DOH....the story continues

So after my last post, i had re fitted the water outlet from the head and waited in hope that no more water appeared and started running down the block, well 48 hours after doing this the dreaded drips continued to show up.............................

BUGGER!

this now means the problem lay with in the head itself, so the tool set was cracked out and off comes the head again.

After removing the head and stripping it of the intake manifold it was time to see where the problem lay..... now before the head was refitted when i rebuild the engine i has taken the head to work and had checked it for flatness, i didnt rush in to skim it as i have read in a few places that the limits you can actually take off are very small with mazda head, so with the aid of a surface table, some parallels and some feeler gauges and a height gauge me and a college checked the head for flatness, now at the time everything seemed to be fine, and the head had seemed as flat as it could be, so it was decided it would be fine to re-fit.

after removing it for a second time i checked it again, and again every thing seemed fine........ so i cracked out the inspection lamp and found a straight edge, this then reveled what i should hope to be the cause of the problem, one corner of the head has actually lifted and is not sitting right by what appears to be .25mm, knowing my luck its probably the one corner we didn't check the first time round with any of the fore mentioned equipment, its also the corner to which the source of the water seemed to be originating from.

so the head will be making its way back to work tomorrow to be skimmed, which stupidly i should have just done in the first place, lets just hope it cures the problem this time.

But in the mean time during all of this i have managed to complete a few other little jobs from the list....

the roll hoop is now fitted and bolted up for the moment, altho this will need to be removed next week so that i can set about making up my boot box cover.

with the head removed i have also been able to gain access to the oil pressure switch, which i was not able to do up due to restrictions on getting a spanner in to tighten it up. so that saves me another job, all tho it could be said that removing the head was a rather radical approach to tightening it up ;o)

Front headlight raiser brackets have been fully finished, painted and will be fitted over the coming weekend, also meaning i can re wire the head lights back in.

i have also with the head removed been able to fit the cable tie anchors that i should have fitted down the drivers side of the engine bay to hold the wiring out of the way, and which i could not fit because the inlet manifold was in the way, i have also moved the wiring to the alternator and starter.

have also started to make my IVA dash, the ally panel has been bent with a good sized radius on the bottom of it all tho i will also be covering this dash in foam and vinyl to be completely on the safe side. and i will start to trim this in over the weekend.

i will add a few more pictures over the weekend for the parts that i have recently covered.

DOH

having filled up with all the fluids 2 weeks ago, went to start looking at getting it started the other night and discovered a few drips of coolant on the floor, hummmm........

on closer inspection it seems that the water is coming from around the top of the engine some where between the head and the block, having a good look it was hard to see where the water is coming from, it is either coming from the head gasket some where, or from the outlet of the cylider head into the thermostat housing, (even tho this has had a new sealing 'o' ring and silicone when it was re-built) but i thought being the easy of the 2 to re-do i would start with the thermostat housing, this means i have had to remove the rocker cover, cam pulleys, and all the engine covers to gain access to the 2 bolts that hold it onto the head, took it off and have checked the seal and re siliconed it, went to fit it back onto the head when i noticed that there is large tab that hangs on the underneath of the outlet was actually hitting against the front of the water pump before it can be fully bolted up, it appears that the after market water pump i fitted is wider than the original pump, so getting out the trusty hack saw, i removed about 5 mm from the bottom of this tab, and it now misses the water pump, so fingers crossed it seals this time and i dont have to remove the head again.
just got to wait for the sealant to dry and will hopefully find out tomorrow.

also i have fitted my new temp sensor that works with the dials which have now arrived, and have also fitted the new oil pressure sender, but i am regretting not fitting this whilst the engine was out, as its rather tight and currently not able to get a spanner in there to tighten it up, so its back to work on monday to make some thing to over come this issue,

Dash board

when the kit was ordered, every thing seems to work well on it apart from the dash that wesfield supply with the kit to fit the mazda clocks, now a kit car needs a nice dash and in my opinion they do not come much nicer than a carbon mods carbon dash, ( the carbon fever has started )

i also going to offset the carbon with some Savage stainless steel switches that illuminate blue, an expensive option but its one of the main parts of the car i think it will certainly be money well spend, also gauges have been ordered and should be delivered this week i hope as long as the snow doesn't hamper Mr postie for too long,

now there is some questioning as to will the dash pass the IVA test as it does not have the correct radius on the bottom edge, now some people have not had a problem and some people have and i think a lot of it depends on which VOSA test station you take it too, now Adam Reeves has also fitted the same dash to his car and i hoping to see what happens to his when he takes his for IVA before fitting the dash.

Now if it doesnt pass i will make myself a dash up at work with the correct radius on it and then cover it in vinyl for the IVA then come home and fit the carbon one once its passed .

i also need to track down a crash pad for the dash, as this will be a permenant fixture on both dashboards, but i refuse to pay westfield for one!!

Other jobs that have been completed

just to add some little notes about other jobs that have been completed,

Prop shaft has been shortened by bailey morris is St. Neots, this was reduced to the measurement that was supplied by westfield,

once fitted back into the car it became obvious very quickly that we have some issues of the prop hitting against the side of the tunnel supports, mostly on where it has been re-welded, so i had to set out hacking out a small scallop to allow some clearance between the prop and brace.

panels fitted to transmission tunnel, there have all been riv - nutted on with M5 stainless head bolts.

brakes have been bleed along with the clutch, now the brakes currently still feel like they have a bit of air stuck in the system, so after reading a few posts on WSCC about brake bleeding i have wedged some thing against the brake pedal and lifted up the back end, and hopefully the 'westfield brake fairies' come to visit and make the pedal firm.

all suspension bolts have now been torqued up, and i have roughly set the camber adjustment on the fronts to 1.75 degrees in the negative, the given base sus geometry recommends between -1.00 to -2.00 degrees, now 1.75 is the closest i can come to that figure, as another turn each way on the top ball joint puts it outside of the figure, but this might need to be readjusted as i have yet to set up the tracking, as i still have yet to sort out the lower steering coloum, but i am going to wait till i have fitted the dashboard before doing this as i may need to adjust the position of the coloumn where it comes through the dash.

Oil and watered up

As the title says, the engine now has fresh oil, and now the header tank is fitted, filled up with fresh water anti-freeze mix, i ordered a 3 meter length of red silicone hose from ebay to link the 8mm bleed off on the radiator to the header tank.
the gearbox has also had a dose of fresh 75/90w gearbox oil, but this was only when i was able to get the fill plug out out of the gearbox, little note make sure if you are going to change the gear box oil, make sure you crack the fill plug off before you install it into the car as access is a little tight, i had to make a hexed tool at work to remove the fill plug as it was very tight and with the aid of meter length of bar it was finally persuaded to come out.

now this is done i will soon hopefully be starting to look at getting the engine fired up for the first time since its rebuild.

Rear Light fitting

Next up was fit the rear lights, i have gone for the carbon light upgrade as they look much better than the standard 'sherpa' rear lights.

now these were very interesting to fit, i started with the passenger side light, now the light position is set by the pattern on the mug guard, so it was just a case of lining up the carbon effect housing to line up nicely with the ridges and corner of the body work, a little trimming of the housing was needed to get it to sit nice and flush all the way round the body work, once happy i had found a position i set about drilling off the holes, to do this i used a little bit of guess work and some rough measuring, to obtain a datum i marked out the 2 large holes where the light units fit, and found the center of the these 2 circles, i then worked out the hole positions for fixing relative to these. i then started off by drilling the holes with a 3 mm drill, this then enabled me to see if the hole centers were in the correct position, if they were not i still had the ability to drag the hole into its correct position. the light unit was then fitted with m6 bolts and large washers, i then drilled off the large holes to allow the light units to pass through the body work, to do this was the easy bit, with a 46mm hole saw it was a case of using the light unit as a guide and drilling through the mud guard and body work,

now this light went out very easy and lined up very well, it was then when i set about fitting the drivers side unit did things sort of take a turn for the worse, first of all the light unit did not sit very nice in relation to rear body work, the gap was very large and sat 7-8 mm away from the corner, so out comes the dremel and a lot of trimming started, now the unit also pointed upwards more than the opposite side, so i started trimming the bottom section of the light to get it to sit more level, to achieve this i cut away about 5 mm off the bottom of the light unit, this also let the into to sit a lot better against the body work, once i had done this i then got out the tape measure to ensure i had it level, when i notice that this side of the body work sits nearly 40mm higher than the opposite side, not this is down to the molds of the rear arch and the location of the part where the light units sit, now i have tried my best to move the unit down but i would never be able to get it low enough for both lights to sit level.

looked a few other peoples rear pictures and have noticed that it is deffinately a mold issue as they all seem to do it, well done westfield!!

Wiring loom - engine bay

next part of the job was to get the wiring loom into place, first job was to cut 2 holes in the scuttle for the wiring loom to pass through from inside the scuttle into the engine bay, now the manual states to drill 70mm diameter holes, but i would recommend going slightly smaller around 68mm would be a good size, as the 70mm holes are a little bit to big and the grommet wont sit quite tight enough in the hole, i may have to apply some glue in places to hold them in.

Once the loom was passed through it was a case of again making sure every thing is run within convoluted tubing and then the time consuming job of running all the wires to the locations needed within the engine bay and making sure that the loom is well secured to the chassis, now at this point i do kind of regret not fitting more of the cable tie anchors in certain positions before installing the engine and the body work. this was mainly the chassis rail that runs along the inlet side of the engine, as its too tight to be able to get a drill or a rivet gun between the intake and the chassis rail, so i have had to resort to getting cable ties where i can around chassis rails.

once you have secured all the wiring running down the chassis rails i then moved further back to securing the fuse box, now i have decided to mount my fuse box centrally on the scuttle, i fabricated an ally bracket, same style as the one used to secure the bottom of the header tank and fitted a couple of riv nuts into it, then bolted the bracket on with M5 stainless dome bolts,

wiper system

Now this proved to be quite a fiddly and time consuming job to get these to sit right along with the windscreen fillet (then again i should be use to this by now).

once the screen was in place, i opened up the indentations on the scuttle where the wiper arms have to pass through and did the same to the 2 raised parts on the windscreen fillet, to allow the bushes to pass through which then screw down onto the arm mounts to hold every thing in place.

once i had decided on my position for the wiper motor i drilled that off and affixed it to the scuttle with 2 m6 stainless dome bolts, and large washers each side to spread the load, once bolted up, and in placed i could then set about bending the pipe that carries the wiper wire that operates the arms, i did this by hand and roughly bent it into location to where i thought the first wiper arm would go, it was then a case of having to joggle every thing into position, i found that the center pipe that links the 2 wiper arms together was about 8 mm to long meaning that they wouldnt line up with the holes on the fillet, so this was cut down, the next problem i found was that westfield give you some angled cut bits of rubber that act as sandwich pieces between the fillet and scuttle were both to long and had been cut at the wrong angle, so with my trusty Stanley knife i set about trimming these into the right shape, and my goodness did they need a lot of cutting, the fillet wouldn't sit correct until i had nearly trimmed them all away.

my biggest tip is to just be patient with this bit, even more with the fillet, as it can be quite tricky bending it to fit between the pillars, now mine had to go in and out a few times, so a little of the gel coat got chipped off the sides, but luckily this is hidden.