Cars

You alright there? Me too. I've been busy.

Previously, I wrote:

and anyway nobody said that the radiator must be at the front of the car.

:)

My thoughts are like wild animals. Sometimes they're exciting, sometimes they're cute, and it's best not to leave two of them in a room with only each other to feed on.

For example, let's look at the boot of a tatty Rover P5.

Normal people would say something like "look at the size of that! There's lots of room for suitcases and shopping or whatever the fuck normal people put in their cars". I, on the other hand, thought "look how much room there is for a radiator".

So, let's talk about that. Basically every car with the engine in the front have the radiator in the front of the car too. That means the coolant lines are short and simple, and means that the boot can be used for suitcases and so on.

Alternatively you can put it in the back of the car. Here is a rear-mounted radiator in Matthew Holder's E36 Compact.

Putting it in the back of the car, i.e. in the boot, has some overwhelming advantages which make it common in torture-test applications like drifting. The primary benefit is moving the primary source of heat (your engine) away from the primary means of removing heat (your radiator). This helps mitigate heat soak, which I'll crudely summarise as "everything getting hot and keeping everything else hot".

There is a smaller benefit that you have much longer coolant lines, and those lines contain coolant, and that adds to the total volume of coolant in the system. A pair of three-metre long coolant lines an inch in diameter will increase coolant capacity by about 3 litres, or roughly a quarter of the capacity of the entire coolant system of the car the engine came out of.

There are disadvantages to this. You lose luggage space; but if I want to move anything I would rather use a practical car. The coolant lines are longer and more complicated. And invariably this means the radiator is no longer the highest point in the cooling system. Some people believe that makes it more difficult to bleed, but this is a solved problem.

Anyway that's how I ended up cutting out the boot floor of a Rover P5. But before I could cut any of it out, I wanted to remove whatever this stuff was from it.

This needed to be removed if I was to weld anything to the remainder of the boot floor once I cut it out, and because I was planning to progressively cut out the floor and reinforce it I would have to remove it before doing any cutting. This stuff also made it hard to mark any cut lines on the floor.

It seemed like bitumen; whatever it is my health is likely not better for having been in its vicinity. It can't be ground off with my usual tools like various drill attachments or angle grinder things, because they just heat it up and spread it around, and give you a differently-shaped mess to remove. You'd never get a surface clean enough to weld to. And manual means like wire brushes and scrapers just seemed to bounce off it.

What helped here was freeze spray, which is apparently used for diagnosing electronics. This makes it brittle for just long enough to remove the bulk of it with a hammer and chisel and by the way this took forever.

Originally, as said, my plan was to temporarily brace the floor with angle iron joining the edge which I was cutting out, and then replace it progressively with 25x2.5mm steel box section. You can see some of that temporary bracing on the front edge below.

It turned out to not be necessary; my assumption that the boot floor was critically structural was invalidated when I started cutting it out. It was so floppy that I could flex it between two fingers. Still, I decided to continue with the reinforcement. It adds some rear-end rigidity (especially with two-inch gussets), probably doesn't add any weight, gives me somewhere to build the radiator mounts from, and looks better than an unfinished hole.

But while welding that in, I became increasingly aware that I wasn't welding this to very much. That was because the area where the battery box used to be (which is not where the battery is going to be) was, quite predictably, entirely rotten.

That started a side quest...

...of replacing about a foot and a half of steel, and there went an entire day.

The other side looked pretty grim, but after cleaning up most of it was pretty solid.

It only needed most of the upward return (to which I was welding the reinforcing frame) cutting out and replacing. (To Internet welders: I know. It'll hold.)

Anyway, the point of this wasn't just to make a big gaping hole in the boot of my car. It was to make a big gaping hole to get some kind of under-body airflow to a radiator, and after a quick chat with Chris from Pro Alloy (who previously remade the intercooler for my 323 GTX) the radiator I chose was this:

It's Pro Alloy's radiator for the Ford Sierra Cosworth. Any radiator I bought would only be a starting point (I'll want to modify the inlets and outlets); this one was priced well enough and I know it'll be up to the job.

What I could do here is use the original mounts for the Cosworth radiator. There are two of them, and they look like these ones from Burton.

In fact I did buy two of these, and they made it into the final product, because the mounting points existed on the radiator and I might as well use them. But I do not trust them to support the radiator alone in this application. This is partly because they were never designed to support the radiator at a 45 degree angle, which is how it will be mounted in the P5.

Instead, I needed to make a mounting frame for the radiator, and let's talk about dimple dies.

Dimple dies are cool! I don't know why I waited this long to get some! You take a boring piece of steel, drill a hole in it...

...stick a dimple die through it, apply about 5-10 tons of force in a hydraulic press, and...

...you are now RACE CAR FABRICATOR. It looks cool, and because a hole with no metal is lighter than metal it saves weight, without compromising strength.

And then if you're me you absolutely go to town on it.

So the frame is made of some 50mmx50mmx2mm steel angle on the sides, with some 20mm box section steel on the top and bottom joining them.

Attaching to that are various threaded mounting points for the radiator itself (using the top and bottom flanges on the radiator) and for a fan shroud. These were made from offcuts of the same massive thick angle iron I used to brace my axle housing when I was welding stuff to it.

And on each corner is a square section of the same 50mm steel angle with a slotted hole for some generic rubber anti-vibration mounting bushes.

This is critical! It doesn't just isolate vibration; it stops the assembly becoming a stressed member when the bodyshell flexes. If it wasn't flexibly mounted I'd have to make the frame out of much heavier material to stop the radiator becoming stressed and cracking.

Scattered around are some of these cute little weld-on tabs for cable-tying a wiring harness to. I think I know how my wiring will be routed, so I committed to it.

This radiator-holding frame mounts to the body via these brackets which are to be welded on to the frame in my boot. It's made of the same 50mm angle iron used earlier, and the remnants of the 1" box section I used to line the hole I made in my boot floor. The box section is rotated through 45 degrees to impart the same tilt on the radiator when it is mounted.

Except that's boring, so let's have some more dimple dies, because race car.

Better!

With those welded into the boot I could do the first all-up test.

Everything landed more or less where I thought it would! Especially the outlet on the bottom; this ended up just below the boot floor, which is exactly where I wanted them. The mounting rubber closest to the camera was a little over-stressed in the shear direction; I remedied that by grinding the slot wider and welding in a little shim.

Those who know Sierra Cosworth radiators (this is pretty niche) will notice that the radiator is actually mounted upside down. On a Cosworth, the fan switch (which might get replaced with a temperature sensor) is installed on the inlet (hot) side of the radiator. On mine, the radiator is flipped so that the fan switch is mounted on the outlet side of the radiator. This is because I, one guy on the Internet, disagree with Cosworth, engineering geniuses. I don't care what temperature my water is going in to the radiator. It might come out a different temperature to what it went in, e.g. if the radiator is doing what a radiator does, and that temperature should dictate whether the fans need to be switched on or nmot.

At this point the mounting frame just looks like random bits of steel crudely stuck together by some idiot with a MIG, because it is. But with all the welds tidied up and a coat of Jenolite satin black it looked way better than random bits of steel stuck together by an idiot with a MIG has any right to look.

This is all to be cooled by twin 10 inch fans from American Cooling Systems, each of which is allegedly rated for 2187 CFM. That's a lot of fan, but to make it more efficient it is best to have them mounted via a fan shroud so that they pull air through the entire radiator. I mentioned in passing earlier that I was going to fit one. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone who makes a fan shroud for Rover P5s with rear-mounted Sierra Cosworth radiators. Strange! You'd have thought that'd be an off-the-shelf part!

That meant I had to make one, and because I was going to make one I thought I'd make one a little bit special.

That's right, actual carbon fibre.

I didn't take any step-by-step pics of this, but this should be fairly self-explanatory: 20mm carbon fibre box section for the standoff, 2mm carbon fibre sheet for the face, and 25x2mm carbon fibre angle for the mounting points, glued together with VM100 adhesive. The fans bolt through with those weird glued-in threaded stud thingies. You can get all of this from Easy Composites, who happen to have an outstanding YouTube channel.

Cured carbon fibre is nicer than I expected to work with! It cuts easily with a normal angle grinder cutting disc or a Dremel-like tool. Easy Composites have a video on the subject. I'm not scared of it anymore, so there might be more carbon fibre parts in my future.

This is crude, and my first attempt at making anything with carbon fibre, but it looks absolutely sick. And nobody will ever see it because it faces the floor! But I know it's there, and it means I get to say "carbon fibre fan shroud".

And that, plus some foam and rubber stripping, is a radiator mounted in the wrong end of a Rover P5.

There is still much to do, because the rest is actually plumbing in the entire cooling system. The radiator needs some modification to the inlets and outlets accommodate a 45 degree mounting angle, an expansion tank needs mounting somewhere, and of course there are no coolant lines.

And in fact I'm not 100% sure there's going to be enough air flow available here. There should be enough underneath to allow cooling at speed, and once I ventilate the boot lid (not at all sorry to anyone who hates seeing perfectly good P5 panels getting chopped up) I should have enough air around for the fans to pull from. That is guesswork, which is not the same as knowing. Without putting this in a wind tunnel, I won't know how well this will work until I actually use it, and it does or does not overheat.

But that's a problem for future Lewis. If I look at everything that I need to do to this car I can be overwhelmed; someone who doesn't really know what the fuck he is doing re-engineering an entire car. But if I break it down into lots of small, standalone projects like this I find it much more manageable, and doing them in whatever order I find most fun on a given day keeps the motivation high.

I know what you're thinking. It's something like "Lewis, this is all totally unnecessary and overkill unless you were planning on, e.g., bolting a massive turbo onto it and getting stupid horsepower numbers which would cause you to actually need all this cooling".

I know.

:)

Part numbers from this post:

• Freeze spray:: Motip 090409
• Radiator: Pro Alloy RADCOSS
• Boot floor corner repair section: J R Wadhams P5BDW37
• Satin black paint: Jenolite 89036
• Red primer: Jenolite 89593
• Carbon fibre: Easy Composites CFS-RI-2-0475, CFBOX-20-17-2, CFANG-25-2-1
• Cable tie mount thingies: Pacific Customs AC750795
• Steel by Thomas B Bonnett, KI Metals and some random eBay seller

Nearly four years ago, I bought a fifth-generation Ford Fiesta for £600. Since then, I mentioned that it passed an MOT, and then I didn't say much about it after that. Inexplicably, it is still alive and I still own it; it recently went through its fourth MOT with me.

I used to call it "the shed" or "the shit car", because it's basically the minimum viable car that I could own. I've stopped calling it that, because it has been a champion. Here is everything that has happened to it.

Sink your money in it, and there you are / The owner of a two-thousand-dollar thousand-dollar car - The Bottle Rockets, "Thousand Dollar Car"

I had rather intended to use this until its first significant MOT failure, and then scrap it. It's a valid, very cheap way to own a car; one £600 car a year is £50 a month, which is probably less than I spend on biscuits. And then it failed an MOT, and I was like...what if I don't do that?

I'll admit, I got attached to it. It seemed a mighty shame to write off a perfectly functional car after nearly two decades of service. Fiestas, and pretty much any car that normal people can afford, go through a period of their life where they are worthless, people decide they are not worth fixing, and they get scrapped. I decided it is worth fixing.

The first MOT failure was for a leaking exhaust and an anti-roll bar ball joint. That barely cost anything to fix, so I did.

I say "I did", but I didn't. I long ago resolved to not do any work of consequence on this car. I already have projects, and all of my free time is accounted for. And with my tendency to get a bit carried away, it'd probably emerge four years later with a mad turbo forged Zetec engine or something. Instead, my favourite local garage does all the work for me. I like them a lot, and with all the money that has gone from my bank to theirs over the years I'm sure that they don't mind me either.

The second MOT failure was for a leaking rear shock absorber; that corner had been clunking for a few weeks before that, so I was not surprised. But it also had an advisory for a corroded rear spring for a while. It seemed mad to replace just one shock absorber, and then put a crusty spring back on it. And from repeating "it seemed mad to replace just..." a few more times it ended up with new shocks and springs at all four corners. That cost more than the car is worth, but that also made it ride like a new car.

I had already sunk more than the value of the car into the car before this, though. At just shy of 100,000 miles I replaced the cam belt and water pump. I didn't know when this was last done, because I didn't have any documentation of it, and even if I did have documentation I wouldn't know when it was last done, if you know what I mean. That was also more than the £600 I spent on the car, but it's also much less than the cost of rebuilding the engine, which is what would be necessary if the cam belt snapped.

It originally had some random no-name ditchfinder tyres on the front. These were fun, because they allowed this 80 horsepower car to do extended wheelspins through 3rd gear in the wet. They were also, for exactly the same reasons, not especially safe. I replaced them with some Fulda tyres on the front, which are much better and not very expensive. When one of the rear tyres developed a not-very-slow puncture (losing like 5psi per day), I replaced both rear tyres with ones that were not bad, which made no real difference.

To my surprise I haven't modified it, because that would be a terrible idea. I mean, I had considered getting much cooler wheels and replacing the suspension with something much sportier than standard when suspension-replacement time came around. But then I would have a slow car with cool wheels and overkill suspension which would cost more to insure and be worth slightly less if I ever sold it.

Instead, it is ever so slightly more original than it was when I bought it. Specifically, I replaced whatever the fuck these wheel trims were...

...with some genuine Ford ones that I got off eBay for like seventy quid.

This makes it look much less neglected, or would if I cared to clean the car more than once a year. This also makes it the only fifth-generation Fiesta to have all four of the correct wheel trims. Ever notice that? All of them either have at least one missing or they're on Halfords specials.

Not original, but another easy way to make a big improvement, were the floor mats. Being fitted with generic floor mats which don't fit any car in particular is an indignity that no car, however humble, should have to suffer. Instead, I found some rubber ones on eBay that fit the car perfectly, and only cost £20. Like the wheel trims, plain mats which actually fit the car are a very cheap way of making things look a little bit happier and fresher.

Another easy way to make it less tired is to polish the headlights. The headlights are the eyes of a car; getting rid of the haze that builds on plastic headlights over times brightens up a car's face. I used the Meguiar's kit which is 20 quid; you can probably get the same results with toothpaste and patience.

Talking of wheels (three subjects ago, this is how I talk in real life), one of the front one had an MOT advisory for having a slight buckle. It didn't seem to have any effect on driving it, but I did not want such a trivial advisory repeating itself in the MOT history. I replaced that with a genuine new one, which was £66 shipped.

The Fiesta's steering was a little vague since I bought it; there was a dead spot for the first couple of degrees of rotation of the steering wheel. It was entirely drivable; it just didn't feel as precise as I thought it should. Before the most recent MOT I asked my garage to investigate that. It was caused by a worn steering rack. That got replaced with a new one, and more than the value of my car left my bank account again. It made it a bit less vague.

At the same time I had a wheel bearing replaced. It was making a rumbling noise. I could have ignored it for longer than I did. I probably ignored it for longer than I should.

The plastic latch for one of the rear seat broke. This is a common problem, because it is badly designed. That's another one of those "subtle neglect" things I had to fix. I could have "fixed" it with a piece of string, or continued to use a screwdriver to yank it up. But it was a cheap fix to make the car right.

Also, the washer bottle cap was, for some reason, a detergent bottle cap or similar that was somehow made to fit. It annoyed me every time I opened the bonnet. Like poorly-fitting car mats and bad wheel trims, this is an indignity no car should have to suffer. I solved it by spending £3.75 and literally six seconds.

And finally, it briefly ended up on the national police database for "cars what do crimes". Apparently my number plate got cloned, and used for some crime or other in London. Fortunately, for whatever reason, the police knew that my plate had been cloned, so they sent me a letter telling me that my plate had been cloned, rather than sending very serious-looking people in black uniforms to my house. For a while, any time I passed an ANPR-equipped car the police would turn around and stop me and inspect my car. They were all very nice about it, so not even that aspect of owning this Fiesta was particularly exciting.

In all that time, and for all the work that was done, it never actually let me down. The closest I got to that was an engine check light coming on once, but that didn't affect how it drove. It felt scary, but I plugged in an OBD-II reader and the fault turned out to be a lambda sensor; it's an emissions control thing rather than a harbinger of imminent engine destruction. It cleared itself not long after, but I replaced the sensor soon after just in case. That could happen on a five year old car; I am not unhappy that it happened on a car that was pushing 20 at the time.

Also, one time a non-standard amount of smoke came from under the bonnet. That happened because the oil filler cap came loose and popped off, spraying oil everywhere; miraculously, it landed upside down on the top of the engine and didn't fall off while I was driving.

I don't know how that happened; I suspected excessive crank case pressure, but I screwed it on, cleaned up the mess with solvents, and it hasn't reoccurred in the thousands of miles since. It was likely it was just not fully screwed on at some point; I won't point fingers about who might have been responsible for that, mostly because I don't know it was not me.

And let's talk about what else has gone right with it. It still does the roughly 45 miles per imperial gallon at which it is rated, after over 100,000 miles. Everything still works, except the air conditioning, and that'd likely work if I ever bother to get it re-gassed. Maybe I'll do that before the summer. Or maybe I'll forget about it, remember it again when the weather gets hot and decide it's too late at this point because we're only going to have like a week of hot weather, which is what happened in the last four "before the summer"-s.

I used the words "more than the value of the car" multiple times above. All of those big expenses were optional. I could have replaced a single shock absorber, but then it would not ride like new. I could have just assumed that the cam belt and water pump were done in the past, but then it might have blown itself up. That's the worst case, but living with the uncertainty was the best case.

We can discount some of the expenses that came up. Tyres need replacing on cars of any age; I'm surprised the bad cheap tyres on the back lasted as long as they did, really. Lambda sensors tend to randomly fail regardless of age. If we look specifically at the things that failed because it is an old cheap car, spread across the time I have owned it, it adds and divides up to about the cost of the car spent every year.

Which...is actually very cheap! As said earlier, that works out at £50 a month, or less per year than some people I know are paying per month to finance fancier cars. And it pleases me to keep a car at the most worthless point in its lifespan in fine mechanical condition.

But "more than the value of the car" is not relevant. If my car cost 50 pence, I wouldn't avoid spending 50 pence on the car to keep it running, because that would be absurd. The cost is meaningless when, in a sense, it is compared only to itself; what actually matters is how I could spend the same money differently and whether that would put me in a better or worse situation. If I scrapped it or sold it, I would have to get another car, probably for the same price, and that comes at the cost of my time. And to me, if I am going to own a car it makes more sense to make the same car progressively less bad over time rather than throw it away and buy another one as soon as anything gets a little expensive.

And that, if I did it correctly, is how I just convinced you that I have good financial sense when it comes to cars. Ha ha ha HA HA HA HA. Honestly, I just got attached and threw too much money at it for that reason. I'm a champion rationaliser.

So what's next?

Well, use it some more; it's done that perfectly for years and I'll keep doing that.

What about further work? The paint is tired, and has looked tired since I bought it. And I'm starting to see hints of surface rust on the car in various spots. I should probably stop this from getting any worse. That'll be a "more than the value of the car" thing again.

The windscreen has had an advisory on it for a tiny stone chip since before I bought it; I don't like seeing advisories stick around forever in the MOT history, but it also seems like a lot of money to fix something invisible. (I don't believe in claiming for this on my insurance, on the "if everybody did it" principle. If a rock went through my windscreen, maybe; a tiny defect that has been around forever, no.)

It has also had an advisory for the brake lines since forever, too. They're probably fine, because I run out of grip from the tyres before I run out of brakes. There are at least two deer and a family of geese that owe their lives to the brakes! But the brake lines are covered in shite so MOT testers can't inspect them and thus can neither pass or fail them. That probably needs only a clean to get rid of the advisory. If I don't forget about it two minutes after I publish this article I might even get around to that.

The noise levels are fine for most of the driving I do. There's a little bit more road noise than I would like on my rare long, straight drives. The car has little sound deadening. There's no insulation under the bonnet, and basically none in the boot. I think it could be made a little quieter by fixing both.

Or again, I'll forget about it after I've published this post! Because it's a car that works perfectly and I don't have much real reason to mess with it.

I know what you're thinking. It's something like "Lewis, a Rover P5's prehistoric manual gearbox will explode if you put 350 horsepower through it". And you're right!

Here was my gearbox. It's attached to my old engine here; I didn't separate them for the eBay auction because I couldn't be bothered. It was an ancient 4-speed manual. It is so old that it actually pre-dates the Rover P5; it's similar enough to the seventy-plus-year-old Rover P4's gearbox that most of the innards are allegedly interchangeable.

Over to the right of the engine and gearbox is a Laycock overdrive, which gives it a fifth gear for cruising.

The overdrive is high-tech for the 1960s; it's electrically-operated via a switch on the dash and had a lockout which stops it being used in fourth gear.

It's an amazing thing! It is far removed from the primitive Fairey units of the era, which used a mechanical lever to engage it, and an instructional plate in the interior telling you what gears you should use it in.

And before we go on, let's have a little digression back in time to "Lewis removes the old engine and gearbox".

To get the gearbox out, you must first remove the overdrive. To remove the overdrive, there is a ring of bolts, four or so of which can only be accessed through a small hole in the transmission tunnel. It's fiddly, it's time consuming, but it's doable - just one of those silly fiddly jobs you get on any car of any age.

Alternatively you could, as someone in this car's past decided, just fucking slice open the transmission tunnel, peel it back, and fold it back into place when you are done and not even bother welding it up because you're time constrained and nobody's going to notice and you are an idiot mechanic.

All I'm getting at, is that if anyone worried that I'm ruining a perfectly good P5 Mark 1A export CKD: I'm not. :)

Anyway, I no longer own any of that. The engine and box sold together on eBay. It made little money. I am comfortable with that fact, because it is going on to a new life in a Rover P4. It will be a substantial upgrade in the much-lighter P4 - that'll be a 115 horsepower engine in a 1400 kg car. Nice!

The transmission wasn't any good to me, because even if it could take the power I want to put through it (it absolutely will not), and someone actually made an adapter plate for it (nobody does), I wouldn't want to use it for a bunch of reasons, one of which is that parts are very scarce and expensive these days. Instead, I ended up with...

...a BMW GS6-53DZ HGD six-speed manual gearbox from a BMW 525D, and some shiny things. How did I get here?

Above all, I wanted a manual transmission. I don't intend to ever buy a car with an automatic transmission, and I'm definitely not going to build one. If I liked automatic transmissions I'd have lots of bolt-on options, some of them quite cheap, but I don't, so I don't.

With auto boxes written off, the bolt-on options (other than some mad Quaife sequential and yes I did seriously consider this) are exactly two: the five-speed Tremec TKX and the six-speed Tremec T56. You can probably find a T56 at a scrapyard, if you live in the United States where the LS engine was born and cars with LS engines were sold by the millions. That is not where I am from, and a T56 is a specialist item over here. You can get them new in the UK, but they run about £4000 before you've bought a bellhousing for it. The TKX is only slightly cheaper.

I'm not building this car on the smallest possible budget. That ship sailed two seconds after I decided to do an LS swap in the UK. But if I can save several grand without compromising anything I will, because that gives me more money to spend on takeaways and more car parts.

So, the BMW gearbox. While I don't want a four-speed gearbox, I have no particular desire for a six-speed gearbox; I am not building this car for motorway-mile high-scores done quietly and economically. I bought this because it is a reputedly strong gearbox. It is rated for 391 lb-ft of torque (or 530 newton metres, the "53" in the name). Most likely the GS6-53DZ is good for much more torque than that (evidenced by the drifters routinely not blowing them up). I should have headroom if I do something silly like bolting a turbo to the LS1 which absolutely is not occupying my every waking thought right now.

As well as being a strong gearbox, it is a strong gearbox I can get cheaply. The HGD-suffix gearboxes aren't as plentiful as the others, but they're not hard to find for less than £500. That means I can justify buying a spare, for when I inevitably destroy it doing massive smoky burnouts. And if anything does go wrong, it's not hard to get parts for them nor to find anyone to work on them in the UK.

To get any of this to work with the LS engine, I got the PMC Motorsport adapter kit. Those are the three shiny bits you see in the photo above. To the left is a gorgeously-machined plate which bolts to the BMW gearbox. On the right is another gorgeously-machined plate which bolts to the LS engine. These two bolt together to mate the engine to the gearbox. In the middle is a custom flywheel, which bolts to the LS1's flex plate/starter ring.

I will need to make a minor modification to the gearbox (the guide tube needs shortening), and there are more parts to be acquired before this is a working transmission setup, but I'll deal with that later. Let's get out the trusty caravan stands and transmission jack and find out how this gearbox doesn't fit the car, and what we can do about that fact.

The good news is that the body of the gearbox fits within the subframe! My fear was that I might have to cut out and reshape the rear crossmember of the subframe to do this, but that isn't necessary. The body of the gearbox clears every part of the subframe, and the output spider clears the rear of the subframe. It's tight, but that's another way to spell "fits"; nothing I actually need hits anything that can't be modified.

The BMW OEM rear mounts are entirely negotiable. It's a three-part system which is very light, but also very large.

There's no room to fit it behind the gearbox in the Rover P5 subframe. This would require cutting out part of the rear-most crossmember - a thing I wish to not do. And even if I could use it, it has rather too much flex for my tastes. It makes sense for minimising noise and vibration in a daily-driven car, and does not make sense for me.

In designing a new mounting, it would be really easy to design something with the access I have now, which would be impossible to fit it when it was on the car. For example, the four bolts on the back of the gearbox are really easy to get to - when I'm working with a subframe sat on caravan stands in my workshop. They're a lot more fiddly to get to from underneath, which is how I will be accessing them when fitting the gearbox to a subframe bolted to the car.

So with some thought (and a stroke of genius from Maurice), I came up with a two-part mounting which is a lot simpler and stiffer than the OEM mounting. Here is part 1.

I copied the hole spacing and the vague shape from the original BMW gearbox mounting and traced it onto 3mm steel plate. I got the holes not quite right the first time; I needed to relocate one of them further out-board, and rather than move that one out all the way I decided to relocate all of them only a little to compensate, and reinforce those areas with welded-on washers.

On that plate is a piece of 28mm ID steel tube, separated from the plate with some random bit of angle iron I had kicking around (probably 20mm). That isn't really there for spacing. Instead, it made it much easier to get the tube aligned perfectly level (± my sloppiness) when I stuck all of this together.

This bolts to the back of the gearbox, and will be bolted to the gearbox when I fit it into the car - solving the problem of those four bolts being fiddly to get to from underneath.

The other half of this re-uses the original two holes in the subframe for the rearmost gearbox mounting bracket on the P5's subframe (but I drilled these out to accept an M8 bolt, only a fraction larger than the original Imperial 5/16). And I took the original P5 rear mounting bracket...

...and Frankensteined it with more 3mm plate into whatever the fuck this is:

These two parts join together via a generic 90mm Powerflex top hat bush which I actually bought for a different sub-project on the car (tell me if you guessed what that might be). When it all bolts together, it looks like this:

This, I think, is a rather neat solution to the problem. It fits. It's simple. It'll actually be accessible in situ. And it'll give me enough flex to stop the vibration driving me nuts (and hopefully enough to stop the gearbox from shaking itself apart), unlike a solid mount.

And with everything else bolted up...

...I get another another milestone: a (stunt) Chevy engine and BMW gearbox bolted into a Rover subframe with no outside support.

And that, is enough car for now. :) See you next time.

Part numbers from this post:

• Gearbox: BMW GS6-53DZ HGD / 23 00 7 522 205 (ZF 1067 401 060)
• Gearbox adapter: PMC A-LS-HGD-240
• Bushing: Powerflex PF99-101
• Stunt engine: Speedway Motors 12640748
• Transmission jack: Draper 09021
• Steel from Thomas B. Bonnett

This was my Rover P5's engine.

You'll notice that it's not in the Rover P5.

So, the workshop build was completed, giving me a much nicer space to work in. The Mazda 323 GTX was fully someone else's problem while the engine is (still) being rebuilt. And some time ago I made some major life changes to give me more time and motivation; it worked! Which meant I could finally get back to the Rover P5, for which there are thousands of pounds worth of parts in storage to fit, and a list of jobs that'll keep me out of trouble for the foreseeable future. And I found myself procrastinating, again. Why?

Someone wise once told me that when I find myself procrastinating, I need to look for the fear. I think one of those fears is that I have seen some really nicely-done Rover P5s, and I doubt I will ever be able to do one as well as those. There's a fear of being judged by all the people that build all those perfect P5s. Half of that doesn't matter (it doesn't need to be perfect) and the other half is mostly something I made up (there are so very few judgy people in the classic car world and I'm actually thick-skinned faced with actual criticism rather than imaginary criticism anyway).

What I also found out was: When finished, I just wouldn't find the P5 fun to drive.

It's a beautiful car, maybe one of the most beautiful cars ever made. This one in particular, in this colour, is so beautiful that I was forced to impulse-purchase it. And yet, it has an engine designed shortly after World War II, a carburettor, a distributor with points, and 115 horsepower. The horsepower number sounds OK, but it is in a car weighing 1700 kilograms. It is substantially slower than my totally-standard 1.4 litre Ford Fiesta from 2004, even if you forget the fact that my Fiesta can corner and a P5 can't. Or that my Fiesta has actually worked every day, where a car with a carb and a distributor with points is a lottery.

A 3-litre Rover P5 is not fun to me, and I live my life one fun at a time, or something.

Anyone sensible would have sold the car at that admission-to-self. Actually, anybody sensible would not have bought impulse-purchased a non-working car for £3500 unseen over the Internet, so wouldn't reach this point in the first place. Because I'm not sensible, I decided to start a new plan: make a Rover P5 fun to drive.

I actually had several ideas. One was to develop fuel injection & electronically-controlled ignition for the IOE engine, to at least make it reliable and probably get a few more horsepowers out of it. That would open up more options, like shoving a massive turbo onto it for the lolz, and well, if that idea sounds insane that's why I didn't do it.

So, what else? Rover V8? 2JZ? K20???

They all have their merits. And yet, those are all petrol engines. Any discussion of drivetrain swaps in classic cars must eventually face the spectre of electrification.

Electric means 100% torque at zero RPM, fewer moving parts, near-silent; it's, like, the future, man. And though some consider it sacrilege to electrify a classic car, it can be argued that changing an old, unreliable, underpowered petrol engine to a modern, reliable, much more powerful one is changing the character of a car every bit as much as electrifying a car is. And nobody but the dullest of rivet-counters objects much to all the mad engine swaps out there; why object, then, to electrification?

But there's more. We all know that petrol engines pollute. Some would argue that, whatever the historic value of these old cars, an internal combustion engine in a classic car in The Current Year is like painting an historic house with lead paint, heating it with trees felled from old-growth forests, and emptying a chamber pot from its windows onto the street. Such a thing may have been a grim necessity in the past; doing it today when we have clearly better and cleaner options is entirely irresponsible. And, honestly, it's very hard to argue with that.

And that is why I bought

a Corvette engine, because fuck 'em.

This is the Chevrolet LS1, a 5.7 litre V8 petrol engine with about 350 horsepower and over 350 lbs/ft of torque, and an aftermarket that will take them to arbitrarily large power numbers. And it makes cool V8 noises! Now we're talking!!

This is not another dumb impulse purchase (he said with a straight face) but the product of a lot of thinking. I wanted reliable power in a compact package that had some hope of fitting in the P5.

I needed something well-documented; "LS1 into a Rover P5" might not have been done before, but "LS engine into something that shouldn't have an LS engine" has been done probably thousands of times. And anything you are thinking of doing with an LS1, the fine folks over at the LS1Tech.com forums have probably already done it five times and found out which of those five ways works best and which four don't.

I needed something somewhat modern; no LS engine has a distributor, and they definitely do not have a carb, which would allow me to preserve my unbroken 41-year streak of not dealing with carbs. (Yes, I would rather re-engineer a car entirely rather than ever deal with bloody carbs and this is literally what is happening here.)

It is a simple engine, compared to other modern engines with the same power figures. I reckon I could hold one in my head. Simplicity means less to go wrong, and simplicity means that if it does go wrong it's straightforward to fix. Simplicity also means that they could build them cheaper, and make up the difference with displacement.

It's kind of cheap. There are no scrapyard LS engines in England; this cost me nearly £4000 and it had to be shipped from Ireland. But if you price it against any other 350 horsepower engine it's not that bad. Sure, everyone's getting 350+ out of their K20s these days - but you won't get a K20 pushing out that kind of power reliably for £4k. Or maybe I could probably pick up one of the German V8s for that money - but then that would be a monstrously complicated engine with no substantial after-market. Or I could pick up a JZ - for substantially more money, and complexity, and that still wouldn't push 350 horsepower without modification. (This was actually my original plan. My brother talked me out of it. I am glad he did, and not just because that means losing the next several years of my life to this is not at all my fault.)

I used to hate the saying there's no replacement for displacement. You probably won't find me using it again after this very paragraph, in fact. But I have to admit there's something to it. For reliable power at a given price point, sometimes it's best to throw a bunch of unsophisticated cubic centimeters at the problem. "Quantity has a quality all its own", as Stalin once said while trying to find positive things to say about my welding. Or, "when in doubt, use brute force".

And that is how Lewis convinced himself that buying a 5.7 litre V8 was a good idea! So...

Does it fit?!

As if I'd ask that sort of question before spending all of my money on an engine! But I had a hunch that it would. Its 5.7 litre displacement seems ludicrous to anyone whose patriotism includes no eagles, but it's actually a remarkably compact engine. It's substantially smaller in most dimensions than a Rover V8, and we know a Rover V8 fits in a Rover P5. But measurements can lie; I wouldn't know for a fact that it fits until I shoved it in the engine bay and saw what it collided with.

What I didn't feel like doing, though, was lifting 215 kilos in and out more than once, because setting up the engine crane every time would be effort. Which is why I bought another LS engine!

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this isn't really an LS engine. It's the wrong colour! This is, instead, a mockup engine, or as I like to call it, a stunt engine. It replicates all of the critical dimensions and mounting points of a real LS engine. My one even has fake cylinder heads! And it weighs like 8kg, or 15kg with the "heads", which is a weight nobody minds lifting in and out of a car. You can get one at Speedway Motors in the US. (Their website plain doesn't work with non-US delivery addresses and telephone numbers though; you'll have to give them a phone call if you're outside the US, and brace yourself for the shipping cost.)

So, I dropped the stunt engine into the P5's engine bay, in about the same place that the original IOE engine sat.

Let's talk first about what "fits" means. What that really means is that it doesn't hit anything that I want it to clear. There are some things that are non-negotiable. It can't interfere with any part of the steering. I don't want to chop out the front crossmember. I don't want to cut into the bulkhead. I don't want to redesign the suspension. I don't want to have a bulge in the bonnet, because that would look silly. Anything else - especially adding metal to the car - is up for grabs.

As you can see, there's miles of vertical space there, and no clearance problems around the heads. Let's look at the air conditioning pump.

Acres of room there, because I threw the air-con pump onto the scrap pile (not gonna need it, and saves 8kg), so there's nothing to clear. Woohoo!!

Let's look at the other side.

The big mount on the right-hand side is one of my old engine mounting points; that's going to get chopped off. The small brackets at the front are for the radiator or something, I forgot. Don't worry about those. They're in the way, but they can be anywhere on that front crossmember, and anyway nobody said that the radiator must be at the front of the car.

:)

Still, there's a possibility that the alternator will not clear the front crossmember. It's going to be tight. Even if it fits, it might be a pain to get in and out. It might necessitate a more compact alternator, and if that doesn't work I can mount the alternator at the top right of the engine as the LS-engined trucks have it. There's some possible solution for it out there even if I don't know what that is yet, so let's call that OK.

It's a bit tight around the steering box and somewhat less tight on the steering relay on the other side. Tight, but some design of engine mounting won't conflict. I can fabricate around this - run mounting rails from the rear to the front - in a way that'll allow me to get the steering components in and out.

And there's enough room at the back that I'll be able to unbolt the engine from the box with less hassle than the original engine! But while we're looking at the back...

No possible design of sump is going to clear that rear crossmember. This crossmember is negotiable though; it needs to be more or less there, but it doesn't have to look like this. It can plausibly be dropped lower and I'll pretend that this isn't going to result in any ground clearance issues.

My brother has a way of asking the obvious questions that I did not think of, such as...

And well, yes, I can.

So, an LS engine fits in a Rover P5, for some value of "LS engine" and "fits". With that point proved, I could drop the front subframe.

This was easier than expected. The six bolts that held it in actually came undone, perhaps because of plenty of penetrant applied in the days before. The only other things in the way were the old over-complicated handbrake mechanism (which is going to be replaced by something much simpler when that comes around), an earth strap, and a brake line, all of which were swiftly defeated by an angle grinder.

With the subframe on the floor, I could take a look at the original engine mounts. I said "Corvette engine" earlier because it is, but it was also fitted in many other cars, and I think these are Pontiac GTO mounts (which obviously implies this engine came from a GTO, and not a Corvette). With those bolted to the stunt engine, I could see that re-using them is somewhat plausible.

But that is without the engine at the correct height relative to the subframe; they're both sitting on the ground.

What is the correct height and location of the engine, though? I actually decided on this early on, before the old engine came out. It was to copy the forwardmost point and the crank centreline of the P5's engine. The engine is exactly central in the subframe. The very front of the vertical centre of the front pulley is 160mm from the deepest point of the dip of the front crossmember, with the front face of it sitting exactly in the fore-aft centre of that crossmember. The engine tilts back at an angle of 3 degrees. That, I decided, will be the position of the new engine; it is as good as any.

But to get the stunt engine in position on the subframe, how am I going to measure those dimensions relative to the front face and centreline of the front pulley, when my stunt engine does not have a front pulley? The answer, obviously, is to fit a front pulley to it. Here's what that looks like.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this isn't really an LS1 front pulley. It's the wrong colour! This is, instead, a mockup pulley, or as I like to call it, a stunt pulley. I don't actually need a whole front pulley; I need something to mark out the centreline of the crank and the stick-out of the real pulley. So I welded some shit together and came up with this. The centre of the rectangular cut-out on the front of the stunt engine corresponds with the crank centreline of the LS. After I positioned it as precisely as I reasonably could, I marked some sharp lines with a paint pen on the stunt pulley. When all four of these markings are lined up with the edges of the rectangular cut-out, like this...

...I know that the stunt pulley is exactly where it needs to be. This saves a lot of tedious measuring (it took 15 minutes to line this up perfectly to make the markings) and it's easy to validate with an eyeball that it hasn't shifted anywhere.

Anyway, let's get the fake pulley onto the fake engine, put it on the subframe and see how it goes.

To do this, I bought these cheap adjustable caravan stands to hold the subframe up to a working height...

...and lifted the stunt engine up to the correct height with this jack designed for gearboxes (which means it has a perfectly linear upwards lift unlike a conventional jack)...

...and with everything in more-or-less the right place....

...bolt the steering box and relay into the subframe and see what fouls what.

It turned out I can't use those GTO engine mounts, because they foul on the steering arms - even if they could bolt to mid-air there would be no clearance there.

Shame, because I liked them, and didn't really want to make my own, but needs must. I made an initial version of my mounts out of cardboard.

Which was fine, except there was no space to get a bolt into the engine block, so I came up with a second one...

...which I could fit to the stunt engine block using a bolt. Which meant I could turn that into steel, and to talk about turning it into steel we shall have a brief diversion about tools.

Tools! I like them! Tools help you make things! And yet I am prone as anyone to thinking that just one more tool is going to solve all my problems. What I actually needed to do instead of buying more tools was to use the ones I have.

Some of those tools are three 115mm angle grinders. They all perform exactly the same. I like having one with a cutting disc, one with a flappy wheel disc, and one with a grinding disc. It saves having to change discs, which I don't like doing because life is short.

The other one is a cheap MIG welder. It's a Clarke 151EN which my brother gave me for free (thanks Alex), which he bought for about £200 in 2013 and didn't use much.

I've converted it to use a Euro torch, to make it easier to find consumables. I also ripped out the gas feed from the welder to use it solely with flux-core (gasless) wire. A lot of people don't like flux-core welding. I kinda like it; I get nearly the same results and I don't need to worry about running out of gas. It's easy to get flux core wire from Amazon; it's more effort to get a gas bottle refilled. And I want to prove a point, and only to myself: that tooling is not what is coming between me and getting actual stuff done.

It's a cheap welder so I might burn it out before I've finished the subframe. Or I'll end up converting it to gas! But for now this will do.

Anyway, with the cheap welder and a selection of angle grinders I turned my cardboard engine mount into 3mm steel...

...and then remade it again with a 6mm main plate chopped off a generic LS engine mount, and 3mm steel for the rest...

...which almost solved the problems I had from the first round. (I'll still need to fettle it in the press a bit to get rid of some heat distortion from welding, and tidy up the welds; that can be done later.)

Those with some the mounting rubbers clear the steering arms with room to spare.

Nice! And I'll need that room to spare, because I need to fabricate some rails for these mounts to sit on. And that starts with these:

These took three revisions across three days to make. Someone who is good at this would have done it in a fraction of the time; I don't know what I'm doing, so it takes longer. That's part of the fun of this. I've never done an engine swap (if you don't count putting a slightly larger-displacement version of the same engine into a car), let alone an LS swap into something that never had an LS. I can chop up metal with an angle grinder and do an ugly job of sticking it together with a gasless MIG I got for free; those are my "skills". And this rules! If I only did what I know I'd still be soiling myself and crying for food. Just give it a go; what's the worst that can happen?

Anyway, the idea behind these sections of rail is that I can bolt them to the engine mount. Then I can get the subframe exactly level, and then get the stunt engine in exactly the right position relative to the subframe (rather than the crude approximation I did to check my steering clearances). This took three hours! And it required continued adjustment over the course of the day as the temperature changed and when I accidentally kicked the caravan stands. From there, you can fabricate outwards from the stub rails towards the front corners of the subframe. This is how a partly-completed rail looks:

And getting the engine in the right position gets a lot easier after the first quarter of these rails is in place! Here is how it extends backwards:

The box to which it extends rearwards (right in the pic above) is not strong enough for these purposes. It is a fairly-thin reinforcer between the suspension arm mounting points and the rear crossmember, which are strong enough for this job. I'll reinforce this box later.

Anyway, spend nine days straight on doing all of those things and you get something that looks like this:

That's close enough to done for the moment; it holds the engine in the correct place and at the correct angles for us to move on for a while. Let's take a look at that alternator clearance again.

That nearly fits. Nearly fitting means "doesn't fit". But "nearly" also implies a couple of solutions that aren't top-mounting the alternator (which I don't want to do because this will merely move the clearance problem somewhere else rather than solve it). One of those would be to simply notch the new subframe rails a little. But I think it would be better to solve this by fitting a modern, more compact alternator. That's the obvious solution to me, because I want to replace my alternator anyway; it and all the other ancillaries on the engine came without no guarantee that they work.

Let's talk about the sump for a second. It's abundantly clear to me that the original front-sump would never clear the steering gear. So I bought this Camaro rear-ish sump instead...

...which still won't clear the steering gear at the front! But it's a better starting point because it has the oil filter at the rear. That means it can be modified to fit. What I knew all along was that the rear of any LS sump won't clear the centre crossmember. There was a little clearance on a sump-less stunt engine - in fact, millimetres from clearing the centre crossmember with the rear sump. But modifying the sump at the rear is not a solution. The sump on the LS engines are structural; the bellhousing bolts to it. So there's a hard limit on how shallow you can make a sump at the rear, and I think the Camaro sump is as shallow as it can be in the areas that interfere with the crossmember.

Instead, that means that we have to brace the chassis with some angle iron, cut the centre crossmember out...

...and remake it, but about an inch or two lower. To do this, I took an oversized length piece of 25x50x3mm box section steel, and clamped that to some temporary angle iron pointing downwards from the outside of the chassis rail, spending as long as I needed to get it in exactly the right position.

From there, I could add some steel plate to hold it in place...

...and then add a whole load more steel and miles of flux core welding wire to make it into a centre crossmember, and by the way there goes another three days.

At which point I started to wonder how much of the weight savings from fitting an LS1 are being negated by the sheer volume of steel I'm putting into this!

After that, I knew that there was going to be some clearance problems around the starter motor. So I cut out some of the steel I just added, chopped a slice of 100mm steel pipe, and shoved that in the hole I made (it's just right of the rear of the engine below).

As promised earlier, I reinforced the box between the suspension arm mounts and the stub of the old rear crossmember by adding even more 3mm steel.

And with all that done, I could spend a day and a half going around fixing up my bad welds, cleaning up a little,...and add a little zinc-rich primer as a temporary to stop everything from rusting faster than a British car leaving the factory. While Chip Foose is not going to start hammering my inbox trying to hire me for my beautiful fabrication skills, it looks pretty OK for someone who has absolutely no clue what he is doing.

So that's where I am now: an LS engine (or stunt version thereof), sitting in a Rover P5 subframe, with most of the things clearing the things they need to clear. Some things need fettling, and some things might still need to be welded to it; this is not its final form. But this is done enough that I can call it done for now.

And that, is the easy part out of the way. :) See you next time.

Part numbers from this post:

• Stunt engine: Speedway Motors SoloSwap 12640748
• Transmission jack: Draper 09021
• Welder: Clarke 151EN
• Sump: General Motors 12640748
• Die grinder: Sealey SA671
• Zinc primer: U-POL WELD/AL
• Cardboard: Amazon single-skin envelopes (from my deliveries), Felix cat food boxes
• Steel supplied by Thomas B. Bonnett

A fully-dressed LS1 V8 engine weighs exactly 215 kilos. That is 474 Freedoms if you are from the United States of America. I put it in the title of this post to save the world a click.

This includes everything, other than a transmission, which is normally directly attached to the engine - power steering & air con pump, alternator, inlet & exhaust manifolds, flex plate, engine mounts, fuel rail, engine side of the wiring loom, etc. There's plenty of numbers out there on the Internet that involve the words "about" and "I think", and I didn't like that, so I lifted one with a £35 crane scale from Amazon to find out for sure.

You're welcome!

I know what you're thinking. It's "how would you know what I'm thinking?". But for the sake of the narrative I'll say that what you're actually thinking is "Lewis, why on earth would you be weighing a Corvette engine?"

That's a good question! And well, things just escalated, a little...

This was my rocker cover.

I picked it up from my engine builder when I delivered the turbo.

I shouldn't really file it under the "Rationalising" series. My rocker cover needed a new gasket and then would have continued to last forever, because rocker covers don't wear out. There was nothing to rationalise; it was neither badly modified nor badly designed. What it also was not, as even the indifferent will notice, was pretty.

Here is one that is pretty:

That's not mine; it is one beautifully restored by 80s Hero. I could have done exactly the same thing with mine, but the one above is perfect. Because it is perfect, I can't do the same thing better, so instead I would have to do something completely different. I had an idea which I did not know would work or not, but if it worked as well as it did in my head it would be awesome.

But before I could do any of that, I had to remove nearly four decades of corrosion, flaky paint, and overcooked oil from it. Half a gallon of old petrol, some oven cleaner and a pressure washer got it back to this...

...then paint stripper, wire brushes, Brillo pads, and arms got it to bare metal.

I could have had this vapour blasted instead of cleaning it myself, manually. I didn't mostly because I started this a few days before Christmas when everything was closed, and partly because I started this a few days before Christmas and needed something to keep me out of trouble in my time off. But I happen to like that this preserves some of the "texture" of the aluminium. Other people have done the ultra-shiny mirror-finish engine bay to perfection; again, because I can't beat that, I have to do something different instead.

After all that, the underside didn't look quite so toxic either.

Back to the plan that was in my head! That plan was to mask off everything but the raised parts, spray those black, then unmask it and clear-coat both the painted and unpainted parts. For the fine bits of masking, I tested with 4mm and 5mm Hobby 2000 tape, which is designed for scale modellers. I figured they really like sharp lines in that world, but to be sure that it would work with the paint I was using I did a test on a sheet of clean brand-new steel plate I had kicking around.

Nice; that's sharp enough that the texture of the rocker cover is my limitation. And with that giving me confidence in the plan, I masked it up...

...then gave it a couple of coats of Jenolite matt BBQ paint, as previously seen on my heat shield. I didn't use this paint for its temperature-resistant properties; if it ever got close to 650 C at the rocker cover I would have bigger things to worry about than my paint coming off, such as my engine being violently on fire. Rather, that was the matt black paint which I had kicking around, so I used it.

That required baking (in the big BBQ this time round) to make it cure, and then I lacquered it with Jenolite clear coat. Which I'm not going to show you yet!

Originally, as you can on 80s Hero's beautiful rocker cover, the lettering would be red. I actually did this on the first iteration of the rocker cover (never believe that I get stuff right the first time), and I didn't like it. Instead, I decided on something more subtle, which was to paint in the letters in a slightly different black to make it recede a little.

It is subtle! So subtle that I'm not sure it actually made any difference other than in photos with a light carefully angled to show the difference - let alone from the 10 feet or so away that anyone but me will ever see this. But I know it is there!

One of my HT lead separator thingies was broken. It's on the right of the original picture above. You probably won't see it, because it was broken.

Fortunately, these are identical to the ones fitted to the early 1.6 MX5s. That means I can buy reproductions of them. I could probably find genuine ones if I was more patient, but these were available immediately. I think they are 3D printed. They are not as strong as the originals; I broke one while mishandling the rocker cover.

Also, I couldn't leave my throttle cable bracket looking like this:

So I didn't. It got attacked with a wire brush and then sprayed with Jenolite satin black paint. (I love Jenolite paints! I mention them often enough that you'd think they sponsor me; I use enough of their paint that I wish they would.)

It bothered me that I used the wrong bolts in this pic. I thought allen heads would look neater, then after I had torqued them down didn't like how they sat. I replaced them with M6x16mm flanged bolts almost immediately after I took the photo.

Meanwhile, this was my oil filler cap.

There was nothing wrong with it. If there was, these are one of the parts shared with the MX-5; I can buy as many of those as I want! And that would look better than most of the aftermarket ones. They're too blingy and branded, which is not at all the look I wanted for my engine bay, because I'm not obsessive about minor details while simultaneously having a blindspot for the big important things at all.

I almost liked the Hoonigan-by-Mishimoto filler cap.

Which is blingy and branded! But it has a nice shape, which meant I could do something with it. So I bought it, and had the red anodising blasted off it by my local powder coaters. And then, to match the rocker cover, I masked off everything but the top face and the 45 degree chamfer on the corner, painted that black with the same Jenolite matt black BBQ paint, baked it...

...and clear-coated it. After which it looked rather more like I wanted it to look!

That took much of a day by itself even if you don't count the time I spent over-thinking this!

And after all that, I have the best rocker cover.

Or at least, I have one that doesn't look like anybody else's, and one that turned out exactly the way it did in my head when I first had the idea. And minus the silly overkill oil cap all of this probably would have cost me about 50 quid even if I wasn't using materials which I already had.

Next!

Part numbers from this post

• 4mm masking tape: Hobby 2000 H2K80007
• Green masking tape: Frog Tape 155874
• Black high-temperature paint: Jenolite 89096
• Clear coat: Jenolite 88987
• Satin black paint: Jenolite 89510
• Oil filler cap: Mishimoto MMOFC-MAZ-HOONRD
• HT lead separator thingies: Mazda B660-10-241 (unavailable)

This was my turbo.

It is an IHI VJ9, and it is also ancient worn-out junk that cannot be fixed.

The VJ9 is a tiny turbocharger built on the IHI RHB5 frame. Despite its size, it is ridiculously laggy compared to a modern turbo of the same size. I came to love that in the few months I had it on the road; a mildly-lively 16v engine that transforms violently into a howling turbocharged rally car engine at about 3500 RPM is hilarious.

This is actually the second turbo that has been fitted to this car. Back when my brother owned my 323 GTX, the original turbo was so worn out that the car spewed enough white smoke to be an actual danger to other road users, so he used his superpower of finding car parts that do not exist to acquire a "good" spare.

"Good" is in quotes, because it was still worn out; there was slack in the shaft, just not a quarter-inch of it like the old one, and the car did not spew smoke after the turbo was swapped. It was sure to be another failure in the near future, and re-fitting this to a freshly-rebuilt engine seemed insane to me.

As I found out, replacing or rebuilding this turbo has some pitfalls: there are no replacement VJ9s, there are no spare parts, and nobody will work on them.

1. There are no replacement IHI VJ9s.

They're gone; as far as I know they were only fitted to the Mazda 323 GTX, and only outside of the US. US models of the GTX had a slightly different VJ14 on the same RHB5 frame; the US models of the GTX made somewhat less power, so I shall assume the US turbo is worse. Occasionally one spots a used VJ14 out there, but that might well be a worse turbo than the VJ9 and there's no guarantee that it would have been a straight fit anyway.

The obvious answer is to have my current turbo rebuilt, which brings us to...

2. There are no spare parts.

I shipped my turbo to who I consider the best turbo company in the country - for turbos that are not obscure ones fitted to extremely obscure cars, anyway. The report back was that the turbo was actually completely shagged:

The bearing housing has damaged ring lands and the actual internal sleeve has separated – not reusable.

Turbine shaft has heavy journal wear – not reusable.

Seal plate has excessive ring land damage – not reusable.

Turbine housing has multiple cracks around the wastegate seat and volute – will go again with some processing.

Compressor housing has rub damage – will go again with some processing.

...and as I soon found out, none of the parts required exist anywhere; there was a multi-month delay getting my turbo back while aforementioned best-in-the-country turbo company scoured all their sources for some stash of parts that we all hoped existed, and did not exist.

3. Nobody will work on them

I know; I've tried. Any company in this country whose website claims they will rebuild a VJ9 will not actually rebuild a VJ9, and I know this because I have called all of them. Most likely some SEO geniuses thought that generating a page saying "we can rebuild X!" for each X of every possible turbo in the world would generate business for companies, rather than generate a small amount of wasted time for all concerned.

A rebuild was not going to happen, then. The only other option while maintaining a bottom-mount setup would have been to get a hybrid turbo. That, to simplify a lot, means preserving some part of the outer shell of an existing turbo and shoving completely different internals inside it. Nobody is willing to do this in this country, either; the few people who actually got back to me told me that it outright was not possible to do this with a VJ9.

What, then, of options that didn't maintain the bottom-mount setup? Turbo manifolds are available for the early 1.6 litre MX5s. I like the Walton Motorsport one, but cheaper options are available if you like playing "will it disintegrate" roulette. One of those turbo manifolds would bolt right up to the B6T's cylinder head; the B6ZE in the early MX5s is almost a B6T with the turbo removed. But I don't like this for a few reasons:

• It would mean re-routing the exhaust and intake. Doable, but that would have to wait for the car to be in my possession again.
• These manifolds are designed for the MX5; they work with the clearances and constraints of the MX5 engine bay. The MX5 is rear-wheel drive, i.e. the MX5's engine mounts 90 degrees out from how the B6T is mounted in the 323. Though the exhaust manifold will bolt up to the engine, there is no guarantee at all that that I would actually have space for it with any given turbo attached.
• Mazda might have gone with a bottom-mount setup for a good reason. I don't know for a fact that they did, because I cannot give you any of those reasons, but I also don't know that they did not. I default to assuming that any major manufacturer knew what they were doing given the technology available at the time, and do differently if I know better.

Any of those things could have added months and unknown expenses to the project. Now what?

You may have noticed that I qualified an earlier paragraph about hybrid turbos with "in this country". Fortunately, nobody has told Bryan Nickell from BNR Supercars that it is not possible to build a VJ9 hybrid, because he has been doing this for years. Actually, he's been doing this with the US-market VJ14s, but the VJ9 is similar enough in the bits that matter to make it possible to do the same conversion.

You strip the turbo down to this...

...post it to Alabama, then some time and about a grand later it comes back as this monster:

So, backtracking. The first pic is the turbine housing, and just the turbine housing. This bolts up to your exhaust manifold on one end, and bolts up to your downpipe on the other. Preserving this means that fitting this turbo does not require any modifications to the exhaust system; it stays as a bottom-mount turbo, bolting up to your original exhaust manifold and exhaust.

The rest of the turbo is thrown in the bin (don't actually do this, you'll need at least the compressor housing later as a reference for building pipework), and in its place you get a Garrett GT2860 CHRA with 360° thrust bearing, a much bigger compressor housing, an upgraded wastegate actuator, and a ported wastegate to avoid boost creep. Or, in other words, most of a modern Garrett GT2860 shoved inside half of an IHI VJ9!

All of that is balanced meticulously, turning a worn-out turbo that was never very good even when new into a modern, reliable turbo good for about 330 horsepower (which is about 130 more than I care to have, but I like having the option). This completely rules!! And it allows me to keep the bottom mount setup, with the same exhaust manifold & downpipe, and the same water and oil feeds. So all that was left was to just bolt it all together, and

JUST KIDDING THAT NEVER HAPPENS

Of course I knew it would not be that simple. The cold-side intake of the new turbo being substantially larger than the VJ9 rather guaranteed that. So let's start with this intake pipe.

I can't modify this pipe, because it is made of plastic. Well, I could; that wouldn't be that much worse than at least one of the modifications I have seen in this engine bay (clue: it is in the photo above). But half of the rationalisation project is to remove bad modifications, and I do not want to add another.

Finding someone who could fabricate a new intake pipe for turned out to be harder than it sounds (and this resulted in another multi-month delay), so I decided I might as well try and make it myself out of steel. And that starts with this:

(Richard Brunning voice) This may look like some pieces of wood screwed into a piece of wood. But what it actually is, is a jig for the intake pipe.

It marks out the rough locations of the inlet and outlet of the pipe, and it has some exhaust studs screwed into the wood which mark the location of the bolt holes. Some more pieces of wood mark the inlet and outlet of the pipe. All of this allows me to line up a piece of pipe (I happened to have an offcut of exhaust tubing which was exactly the right diameter for the job), and make some mounting points out of cardboard:

Those get made into 1.2mm steel with an angle grinder and welded on, and with a 90 degree silicone hose bend attached and a bit of Jenolite satin black paint...

...I have an intake pipe! And yes, I know those mounting points look like they are not fitted straight; I sacrificed this to get the mounting angle perfect. You'll live.

You may have noted the nice bead on the end of that pipe. I made that with a £70 hand-cranked bead roller. That was not a bad investment. It's easy to use; even I got it more-or-less right on my second attempt.

Meanwhile, the water feed pipe for the turbo used to have a bracket that bolted on to a mounting point on the turbo.

That mounting point does not exist on the new hybrid turbo. This bracket might have been overkill and I considered doing away with it altogether, but again I just assumed Mazda knew what they were doing when they did this, so made a prototype adapter bracket to go onto a mounting point on the compressor housing:

But after giving it some thought, I realised this would put the water pipe in the wrong orientation; it would feed from the correct side, but it would feed water up into the turbo, rather than down. That would be fighting gravity, which isn't such a big deal, but because it was fed from a completely different place, further modifications would be required on the engine side of all of this to make it work. I didn't want that, so I rethought it, chopped off the bracket from the water pipe, and welded on this crude prototype bracket made out of some 1mm scrap (also, see if you can spot where I forgot to turn on the MIG welder's gas)...

...before committing to it and making a preliminary version out of 2mm steel.

But then I realised that with a small modification to my original wastegate actuator heatshield...

...I could incorporate that into the assembly, by making another 2mm steel bracket to bolt on to it via some M6 captive bolts welded on to the water pipe bracket.

Which, when refined a little with a flappy wheel and painted in more satin black Jenolite paint, actually looks quite neat.

Meanwhile, here was my "boost controller".

I put "boost controller" in quotes. My brother doesn't like it when I call it a boost controller; he insists that this is merely a bleed valve, and so I call it a boost controller to annoy him. It bleeds off air pressure to the wastegate, which means that the wastegate opens at a higher boost pressure. This is a very cheap way to run more boost in a turbo car. This did the job; it meant the 323 GTX was running about 13 psi, which with some calculations I completely made up would make it run about 200 horsepower.

Still, I didn't like this boost controller, which is why I put it in quotes. It dangled around the engine bay not attached to anything but its hoses; thus, it was a bad modification. So I spent a few quid on a new Turbosmart Boost-Tee manual boost controller, which probably does the same thing, but looks much better.

This controller came with a bracket to attach it somewhere, and I was not entirely sure where when I bought it. Most people would just shove it into the bodywork with self tappers or cable tie it somewhere; if I did that, it would be another bad modification. Instead, after looking at my nice new intake pipe I figured attaching it there might be a good idea. So I did!

I took a 5mm-ish-thick section of angle iron, chopped it into smaller bits of steel, drilled and tapped some M4 threads into it...

...and welded them on to my intake pipe to became the mounting points for both the pipe clamps and the boost controller.

But, it bugged me that the boost controller bracket and the pipe clamps were shiny stainless steel, so I fixed that too, not that I am obsessed about tiny details or anything.

And then I modified the wastegate actuator heat shield bracket to add a routing guide for the pipe, which is to say, I drilled a hole in a piece of steel and welded that on to it.

You may notice that the water pipe is uncomfortably close to the intake pipe. You'd be wrong, because it's actually touching, which is more than uncomfortably close. We'll fix this later!

Back to our intake pipe. Here is a photo of it, in case you forgot what it looks like.

The mounting point on the right hand side on this photo bolts onto the engine somewhere. The one on the left used to bolt on to the turbo, on a mounting point that no longer exists. Which is OK, because we can add another bracket to our combined water pipe & wastegate actuator heat shield bracket to make a three way bracket!11

That means making a rough template out of a previously-unseen proprietary composite material (Frogtape-reinforced cardboard)...

...then copying that on to 2mm steel...

...then fine-tuning with a flappy wheel and other abrasive tools until it is a BRACKET.

If you didn't notice (and also if you did), the holes here are slotted on opposite axes (and doing this burned out my Ryobi multi-tool; lesson learned). This is because I am working blind, without the car; while I have taken as much care as I can to get this intake pipe dimensionally compatible with the original, I still don't know anything for a fact. With the combination of these slots, the flexible 90 degree bend, and the flex in the mounting points (the reason I made them out of 1.2mm steel!), this should have enough adjustment to fit on the car even if I got it completely wrong, which I don't think I did.

And now, some odds and ends, which happened at various points and didn't really fit into the narrative.

The downpipe and exhaust manifold were ceramic coated by my local powder coaters. This is an extremely high-temperature coating that should keep the heat in the exhaust system and out of the engine bay; as said previously, I am quite serious about heat management this time round.

This could be great, or it'll lock the heat into the cast iron and cause it to fail spectacularly. We will see!

Talking of the exhaust manifold, several of the studs did not come out cleanly. I cut these off, and re-drilled them. But I made two huge mistakes. One of them I re-drilled ever so slightly away from where it should have been - maybe three quarters of a millimetre, which took it out of tolerance and meant that the turbo did not fit on it. With another of these, the hole clearly needed helicoiling, and I made the mistake of not using a drill press when drilling it out for the helicoil. I figured the existing hole would guide me well-enough to be able to do it with a hand drill, and no it did not guide me well-enough; the hole for the helicoil was not made straight, and this meant the stud did not go in straight.

I thought this would be a write-off for the manifold, because nobody wants to fix 36 year old cast iron. Except Matt from Fusion Fabrications! Who drilled all but one of the holes out to 12mm, forced in some cast iron bungs, then meticulously re-drilled all the holes at the correct spacing.

Back to that water feed pipe from earlier. This only needed a tiny modification to get it to clear the much-larger intake pipe; I heated it up with the oxy-propane torch, and bent it in the other direction using two long sockets either side of the original bend.

The oil drain should have been a straight bolt-on fit. The Garrett CHRA was drilled to have them as two M6 holes spaced 38mm centre-to-centre. This is the correct spacing for every RHB5 turbo. But the drain from my VJ9 was spaced at 40mm for no reason, because why wouldn't you randomly have one turbocharger in a range of turbochargers with a subtly different oil drain?? Which means, it does not fit. So, the holes on the original oil drain had to be slotted 1mm inwards (thanks Maurice).

And finally, the water drain pipe was not long enough to clear the much bigger turbine housing. So that was remade using the original banjo fitting.

And so, thirteen months later, it is Done; all that is left is to drive it and all the other new bits over to my engine builder tomorrow.

The turbo itself is a massive upgrade. The ceramic coatings & improved heat shielding should also be a substantial upgrade, and the new boost controller is not a bad modification like the old one was. And it looks a whole lot less ugly, though it is likely that nobody but me and my engine builder are ever going to see any of this.

More than anything, though, this has been a massive confidence boost for me. After having so many supplier delays (accounting for about nine of the thirteen months when you factor in people who gave me radio silence), I figured I'd take a punt at doing as much as I could of the work myself, such as the brackets & pipework & boost controller mounting. In one case doing it myself didn't work out; I should not have taken such a cavalier approach to the exhaust manifold studs, and I am thankful for Matt for fixing my mess. But sometimes it actually worked out fine! The pipework & brackets work well enough, and that was mostly just me and an angle grinder and a worn-out MIG welder.

So, back to that Rover P5...

I originally planned to fold this into the upcoming "turbo" part of the rationalisation series, but there are parts of that which are still not complete, and are entirely out of my hands at the moment. Also, the heat shield turned into a multi-weekend mini-project in which I learned some things, so maybe you can too.

This was my heat shield.

Actually, it's my heat shield bolted to a scabby, worn-out, nearly-four-decades-old turbo. The heat shield is made of two sections. In the photo above, it's the piece of metal with white scribbles on it, and the piece of metal bolted to that. It is supposed to protect things in your engine bay from the turbo's extremely hot turbine housing.

Mine was not in very good shape. It had started to rot, and when I unbolted it with the impact wrench, a bolt came undone, with a chunk of both sections of the heat shield attached to it.

As I had other things to do, and no clear plan for what to do with my turbo (if I had proceeded with a completely different turbo I wouldn't be able to re-use any part of the heat shield), I filed it under "I'll deal with that later", and stopped thinking about it for several months.

When I returned to the heat shield, I planned to make a new one, because I thought the larger section of the heat shield would be impossible to repair. It is not a solid sheet of metal; it is a sandwich made of two sheets of 0.4mm-thick steel - far too thin for me to weld. In between those sheets is a fibrous heat-resistant material. Because I have probably inhaled quite a bit of it I shall pretend that material is fibreglass, and is definitely not some other fibrous material that was rather too popular for its heat-resistant properties in decades gone by.

I did not enjoy the idea of making a new heat shield, because the correct material for making heat shields is about £150 for a 30x25cm sheet - and the chances that I'd get it right the first time weren't very high, so I could count on buying a couple of sheets. That would be a rather small expense in the unending stream of expenses that the 323 GTX has given me; one sheet costs a little less than one-sixth of a turbo, or one-twenty-secondth of an engine rebuild. On a whim, though, I figured that I may as well try to fix it despite being sure I would not be able to; I wouldn't have really lost anything by trying other than some offcuts of steel, some consumables, and a little time. So I made a very loose plan for some repair sections out of some cardboard...

...then I chopped up some bits of steel, and tried to stick it all together with a MIG welder.

It worked! That is the kind of welding that would fill a YouTube comments section with horror, and I'm OK with that. The excuse is that the metal was paper-thin and that I'm using a worn-out 20-year-old MIG welder which doesn't work at any wire feed speed other than "full send". The full truth is the previous sentence plus the fact I do not weld often enough to be good at it. Still, it's out of sight so it doesn't matter how ugly it is, and these crude welds are strong enough for these non-structural purposes. I went back over some of the areas the next weekend because I wasn't happy with it; it didn't look much better than this after the second round.

Anyway, that was a small success; I did a minor modification with an angle grinder to accommodate the new CHRA, de-rusted the rest of the heat shield with Jenolite rust eater...

...and I could have left it there. Having an unpainted steel heat shield was better than what I had, which was a disintegrating unpainted heat shield. But I wanted to paint it. That would mostly be to make it look nice, but that would also give it a better chance of lasting another 36 years.

And that's why I had a BBQ!

The temperatures near the turbine area of a turbocharger can be quite extreme, hence the need for a heat shield. For paint to survive in this area for any time, it needs to be special high-temperature paint, and all paints of this type require curing in a hot environment, usually in the region of 150°C (300°F). I previously attempted this by improvising a solar oven, but with no sunshine to be seen in England for the next six months I decided to liberate an old BBQ and use that for generating a lot of heat.

I tried to time all this so as soon as the BBQ was uncomfortably hot, the heat shield would be painted and ready to go in the "oven". Some time later, after curing and cooling, the result...

...was a total failure. The paint came off in my hands while handling it, as if I had thrown flour onto the part and expected it to stick. I don't know why this did not work. The surface was impeccably clean when I sprayed it, it was sprayed under relatively-controlled conditions, and the BBQ was definitely hot enough to cure the paint. Maybe the lesson here is not to buy no-brand-in-particular VHT paint. That probably means I need to revisit some earlier stuff since I have pipework painted with the same silver VHT paint.

Anyway, I wiped off what was left of the VHT paint and tried something else! Something I already had, which was this stuff:

It is Jenolite black BBQ paint. It is good for 650°C. That is as hot as I'd ever want it to be at the heat shield; if it got much hotter than that I'd have some other problem like the car being on fire (though later I will mitigate that too). It is less blingy than the silver VHT, but that is probably better, because it won't look like garbage once it inevitably gets dirty.

The instructions on the can say nothing about using heat to cure, but product descriptions online seem to hint at it. And, if it's going to burn off to some extent on its first heating I would rather that happen in controlled conditions, like on my BBQ, rather than on my car, where it would probably result in a scramble to work out what was causing all the smoke.

Dinner time!

After cooling, nothing came off in my hands, and after spraying with electrical contact cleaner and wiping it more thoroughly only a small amount of black came off. That is as obviously attributable to the soot from the BBQ as it was from the paint, so I called that a win.

And, I could have left it there! But the black paint is just cosmetic. Inspired by this post, I decided to give the heat shield some heat barrier properties as well. I experimented with a couple of self-adhesive materials here. I believe their rated temperature ranges; I wanted to know what their failure modes were when I exceed those temperatures. If I have a thermal problem down there I do not want anything to combust.

That is why I spent some time on a quiet Sunday afternoon setting things on fire with an oxypropane torch.

An oxypropane torch burns at about 2000°C (3600°F). That is about the same temperature that a UFO must endure while entering Earth's atmosphere; i.e. far beyond anything I am likely to see at my turbine housing, and far beyond anything these heat barrier materials are designed to withstand. I subjected it to these temperatures for two reasons. One, because it is very fun. Two, because extreme beyond-design-basis temperatures will illustrate the failure mode of the material.

The heat barrier pictured above caught fire at these temperatures. I'm not naming the material because I don't want to "name and shame" when I am subjecting it to temperatures far beyond anything it is designed for. This material may well yet be useful in future; I tested this material inside my BBQ as well while curing paint and it held up very well. I may well use the remainder of it to modify my BBQ to retain even more heat for future paint-curing exercises, and if it surprises you to read the words "modify my BBQ" here you might not know me very well.

The winner was Thermo-Tec Aluminized Heat Barrier (which was also used in the post linked above). It is self-adhesive, bonded to fibreglass (violating a promise to myself to never work with fibreglass again; I was itching for days), bonded to a thin aluminised layer. It is rated to 1093°C (2000°F), which is somewhat hotter than the worst-case scenario temperatures near my turbine housing. More interesting (and more fun) than any of that, when it failed at the oxy-propane torch the adhesive and the fibreglass substrate hardened (rather than caught on fire) and the aluminised coating fell off. That is a graceful failure.

I found it easier to apply the heat barrier in multiple sections. The smaller part of my heat shield required three, the larger part needed two. It's fine for the sections to overlap at the edges; you are not sufficiently space-constrained for a tiny bit of extra thickness in places to be an issue, and a little overlap is better than leaving a small gap. I also found it very useful to make cardboard templates first; it has about the same flexibility as the heat shield material, but rather less awkward to work with, and it's free to make mistakes. Thermo-Tec very thoughtfully included some cardboard for this purpose, with their packaging.

And if you're wondering, yes I made the obvious mistake when tracing around the cardboard out the material the first time. I won't tell you what that is; you will make the same mistake exactly once, and you won't feel bad about it because you know I did it too.

And with all that done, it looks pretty sweet, bad welding notwithstanding.

As always, with the car some distance away undergoing an engine rebuild I am doing all of this blind. I won't know it'll work until I run the car up to temperature for a sustained period of time, which is some time away. I must trust that the paint and the heat barrier are going to work at their rated temperatures, that my turbo isn't going to run vastly hotter than any turbo normally does. Other than a single hole to drill where the two sections overlap (which I cannot do until the exhaust manifold is back to allow me to bolt everything together, and its current absence is yet another story for later), I shall call that finished.

Onwards!

Part numbers mentioned in this post:

• Rust converter: Jenolite #89023
• Black BBQ paint: Jenolite #89096
• Self-adhesive heat shield: Thermo-Tec #13500

I had an overheating episode in 2020. It was not fun. It lacked so much fun that as part of the 323 GTX rationalisation subproject I wanted to give the 323 GTX some bonnet vents. Actually, I don't think bonnet vents would have saved me in that situation, because it dramatically overheated at low speed, but still, that scared me into doing as much as I could to keep it cool in every situation.

Putting vents into a bonnet requires making holes in the bonnet. Fortunately, I had a spare bonnet for this car. Actually, it's the original bonnet for the car; the reason for my original bonnet being off the car is too long to go into here. The one currently fitted to the car was fucked by an idiot, and that is also something I won't go into here, so the original bonnet was intended to go back on at some point.

Anyway, I am lucky to have a spare bonnet for this. It is probably the only bonnet in the country which is not fitted to a car. It might seem like a strange act of sacrilege to make holes in it, like sticking a sunroof on an E-type but more so. Oh well; originality went out the window a long time ago, and it's not like there's any other owners around to criticise me anyway! :D

So, vents. You're spoilt for choice these days, as old people are obliged to say. Given my insatiable urge to over-solve every problem, I decided to set myself some arbitrary criteria. Otherwise I would just be able to buy whatever vents, make a hole in the bonnet, and glue them in. That would be too easy!

Of course, I wanted something functional; that requires a rear-facing vent and not a scoop. But also, I wanted something that did not look out of place on a 1980s car. The generic vents that you can buy on eBay for a few quid function as well as anything does. But they are all designed for modern cars; often they are copies of vents fitted from the factory to modern cars. They would look strange on the boxy little 323. I also wanted subtle. The 323 GTX is a very subtle car. There are very few giveaways on the exterior that it is a mental turbocharged rally car at heart and not Grandad's shopping hatch, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Instead of subtle, I ended up impulse-purchasing a pair of Ford Sierra RS500 Cosworth vents instead! Woohoo!

Don't worry, these are not genuine RS500 vents! Because I am not insane. There were a couple of genuine ones on eBay with a £300 starting bid. I didn't really want to pay that for something I was not sure would actually work, nor did I want to deprive someone's RS500 or Sierra Cosworth project of its proper vents. My vents are fibreglass copies from this seller on eBay that cost about £65 shipped. Mine have a lip on them to allow them to be fitted easily to not-RS500 bonnets like mine; otherwise, they are very close to the originals.

I liked them. They would not look completely wrong on the 323 GTX, because both the GTX and the RS500 were race cars at heart, born from homologation necessities in the same era.

Anyway, I ordered them, they showed up a few days later and oh no, they are quite big.

They're so big that it wasn't clear they would actually fit anywhere. This is the sort of thing I should have figured out before buying them, like by finding an RS500 and measuring the vents, or asking the seller, but that's not how I work. If I was better at thinking through the consequences before impulse-purchasing stuff I would not own two project cars.

Here's a picture of the inside of the bonnet. Danger zones are annotated in red, potential locations are annotated in green:

Location A was OK, because it only required cutting out the brace at danger zone 2. However, any location for it would require that it would overlap the styling line (small indentation running the length of the bonnet) at 3, which would look weird. Moving it outboard to avoid this line would put it in danger zone 1, and that would be cutting a lot of strength out of the bonnet.

Location B might have been OK, but it had the same problem of either overlapping styling line 3 or going outboard into danger zone 1, and would have meant cutting into danger zone 4, and it would have been a lot of work to translate the strength cut out here somewhere else.

For styling purposes location C might have been fine, but it meant cutting most of the brace in danger zone 4 too. It also overlapped the line of the bonnet bulge at danger zone 6.

Location D is...a strange one. It would have required cutting out multiple bits of bracing in danger zone 5, but this strength would have been easier to translate elsewhere. I thought it might look a bit weird, so I flipped the bonnet over, plopped the vent on top..

..and decided that yes, this definitely looks weird and I don't like it. It might have worked fine with a vent of some other shape, but this parallelogram shape so close to and overlapping the centre line of the bonnet just doesn't work.

E might have actually been optimal if the bracing was designed differently; it is location C moved far enough back that the bonnet bulge is no longer an issue. But that would have meant cutting the brace in danger zone 4 and the smaller part of 5; again, this strength would be hard to translate elsewhere.

So, after a full day thinking about it, I realised the vent just won't work on this bonnet. At this point anyone else would have just bought a different, smaller vent that'll actually fit. But I'm not the kind to give up, so I decided to look at some photos of cool cars. When doing that, I noticed from this pic of the Sierra Sapphire RS Cosworth...

...that it's actually OK to have a vent being intersected by a styling line. Nobody complained about it on the Sapphire RS Cosworth as far as I know, or even noticed. Thus, location A will probably work fine! Yay!

I did a little prayer for courage, cut out some bracing...

...made a hole...

...and did a dry run of the vent to see if I liked it.

As the kids would say these days, sick fam, and innit. That is to say, I liked it, which is just as well, because that hole is never going to be un-made.

Note it is now the vent. My brother came up with the idea of using a single vent, because that would look cool, and also make it look less like it was trying to be an RS500. I agreed - quite enthusiastically, because as well as looking cool this only meant making one big hole in the bonnet rather than two. That would halve the work, and I like putting in less effort if I can get away with it.

Back to the vents themselves, then. Unlike the ABS vents you can buy for about 30 quid, fibreglass never comes out of a mould perfect. These vents were not perfect, and I did not expect them to be.

I could have left this problem to whoever does the bodywork on my car when it comes back from the engine builder. I did this myself instead.

The process is this:

• apply a very thin skim of knifing putty to any low spots
• sand them back
• apply filler primer
• sand back the filler primer
• find progressively smaller low spots and go back to the first step
• enjoy your beautiful vent!

It took forever until I was happy skipping to the last step. Actually it felt like I was making no progress until I put it side-by-side with a fresh-from-the-mould one...

...and realised that at some point I had to stop chasing increasingly small perfections, that I had to consider it good enough, and that I had probably reached that at least one iteration ago. It is Done!

Actually, not done.

So, my vent will turn one big hole into four, smaller, better-looking holes with rather better aerodynamic qualities. Those four holes allow air out of the engine bay, which is good, but also allow things into the engine bay, which is not desirable. Of course, an engine bay is not a sealed environment; I won't bother to make plugs for the vents to prevent water ingress, because if your engine explodes on water ingress it will do so one day whether you have bonnet vents or not. But, it seemed wise to put something in place to stop ingestion of larger particles, such as sparrows.

Also, vent mesh looks nice. So let's do it!

This is steel mesh. It costs about £10 for an A5-sized sheet. I like mild steel because it's easier to work than stainless steel and it survives being bent repeatedly in different directions rather better than aluminium does. The latter is a good characteristic for this application, given that I did not really know what I was doing and might have to un-bend and re-bend the material quite often.

The first one took about two and a half hours, from memory. The others took somewhat less because I almost knew what I was doing at that point.

I painted these immediately after forming them to shape. If it seems like a strange decision to paint them now, bear in mind it may be many months until this vent gets its final coat of paint; I did not want it to gain corrosion in storage. And it is much easier to ensure that it has a thorough coat of paint now than it would be after it was glued in.

I glued these in with two part epoxy. I learned - maybe re-learned - two things. One is that two-part epoxy is horrifically messy. Another is that I shouldn't be using it on a boiling-hot summer day, because it sets basically instantly. These two things combined are hilarious.

At some point I had the idea, and I do not know where it came from, that I should add fibreglass strips to ensure that the mesh was held on firmly.

It was a terrible idea. First because epoxy - even far less epoxy than I used - would have sufficed to hold them in place, and it was completely unnecessary. Second, because there wasn't really anything for the strips to grip to (because the mesh has holes, duh), so when it was dry it peeled right off. So this just left me a mess to tidy up afterwards (which took another day). On the upside it reminded me to never work with fibreglass fabric! It itches like buggery.

Anyway, with that all done, and the mesh glued in, and a final coat of grey primer...

...I'd say it looks AWESOME. And that is even more striking compared to a vent that came straight from the mould.

And that, is making a short story long, and is also how I lost about seven weekends.

The next part should have been easy. I wanted to get the rest of the bonnet prepped for paint as well. In the earlier pictures the eagle-eyed among you may have noticed an area on the front lip of the bonnet which was coated in red oxide primer. I was aware of this as an area that needed some tidy-ups; the red oxide was applied eons ago to stop rust from progressing. And so I poked around this area with various tools...

...and if this was a YouTube video or my internal monologue, there would be a scream sound effect playing about now. It turned out that much of the front lip of the bonnet was rotten and that the rot had gone all the way through to the outer skin. So as always, things escalated...

...and the rest has become another sub-sub project. As always happens with shit old cars, every job you do generates at least one more job to do. Onwards!

In part 1, I spoke of things being either old or badly modified, and those things being targets of my 323 GTX "rationalisation" subproject. The hard pipe between the intercooler and intake manifold was both of those things, though the bad modifications offended me most. Because I am an idiot (also, because I didn't expect to be writing about any of this in detail), I didn't take a photograph of the pipe before I started work on it. I'm sure you can extrapolate what it looked like from the various pictures (those pictures being rather bad for someone who has a website about cameras because of my phone's pathological desire to focus on the wrong thing). So let's move on!

When new, the Mazda had an air-recirculation system to prevent turbo stall when coming off-throttle. This was gone long before I bought the car, and it had been replaced with a dump valve (which vents excess intake pressure to the atmosphere). The vestige of this system was an outlet on the pipe which was blanked off like this:

I don't like this. It works, but it is ugly and unnecessarily space-consuming; it is a bad modification. So, my plan was to remove the hose, grind off the stub of pipe it was clamped to, then do something to blank it off permanently. But it turned out...

...that I didn't need to grind it off, because the stub is pressed in, which rather makes sense if you think about it for a few seconds. Mole grips pulled it out with not too much persuasion. There was no need to apply heat either. That disappointed me because I wanted an excuse to use my oxy-propane torch, because it is dangerous and exciting.

A brief debate with myself ensued as to how to blank off the hole. My first thought was that I could get or make a fractionally-oversized plug of aluminium, heat it up (excuse to use my oxy-propane torch), and force it into the hole with a hydraulic press. My second thought was that if this didn't work as well as I hoped my intake pipe would become a firearm about half a second after the turbo wakes up. That would be pretty sick, actually, but firearms are largely illegal in the United Kingdom. So the third thought was to tap an M18x1.5 thread into it and put a blanking plug (which is really just a somewhat pricey bolt) into it.

That looks tidy, and threading it gave me the option to screw a sensor or something in there in the future.

Next up was the dump valve. It is a Bailey DV26 (I think), and it is roughly 20 years old. It did the job well and it sounded nice, but I did not like the way it was attached.

Specifically, I do not like the look of blue hoses; they are too blingy and "modified car"-looking. I actually bought some black hose to replace the blue hose, but changed my mind again because after testing the new hose I still didn't like the way it attached; the use of a coupling hose seemed unnecessarily complicated. I had some thought about cutting a thread onto the end of the Bailey BOV and then screwing that into a step-down threaded adapter to the M18 thread I made earlier. Or, I could throw it in the bin...

...and replace all of it with a Turbosmart Vee Port Pro instead!! The Turbosmart is V-band-clamped to a weld-on flange, which is compact and looks nice. My friendly local TIG welder took care of welding the flange on.

(I kid about throwing it in the bin; I liked the Bailey BOV too much as a piece of engineering to do that, so I chucked it into one of my "I'll do something with that some day" parts boxes. If you're here from a Web search looking for a Bailey DV26 dump valve for some strange reason, drop me a line! You can have it for the cost of postage.)

When I stripped the pipe of its components, this mounting rubber fell apart.

I am not blaming the mounting rubber; I prodded it with a screwdriver to make it move, and it fell apart because it is old. I am sure I could have gotten a less destructive result with a more delicate removal technique, but life is short.

As with almost all GTX-specific parts, these mounting rubbers do not exist anymore. It took an entire evening of eBay searches to work out that you can substitute this with the fuel tank mounting rubber from an early-80s Yamaha TY 250!

It has exactly the same diameters (plural intended) and it is of the correct shape. It is a little bit shallower, so it may require a small spacer underneath it on the engine side to make it fit right. I'll only find out when the engine goes back together.

The coupler hose from this pipe to the intake manifold was OK, because it coupled two things together adequately.

But, with everything dismantled, it'd be mad not to replace it and its six-hundred-year old Jubilee clips with something newer and tidier.

I learned the trick for cutting flexible reinforced silicone hoses like this: Clamp it tightly to a piece of tube using whatever clamp you plan on using when the hose is on your car, then use the clamp itself as a cutting guide. Obvious, isn't it? I am embarrassed that I didn't think of this myself! I got it from a YouTube video.

As it happened, the amount of excess I needed to cut off was exactly two Jubilee clips wide. This made it easier to cut perfectly straight. I clamped it to a piece of exhaust tube and and cut off one Jubilee-clip-width top and bottom, so that the SFS Performance logo was exactly centred along the length.

All the new hoses on this engine will be black, including this one; as I said, I don't like blue hoses. This has an advantage I did not expect. To tidy up the stray white polyester reinforcing fibres that are left from cutting a hose like this, I could burn off the ends with a cigarette lighter and then paint over them with a black permanent marker pen. It looks tidy, though nobody will notice how nice I think this looks.

The intake pipe was old, and had spent 36 years in an engine bay that never got much love. It needed a clean, and a coat of paint.

Oven cleaner, Brillo pads and electrical contact cleaner took care of most of the cleaning. I gave it a coat of very-high-temperature silver paint.

The particular VHT paint I used requires baking to cure it. I did not stick it in the oven, because of our commitment to sustainability and net zero I didn't want my food to taste of VHT paint for weeks. It was a boiling-hot day, so I improvised a solar oven using a box lined with baking foil and a sheet of glass.

We'll see how well this works, when the paint does or does not fall off. It got very hot in there over the course of a day; the unpainted areas of the part were far too hot to handle without gloves when they came out. I don't know if it reached the 160° C required for the paint to cure fully, or if any temperature short of that would be sufficient. Time will tell.

And that, is that.

It makes more sense now, and it looks a lot nicer. It was probably more effort than it was worth to take something that already worked and make it into something that still worked, but it does not offend me now.

The next part of this series is unwritten. It involves a half-year odyssey to acquire a new turbo. And I still didn't get a new turbo, as such. I will write that part when some other components that do not currently exist come into existence. So that, is a story for soon.

Part numbers from this post:

• M18 blanking plug: Jetex U690200
• Mounting rubber: Yamaha 90480-18290
• Dump valve: Turbosmart TS-0205-1131
• Coupler hose: SFS SFSSCH63BLK

This was my air filter.

It has "Mazdaspeed" written on it. This would be kind of cool, but Mazdaspeed never made a generic 3 inch cone filter like this. There was, however, a company in the early 2000s taking generic 3 inch air filters and putting the names of manufacturers' performance divisions on them, along with fancy-sounding text like "EXS" and "EXCHANGEABLE FILTER SYSTEM". You could get one with NISMO written on it, if you wanted.

That is OK, because with a clean and an oiling this would probably remove particles from air as effectively and sound as loud as any other cone filter. It goes into the "badly modified" category I spoke of in the first part of this series because of how it was attached to the air flow meter. (Actually, it should go into the "badly modified" category because this setup sucks hot air straight from the engine bay and as such is probably less effective than the stock airbox, but I digress...)

There was an adapter on the air flow meter made of two parts that didn't fit smooshed together to make something that somewhat worked:

I did not like that, but worse than that, a low-quality rubber coupling hose went over the body of the air filter, attaching like this:

As the splitting of the rubber coupler hints (also the fact it kept falling off), this did not work very well. It was mostly through good will and fortune that it never disappeared altogether. This wouldn't do, so I set about designing a new, better, single-piece air flow meter adapter for any standard 3" air filter, spent quite a few hours on some meticulous measuring and initial CAD work...

...then found out that I could buy such an adapter off the shelf for about 30 quid. So I did that instead! It was only available off-the-shelf, unlike almost everything else for this car, because the 323 GTX shares an air flow meter with the early 1.6 litre Mazda MX5s. There are trillions of those still on the road, and there is a very healthy aftermarket for them.

While handling the AFM, I noticed that the vane seemed stuck, which certainly wouldn't help the car run properly. After pulling off the cap, it turned out to not be the most common problem with these air flow meters. Because that was not the problem, chances were that a sharp prod would probably get the vane unstuck. It did! So I gave everything a blast of electrical contact cleaner (nectar of the gods), gave the hinge a little bit of WD-40, and it worked freely and squeak-free after that. I sealed the cap with silicone sealant this time around, because the previous person who took it apart neglected to do that.

I took a photograph of the internals when I had it apart, in case anyone wondered what that looks like.

Anyway, the new adapter is much neater, because it is made of one piece of metal and any generic filter attaches to it like every other filter does.

I gave the exterior of the AFM a good clean with a Brillo pad. It did not come up shiny, but it did remove some of the surface corrosion and crust. It now has a PRORAM universal 3 inch filter attached to it, because that was quite cheap, not blingy like the really cheap ones, and will work exactly as well as any other cone filter. The whole assembly looks much neater than it did.

And that, to make a short story long, is that. It was all very easy and I don't know how I got six hundred words out of that! Next up, though, things get a bit more involved...

Part numbers:

• AFM-to-3" filter adapter: Jass Performance 5401
• Air filter: Ramair PR-CC-150-76

This is my 323 GTX's new intercooler, next to its original one. The new one is a work of art with a 60mm core made by Pro Alloy. The original one is old, weird and inefficient.

So, the Mazda 323 GTX is not dead or abandoned. I put it in warm dry storage, because if I had to look at it every day after the engine's near-death experience I probably would have stripped it and scrapped it. I intended to get back to the Mazda after the P5 was done, because I thought I would have the P5 done within a year.

The GTX came out of storage a while back, and is currently having its engine rebuilt. Someone else is doing that for me, but this has also given me the opportunity to rationalise some things around the intake side of the engine. Some of it is merely old. Some of it has been badly modified over the years, and needs re-modifying in less bad ways. I would never get around to doing all of this if i was still using the car, so maybe the engine death was an expensive blessing in disguise. I have called this "rationalisation" in the title of the post, as if there was anything rational about owning a 1980s rally car that you can't get any parts for.

One of those things is the intercooler. It is in the "merely old" category. It used to fit like this in the car:

The 323 GTX's intercooler is an old, bad design. This can be forgiven, because this was 1987, and to my dismay 1987 was 36 years ago. It likely did not do very much, but it didn't do very much just as well as anything else of its era. The bent fins that came with age and from being mishandled means it probably did even less. With my newfound desire for reliability, I wanted to replace it with something a bit better.

A recurring problem of owning old, weird, near-extinct cars is that there is a wealth of information out there, from forum posts written 15 years ago. Someone would have solved a known limitation of your car by finding a simple bolt on upgrade from a car that was common at the time and is now just as extinct as your car is. In the case of the 323 GTX, it was an easy bolt-on upgrade to its intercooler with a bigger, much better-designed one from...a first-generation Ford Probe or Mazda MX-6. Well then!

(Digressing, my favourite in that genre was trying to find seats for my mum's Suzuki SJ 410. All you needed to do was pull the seats out of a Suzuki Swift GTi! They bolt right in!)

The obvious solution would have been to go with a big front-mount intercooler. I did not relish the possibility of chopping anything up to mount one (like the unobtainable-at-any-price front bumper). Neither did I want the hassle of reworking all the pipework. I'm going to have to do some reworking of it anyway, because of a different turbo (more about this soon), but a completely different configuration is effort.

I don't know that there would be other complications I cannot foresee with an FMIC setup, because I cannot think of any. I also do not know that there will not be any complications because I cannot think of any.

What I wanted was a modern, efficient intercooler which fit in the same space as the existing one. This did not exist, until Pro Alloy made one for me.

The new intercooler is spectacular. It is a much better design, and the quality of the work is impeccable. It came with a price tag that would seem expensive, if you did not price in the fact that I was paying professionals to design something that didn't exist before and then hand-make that thing to the highest standard.

It has been designed to fit in the same space as the original intercooler, using the same mounting points. The pipes are of the same size, and come out in the same place. The height and width of the intercooler does not exceed that of the original at any point. It is somewhat thicker, but the cunning part is that this thickness has been engineered to extend into the engine side, where there is room, rather than into the front panel, where there is none.

It looks right to me; OEM, or maybe OEM+. It should give me more reliable power. It might even sound a bit nicer, too.

...or it will just act as a much more efficient engine-to-intake-air heat exchanger! We'll find out when all of this goes back together. Onwards!

Cars age differently these days, and by "these days" I mean "the last two and a bit decades". Cars seem to transition to "old terrible car" much more slowly, and also go through the trough of no value to "classic" much more slowly too.

What brought this to my mind, and exhibit A in my study, is Onslow's Cortina in Keeping Up Appearances.

The car, when it appears, is a self-contained joke. The joke is that it is a shit old car. The British audience in the early 1990s knows this, because it is a 1978 Ford Cortina. It has mismatched body panels and a missing grille because that is what is expected of a shit old car, and it backfires because it is the kind of car they would expect to backfire, because it is shit.

My mum owned one of these, of roughly the same age, around the time the second series of Keeping Up Appearances was airing. She bought it in a hurry after her Ford Capri was stolen from a car park in Ilford in 1991 (every Ford Capri was stolen from a car park in Ilford, in 1991), because it was cheap. She hated it to its core, and she gave it away because it was bad. I only have vague memories of it, but I do recall that the Honda Accord she owned after that was a revelation to all of us because it reliably started every time.

So, the Ford Cortina Mark IV. Terrible stopgap car for my mum, standalone visual gag in Keeping Up Appearances. It first appeared on screen in the second episode of Keeping Up Appearances in 1990. The car was built in 1978.

You may have been doing the sums in your head already, and know the point I am about to make by those sums multiplied by the title of the post. So here's the scary bit:

Onslow's Cortina is a mere twelve years old in Keeping Up Appearances.

Which is to say it's roughly equivalent...

...to a 2011 Ford Mondeo today. The Mondeo looks like a modern car to me! I have a hard time imagining that its very continued existence as a car could be considered as a joke in itself. A 1993 Mondeo, maybe, with enough gaffer tape.

Maybe I just lack imagination, and maybe someone who has watched any meaningful amount of television in the last decade could prove me wrong. But I've seen far more Mondeos of any given age than I remember seeing Cortinas as a kid. Anyone reading this probably already knows that my working car is a 2004 Fiesta, which is to say, I drive a nineteen-year-old car; a car old enough to get a driving license and drive other cars. It's a running in-joke-with-myself (I am easily entertained, usually by me) to seek them out in car parks and park next to them in some sort of shit car solidarity; this is not hard to do because fifth-generation Fiestas are still absolutely everywhere.

Let's talk about classic cars, and specifically the Ford RS2000 in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels:

The aesthetic of this film is self-consciously retro, gritty and cool - that is, what was retro, gritty and cool in 1998. The RS2000 is retro and cool in this film too - and it was a 20 year old car. Now, I don't know for a fact that a film maker would not do the same thing today with, e.g., a Ford Focus ST170...

...but I doubt it.

The flipside of cars becoming terrible cars much slower, as I said, is that they also don't get regarded as classics quite so readily. Though looking at it through the mists of time, I disbelieve that anyone in 1995 would have choked on their Corn Flakes if it was suggested that a 1972 Mini was a classic. I have an easier time imagining a certain set of people scoffing at the notion that a 2000 Mini - you know, that one - was a classic in 2023.

Maybe I am being very selective with my samples. If so, that bias is unintentional. Or maybe, again, I am just lacking imagination. There is harder evidence that I am not lacking imagination. Recall that the road tax exemption for historic vehicles used to be a rolling 25 year one; presumably, it was because so few cars lasted to a quarter-century old that there was no point in taxing them, and those that survived deserved an exemption because they were considered classic cars.

Why do cars of the late 90s and onwards seem to have aged differently to the cars of the late 1970s and early 1980s? I have some ideas:

• I am completely wrong. It's plausible; history could have frozen in my little head when new numbers came in, everything since 1997 is "modern" to me, this is all made up, and television programs actually do depict 2011 Mondeos as comedically terrible.
• Cars just last longer these days, and they last longer because they are better. I think this explains it, to whatever extent "it" is real. Rust-proofing is better, engines are built better, and self-adjusting systems mean fewer mechanical failures - no longer written off by either catastrophic failures, or by many smaller failures leading to "that's it, I'm done with this fucking car" and an early trip to the scrapyard.
• Cars have not improved so much between generations that buying a new car makes immediate practical sense, where it did in the past. For all I know a 2014 Fiesta might have real improvements over my 2004 one, but The Shed still starts every time I need it, and has a working heater. (It'd probably even have air conditioning, if I bothered to re-gas it.)
• We have a different relationship to the cars of the past, for the above two reasons.
• Or maybe, nostalgia ain't what it used to be; that, despite all the enormous technological changes of the last three decades upending basically everything, we feel closer to our immediate past than we did in 1990. Though it is an example from the United States, and one from 1973, American Graffiti stuck with me for two reasons. One is that dear God there is much to appreciate about this film but the attitude towards women makes that awkward to watch in The Current Year. But, the other is that it was a nostalgia trip about a very different, then-gone era...of eleven years before the film was made.

I don't know which of these is true, so I don't have a good conclusion to this piece. Oh no! Answers on a postcard. But I'll leave you with one last little snack for thought: the Bluesmobile was only six years old!

Here are some things that happened in my life recently, none of which really merit their own post.

The Shed passed an MOT.

It actually failed an MOT, then passed an MOT, after £164.78 of parts and labour from a local garage. It's work I could have done myself, on some theoretical level. If I had resolved to do it myself it'd have ended up in the project queue behind a bunch of other things that want my time, and I would own three cars that don't work.

I don't like spending money, but the invoice showed numbers such as "18.40", which reminded me that buying a shitty Ford for a daily was a really good idea.

I found a remnant of King's Lynn's railway network that I didn't think still existed.

These rails are on the Boal Quay, and haven't been used since 1968. I'd seen what looked like rails on Google Maps' satellite views. I assumed that either it wasn't what it looked like, or that the satellite imagery was out of date. I hadn't cared to visit them in person to see if they are still there, until a couple of weeks ago. They are still there!

I have a web page at my other website on South Lynn's railway remnants. That page has been online for over a decade now! Depending on your definition of the area, this remnant might not actually be in South Lynn. I updated the page with it anyway, hoping Actually Guy (you know the one) won't show up and complain, and while I was there I added a ton of new information, more-or-less re-writing the page in the process.

I took the photo above on my Fuji X100 (the second one). Since I bought that camera, it has been nearly everywhere with me. I have been getting used to its various weirdnesses all over again. So while I was there, I almost completely rewrote the page on my other site about it.

I've been shooting raw (RAF) in the X100, because I can. That means processing them with software, and because I am on Linux, Darktable is the best software out there. I have a webpage about that on my other site too, which was also a decade old, so while I was there I completely rewrote that as well.

One of my many weaknesses is being able to dig some, oft several, layers of "but, while I'm here..." below doing a simple thing. Still, none of that was a bad way to burn a couple of days over Christmas!

My cat is still completely adorable.

She got a new cushion for Christmas. She likes it very much.

That is all!

This is my brake servo.

I removed it from the car as part of the "refurbish the brakes" subproject of the "financially ruinous Rover P5" project. It's a separate unit from the pedal-activated cylinder unlike it is on almost any other car, because Rover loved overcomplicating things back then.

The vacuum chamber (the large cylinder on the right) was half-full with brake fluid. As the name "vacuum" implies, there is not meant to be any fluid in there at all. That was quite the surprise when I took it apart, and also a surprise which caused me to lose a full set of clothing. There was little way the servo could have been functioning, and I suspect that aeration of the brake fluid would have caused the braking system to be minimally-functional even without the servo's assistance.

I suspected this seal may have been the problem:

But, the unit was so ugly that I cannot say for sure that any single component was at fault. The photos you see here were after a blast of electrical contact cleaner (which is great for cleaning up anything that isn't an electrical contact).

I take a lot of photos in the course of doing things as reference for how things need to go back together. In the above one, you can see quite a lot of mank in the servo's internals.

Under other circumstances, I would have considered giving it a wire brush on the outside, a soak in petrol and a skim with very mild abrasives to clean the cylinders. But while I was ordering an electroplating kit for the various fasteners I have removed from the car, it seemed a good idea to order an electrolytic cleaning kit` as an experiment! As if I didn't have enough new things to learn...

Electrolytic cleaning is, in my head, electroplating in reverse. Rather than using an electric current to attract material onto a thing you want to plate, you operate it in reverse so an electric current attracts material away from a thing you want to clean.

It works quite well. In the process of working quite well, it turns the electrolyte (this is water mixed with powdered sodium carbonate) into the only thing I would like to drink less than brake fluid or Foster's.

The exterior of the servo still required some love from a wire brush on the outside after the cleaning. The two bores feel very nice after the cleaning, so I will leave them be.

And the part that makes me happiest, is that the Girling wordmark is now visible!

And that...means that after two weekends I am half-way through rebuilding one of the components of one of the sub-projects of the P5.

Onwards!

And that, kids, is where your Isopon P38 comes from!

This was not an act of wanton destruction and savagery. I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy it, but it was necessary, because my brother's 1963 Land Rover had, as my brother sagely observed, a lot of filler.

Some time before my brother bought this Land Rover in 2008, someone had tried to make its bodywork a bit smarter, with a lot of filler. I cannot say that this was a terrible idea, because it held up as well as a monstrous amount of filler could reasonably hold up.

It took my brother rolling the car onto its side some years ago to crack it severely, with some help from daily driving for years, three road trips to Africa, and one gentle road trip to China via Kazakhstan and Mongolia. Even then, as ugly as it was, it was not an MOT failure, until someone picked off some bits of it, and then it was an MOT failure because of an exposed sharp edge.

So, with a lot of filler removed, and some help from a blowtorch, soap^[1], and a selection of percussive persuasion tools, we had a straight panel again. I say "straight", though I actually mean "straight enough to be presentable on a battered Land Rover". I made sure that Alex was out of arms reach and did not have any power tools to hand when I said "that's straight enough, but do you know how we could make that panel absolutely perfect? If we got a lot of filler..."

Many other things were completed over the weekend, thanks to Alex's superhuman motivation. And also his ability to talk people out of whatever else they wanted to do and into helping him.

I had other things to do with my current project-within-a-project on the P5 (more on this soon-ish), but after the filler-mining was complete of course I stayed up much longer than I was expecting to stay up, helping him wire in a pair of new horrifically-bright LED light bars, because Alex can talk toothpaste back into the tube...

...which took us into the early hours of the morning, and all of that was definitely a good way to spend 14 hours!

Thanks to Alex for the video and a couple of the pictures in this post.

[1] With very thin aluminium such as that of a Land Rover body panel, you mark the area you want to with ordinary soap. Heat that area with a blowtorch. When the soap turns black, it is at a temperature that is more-or-less optimal for percussive reshaping. :)

I love good documentation.

The Rover P5's workshop manual - the original one written by the engineers at Rover - is the best manual I have ever used. I especially enjoy that the manual sets out exactly what tools you will need including the sizes of spanners in the preface. This is the only workshop manual I have seen that does this, and it makes every job a tiny bit faster and a tiny bit more fun.

How many times did I work on the Mazda and read through a 20-step walkthrough and then in step 19 it says "use special tool, part number F-U, which is obviously completely unavailable for any amount of money to remove this delicate thing that will definitely break if you try to use cruder methods to remove it"?

Good documentation is important, and I believe in thanking people for good work even if I am late to their particular party. So, thank you, Rover engineers from 60 years ago. You did a fantastic job.

The weekend before last, Mazda Amy started making a scary knocking noise at about 2000 RPM upwards when the engine was warm. By "knocking" I do not mean pinking; I mean that scary kind of knocking that hints at a piston being prepared for a journey into earth orbit, and hinting at a full engine rebuild about 300 miles since the last one. Yay, time to throw some more time and money at a 34 year old hatchback.

I love this car. I always will. I'll never sell her, because I know I would regret that forever. She's too rare and she is too special - special in both a "special to me" way and in an "unlike any other car ever made" way.

But...not now. Not this engine rebuild right now, days after I've spent a frightening amount of money on parts for the P5. I made the tough decision to send her away into secure, insulated and dry storage for a little bit.

It broke my heart having to do this. But if I am going to get the P5 done in any reasonable timeframe, I need to sink every spare penny I have into it. And in the meantime, Mazda Amy needs to go some place where she is not going to deteriorate from disuse. This is not goodbye to Mazda Amy; I am kicking the can down the road, and I hope to catch up with that can at some time about six months to a year from now.

Although...even though I knew this wasn't really a goodbye, I will miss her desperately.

I think I only avoided an emotional moment while she was being put onto the truck because I was having a lot of fun talking to the recovery truck's driver. He was a fellow petrolhead who really understood why someone would have so much love for one forgotten rally-homologation variant of a forgotten 1980s hatchback; while he was loading up my car we had wide-ranging conversations about petrolhead topics like the Vauxhall Calibra, the joys of the Rover V8's unique noises, and even our favourite local drift racing drivers. (Quick shout out to Farrow Auto who moved the car for me; I will entirely recommend them to anyone in the area of King's Lynn.)

All of which left me without a working car. And also without a lot of money, by which I mean no fucking money. A brief quest ensued for something on the really really low-budget end of budget motoring.

I wanted something that costed significantly less than a grand. Making it more difficult, I had a few criteria, which would rightly open me to accusations of being a bit of a prima uomo given the price constraint:

• It must already work. There are huge bargains to be had in the sub-£1000 and especially sub-£500 market, if you feel like doing a bit of work on a car. I don't mind doing any kind of work on cars in the general case, but after three "barely made it home" incidents in Mazda Amy and one bonus "took my chances and can't gauge how lucky I was to make it home" incident in Mazda Amy...I'm tired. I don't mind sinking everything I have into cars. But right now, I just want a working car that gets me to places and then home safely.
• I must be able to get parts for it, cheaply. Here's a good metric: can you get a pair of brake discs and pads from multiple vendors for less than £35?
• There must be no modifications. A car with modifications that is worth less than £1000 is modified in ways that have made the car worse. Returning that to standard costs money. I don't want to spend money.
• Nothing French, because if I had to drive any French car made since about 2003 I would be irresistibility compelled to hate-drive it into a wall.
• Nothing British. There's no shortage of old Jaguars going for very little money, and those are cheap in the same way "Doberman puppy, free to good home" is actually free. There is also no shortage of cars from MG Rover out there for very little money. They are massively underrated, but good luck getting parts for them.
• No automatic gearboxes, because I don't like them.
• No Diesels, out of a misguided sense of principle. (Ask me about that some day.)
• Not a Honda Jazz, because I am not old enough to legally own a Honda Jazz. The law is what it is; complain to your MP if you don't like it, not to me.

Despite me being too fussy...I found something!

You've heard this one before: Lewis has plans to get a sensible economical daily driver, with a few creature comforts and ends up with...

...something that is actually completely sensible and economical, which was not how you expected that one to end. Meet The Shed!

The Shed is a Ford Fiesta 1.4 LX from 2004. It came with 8 months of MOT and half a tank of fuel. I saw it advertised on Saturday, and I viewed it an hour later. After looking it over for about five minutes, I told the owner I was satisfied it did in fact have four wheels and a working engine, and I handed over her full asking price of...six hundred pounds.

£600! For a working car with no obvious problems! Even if it fails its next MOT, and I decide that it is not worth fixing, that would allow me to have a car for about £75 a month. That is cheap motoring!

It's not just cheap to buy. It should be cheap to own as well. It uses almost no fuel, because it has a tiny 1.4 litre engine and weighs as much as a skateboard. Parts are ridiculously cheap and all of the important stuff is still available brand new, because it is a Ford. And because it's neither fast nor expensive nor desirable, insurance is really cheap too (about half the cost of Mazda Amy).

The Shed is not in bad condition at all. I realise that anyone who knows me, knows that I set that bar quite low, but I think by any reasonable person's standards this is rather good for the money. It is cosmetically imperfect; there are no major dents, but it does have several little scars caused by its time in use as a workhorse for a young family.

The silver colour hides a multitude of sins; I'd call it "20 foot good", in that the £600 car looks like at least a £650 car at that distance. It had a slightly frightening MOT history, but the previous owner's husband is a mechanic; he fixed any advisories & minor faults immediately after they came up.

Most importantly, it is completely solid; there is not so much as a hint of surface rust that would shortly become something much nastier.

The interior is in much better condition.

I was expecting The Shed, as a car that had been used as a child transporter, to have parts missing or broken, and to smell strongly of Fruit Shoots and Marathon bars (or whatever they're called these days). It does not. The Shed is tidy inside and there's minimal wear everywhere.

The Shed is even quite comfortable! It has air conditioning, electric windows, electric mirrors, and a working (original!) stereo. To most people I'm sure that reads as someone pleased that their hamburger includes bread and meat. Do bear in mind that Mazda Amy had none of these things; The Shed is practically a Bentley in comparison. It's also extremely quiet...compared to a mental turbocharged 1980s rally homologation special with minimal sound deadening and a fucking drainpipe for an exhaust. I reckon if I had someone in my passenger seat I could talk to them without raising my voice!

I'm...somewhat liking The Shed. Or maybe I'm just liking the fact I have a car that works, or maybe those likes are the same thing.

So what's next for The Shed?

I think...pretty much nothing. I will not make any modifications, because modifying a £600 car will make you slightly poorer, increase your insurance costs, and leave you with a £500 car. Except, maybe, if I can find some at the right price, getting some alloy wheels to replace these...

...because wheel trims always look bad. Genuine Ford alloys, like those fitted to the Mark 5 Fiesta Zetec, would look much better and would not look "modified".

Otherwise, I want The Shed to be a car that transports me and objects between places, and it does that just fine, just as it is. I'm unwilling to spend much money on it. But, even though it is The Shed, it still deserves some cosmetic attention. It'll never be an interesting car, but it may as well look as good as its completely-stock slightly-dull self can.

I've set a budget of £100 to improve it cosmetically; if only for my own entertainment, I want to see how I can make the maximum possible cosmetic impact with almost no money. I might even document it here as I go!

TL;DR: This requires some amateur machining skills. This also requires the SJ410's sump, oil pickup, and dipstick. It also requires either the SJ410's camshaft or a distributor from a late Vietnamese- or Myanmarese-market Suzuki Carry.

Did you know that the ancient Suzuki F10A engine is still produced today in China? As I write this, they are, because they are still used in brand new vehicles sold in Myanmar and Vietnam. And here's something somewhat more interesting than that: Manufacturers of these engines will sell them directly to customers in the West, even in single-engine quantities. Which is to say: if you need a new F10A engine, you can get in touch with one of their distributors, and have a brand new engine on your doorstep in a few weeks.

That sounds awfully tempting for any owner of a Suzuki SJ410 that has a worn engine; for significantly less than a grand (including the very expensive P&P), you could have a brand new engine in your SJ!

Here is what one looks like after it comes out of its box and goes onto a Draper engine stand:

I did say "box"! Bless these tiny engines; they're small enough that they can fit in a decently-sized, man-portable cardboard box with generous amounts of packing materials.

These Chinese-made engines (which I shall hereafter refer to as "Chinese engines") are designed for various small rear-wheel-drive trucks and vans that are still in use in a couple of Asian markets. The engine differs in subtle ways to the original F10A as fitted to the SJ410. It will require minor modifications to work with the ancillaries of the SJ, all of which I shall detail in this post.

Mounting points, general

Several of the mounting holes were drilled to...well, some thread that wasn't anything in particular. If you get any resistance winding in a metric bolt to any of these holes, don't force it. Use a tap to bring no-thread-in-particular out to a metric thread.

You'll make life easier for yourself doing this on an engine stand before you try and fit it to the car; check every thread while you still have easy access to it.

Camshaft

The supplied camshaft will almost certainly be incorrect; the distributor drive splines are angled in the wrong direction and will not drive the SJ410's distributor. Thus, you will either need to use your existing camshaft, buy a new one (available off-the-shelf), or fit a distributor that is appropriate for the camshaft. The correct distributor for the Chinese engine's cam should be the same as those fitted to later Vietnamese- and Myanmarese-market Suzuki Carry.

Alternator bracket

The Chinese engines use a different mounting point for the alternator bracket. This photo should illustrate this:

The spare hole at the top is where the Chinese engines are expecting the alternator bracket to bolt to, whereas the rightmost hole is where the SJ's alternator bracket wants to bolt to. The pegs are still there (presumably from the original casting) to accept a hole, but there is no hole or thread inside it. You will either have to modify your alternator bracket, or drill a hole and tap a thread into the still-extant mounting peg. The latter is what you see in the photo.

Engine mount brackets

You will need to drill out the engine-side holes in the engine mount brackets, because the Chinese engines have an M10 thread and the original SJ's engine uses M8.

On the exhaust-side engine mount, you'll have the same problem as you did on the alternator; the pegs for a mounting hole still exist, but you will need to drill into the peg and tap a thread for the engine mount. Be very careful here; it is easy to drill too far and thereby poke a hole into your crankcase area, and you'll end up with machining swarf chilling in your crankcase.

Sump & oil pickup

You will need to use the SJ410's original sump. This should clearly illustrate why:

The sump on the SJ410 engines has a large cutout at the front to clear your axle, and is somewhat deeper at the back. Of course, this is not necessary on rear-wheel-drive cars, so they have a flat, deep sump. If your SJ410 has a substantial-enough suspension lift kit, you might get away with it. Or you might smash an axle-sized hole in your sump, and not get away with it. It's much better to use the original sump.

For this reason, you're going to have to use the SJ410's oil pickup pipe, too, as the SJ410's picks up from a different place, and the Chinese engine's one will be too long for the SJ engine's sump. This will present you with another problem, which is that the extra length of the SJ's oil pickup necessitates an extra bracket to hold the oil pickup in place. This bracket is attached to a hole on the middlemost main bearing cap...

...which does not exist at all on the Chinese engine's middlemost bearing cap:

Don't try and use the SJ410's bearing cap; the tolerances down there are very tight. It is best to weld a nut onto the Chinese engine's main bearing cap.

Here's what that looks like:

You'll also need to use the SJ410's dipstick, or modify the Chinese engine's dipstick.

Spark plugs

Your Chinese engine may come with spark plugs. If it does, they will probably be mystery-meat spark plugs. They will do fine, in the short term. They will burn out soon enough, so you should definitely replace them at the first opportunity with a set of NGK plugs.

Addendum: the real work here and all of the learnings are those of Maurice Carter, who does not have a website. My contribution is limited to offering bad ideas, offering exactly two good ideas, taking photographs, and arranging some words to form some sentences that you just read.

On the weekend that has most recently passed, my mission was to find out exactly how bad or good Penny the P5 is. The good news is that everything is very good and really solid, despite the scruffy appearance. South Africa was very kind to Penny. There's only one little bit that looks a bit sketchy on one of the front inner wings and where it joins to the sill.

Also, there's almost nothing missing. Those bits that are missing might be a pain to find, but none of them would stop me getting it running. (I was immediately 250 quid poorer from buying three of those bits on Saturday. It's only money...)

What is not missing is this. Behold, 3 litres, 6 cylinders and 115 horsepower of IOE Rover FURY:

If you look at the far bottom right you can see a glass washer bottle! I was last-Saturday-years-old when I learned that was a thing.

I do wonder how necessary that gigantic airbox is. I also wonder if it could be replaced with a tiny K&N or Mishimoto cone filter. Or maybe a Range Rover airbox, since that's what I know to be sensibly-sized and what I know to have very little intake noise. Or maybe it can wait till I pull off my next terrible idea!

So, back to what I should be doing, which is to get the engine started. I said there's nothing that would stop me getting it running. But it's clear that all the wiring is not in a great state.

The wires exist and have not set on fire yet. It will almost certainly work to whatever extent it can, until it sets on fire. I can certainly foresee a situation in which I am going to replace some substantial part of the wiring just to get the engine started...and if I'm going to do that, then I might as well go all the way...

...which is to say I have decided to rewire the entire car, and do so for negative earth & an alternator, before I even attempt to get the engine running. This might be a bit of a brave move given that my knowledge of electrical circuits is limited to basic knowledge of how DC circuits work. Oh well, as a wise man said one time, the best way of getting started with something you don't know how to do is by starting to do it. Fortunately, you can buy entire wiring harnesses off the shelf from Autosparks, which should be about £512.40 if you add in the optional wiring for an alternator, electric fan, and radio feed (I don't intend to fit a radio to it, but I don't want to rule it out). Yep, it's only money...

As I knew before I bought it, the interior is totally shot:

It's not just the cover that is torn; whatever previously resembled foam on the seats has turned into something that is not at all like foam. It has the texture of compressed sand, in that it crumbles into dust when you squeeze it in your fingers. Also, almost every piece of woodwork has delaminated, and those bits of wood that are covered in other materials have had their coverings disintegrate. I think I might be able to learn enough woodwork by myself to fix some of those bits. The upholstery almost certainly needs to be done by someone else.

So, this isn't going to be an easy recommisioning - not that I thought it would be, even before I introduced this new complication. And definitely not cheap, though I knew that would not be the case either. I can afford it, but I will say that I will definitely be eating a lot of instant noodles over the next few months...

...and these are the God-tier mother of all instant noodles. Something, almost certainly, for a future review on the very website you are reading now.

Onwards!

I've been thinking about a backup car for Amy, my Mazda 323 GTX, for quite a while now. Not because I don't like her. She rules. She also doesn't work all the time. I've been wanting to take her off the road and get her indoors for a while now. I'd like to modernise & rationalise the turbo setup and the engine management. I'd also like to get her bodywork sorted once and for all, rather than the remedial work that I am doing now.

And also...a tiny, ridiculously rare turbocharged hatchback with poverty-spec features (wind-down windows, no air conditioning, no safety features at all) isn't exactly what I need in a daily. I'd actually like to make it to destinations, and get there in comfort, without spending three million pounds on fuel.

So. I needed something cheap, economical, sensible, modern, reliable, easy to find parts for, and with at least a few modern creature comforts as well. And that is why I bought

a three-litre Rover P5 from 1964, which might work, because Lewis Logic fucking rules. Say hello to Penny the P5!

(The car purchase is real, but the narrative may or may not be. All I'll say, is that when I first started writing this the narrative hook was along the lines of "I realised I could not officially be an old man unless I was driving a Rover". It's up to you to decide whether I was completely making shit up.)

This car spent most of its life in South Africa. The chap that owned her brought it over here about four years ago, then got ill, and died. Penny made her way to a dealer, who then advertised it on Car and Classic. There was a "Project Profile" feature piece, which I read, and I immediately knew I had to have that car.

I've had a bit of a soft spot for the P5 since I saw one at the end of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but I do not think I have ever been emotionally affected by one. I don't think any car ever has affected me as much emotionally as this one did via mere pictures on the Internet.

I sat on those "I need this car" thoughts for an entire work day. When I clocked off, I called the chap and provisionally reserved it. Exactly one week later, it was delivered to my driveway. And she is every bit as beautiful as she was in the photos.

So what's the plan?

My immediate plan, as in tomorrow lunchtime and this weekend, is to make everything watertight. Brand new door seals are included with the car, but not fitted. I'd also like to make the boot latch work (it does not work), and the bonnet to close (even better if I can open it again).

Next up, of course, I want to make it solid underneath. Because the car spent most of its life in South Africa, I am hoping that I will not have too much to do. South African weather is much kinder to cars than our own climate is. But the car is 57 years old, so no doubt I will be able to poke some holes in it.

In the meantime, I will have to go through some paperwork and some small amount of arse to get it registered in the UK. The guy who imported it never did. I am hoping this will not be too difficult. While this happens, I will not make any modifications to it - and by that, I mean not even replacing any parts with functionally identical modern ones. My reading of the rules for getting an age-related plate when "naturalising" a car is that every component must be original. My reading might be unreasonably strict, but I'm erring on the safe side because I do not want to end up with a Q plate.

After that, will be the slow process of recommissioning; replacing every consumable part, checking every safety-critical part, getting the engine working (it may or may not work, though it does turn over by hand), source the very few bits that didn't come with the car, and eventually getting it to a state in which I can MOT it. (I'm quite aware that at its age I don't have to MOT it, but with the amount of money this will cost me it would seem foolish to not spend an extra few dozen quid for an extra set of eyes to ensure that I have not done something stupid). My hilariously-over-optimistic timeline for this is to have this done before the end of Summer.

After that, let's talk about what I will not do. I want to do nothing that will change the car's character. It was designed to be a big, boaty cruiser for important people, and it will continue to be a big, boaty cruiser for some idiot from Norfolk. It is a silent straight 6, so it will stay a silent straight 6. (And if I was going to do a 3.5 litre V8 swap I've got one kicking around which is much more interesting to me than a Rover one.)

I also don't want to change the car's history. There are dents and scars on the body, and those are part of the car's past. I don't think I should attempt to do much with them. I probably will stabilise those scars where they are showing surface rust, so they don't turn into something worse. And even though the metallic paint is almost certainly not its original colour, that too is part of the car's history and not something I want to change. Plus, I love that colour.

What I will do are some tiny modernising touches. I'll definitely convert it to use an alternator & to have negative earth electrics, and replace any invisible electronic components with modern solid-state ones. It will definitely get seatbelts at some point, because I do not want the tiniest low-speed shunt to cause a brief, very exciting trip through the windscreen. I might do something about the distributor having points, and about the fact that viscous fans are wank...and probably a lot else, but you get the idea. Tiny modernising touches, as I said, that will make her a more viable daily.

That's all for now. Onwards!

This was my mum's Mercedes 220. It was glorious.

She bought LRO 468L for £500 in either 1989 or 1990, because back then it was merely an old car (though cars aged much quicker 30 years ago). It was beautiful, silent, luxurious, and very wafty. I loved it, and everyone else did. She sold it a few months later for slightly more than she paid for it, because it needed welding work on the floorpan. A very young Me did not talk to her for a day after that.

It was last MOT'ed in 1990, so we can probably conclude it does not exist anymore (or, to avoid offending those of you who believe in the laws of thermodynamics, exists in an entirely different form). A W114 or W115 is still on my bucket list of cars to own. It might even be the next project I build, if my next project starts before the prices of these go through the roof.

Fast-forward just a few years. Recently, someone pointed out that if you search for a registration plate on Google Images, there's a good chance that it will find a photo of that car, because Google indexes any text it finds within an image, and may notice the text on the numberplate. Like ANPR, but for everything.

It worked on my car. Among others, it found a photo taken at the late Rockingham Motor Speedway, which my brother (the previous owner) took in 2007 back when "camera phone" still meant "thing with a dialpad", and posted on a forum in 2008.

It worked when I entered the registration of this Mercedes, too. I know the registration off by heart, because my memory is weird. I remember a Windows 95 product key that I last used in anger in 1997, and the registration of my mum's car from 31 years ago, and sometimes draw a blank when I have to enter my PIN into a cash machine.

The first result was the picture you saw at the top of this article. I uploaded that photo to Wikimedia Commons over 15 years ago, and things often spread to weird and unexpected places when you do that. (I'll tell you the story about the wall art in the bogs at Downham Market station some other time...)

The second and third images were the offspring of obsessive categorisation at scale. I would hope any petrolhead would know about the Internet Movie Car Database, wherein a (presumably vast) number of very dedicated people are aiming to identify every car in every film & television program. If your car appeared in the background of, e.g., an episode of The Bill in December 1984, then there's a good chance someone has captured and categorised it.

Well how about that!

But wait: It's brown! Or at least looks brown. Did it get a respray before my mum owned it? Or did a worn 80s VHS tape not reproduce the glorious red that it was? I won't ever know the answer to that, and I am okay with that.

The cars we knew in our youth are, or will be, almost all lost to time and entropy; only a very few are lucky enough to be recommissioned or restored. But this Mercedes was lucky to have its few seconds of fame on the small screen, and was immortalised, to some very tiny extent and entirely accidentally, by some extraordinarily committed people on the Internet. That's more than most cars will get, and that, is good enough for me.

Mazda Amy has a new windscreen. This could have happened several months earlier. More about that in a moment.

My windscreen was not broken. It was, however, severely fogged in the corners, where water had made its way into the laminates and had started to separate them.

This is not an MOT failure right now, though it may have become one in the future as the fogging spreaded. It may have weakened the glass in the corners, though for many other reasons I'd be so completely doomed in an accident with the modern artillery tractors 4x4s half the country drives these days that I don't think it'd make any practical difference in an accident. I was not convinced that it was watertight. It definitely looked terrible, and was for some time on my list of things to fix.

The used market for vehicle glass is tricky. Whenever I've stripped a car for parts, the glass has always been nearly impossible to sell (and for windscreens, that can only happen if one manages to get the glass out intact, which only ever happens on non-bonded windscreens from very old vehicles). There's usually only a small time window available; you generally try to get rid of the glass at the very end, right before you send the shell off for scrap. That means when you're looking for glass you'll almost certainly not find it.

Not that I really wanted a used windscreen, but going used is often the only option for very old and/or rare cars. I certainly did not think that one of the mainstream glassmongers would be able to obtain one, so I did not try. It was as a last resort that I thought to try Autoglass, whose site claimed they were able to do a replacement. It seemed implausible to me at the time, but I rolled with it.

I originally booked this replacement in October. I heard nothing back for a couple of months. When I poked them last month the very nice lady on the phone explained that it entered their system, and then nothing happened, for unclear reasons.

Not to worry. Autoglass Lady quickly made things right, and Autoglass went about sourcing a new windscreen. When they got back to me, the same Autoglass Lady (or at least sounded the same) used the definite article ("the windscreen") in quite a precise fashion; a fashion that implied the windscreen they had sourced was the only one they could find in the country. So if you've come here from a search engine because you're trying to source a windscreen for your BF 323 in the UK: I probably took the last one. I'm sorry.

The windscreen has a blue tinted sunstrip, which the original did not. My car is blue, and will be staying blue even after I get it into a bodyshop, so I am okay with that. Even if I wasn't okay with that, I'd have to deal with it, because it is the windscreen and I will take whatever I can get.

I can't even remember whether I have windscreen cover on my insurance, and I do not care to look right now. But even if this was eligible for an insurance replacement, which is unclear, claiming for it would have felt fraudulent as I knew about this problem long before I insured the car. So, I paid for this out of my pocket. The cost was a mildly eye-watering £431. That included fitting, of course, as this is definitely not a job I would consider doing myself, but still...

I won't fault Autoglass for this, because this is an exceptionally rare car (even in non-turbo, non-4x4 form) and I would expect the price of the windscreen to be priced accordingly. I'm actually very happy with them, because once the disappearing-booking mistake was rectified their service was outstanding, and because they managed to source the windscreen, which is something I never expected.

So that's one more pile of cash in the furnace, and one more job out the way. This also means I can tidy up the trims that normally cover the very visible gap you can see and get those fitted, too.

Onwards!

Yeah, I know she's an old shit car, that she has her scars, and that she's probably not pretty to anyone but me. But I do love seeing this little thing, ready to go and ready to make tiny turbo noises.

That's all. 💕

Today, I decided to take a look at the Gaz rear suspension that I removed a few days shy of two months ago.

I know, it looks like shitty old suspension and maybe that's because it is. But this was a nice and rather expensive bit of kit in its day. Back in 2007, when my brother owned the car and had some intention to get it back on the road after a failed MOT, he replaced the rear shocks with two of the custom-made Gaz shocks seen here. These cost £250 for each shock absorber back then (about £300 inflation-adjusted).

Before the K-Sport "biting the bullet" episode, I had the idea that maybe I would also get Gaz to custom-make some front ones too. I decided not to; even at the non-inflation-adjusted price, that would have been £500, minus the desperately-needed new springs both front and rear. Each corner also needed new top mounts (which would have been another very expensive custom job) and even that would have left me unable to adjust preload and ride height separately as I can on the K-Sport setup, so they had to go.

That made me sad, because I knew these shocks, as old as they are, had maybe 100 miles of driving on them, if that, and that it was top-quality stuff in its day (and still is). So today, I decided to give them both a bit of a cleanup to see what they looked like. Top is before, bottom is after:

Tools used: Brillo pads! I'm not kidding. If you need to remove tarnishing or crap from any metal, a slightly damp Brillo pad is your best friend. The steel wool is only slightly abrasive, and with the built-in soap and a bit of water they glide over whatever you are trying to make pretty. On top of that, I used some electrical contact cleaner (for when I needed to quickly blast away the soap residue to see where I was with the cleaning), paper towels, and a little WD40 to lubricate the threads on the shocks to make it easier to get the bottom nuts on.

It's a tribute to Gaz that even after 13 years of disuse and only a hundred miles of use that they are still in really rather good condition. There's a tiny bit of pitting on the shafts but otherwise these shocks are close to perfect and still feel great today!

I don't know if these will make any amount of money that is worth my time to list them on eBay. I am not worried if they don't. They're just too nice to go onto the scrap pile, and I would rather see these go on a car again rather than being recycled.

Onwards!

The backroads were rather fun this weekend. For whatever reason the tractors around here have been busy this weekend, and deposited a ton of mud onto the wiggly roads around here. Which is fine, because that's where our food comes from and all. The tiny 4wd Mazda was bothered by it even less than I was. I'm amazed at how well she handles on greasy roads!

This weekend's blasts were mostly about debugging a whole lot of squeaks and rattles coming from Mazda Amy's interior trim. I bought a huge box of assorted varied trim clips that might help with this.

Onwards!

Edit (March 2021): Change of plan. I decided against having any kind of stereo in my car. Without cutting up any panels, I would never had a stereo that sounded really good, and also because hearing the engine is far too important to me. The latter isn't just because I like the noise, though I do; it's because I need that feedback to instantly know when something is not right with is. This head unit has been sold and was posted off for its Forever Home in a Porsche 928.

This is a Blaupunkt Vancouver SQR 45 head unit. As I am told, it was originally fitted to some expensive, high-end German cars. I believe, but do not know, it would have been fitted to the Porsche 944, and possibly the Porsche 911. Hopefully, someone coming here via a search engine will be able to correct me some day.

I got this for free, some years ago. Via some chain of events that I'm probably better off not knowing about, it ended up in my mum's 1988 Suzuki SJ410. A few years ago this Blaupunkt was, while still functioning, acting a little erratically, so it got replaced by a much more modern unit with a CD player, USB, and all those other things that people in the 1980s did not know they needed. This head unit was going to go in the bin. I thought it was too nice to go to landfill, and that some day it'd be a nice addition to Mazda Amy (which lacks a stereo), so I saved it.

Then some time passed, and with my car mostly working as it should, I decided I should actually do something with this stereo, so I got in touch with Bal from Retro Car Audio UK who did a refurb to bring it back to life. This cost me £285, which for most people doesn't resemble "cheap". I would not want this work to be done cheaply, because you get what you pay for. And this work was done on a rather rare head unit that I have seen selling for £200+ in working condition (not "refurbished by a pro and works exactly like new", as anything is when Bal is done with anything), I think the price was extremely reasonable. I could probably make a small profit selling it, though I don't plan on doing that.

The failure sheet, quoted directly from Bal, was this:

Power supply stiffening circuit malfunctioning

Radio PLL synthesizer circuit failure

Capacitor failure throughout - I will replace all electrolytic capacitors.

Cassette mechanism needs a full service

Volume pot oxidized

So it goes. Hey, Lewis-logic says it was a free stereo! Just like that time I bought a "cheap" Mazda 323, ha ha...

Anyway. It's here. It's lovely. Bal has done an extraordinary job. There are some practicalities I need to work out, though.

The UK edition 323 GTX had the stereo as an option in the "Lux" version of the car (that edition also including a body-coloured bodykit and alloy wheels). This stereo system only had two tiny speakers in the dashboard. The Rallye edition never had a stereo, but retains the two places where speakers would have been. Now, this car is extremely loud, because of its minimal sound deadening and 3" straight-through exhaust, and might get even louder in the near future via a tubular manifold and probably an obnoxious, totally illegal external wastegate. I'm not convinced that two tiny speakers are going to supply sufficient loudness, even with today's speakers being vastly superior to anything that existed in the 1980s.

But, I will not cut 6x9 holes in the parcel shelf I spent years trying to find (though I did briefly troll my brother, who acquired it for me, into thinking I would do just that, which was fun), or cut speaker holes in my even rarer original door cards. I need something stealthy. I think I can use the space under the front seats for a couple of compact subs, and maybe use the coin/random shit holder below the diff lock switch in the centre console for a small mid speaker.

There's also the small matter of getting the head unit to fit into the hole where a stereo should be. This may require home-brewed brackets!

Something that is not a practicality concern is the lack of an aux jack. Cheap tape adapters that you can buy for so little money that they may as well come free in your Corn Flakes are, by all accounts, remarkably good. Technology Connections from the YouTube explains why:

And because I like physical buttons, because I have a huge MP3 collection, and because I like not farting around with my phone while I am driving (it goes in my glovebox, on silent, and yours should too): this is probably going to be paired with a 5th generation iPod, running Rockbox. Or maybe I'll start a tape collection instead!

I'm also not totally happy with the backlight of the LCD on this one being green, when the illumination for the rest of the dash is consistently yellow/orange, but I'll park that one, for now.

Ah well, I'll poke around things this weekend. One expensive thing at a time.

Onwards!

So the alignment is done, and the figures in the photo showed that I didn't do a terribly bad job with my bottle-jack alignment. But, lacking a level surface, let alone all the tooling and knowing what the fuck they're doing that a real garage has, I took my car to Autoleys in King's Lynn.

They normally work on BMWs, and it was quite fun bringing down the tone in their car park with a shitty-looking 1987 Mazda 323, but bringing down the tone wasn't why I picked them. It was the first place I found that would do alignment that didn't involve me driving on main roads. Not that I don't trust this car or anything, given that I'd already sorted out the horrific bump steer and the dangerous understeer, but.

Anyway, this got done. I found a way to kill two hours in King's Lynn while Autoleys did what they did. And this car is better than she has ever been. I only write about this today, rather than on Wednesday, because I've had a chance to take her for a proper hoon two days in a row. Which means I can talk about how good the K-Sport suspension setup is now!

So, I've got my ride height exactly where I want it now:

Which partly happened by accident; from a previous episode, I took some dimensions from my collapsed former front suspension and used that as a baseline for my new suspension. Turned out that when you put not-collapsed brand-new front suspension following the old dimensions, the ride height is where I want it. No sump-smashing. There are no more "lows", but there are no also more scary noises when I hit a bump too fast.

I must say that the K-Sport suspension is awesome. It was horrendously expensive and I am happy with every penny I spent on it. The K-Sport suspension combined with good Toyo rubber means this car runs out of cornering ability long after I run out of bravery. Because this setup is okay with back roads and their corners at any speed, that also means that there are a lot of bits in the interior that are rattling at speed and it's quite hard to debug those rattles. That merely annoys me; maybe I'll find someone to ride with me and help me with that some time.

This chapter concludes with this: Everything is great. My car is still my favourite car in the world except that part where she's now both burning oil and leaking it from the front crankshaft seal. But that, is a thing to be solved another day.

Onwards!

This week's problem: extremely low engine idle speed. It wants to sit at about 200-300 RPM, which is so low that it stalls or near-stalls the engine. This happened out of nowhere yesterday. This, only takes a few minutes to fix with a screwdriver.

So, instead of solving that problem I got a Bad Obsession Motorsport sticker for my horn push! And doesn't it look good.

It's actually lovely quality (it's very thick), and I reckon that's given me about another 15 horsepower. Or maybe it hasn't, but it's definitely a good idea to represent the greatest angle-grinder engineers in the world.

Onwards!

The title understates the success of my weekend. I actually improved it!

You may remember from the last episode:

Actually, that's a different photo; I used my trusty, battle-scarred SLR to take a photo today in the hope I'd get a better photo of the same thing, and still managed to get a bad photo. Maybe I'm just doomed if I try to take photos of anything but BMWs driving sideways past me at 50 miles per hour.

Anyway, that was the thing I worked out wherein I found it was much easier to get the bottom bolts in if you jack the hub up. At some point in the week, while working on something completely unrelated, I had a lightbulb moment: I had bolted up the front coilovers when the hub was dropped, which, from what little I know about suspension geometry on a car like this (mostly learned by osmosis from the drifters), means that I had ended up dialling in positive camber to the front suspension, which would almost certainly explain the bump steer and the near-dangerous amount of understeer.

I guess that's one of those things you don't know unless you know it; I've only fitted suspension on ancient Land Rovers in the past, so I don't feel bad about it. The upshot is: If you're doing coilovers on a car with fully independent suspension, always jack up the hub to roughly its natural sitting position (since your car is going to be jacked up when you do this, remember you need to do this relative to the body and not the ground) before doing up the bottom bolts.

So that's what I did when fitting my new longer bolts (sourced from the wonderful Franklin Industrial Supplies in King's Lynn, and picked up for me by the equally great Maurice due to my lack of a safe vehicle, so thanks to both). With the car back on all four wheels, I took it for a swervy spin down my street to get everything settled to where it wanted to settle, and with that settled down, I measured the gaps on each corner between the arch and an arbitrary point on the sidewall with my cheap Vernier.

Hey, I hate to boast about getting my front ride heights within two millimetres of each other, but it was a complete accident, so I'm probably not going to boast about getting my front ride heights within two millimetres of each other. I rather liked the extra ride height on the front, so I decided to raise the rear suspension to match it.

This is merely time-consuming, rather than difficult, especially when you know the thread pitch is 1.5mm. Working from the measurements I have, I needed to raise the rear left by 20mm; that meant unbolting the rear shocks at the bottom (and loosening them at the top, to give me some room to wiggle the shock around) and unscrew the bottom mount by 13 turns. I needed to raise the rear right by about 7mm, which meant unscrewing the bottom mount by 5 turns.

After that, it was time to go for a little spin on the bumpy backroads around here.

And the end result...is the bump steer is almost gone, and the understeer is gone entirely! Yep, it still needs a proper alignment from people who know what they are doing and who have tools I don't have, and I'm going to see where I can get it booked in next week to make that happen, but I can confidently say this: The new suspension and the ride height has completely transformed the car. Yeah, the K-Sports were a bit of a fiddle, and you cannot fit them unless you have some minor fabrication skills, but they are awesome even at speed on the terrible roads in this little corner of Norfolk.

There's one more good thing that came out of this. Let's go back to the Driftworks steering wheel I bought and fitted a few months back:

You may notice that in this photo, the steering wheel is at a bit of an angle. The fun part is that this was with my steering centred. And no, this could not be because the boss was fitted incorrectly; there are two nubs on the Mazda steering column that meet two holes on the Mazda steering boss, which means it is impossible to get that wrong. It was annoying; because of the low sitting position in the Mazda, it meant that one of the spokes of the steering wheel was blocking the speedometer in the 20-30mph range.

Unfortunately, it was not quite out enough that I could unbolt the steering wheel and rotate it by one bolt spacing (6 bolts, so 60 degrees). I wrote this off as "I'll deal with it some other time", as I didn't want to pull the engine out to get to the steering box to fix a minor annoyance; I figured I'd get someone else to pull the engine out to get to the steering box to fix this minor annoyance at some point. I'm glad I didn't, because with the new suspension sitting correctly this happened:

Which looked like everything had changed, such that the steering wheel was out by almost exactly 60 degrees, which meant I could unbolt and rotate the steering wheel by one bolt hole to the left:

And well, that's actually still not totally straight, but it'll do. And does that mean I actually fixed a steering alignment problem with this car with a prehistoric Halfords bottle jack? I don't know if I did, but that's not the story I'll tell everyone else in the future.

In short: I got everything done that I wanted to get done this weekend and fixed a thing I didn't even intend to fix. And that, means it was a good weekend. :)

Onwards!

So last night that thing happened wherein the clocks shift by an hour, for entirely unclear reasons. I figured it might be time to change the clock in the car. I've never looked at the clock, really, other than that brief time when it was a canary for electrical problems. I've certainly not changed it; that means that the clock has not been set in 13 years. Today, I looked at it:

The time was actually 3:33pm (what sensible people call "15:33"), so when you ignore the clocks changing, the clock has lost 6 minutes, in over a decade. That's pretty impressive!

That LED poking out of the clock annoys me though. That's probably a remnant of the vestigial alarm system. That vestigial alarm system is something that I want to get rid of. But that, will come in a much later episode of "Lewis spends too much money on a 33 year old hatchback".

So I joked at the start of the previous episode about things going smoothly and as expected until they do not go as expected, but the rears really did go as expected. There's no follow-up joke about this not going as expected this time! And not even the smallest hint of a bracket on this one.

Yeah, that probably would have been a more interesting photo if I had used my phone in portrait orientation but I refuse to do that for weird reasons. But they're on! It was rather uneventful, so I will visit assorted tangents while I talk about fitting them.

The downside with the K-Sport coilovers is that they do not have any instructions other than generic ones for no particular vehicle. That is expected, because they're specialist parts that assumes a specialist is fitting them. Which I am not! I'm just an idiot learning stuff as I go from an old car that consumes an alarmingly high amount of my disposable income.

One thing I learned is that when setting up the ride height it's not necessarily valid to offer your new coilovers against the old ones and match the heights; that only works if your spring rates on both the old and new ones are similar. It so happened, i.e. it was a coincidence, that this worked for the front shocks. When I tried this on the rear it left that corner sitting absurdly high. Alas, I did not think to take a picture of just how absurdly high it was, so I had to pay some mates of mine from Hollywood a lot of money to make a dramatic but very authentic CGI recreation of how this looked:

That required some fiddling, and by some I mean about two hours. After much fiddling I found out this: A good baseline is to have the bottom of your coilovers screwed in by about 85mm from the bottom of the thread. To illustrate this, your bottom nut should be in about this position:

Time for one of those tangents! The cheap Vernier here is one I bought off t'internet the other day, just because I much prefer measuring things with one of these vs tape measures or rules whenever I possibly can, and I needed one that was cheap enough that I wouldn't mind using it in the drizzle (which is basically all but a month or two a year around these parts). It seems that the cheap ones are almost exactly as accurate and, other than lacking the nicety of a "hold" button, about as good for my purposes as much more expensive ones.

Also, I am wearing gloves. I've only had my own car on the road for a few months, but I've actually been working on cars (i.e. other peoples' old shit) for over 15 years. and why had I not tried wearing mechanic's gloves before?! It's so nice to finish up a day without random nasty abrasions, and without a coating of grease and dust and assorted old-car mank on my hands that takes multiple cleanings with a nail brush to remove. These cheapies, with their curious "Qear" name, worked great:

Anyway. Remember that 85mm? About that 85mm! That will give you a ride height that looks something like this (which will be a bit lower after it gets used and settles):

...which is close enough to the ballpark of where I want it to sit. More on the ballpark in a bit; just bear in mind I'm on 15 inch wheels and 195/45 tyres; adjust your baseline accordingly depending on the size of your own wheels. One of the other lessons I learned in doing the first side, which was one of the things that made the first side take nearly three hours and the second side take about a third of that, was this (and forgive the terrible photo, as I am incapable of taking a picture with a phone):

Which is to say: it is vastly easier to get the bottom bolts in if you have a small jack to hold up the hub. That way, you're only fighting to get the holes lined up in one dimension, rather than two; I lost at least twenty minutes struggling to man it out in two dimensions (and by "man" it out, I mean if a woman was doing it she'd have gotten this job done about eighteen minutes sooner by working smarter than me). As the main jack was in use because I'm too lazy to set up axle stands, this little bottle jack worked fine, but in a pinch I'd have used one of those dodgy scissor jacks if I had to.

ANYWAY, about that ballpark! Everything is sitting in the ballpark of where I want it to be, and close enough that I am happy to declare any small adjustments NMFP. And as soon as I source an appropriate set of bottom bolts for the front shocks (I hope you didn't think I'd drive the car any non-trivial distance with just one "spare" thread) she is going to have a visit with to people who have actual level surfaces to work on (and niceties such as hydraulic ramps which make working underneath cars less of a hateful experience than it is for me).

Yeah, this suspension change has completely ruined my handling for now; it has horrific bump steer and alarming amounts of understeer. That is entirely what I should have expected; replacing old and probably half-collapsed suspension with brand new stuff is of course going to substantially alter the geometry and it takes professionals with much more equipment than I have to get everything set up nicely. Something approaching a review of this suspension will be the next episode of "Lewis spends too much of his money on a 33-year-old hatchback".

Onwards!

Fitting new coilovers (to old cars, at least) is dead easy; this job was four bolts on each shock, everything comes undone easily enough, everything fits perfectly and just works and ha ha just kidding you know that wasn't going to happen on this car.

Actually, part of that was true; the old coilovers came off with only minor hammer persuasion, and the new coilovers themselves fitted fine. But on the front coilovers, there should be some brackets to hold the brake pipe in place, to prevent it from hitting the wheel or the tyre when it flaps about. The brackets supplied with the suspension were wholly inappropriate. One of them was purportedly intended to wrap around the body of the shock absorber, but did not have the diameter to do this successfully. One of them was a long rectangular steel band, which was flimsy (and also too thin, which I will get to).

Because the latter one was thin and flimsy, I could attach it to the back of the shock, bend it through 180 degrees with a hammer & Knipex grabs, then add another 90-ish degree bend with a hammer to make this work as an "I need to get to the shop before it closes" workaround. So that is what I did:

That's ugly. And because it's so thin, it would not hold the brake pipe securely using the standard clip without some more hammer-and-grabs "adjustment". It did, however, get me to the shop, and there's something to be said for that. But what was actually called for, was a proper bracket!

My old coilovers already had such a bracket (I think this would more properly be called a "hanger"):

Yeah, that's the opposite of pretty, and would have been the opposite of pretty even before it went rusty, but it worked for years and I can't fault anything that works. And that gave me something to work with! Because the old shocks are about the same diameter as my new ones, I was confident that a bracket in the same position of more or less the same size would keep the brake lines from fouling anything.

So you start by making & writing down some measurements, then making a cardboard template:

Rather than being welded to the shock (a fairly bad idea), this will pick up from the bottom bolts at the front of the shock.The vertical lines are where 45 degree bends are required; they are lightly scored with a Stanley knife to make the cardboard bend naturally along those lines when validating the design.

Always make things out of cardboard first! You can validate, iterate, and throw away designs very quickly, and you can do that at no cost because cardboard is free. The one you see was my second iteration; my first was unnecessarily elaborate.

Validate your cardboard design in place:

Then transfer your design onto 3mm steel:

You might think that 3mm steel is excessive, but 3mm is the exact thickness required for the OEM brake pipe & clip to fit nicely. Other people have made these out of aluminium, but steel seemed much more appropriate to me given its safety-critical location. (It's safety-critical not just because it's holding the brake pipe; it's bolted up with the shock bottom mount, and if this cracks or breaks your shocks will be loose.)

Once you're done, you dry run that to be on the safe side, and probably find you have some minor fettling to do (this was the third dry run for me, after some small adjustments to the holes and the slot):

Then give it a coat of zinc primer and a coat of paint, and fit it for real:

Don't judge me on the colour! They're loud cyan because I had a can of loud cyan paint kicking around, which makes it a much better colour than any paint I didn't have.

Now you have one possibly-overengineered brightly-coloured brake pipe bracket. Just like that! Do that one more time and you have two possibly-overengineered brake pipe brackets!

So that part is done (though I am possibly-irrationally nervous about there being only one "spare" thread on those bolts with the bracket in place, so I might swap them out for something longer to put my mind at ease).

In a short while, which means however long it takes me to work out how I make a pretty drawing in FreeCAD, I will publish my designs for this bracket to help anyone else facing this (very very niche) problem.

Onwards!

It took me five years to find one of these in usable condition. And even then I could not find one! Instead, my brother did, because he has a weird skill of finding parts that don't exist. Back when he owned it, he somehow managed to source rear seats for it (the owner before him removed them and binned them, because racecar), and what might have been the last three 323 GTX rear arch repair panels in the country. And Alex delivers again! He managed to find a parcel shelf in the United States, priced at $100 (plus the usual horrific shipping costs).

The interior, then, is now complete, other than the boot carpet situation, which the parcel shelf allows me to ignore. The parcel shelf definitely needs a clean (that'll be my lunchtime project for tomorrow, because working from home is pretty great), but otherwise it's in awesome condition.

Today's episode of "shipping from the US is madness" thing (previously): I have still not worked out whether and under what criteria I will be paying import VAT for anything I import from abroad. I had to pay £28 on this $100 parcel shelf, yet paid none on my short shifter & bush kit, or on my as-yet-unfitted digital dashboard (all of which are worth substantially more than $100). If it's not actually random, the criteria are obscure enough that it may as well be!

Unrelated story from today: A chap spots my car outside the shop - as I learned, he is a mechanic by trade and a petrolhead - and told me that he's heard it driving around but can't work out whether it's turbocharged or whether it's supercharged. Yeah, maybe I really should stop ignoring that timing belt whine...

The only positive side effect of my Facebook account reactivating itself (it is now scheduled for permanent deletion, since Facebook won't play nice) is that I got to find out about a car meet on Saturday with Only Fools & Motors over at the Coach & Horses at Tilney All Saints on Saturday. It seems that this would be the last event of the year, and not just because of that thing that is going to forbid gatherings of more than six people. And so everyone's (my) favourite sleeper Mazda 323 got to have her first outing!

So, before my car returned to the road at the start of August, I had not even left my village since lockdown started. With the car done, I did get to go further away, but this meet was the first time I have socialised and mingled and generally been around a non-trivial number of people, and it felt good.

It was a nice way to burn about three hours. I didn't expect that at any car meet my 1987 Mazda would be about the median age of vehicles in any particular place, but that happened - the variety of cars was huge! And I met some old friends (there were more than a few drift friends there) and I got to make some new ones too.

...this seems like a good idea. This was just shy of £25 on Amazon, and while I doubt I will need to use it because I totally trust this car to not set on fire, there's no reason I should not have one handy. £25 and a tiny bit less boot space is a small sacrifice for not losing four years of work.

Also...the boot, where the extinguisher is bolted in, was not part of my interior cleanup rampage, and it looks absolutely terrible. The carpet is a Mazda carpet, but it is not from a Mazda 323; it has a nicely-sewn Mazda logo suggesting it is a carpet made for a Mazda Something but it has been cut about to fit inside the back of the GTX (which is why I didn't mind drilling a hole through it). It is also hopelessly warped by the car not being watertight when I bought it. I'll look into my options.

My brother Alex came over in his E30 to make my driveway look much cooler. 80s car friends, yay! 💕 We've been meaning to get a photo of them together, when they are both working, so we did!

Actually, the goal today was not to add even more obnoxiously loud colours to my driveway, but to get Alex's clutch working on his 1963 Land Rover, not pictured (yet). That did not work, because of a lack of parts. We thought the clutch slave cylinder was dead, because Alex had installed it upside down (which means bleeding it will not work as as it should). With the slave cylinder installed the right way up and with the system bled appropriately, the clutch still didn't work, which means the master cylinder is probably dead in some way. We didn't have a master cylinder, so that should have been the end of the day.

Except...once you start, you're sort of committed to doing something that day, so we decided to save it by getting stuff done in lieu of getting anything done that we actually wanted to, like cleaning up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted.

By which I mean Alex cleaned up the chassis & an outrigger in preparation for a second fuel tank to be fitted. I mostly sat around making stupid jokes and offering encouragement and giving the occasional good idea. The work itself didn't require a second person.

But, I did get to hang out with my brother at a sensible distance, we had a day of fun and of getting things done that we didn't intend to do and of decades-old in-jokes, we consumed food, and Alex departed with a wicked rolling burnout down my street to round it off.

Sometimes, an unproductive day can be a good day. ❤️

Photo credit for the last and second-to-last photo: my brother's 11-year-old kid Rowan. Thanks kid!

Small victory: Mazda Amy has a working clutch! (Again.)

Obviously, I had a working clutch at certain times when she returned to the road. Not long ago, though, I had an hilarious (by hilarious I mean terrifying) incident while parking, in which my clutch pedal went straight to the floor with no resistance and the car kept moving and...no, that was not nice. That's definitely not something your driving lessons prepare you for, since driving instructors own modern cars that work, rather than old shit that works when it's in the right mood.

It just so happens that, a few weeks earlier, after working on my brother Alex's old shit Land Rover, he had exactly the same problem, and his save (turn off the ignition and slam on brakes and full-force it out of gear simultaneously) prepared me for what I would have to do, if I ever had to do the same thing. Like watching some automotive version of Bear Grylls making a tent out of an otter or whatever, not something you will think you will use, but now I know how to deal with that situation, not that I'll ever have to do that...

So it goes. I drove her home very carefully because she was actually dangerous; I am glad the clutch failure happened during low-speed reversing rather than the clutch engaging while I was in first gear waiting at a junction onto a main road. The episode scared the shit out of me, and so she came off the road until I worked out exactly why that happened and how I could make it not happen again.

I was not entirely sure about any of this, and until I was entirely sure, I would not drive her.

Rewind a few months. While I was cleaning out thirteen years of accumulated "might need that some time in the rebuild" shit from the interior, I found...a clutch slave cylinder.That was not my purchase; Alex bought it when he owned the car back in 2007. I didn't like the look of it; it looked like generic poorly-manufactured aftermarket blah that might be useful for something else some day, so I threw it into my big box of parts and didn't think much more about it.

So. It did strike me as strange that Alex would have randomly bought a clutch slave cylinder rather than any of the other parts that the car needed. I had a word with him and he could not remember why he bought it. He also couldn't remember whether he had any problems with the clutch. This is understandable; 13 years have passed since he had it on the road.

Fast forward to today! I bought a clutch master cylinder with the intent of replacing both cylinders. As I found out today the master cylinder I ordered was entirely the wrong part, so I was prepared to write the day off and wait until I could find a master cylinder that was actually the right part. But on a whim, we pulled back the boot (dust cover, as it is called in the Colonies) of the slave cylinder and a bunch of fluid came out. For those of you who don't get it, the proper role of the boot/dust cover is not to hold in fluid. (The bits of liquid mess you see in the photo would be freshly-liberated clutch fluid.)

So, the slave cylinder was clearly the problem, which is nice, because that means it wasn't the master cylinder (for which I had the wrong part) or the clutch itself (which is only available from ACT these days and costs £500). With the "new" slave cylinder not looking like an OEM part, it was dismantled to see if anything was wrong with it before any attempt to fit it...and yep, there was a lot wrong with it. There was machining swarf inside the bores, the bores felt horrible, and most inexplicably the hydraulic fittings seemed to be threaded to Imperial rather than metric. Trust me: when you have the option (I don't) of getting OEM parts, get OEM parts or parts from reputable tuning companies; the quality of aftermarket generic parts is rather variable, and by that I don't mean surprisingly good.

Oh well. Bores were cleaned, swarf was eliminated, Imperial threads were tapped to metric, a thing was fitted and actual working car again. For real this time! Until something else breaks.

Onwards!

So, that was expensive, but what can you do. (Other than not owning old shit that is nigh-on impossible to get parts for. I should have thought about that five years ago!)

My car is running a fairly horrible mongrel suspension setup. Shortly after she came off the road in 2007, she gained some custom-made rear shocks from Gaz, as part of my brother's work to get her road-legal after her last MOT failure. These were, and still are, very nice; as good as you would expect from tailor-made stuff by Gaz. They're still on springs of unknown provenance and unknown age, which I intended to replace at some point.

The front ones, on the other hand, are awful; they look like budget coilovers from a completely different car (quite possibly a Mark 2 VW Golf) that were bodged to fit. In other words, they were shit coilovers, that are now old and shit coilovers that feel terrible. They also sit far too low. Weird, I know, someone with a modified Japanese car saying such a thing; except I actually like driving my car on the road, and me driving anywhere means driving some distance on Norfolk back-roads. As much as I like "the lows", I like not having a smashed sump even more.

As you may have guessed, with the GTX being a very rare car and the suspension being specific to the GTX, I do not have many off-the-shelf suspension options; there are only K-Sport and D2 coilovers available for it.^[1] Bear in mind that the UK market for any 323 GTX part is about five people, myself included.^[2]

I was kinda ignoring the suspension issue, mostly because I'm cheap and it handles well enough (tiny wheelbase, 4wd, and good rubber goes an awfully long way). But after multiple painful bottoming-out incidents on the back roads, and with everything being vague on those roads at very high speed, and seeing these selling for about £200 less than I had last seem them sold...this had to be done. It's overdue.

I'll update when they are here and fitted. I suspect this is going to be a massive improvement; you'll probably get a review out of this.

Aside: yeah I've done this one before, but what is the deal with shipping from the United States? I did notice that these were available from the US, for significantly less money, and I might have been tempted to save a few quid by waiting roughly six years for these to make their way across the Atlantic. And then I looked at the shipping costs:

OK, so this one was a bit of an outlier, but all of the coilovers that came up in my searches (only one of which was actually for my car) had shipping costs not far off £200. It's so strange.

[1] Fun fact: I'm told that D2 and K-Sport are made in the same factory, branded differently for different national markets.

[2] And I know that one of those people already has K-Sport coilovers fitted...

Milestone: actual working car that is taxed and MOTed and insured!

She's back. She actually arrived home on the first Saturday of the month, but I did not get to drive her properly until Sunday, because I spent so much time on Saturday working on Alex's old shit rather than driving my old shit. So it goes. I did take her for a little 20mph run down my road to ensure nothing exploded, and Alex (who formerly owned this car) did a little completely-legal short drive with a cheeky four-wheel-drift for old times' sake. Nothing exploded. Lack of explosions please me.

She is AWESOME. There is nearly-infinite cornering grip from the four-wheel-drive system, there is horrendous 80s turbo lag (basically nothing below about 3000 RPM) which is more hilarious than frustrating, she is tiny when you park her next to anything made in the last ten years or so, the noise she makes at high RPMs is deafening and encourages you to powerband her constantly and...yup, I love this car. This has been an expensive and time-consuming and oft-frustrating endeavour and it has been worth every bit of it.

She's not pretty - yet. I'm aiming to take her in for a full respray from the best people in the business next year. But given that she started like this in 2015...

...I don't mind being a little bit proud of all of this finally coming together.

So then, teething problems.

No matter how much fuel I put in, the fuel gauge never reads more than half full. Unless she really did drink ten litres of fuel in less than a mile on Saturday, the fuel gauge is also entirely unreliable at low levels too. It's probably just the sender unit. For now, I will live, until I find another one (which is likely a GTX-specific part, i.e. completely unobtainable).

She has a weird pogo problem in first gear when the boost kicks in; if you back off the throttle at about 3500-4000 RPM, she will drop revs, then rapidly gain them, then drop them, etc, which is dangerously undriveable. This only happens when the clutch is engaged and only in first gear. Alex mentioned that he recalls messing with the throttle cable damper to make the throttle response more snappy, and thinks that is related. "Just see 1st as an ON switch" was his advice. I'll roll with that for now.

The day after her first long drive, she overheated MASSIVELY in a 30mph zone - the bad "hit the red mark on the temperature dial and start knocking" kind of overheating. Fortunately this happened metres away from the entrance of the Tesco car park in Downham Market. Not to worry - I topped up the lost coolant with some of Tesco's finest bottled water, gave her an hour and a bit to cool down, and drove her home in full driving-instructor-approved highest-gear-possible mode to keep the airflow high and revs low. Nothing went wrong and I made it home.

Curiously, while I was in the car park waiting for her to cool down, I put the heater on full (this, if you did not know, helps to cool your engine in an emergency) and only got luke-warm air coming out even with the temperature gauge hitting the red. Curious, but could be an unrelated problem, so I thought...

What I thought was the problem, after some investigation, was that the fan wasn't kicking in. That would somewhat explain why she had happily been power-banded for an hour straight and then boiled almost as soon as she came in to a 30 zone. That was down to a bad connector, which only required some electrical contact cleaner. Happiness.

Or so I thought. After a test drive a little while later, in which the temperatures were lovely, I parked up at home, went to grab a bottle of water, and a few minutes later she inexplicably did not have enough voltage to start. I thought this strange, but I put the battery on charge, drove her a half mile to the best local shop in the world as a test the next day, and found that she would not start again.

On a whim, while in the car park I decided to poke around to find out why my battery was not charging and saw this.

Oops. At some point, she had randomly decided to lose her alternator/water pump belt and her power steering belt. There wasn't far to go, and I did barely make it home with what charge was in the battery after a jump start; in a rare example of me making a sensible purchase and a sensible decision, I had purchased some Sealey jump leads the day before and put them in the car.

Still. This mystified me. A missing water pump belt would certainly explain why it was overheating, but that belt also drives the alternator and given that I was almost in "no electrical systems" mode after a mile of driving, there is no way she would have survived any of the much longer drives I had taken her on previously.

The only explanation of this is me being an idiot. About thirteen years ago (when she was under Alex's ownership) I rebuilt this engine. I very distinctly remember tensioning the timing belt (on some engine designs, a slipped timing belt can explode your engine, though I did not know at the time that the Mazda B-engine is not such a design). I do not remember with the same clarity doing the same for the alternator and power steering belts. If I hadn't tensioned the alternator/water pump belt properly, that could leave things working to an extent, but not sufficiently, and would lead to the belt falling off eventually.

And that, as much as the non-functioning fan, would explain the cooling problem. With a poorly-functioning water pump, water will circulate itself to an extent by virtue of hot things naturally wanting to travel to cooler places, but not sufficiently. That also could explain the luke-warm air coming from the cabin heater.

I got two new belts from my local motor factor. So that this information is out there for anyone that came here from a search engine, you will have luck by searching for Gates part numbers 4PK878 (the power steering belt) and 6264MC (the alternator belt, which is also QH part number QBA887). Your part numbers for the power steering belt will be different if your car is fitted with air conditioning.

I took her for a short drive today. The temperatures are lovely, I have more charge in my battery than I did when I set out, and my power steering actually works now.

This, is just how it is. It's expected. She is a 33-year-old car that had been off the road for thirteen years, I fully expected certain things to not work quite right. And even if I had cause to be mad, she's way too cute to get angry at, isn't she? :)

Onwards!

I bought Mazda Amy without caring about the mileage. I mean, there's a pretty low overlap between people who care about how many miles a car has done and people who buy completely rotten cars from 1987. But while cleaning the interior, after five years of owning this car I checked it on a whim. Just under 63,000 miles! That seemed remarkably low for a 33-year-old car, even if it did spent 13 of those off the road.

Today, I was looking at the history of my car on the government's free MOT history check website, and well:

That would explain that, wouldn't it. 😶

Hint hint: you should never trust any online advert in which someone hides the number plates; anyone who thinks about it for more than a second knows it's pointless, and there's a non-trivial chance they're not wanting you to enter its reg into a certain government website...

Off for final MOT prep at Setch MOT centre. She'll be back soon!

Some people feel like they're giving up by giving their project to someone else to finish - that it's less authentically "theirs" if they haven't done every bit of the work. I don't feel this way at all. This is this car's fifth year of being a project. It's come an awful long way, but seeing that interior looking as beautiful as it does made me want a working car this year, and hopefully this summer. That simply isn't going to happen if I only do this on my free time.

First, there's some jobs I just don't care to do. Those would be things like the oil changes (all four: engine, gearbox, transfer box, & rear diff). My excuse is that I am getting old; I'm too old to want to crawl under cars to change fluids. Been there, done that, had hair caked with grease and eyes full of whatever that is that always into your eyes when you're working on an old car. Buy me a four-post ramp and I might think differently.

There's also some stuff that I just can't do; I don't have the presses required for doing suspension bushes, and that's more crawling under cars that I don't want to do as well.

Then there's...the wiper blades! I'm weird; I rebuilt the engine on this car, but I still don't know how to change wiper blades. Also, there's a whole bunch of other tiny jobs where I just want to hand it off to someone else, receive a working car, go drive working car.

Finally, as anyone should who owns a car that has been off the road for a while, I want someone to check over everything. If you work on something enough you will develop blind spots. You want someone with a fresh pair of eyes - and an MOT-tester set of eyes, at that - to look over everything and find out if you've missed something totally stupid. That's why she is heading off on the back of a recovery truck and not under her own steam. (That and I don't want to use the fantastically fragile transmission until I know it's got fresh fluids in it.)

Onwards!

I'd paid almost no attention to the interior of Mazda Amy so far, because there seemed like little point in doing so while I might still be in and out of there with tools and boots. And of course I left a ton of crap in there because just in case I need it for a future job on the car.

That left me with an interior looking like this:

Yeah, not really proud of it, but now there's a point in making it look nice.

In the best case scenario, this would be the first clean since 2007 when the car came off the road. It was pretty foul in there. My approach, if you care, was just brute force:

• Everywhere: Lots of industrial hoover action!
• Plastics: Cloth and soapy water on the plastics to get off any loose bits, then ZEP foaming citrus cleaner, sometimes in the reverse order if those bits were nasty. For the faded black bits, especially the dashboard, I hit them with WD-40 electrical contact cleaner (not at all to be confused with regular WD-40), then went over them with Gtechniq C4.
• Carpets & seats: I used whatever worked; if I thought I could get a particular area clean with a damp soapy rag, I did. I used Vanish carpet cleaning spray in places. I had to resort to electrical contact cleaner where I saw proper oil. I was more careful about using water in these areas, of course, especially the seats.

Over four hours later:

Much nicer. Seeing the interior looking lovely (look at all the purple and the 80s bits!!) was enough to remind me why I have spent so much money and time (mostly money) on this thing.

The reverse view, with lovely Driftworks steering wheel:

Next to arrive (tomorrow) is a blanking plate for that hole in the middle where the stereo should be and then I can call this done. Maybe I'll actually get a stereo in there some day!

Mazda Amy may not be the most powerful car in the world, or even more than slightly quick by modern standards. Even so, it seems a waste to have a four-wheel-drive performance car, with an awful lot of grip and go-cart handling, running on the nastiest no-name ditchfinders (it's a terrible idea for any car - don't cheap out on tyres if you don't have to).

She's now running on Toyo Proxes TR1 supplied by Demon Tweeks and fitted by my favourite local tyre van. One more job down.

Onwards!

On my brief test movements with Mazda Amy, it always struck me that her gear change was always awfully vague. And not just "old car" kind of vague, but Land Rover "there's a gear around here somewhere" vague, with no clear stops on the X axis, and an enormous throw on both axes. That's one of those things I was prepared to live with as part of the "drives old shit" package, though I did have my mind on getting someone to do a short-shifter mod for me at some point.

Last month, word reached me that Jeff Sylvester, a chap from the USA who is a legend in the small global 323 GTX community, was offering a short-shifter modification for the GTX at a price I thought entirely reasonable. Things were arranged, money was paid, and I pulled my shifter out for a journey across the Atlantic. This is what mine looked like:

Those disintegrated pieces of black plastic next to the shifter ball are meant to be the stops on the X-axis, so that explains the vagueness!

This is what it looked like in progress. You'll see Jeff replaced the pointless plastic stops with metal ones (and the really eagle-eyed who have an eye for that sort of thing would have spotted a Corvette panel in the background):

The physics of a short-shifter mod should be familiar to anyone who has sat in an unconventional place on a see-saw; as I understand it involves cutting and shutting things to move the pivot point around to make the same amount of gear lever movement induce more movement on the cables, i.e. a shorter shift with somewhat more effort at the gear lever.

Jeff didn't stop there, though he could have; he cares about the quality of anything that leaves his workshop, so he cleaned everything up and gave it a coat of paint. Here's how it looked when it came back to me yesterday:

Refitting was dead easy. A bracket for the centre console tray, which bolts to the shifter assembly, needs to be gently (angle-grinder) modified to clear the slightly taller shifter, but that's all.

It feels lovely. I have gears in easy-to-reach and mostly predictable places now!

Now, about that manky interior.... Onwards!

Aside: why is it rather cheap for me to send parcels to the United States, but horrendously expensive to get anything sent in the other direction? I paid whatever it was I paid to ship it over there for modification, on a three-to-four day service. It cost me very slightly more to get it shipped back on a nominal three-to-four week service. This is not the only time this has happened; I did not order a Walbro fuel pump from the United States because the shipping cost nearly as much as the fuel pump, and previously I had to contend with £30 shipping for some decals. I would love to order more things from the US because there are far more GTX parts available over there than here, but the shipping costs are usually unreasonable enough to put me off the idea.

Bumper restoration with Gtechniq C4. Before is on the right, after is on the left. The picture speaks for itself.

My original bumpers & sideskirts are from 1987. They are not body-coloured, they were faded and looked awful, and I wasn't sure what to do with them. This being one of the rarest cars in the UK (5 on the road as of time of writing, the bumpers & sideskirts being specific to a subset of this particular generation of 323), I could not risk doing anything irreversible to them, and I wasn't willing to try anything that hasn't been proven to work.

"Back to Black" and everything of its kind does close to nothing when it's gotten this bad. If anything, it makes it somewhat worse, because rather than having tired-looking plastic, you will have tired-looking plastic with a nasty residue that will have to be removed before you give in and spend £20 on a bottle of C4.

Spraying these plastics black (as I did with my mirrors, which were already painted) was not an option. Unpainted plastics are not metal; you will never be able to remove the paint you've sprayed on.

Apparently you can apply heat to black plastics to restore them. Good idea, and this apparently works well, but that is something incredibly easy to get wrong (especially with my clumsy hands) and any getting-wrong on those lines would, again, be irreversible.

I sat on this problem for a couple of years.

At some point I heard about Gtechniq C4. I bought some. I put it on.

Again, look at the picture. It speaks for itself. This stuff would have gotten you convicted for witchcraft a few centuries ago.

Make sure that your surface is meticulously clean. C4 will not work if it is not. Your surface must be clean of any dirt, dust or grease. It must also be clean of any lesser detailing chemicals such as "Back to Black".

I gave my bumper and sideskirts a thorough scrubbing with a very soapy mix of water and Fairy Liquid, then rinsed that off with cold water. After that, to be on the safe side, I rinsed the panels with extremely liberal amounts of U-POL System 20 fast-drying degreaser. That degreaser is about £20 on eBay for five litres of it. I used about half a litre, because I had some left over from my bodge rattle-can respray.

C4 seems expensive, at £20 for a small, eyedrop-dispenser-sized bottle. But a little C4 goes a long way; two of these tiny bottles covered my front & rear bumpers and my sideskirts with a little bit left over. Modern cars that do not have acres of unpainted plastic will need far less of it.

Sometimes, when I show things to not-car people, I often comfort them with "nah, it's just surface rust", because rust isn't actually all that scary (for someone that mostly works on old shit cars). On the other hand, sometimes it really is as manky, bad and dead as it looks:

That is my former fuel pump. It is dead. I think it is dead because the filter fell off. Most likely, something nasty got sucked into the pump, and that killed the pump. Probably some of this stuff that we scraped off the bottom of the tank:

On the other hand, it's plausible that it was 33 years old and ready to give up as 33-year-old parts occasionally do. In both cases, it was the reason that my car was not starting.

One massively overkill Walbro 255 LPH pump from Driftworks later:

This was a dead easy fit, and there is nothing to report there. And, with a change of the other fuel filter, I now have a working car!

I was considering giving the inside of my fuel tank a clean. My brother's advice is to fill the tank up, keep it filled, and change the filters regularly. I'm going with that, and not just because I don't want to shove my arm into the fuel tank again.

Onwards!