Day 86 - Windscreen Doh!

The plumber came round during the week to do a bit of work under the floor to stop the pipes from freezing again over the fast approaching winter. Unfortunately with his head and shoulders under the floor his feet were swaying about and kicked over the windscreen cracking it into a dozen pieces. Doh!

I managed to contact the supplier and it turns out that the windscreen is from a Citroen AX which is not a problem to get hold of if it wasn’t heated. But heated is a custom option and there are none available.  He suggested I try Arden Automotive to see if they have any on stock as in the past they had bought a couple at a time.  But he never came back to me.  I have managed to contact the manufacturer of the custom windscreen But it is likely he wouldn’t have a screen in place until January/February next year.

Now the IVA test requires that there be a form of heater/blower to clear the screen which leaves me with a dilemma.  Do I order the heated screen and hope it comes in time or do fit a dedicated screen blower into the dash board which means cutting holes.

 

Day 85 - Exhausting

This morning I decided to mount the headlights in the bonnet. The mounts are aluminium plates that stick to the bonnet with PU adhesive.  It took a while to clean up the headlight mounting faces and headlight recesses on the bonnet so that the plates sat flat and the headlights didn’t foul when in place. Then I drilled the holes in the plate through so that the headlight mounting stud fixings sat cleanly in the mounting plate.  Then applied just enough of the black sticky stuff to the plate and pressed it down.  This stuff takes a couple of hours to dry and a few more hours to cure fully.  I placed a brick on top of each plate to ensure each plate is in full contact with the face and wiped away any excess that was squeezed out the sides.

Leaving the bonnet alone for the adhesive to cure I started to make up the looms for the rear lights.  I

Stewart’s email came back with a few photos of his knuckle and a ruler up against it. The knuckle centres were about 177mm apart.  I put a ruler on mine and it measured about 189mm so I wasn’t far wrong when I said it was 12 mm out.

Kim came round to assist. Originally I was going to do some earth continuity checks with her around the cable harnessing but I hadn’t progressed as far as I’d hoped with the wiring and there was another problem I wanted to deal with.  The Exhaust - I figured I would have to work the exhaust backwards e.g. from the tail pipe to the mid section where I would have to get some custom welding done to make the exhaust fit.

This is the situation the two cat system I bought off EBay has a 2.5” pipe to a flange at the back end. At the other end of the exhaust I have the custom exhaust pipe which is a 3”  2 bolt flange so I will need a coupling adaptor piece in order to fit the two pieces together.  From what I have seen on line the pieces are anywhere between 6 and 8 inches in length, So I will have to get a 3 inch 2 bolt flange to mate with the adaptor.  Weld the wide end of the adaptor to it and then get the 2.5 inch flange cut off and suitably mark up and weld the other end in place however far up the pipe is necessary.  This however cannot be done unless I know the tail pipes are exactly in place then I can see what I will have to work with hence I decided to fit the rear bumper unit. 

There is also a exhaust hanger bracket that will support the exhaust from the diff nose bracket looking through the photos of other builds.  I had to cut the old one on the sub-frame off to get the sub-frame to fit flush to the body so another support bracket will have to be sourced at the same time.

Ignition wire – Looking at connecting the ignition stud in the bulkhead to the ignition cable I decided the joints at the steering column were legacy and messy and repeatedly modified there were supplies to the window closers (which I had now removed) and supplies to the immobiliser.  In general it looked a mess.  So I tried removing the old soldered joints but my soldering iron simply wasn’t generating enough heat to liquefy the solder and allow me to pull the redundant cables free.  In the end I chopped the mess out and laid another piece, the correct length, and with the addition of heat shrink neatened the whole job up.