Sunday, March 15, 2009

Stoneleigh etc!

I had a busy weekend last week! I still managed to fit in the spares day at Stoneleigh though. It was literally a drive there, quick look around, go home event for me this year. My grandma was taken into hospital on the Friday so I had to be back to visit her along with various other things. It was still quite a successful trip though. I picked up a new set of carburettors from Andrew Turner and bought various nuts and bolts. The carbs are awesome and a huge improvement over my last set - Andy had a look at those and pronounced them knackered! The new ones are not only better (fitted with seals around the throttle spindles) but shinier too! I'll post some pics of them at a later date.

I also got on with the heater box this week. Painting it was my first experience with POR15 and I've got to say I'm pretty impressed. It's not the easiest to use because you have to clean the part in various solutions first and then you've got to transfer some of the paint to another container and seal the can with cling film. You also need to wear gloves or everyone at work will be asking you why your hands are black! The results were pretty variable. The first parts I painted ended up covered in brushstrokes whilst some of the later parts look similar to powdercoat. It's certainly interesting stuff!


I also got around to sorting out the hose that runs from the inlet manifold to the heater valve. This is usually a shaped piece of rubber hose but I wanted to replace it with silicone to match my other hoses. Having a custom hose made would've cost a fortune so I decided to use two 90 degree bends and a piece of alloy tube that I bent to shape. This looks good and gets the job done on time and under budget!


I'm sure there are people reading this that are going to be thinking that I should have used a flexible hose because of the movement of the engine. I have checked this out and it all seems fine. My engine is fitted with new mounts and doesn't vibrate around all over the place! There is also a load of flexibility in the silicone parts so I don't think it's going to be a problem!

Sunday, March 01, 2009

Heater Box Issues

A while back I mentioned that I was looking for a heater box to replace the rusty one with a broken linkage that came off my car. I did eventually manage to track one down on Ebay nut when it arrived I realised it wasn't going to be as simple as just chucking it in the car!

It was advertised as a 'Mk4 and 1500' heater box so, naturally, I thought it'd be the same as the one I had. It was, however, slightly different internally, with a different resistor and motor wiring! After carefully studying the two designs I decided the best course of action would be to drill out the rivets holding the internals in the original box and remount them in the new one. In order to do this I had to cut out the different brackets in the Ebay box. This then left a couple of small holes close to each other.
Obviously it's not great having holes in a heater box, so I decided the best thing to do would be to drill them out into one big hole and fit a grommet. This seems to be working out okay so far and I'm just waiting for some POR15 to arrive so I can paint it.
I've finally got around to cutting out the passenger side engine valance. These are coming on slowly and just need a bit more fettling to fit. Then I can make some brackets for them and maybe finally get them powdercoated!


I really want some parts to arrive this week. The HCR is getting nearer and I'm still waiting on a list of parts as long as my arm. Moss said my alloy bellhousing would take two weeks and that was just over two weeks ago so hopefully that'll be arriving soon. I'm also still waiting on my alloy water pump housing. I was told at the end of Jan that it'd take a week and it's still not here!