It has been many months since my last post about genuine work on the car but that is largely because it has been many months since I have actually done any!
Between preparing the house for our new baby, Christmas and then the arrival of our baby (Lilly), the car has just had to wait.
But spurred on partly by the slightly milder weather but mostly by the fact that Complete Kit Car Mag are coming to take some photos, I finally headed out to the garage to fit the last major component to the car, the air filter.
I have been driving around since SVA with no air filter fitted which is OK but it really is only a matter of time before something finds it’s way in to the throttle bodies so before any serious spring time driving could be done, the filter needed fitting. It also finishes the engine bay off nicely.
I purchased an air filter kit months ago but as seems the norm with kit cars, no one makes a kit for a specific engine so instead you have to order a generic filter and base plate and then drill and fettle accordingly.
So the base plate for the filter looks like this.
And these are the tops of the throttle bodies that the filter base plate needs to be fitted to.
So as every, I started with a cardboard template.
There are several holes that need to be made. The actual holes for the throttle bodies obviously but also the holes for the bolts that hold the filter to the top of the engine.
The problem is that you cannot see where the holes need to be, much less mark where you need to drill.
I came up with the idea of putting rivets in to the drill holes with the shafts pointing up. I then placed the cardboard template on the rivets and pushed to make holes where I needed bolt holes drilling.
It kind of worked OK. When all the holes where drilled, a little fettling was needed to compensate for the some what inaccurate measuring method but all in all it did the job.
The larger holes for the actual air intakes were more of a problem so after some thought, I decided the best method was to give it my best judgement and cut the holes lightly large to allow for any discrepancies.
I cut the holes out of the cardboard template to make sure I was in the right ball park, I was!
I also had to mark a couple of little sections of the plate to be ‘nibbled’ away in order to allow the base plate to site without hitting existing engine parts.
Once I was happy with the cardboard template, it was time to get drilling on the real thing.
As ever, my drilling (and particularly my hole cutting) was a little wonky and a couple of the bolt holes had to be extended to allow it all to fit but all in all it went on to the engine without any drama.
So then the final job was to attach the actual air filter to the base plate using the provided clips.
Last big job completed in just a couple of hours!
Well almost.
The actual final stage was to see whether the bonnet would still fit on the car as the air filter sticks up above the engine quite some way. Luckily, it did.
Some guys from Complete Kit Car are coming tomorrow to photograph the car and there is going to be a two part article in the this and next months editions of the magazine charting the build of the car through to final completion. So if you are interested, pop down to WH Smiths and get your self a copy (out 20th Feb 2009).
Feels great to be back in the garage and working on the car again.
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