First drive

Lots of progress on various things this weekend. Saturday was mostly electrical: sorting out the reverse light wiring, and extending the wires on the lambda sensors. Unfortunately it turns out that they use solder-defying wire, so I had to use two sets of bullet connectors to insert an extra section of wire, which was a bit tedious, but should work fine.

While I was at it, I got annoyed with the ECU reporting an error for the missing fuel vapour valve (on a proper car, it takes fuel vapour from the tank and feeds it into the air intake when getting a perfect air/fuel mix isn't critical [i.e., part throttle with a warm engine]). I don't have this facility on my car, so I removed the valve. Since the ECU complained, I measured the resistance of the valve, which was about 42 ohms, and stuck in the closest resistor I could find instead (200 ohms), which seemed to keep the ECU happy.

Today was mainly spent working on the bonnet. Emily helped me fine tune the shape, after which we attached the bonnet clips. I'm not completely happy with the fit, but I think it's about as good as we're going to get without cutting a new bonnet from scratch from a fresh aluminium panel.

The plan was then to drive out onto the drive and set up the geometry, but it was a bit dark, so in the end we just tidied the garage and drove back in again. Still, first drive: it went well, although there was a fair bit of smoke from the engine. Will suggests that it may be too rich, caused by faulty air or coolant temperature senors, or maybe just the lambda sensors not being warmed up. Need to try and figure out what's going on here or it will likely fail MOT. Fingers crossed it's not burning oil because of fatal engine issues...

I let Emily drive the car back into the garage. Happily, she didn't crash.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srfQgUFF-ps

Emily, not crashing or speeding. Phew.

The road to Hell

... is paved, they say, with good intentions, and so it proved for me over the weekend.

It started well: it looked like some bits for attaching the clutch switch weren't going to turn up on time, but I was rudely awakened on Saturday by a knock at the door, which turned out to be the postman with the clutch switch. Glad I got up to answer it then.

Plumbing it in was relatively painless, surprisingly - I cut the braided clutch hose, following Peter's advice to use side-cutters, and then switching to a hacksaw when they proved ineffective (the hacksaw worked much better, though I recommend wrapping the hose in tape first to prevent fraying), and attached new end pieces to the cut ends, which, as they have not leaked so far, seem to be good. I cable-tied the switch into place (more on this later), and set about bleeding the clutch.

This went surprisingly badly: despite the reservoir having plenty of fluid in, nothing was coming through. In the end I gave up for the day.

On Sunday, Will came over and had a poke around the car for me. He pointed out that the gearbox switch was clearly going to fail IVA, because it caused the wires to rub against a panel, so after some deliberation we decided to chop the switch down with a hacksaw. Despite very limited access, we were mostly successful, although some work still remains to be done to insulate the wires which now occasionally touch and randomly light the reverse light.

He also pointed out that I could do a better job of mounting the clutch switch. This was clearly true, so with the best intentions, we made up a bracket to mount it onto, and tried to attach it. At this point I snapped off a bolt in the block and after much cursing, was unable to remove it.

Will left me to it at this point, but undeterred, I made up a new bracket which conveniently covered up the mess I'd made with the previous attempt, and got the clutch switch mounted in a much more satisfactory way.

Clutch switch bracket (attempt no. 2). Note cross-threaded banjo bolt.

Whilst tidying up, I noticed that the clutch hose was now a little twisted. Once again with good intentions, I detached it from the master cylinder, rotated the end by 180 to remove the kink, and reattached it... at which point I cross-threaded the bolt and damaged the thread in the master cylinder.

This evening, then, was spent removing the master cylinder to get decent access to it, running a tap down it, and reattaching it. Fortunately the repair process was painless and after a couple of hours, I had everything back in place, with the clutch properly bled, and the switch functioning properly.

Now that I no longer need access to this part of the car, I permanently fixed on the drivers-side front wing, and then the exhaust. It's looking very nearly ready for an MOT...

Nearly ready for MOT?

Edit: props to Emily for her brainwave when it came to fitting the exhaust. (Using a jack to raise the manifold up slightly made it a lot easier to get it on).

Panels and exhaust

After some delays, my replacement primary and the silencer arrived in the post. With Emily packed off to Germany for the weekend, I spent it almost entirely in the garage working on the car.

Exciting parcel.

First up, I fitted the new primary - this one clears everything with plenty of space. With that attached, I put on the manifold, and trial fitted the silencer.

Silencer on.

It's pretty big (8" diameter), but it has twin cats which are good for 300 bhp, so there's plenty of headroom for future engine upgrades. Most importantly, the sound is great: not too quiet, not too loud, with a nice growly sound at idle and a really sporty noise when I poke the throttle a bit.

Once the exhaust mounts were in, I was finally able to bolt down the driver's seat, and attach the rear wheel arch and drivers-side wing.

Saturday's main goal was to run the engine, now that I had a silencer to keep from upsetting the neighbours, and see if everything worked as it came up to temperature. I gave it about 10-15 minutes, during which time the radiator got warm, and no leaks developed, or anything else untoward, other than the Racelogic traction control reading the revs about 50% too high. A bit of internet research suggests that it is probably configured for a 4-cylinder engine, which would make sense, so this will likely be an easy fix. I also tweaked the switches on the dash so that they light up dimly with the sidelights, and brightly when in use.

On Sunday I enlarged and finalised the hole for the exhaust primaries in the front wing; then Rich came round to help have a look at the bonnet. He spent most of the afternoon having a nap in the drivers seat, but eventually he woke up and we got round to lining up the bonnet and bending it. Conveniently, the exhaust is about the right radius to bend it over.

Bonnet on. Looking really close to being complete now...

Unfortunately, the bonnet predates a design change where Peter moved to having flared front wings, to allow hot air to vent at the sides of the engine bay. This means that the rear end of the bonnet needs to come out about 15mm further each side... which I think is the cause of the 10mm vertical gap to the wings. It would be possible to flatten out the lip at the bottom and rebend it, but I can't imagine the result would be very pretty, so I think the best solution will be to get a new, slightly bigger bonnet.

There are a few things left to do before I get an MOT and IVA test, but not many. I need to fit a clutch switch for the traction control to do its full-thottle-gearshift magic (not an IVA requirement, obviously, but access is much easier before I rivet on the drivers-side front wing); cover up some sharp edges with rubber trim; fit the fourth wheel-speed sensor; sort out the bonnet; setup the suspension geometry... and that's more or less it.

I'm tempted to book an MOT a long way away, as (I believe) I can legally drive to it, but this is probably unwise. Tempting though.