Just A Couple More Things.....

Feb 24th 2015

Right. Now we are in the final stages.

There are various little bits and pieces to do. Some are important and others are vanity.

The bonnet is vanity.

Bonnet

It was pretty shabby. A grp moulding from someone else’s bonnet by the look of it. Rather bumpy and with a couple of big splits in it at the front where the car had rolled and obviously the whole weight of the front end had rolled over the bonnet.

Also it was hand painted in a thickish paint.

First thing to do was to strip off the hooks for the rubber bands that hold it down and repair the cracks with some new fibreglass mat and resin on the inside. Then I ground out the cracks on the outside and filled them.

There was nothing really to fix the position of the bonnet on the car apart from an alloy plate at the front with a lip for the bottom edge of the nose of the bonnet to sit in. The problem with this was that it was wearing into the grp. I decided to bond some wood blocks inside the bonnet to sit on the chassis frame top rails.

Then I would get some spring clips to hold it down. These things have become pretty expensive since I was rallying. In the end I found some at £5 for a pair (two pairs required). Wonderful thing this internet-work-web.

Just about everything I get is on-line. It’s just so convenient and you don’t end up settling for something you didn’t really want. You can spend hours driving around the locality trying to get a special bit and even if you find it, the time and fuel involved outweigh the postage you would have paid buying on-line. 

I’d already decided I wanted a dark grey metallic finish. As it’s winter and the temperature doesn’t get much above 4 degrees in my garage I wasn’t going to get much of a finish with rattle cans. I do have a compressor and spray gun, and have done plenty of cars before. However the cost of getting the paints and solvents didn't look worth it for worth it for a small bonnet.

How little I knew!

I can heat the place with a gas blower heater I have, but it stirs up dust and I have to turn it off when painting. Naked flames, solvent, etc.

I decided to use vinyl wrapping film. I got some samples and Anthracite Grey Metallic looked good. It’s a matt finish, which probably is a good job as the bonnet, whilst being a lot smoother is still a touch bumpy. The problem here is that the vinyl wrapping is usually done on painted vehicles. If I could get a good paint finish to stick it to, I wouldn’t need the film anyway. Would it stick to primer, well flatted down? The supplier thought it would as long as the surface was well flatted with a fine wet’n’dry.  He did think there may be problems removing the film later on. Not quite sure why. Anyway I had a bit of the previous car’s bonnet with an air scoop in it, so I primed that and flatted it down as a test piece. I used the sample they had sent and it looked OK. The air scoop was pretty intricate and getting rid of creases was tricky, but the present bonnet doesn't have such sharp profiles to wrap, so I thought I'd be OK..

A problem I hadn’t envisaged was that after flatting the bonnet back it was a patchwork of different colours, filler and grp. 

When I primed it the paint reacted with quite a few areas. Not normal really with rattle cans. I flatted it back and filled the worst areas to a higher level, covering the feathered paints edges. It still reacted a bit so I ghosted the primer on in a load of very light coats.

There were still problems with the paint reactions though.

I decided to bite the bullet and get some Barcoat which is a spray-applied isolator. I've used it before on old cars and it solves the problem. 

After coating the bonnet you primer it straight away without flatting the isolator. You can then flat the primer in the normal way as long as you don't go through to the isolator again. 

Having gone this far I decided to spray a top coat on and use that as my finish.

I had a litre of primer in the garage anyway so I just got the  Barcoat and some cellulose top coat as well as 5 litres of anti-bloom thinners.Cellulose is much safer to work with and you can get a pretty good finish from the gun, without too much compounding.

Just to be awkward I got metallic silver top coat, having decided it would be better for a slightly uneven surface than a dark colour.

The process went pretty well. I did spatter a bit of metal flake on an obvious spot on the bonnet as a result of leaving the gun for 15 minutes between coats. Looking in the paint bowl when I was cleaning the gun it looks as though the flake had run back down the pick-up pipe and formed a little heap. Then when spraying again it had sucked up these stickier solids and spat them on the bonnet. I think it will flat out. If not I have plenty of paint left for another re-coat when the weather is a bit nicer.

Other Items

which are very much more important included 

The Cooling Fan.

I mentioned the original was a "puller", not a "pusher", and mounted in front of the radiator it was trying to pull air from the engine to the front of the car. The opposite of what is needed. I did try reversing the polarity and it did spin the other way, but as the blades were designed to be efficient going the correct way it wasn’t really moving very much air.
A bit of a search on-line showed that whilst Kenlowe fans are up to £90 you can get motorsport fans (ie, noisy) for about £18 in the size I was looking for. When it arrived I fitted it using some alloy angle I had and a mixture of pop rivets and bolts. It sits nicely close to the radiator and as you can reverse the polarity and turn the blades around you can get the best performance for your own installation easily.

I think I may look for a thermostatic switch, but it’s not essential.

The Wiring Loom 

wasn’t complex as there isn’t much to operate. However I had decided to ditch the terminal block connector and use a waterproof plug and socket. This fell at the first hurdle as they are specific to cable sizes, and I had a mix of cables sizes.

Then, looking at the existing connections around the engine I realised that many of them were bullet connectors. So why not connect my loom to the engine the same way? Yes, they may corrode a touch but a quick pull and twist would probably fix that. I also found that two of the cables from the switch box in the cockpit were live feeds from the same busbar. So that was one less cable to have. I re-wound the loom with proper loom tape. Unlike insulating tape, it isn’t sticky so doesn’t deteriorate into a gloopy mess.

This probably hasn’t improved the wiring performance at all, but it looks nicer.

Where the loom and choke cable came through the bulkhead used to have some rubber grommets, but I had some conveyor belting so I made a patch of it with slots cut  to accommodate the loom and stuff. This makes it easier to remove the bits if I need to.

Brakes

I sorted out the brake pipes as well whilst I was fiddling about. The rears seemed to be have been sourced from a real car and one of them was about 2 feet too long. I snipped that off and got a friend to put a new flare on it. I do have a flairing tool, but seems to have lost the mandrel I needed. Bugger.

The same at the front as I moved the distributor block for the brake flexy hoses so the front rigid pipe turned out to be too long. 

The front offside brake calliper had been a bit of a problem with the seized bleed nipple which we had tried to remove, but couldn’t. I decided to fit the calliper again and if the bleed nipple was still sealing, just bleed the brakes through the banjo nut.

Initially it seems to have worked. If it should fail it’s not a major problem as the front brakes tend not to be used at more than about 5mph and there are still back brakes to use.

I put new brake pads in and changed the disc on the right hand wheel as I had a spare brake disc and the existing disc was running out a bit and knocking the pads back, giving a very long pedal.

Whilst I was doing the calliper I spotted that the nylock nut that secures the wheel to the stub axle was very tired. It wasn't nipping the bearings at all. I had only driven the car around in the drive for 5 minutes and already it had loosened .

It looks like I need to treat these hub nuts as disposable and fit new ones every time. I have sourced some castellated nuts, which may be a more secure answer,  with a split pin to hold it in place.

Knob

One thing that had been a bit of an irritation was that the knob on the wheel was fitted using a bolt which had been bent to get it orientated correctly. If it had been just bolted to the spokes without the bend it would have been at an angle (not parallel to the steering column). I had taken the knob  off and now wanted to weld some wedge-shaped brackets to the wheel spoke so that the bolt holding the knob to the wheel spoke would be at the correct angle without having to bend it.

I did this without too much bother, but it did mean cutting the vinyl and foam wheel covering back and pouring water on it as soon as the MIG torch was taken away or the foam would have caught fire. Well, it did catch fire, but I needed to stop it burning. Blowing at it didn’t do much good.

Spare Wheel

 Something that has no effect on the performance at all is the spare wheel. OK, it’s a bit of weight behind the back axle, but other than that it’s just a requirement of the rules. Again, the one on the car had been through the wars so I stripped it of paint and bashed the dings out of the edges as well as I could. A coat of paint and it looks very smart. As the wheel sits on the back with the inside facing following cars I made sure the inside was properly prepared. Some of the welding needed grinding down a bit.

Gearchange

I have just done a mod to restrict the gearchange mechanism.

The gearchange is a bit awkward, although it’s a simple arrangement, which is probably best. If you imagine sideways in a car with the gear lever between your legs you get an idea of the shift pattern.To move the lever across the neutral gate you are pushing or pulling. To actually engage a gear you need to swing the lever to move the operating end either to the left or right.

This is fine except the move backwards and forwards (the neutral gate) has three positions.

The furthest away plane for 1st and 2nd

The middle plane for 3rd and 4th

The nearest plane for 5th and reverse.

Because of the fact that there is a diff in the trans-axle on the engine and another one in the rear axle the reduction is enormous so 1st and 2nd are useless. However you can push past the 3rd/4th plane if you are not paying attention and select the wrong gear. I

I made a bracket that bolts to the chassis rail and stops the working end of the gearchange rod going forward to the 1st/2nd gear plane.

So I have 3rd/4th if I push forwards and 5th/Reverse if I pull back. That should make it a bit easier.

Bit More Clutch Work

I've discovered that the clutch slave cylinder push-rod is now too long. When the car is running the release bearing is not clearing the clutch cover and there seems to be a bit of motion transferred into the gearbox.

 This shows up as creep even when in neutral. Easily stopped with a finger on the fiddle brake, but not right, and part of the problem that gave me trouble on the clutch in the last car.

I need to shorten the pushrod and install a return spring to ensure the release bearing clears the clutch cover.

Body Panels

This is a major part of the rebuild. Not because it involves making any new bits, but because it signifies the approach ot the end. 

The alloy panels were getting a bit dull so I cleaned them using a metal polishing kit with drill-mounted mops to bring the shine back. There were a couple of dings near the front which I managed to get a bit flatter and I also decided to cut the side panels so that the bits alongside the engine bay were separate and could be removed more easily. To work on the engine or suspension.

This was with the polished panels attached.

At the back I put the back panel on and made a new "boot lid" from tread plate alloy

This shows the painted bonnet and spare wheel. Just about finished, really.

Gauges

I decided to fit some gauges. oil pressure and water temperature seemed like a good idea.

I got the oil pressure gauge first and after a bit of fiddling with the adapters got it connected (Honda engine 1/8th BSP, gauge 1/8th NPT. Quite awkward but I had some adapters from doing the Suzuki engine so managed to cobble something together.

I started the engine and waited to see if I had previously unknown problems
................................................Relax. 

It showed 65psi cold, at low revs. It should be 50-55psi at 3000rpm when hot, so I guess it'll be somewhere in the area.

Awaiting the temp gauge

That's about as much as I can do before the first outing at Bolton Abbey near Skipton. We'll have to see how it goes and re-visit any problems.