Cooling system – Tim's Car Pages

I’ve just about got the cooling system sorted out, although I still need another hose. I decided to run that “hot” line that I talking about in an aluminium tube so that should be OK. One issue with the CBR1000 is that it doesn’t have the header breather connection that the CBR900 had. In that case I routed that into the breather connection on the header tank. (Which you can see sticking towards you from the top of the tank.) However, the CBR1000 doesn’t have such a thing and I’ve plugged up the outlet (using a little plug that turned on the lathe) from the header tank this time.

I trekked up to Dan‘s at the weekend and got him to wave his TIG torch at the water pump. As you can see in the photo I’ve now got the thermostat inlet welded back on at a slightly jaunty angle. I’ve since installed this in the engine and connected up the bypass. It does clear the prop, although not by very much. However, I reckon that it’ll probably be OK and I’ve connected up the rest of the hoses to the pump. As mentioned above, I’ve run that line I was concerned about in some 25mm aluminium tubing. I reckon that should be OK. I’ve ordered the missing elbow that I need from Rally Design as well.

So, the cooling system is essentially done and I will fill that as soon as I’ve got some coolant. I’ll also fill the lubrication system so we’re getting closer and closer to making things work.

I’m getting closer to actually making this engine work now and I decided to start powering up the car. I’m always very wary about doing this as if there’s anything wrong then I could easily toast the loom and end up with a horrible job replacing a load of melted wires.

I started off by buzzing out all the loom connections to the ECU which was tedious but useful. After that, it was softly softly and using a selection of very small current fuses. After a while all of the non engine functions that I could test seemed fine.

Next up was the engine loom and the associated ECU and so on. Eventually, I powered it up and the FI light I put on the dash came on permanently and nothing else happened. According to Andy if everything is OK then the pump should start up for a couple of seconds and then shut down.

So, I tried actually connecting the secondary injectors which was rather hard because the length of the wires is not yet suitable. The photo shows the secondary fuel rail at a rather jaunty angle in front of the ECU.

With the secondary injectors connected the fuel pump did start up properly which is a good sign. So that’s at least a start. As soon as I’ve got the induction side of the engine sorted out I’m going to have to try starting the engine, albeit without and exhaust system. That’s going to be slightly noisy.

The only problem is that the FI light stayed on in all of this. I suspect that this is because the Exhaust Gas Circulation Valve (a sort of servo-controlled flap valve mechanism in the bike’s exhaust pipe) is not connected. When I’ve got a while I’ll connect the required jumper to the “Data Link Connector” in the loom and read the fault codes out of the ECU.

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