and most annoyingly, he'd clearly not bothered with a torque wrench (well, it would be surprising if he had, given the other bodges), and had torqued up one of the bolts on the engine lifting bracket (which had to be removed for access) so tightly that on removal, the thread from the engine remained attached to the bolt I removed. I could enlarge the hole and re-tap it, I suppose, but it's not really important (at least until I want to remove the engine), so I've left it alone for now.

I replaced the gasket, reattached things, and all is now leak-free.

New thermostat housing.

Rich popped over and we had a look at mounting the seats and harnesses. No big issues here, although a bit of care needed to make sure all the holes lined up, which, in the end, they did. Seats are in and look good with the harnesses.

Seats and harnesses done.

I also took a look at the throttle pedal. Ignoring for now the issue of mounting it (the captive bolt it pivots on is too short, so I've had to grind the nut down from 10mm or so depth to about 2mm - hope IVA don't mind / notice), the return is a bit feeble, so I attached an additional spring. It seems a little more positive now, although possibly a stiffer spring wouldn't hurt.

Additional spring on throttle pedal.