I trimmed down the dash a bit and mounted the instruments, so far as they go, to the smaller plate; here it is. The space on the right is for the Palm. Traditionally, I put this on the left but the gearchange actuation lever is in the way. I might change the software slightly so as to move the gear indication to the left of the display, although it might not be necessary.
Next up was to sort the oil cooler. I arranged to attach it to the chassis in the position I talked about a while ago and plumbed it in to the sandwich plate. As usual, I’m just using push-fit hose which in my experience works quite well and is at least reasonably cheap. Mind you, it’s practically rupturing to push the hose onto the fittings.
You might be able to tell on the photo that I’ve mounted the cooler on little anti-vibration bushes. Oil coolers like this are aluminium and they tend to vibrate and crack. Hopefully it won’t be too wibbly wobbly.
As it was clearly fluids time I then filled the cooling system. I debated for a while whether to use water or proper coolant at first, the problem with the latter being that it’s expensive and if there was a leak somewhere then it’d be a waste. So, I put some water in and it didn’t, leak that is. So, I drained it all out again and put some nice garish pink coolant in it. The odd thing was I didn’t seem to get as much coolant in as I drained out water. I must have an air lock in there somewhere. I’ll have to watch out later.
Next up was to put some oil in after which it was time to turn the engine over. So, I put the right fuses in, pressed the starter and nothing happened. I worked out which connector I hadn’t re-attached and then the engine spun around. That meant, of course, that things like the starter relay and so on were working.
Then, as usual, I set out to flatten the battery by spinning the engine around. Eventually, I got some pressure in there, after adopting the old trick of cracking the filter open a bit.
Carrying on the fluid theme I put some fuel in the tank and then started up the engine ECU to see if I’d got any fault codes. There were a couple of minor issue but I cleared them and it was time to press the starter button for real:
Yikes! I particularly liked the blue flames!
I also tried running the reverse. Obviously the car’s off the ground but the rear hubs did go round, and backwards at that. So, perhaps that will work too. I’m pretty sure it’s going to flatten the battery in double quick time though.
Then it was time to turn to the hydraulic systems and here I struck a bit of a problem. I’d become concerned that the banjo bolts I’d used for the fluid takeoffs at the master cylinders weren’t as long as they could have been so I’d ordered some longer ones. And, when fitting a new one to the front braking master cylinder I managed the strip the threads in the master cylinder. In fact, I suspect this is because the banjos were indeed not long enough and that meant that there was too much load on too short a length of tapped aluminium. So, ho hum, I’ve ordered another master cylinder.
In the meantime I’ve bled, or tried to bleed, the clutch and rear braking circuits. However, I seem to be having difficulty getting them to work properly. I’m wondering if this is because the location of the master cylinders, slightly on their side, means that there’s a bit of air inside the cylinder that isn’t being expelled, especially because I’m using a pressure bleeder which isn’t moving the piston in and out of the cylinder. I’ll have to think about that.