Its running again and getting close to moving

A fair amount of progress has been made this weekend. First up Duncan and I refitted the engine following fitting the baffle plate last week. This took a leisurely three hours. Before fitting the engine I took fellow racer Gordon Griffin's advice and eschewed the exhaust heat wrap as nasty horrible & ineffective. In order to protect the fuel tank and my arse on the other side of the bulkhead I stuck some heat reflective blanket on the engine bay bulkhead. With the engine bay empty I also painted up a a few areas where I'd welded brackets in place and tidied up the wiring an main earth points.

By Lunchtime we were ready to fill the coolant system and restart the engine. With the engine idling nicely we then kept adding oil until the running level at idle was on the Max mark in the sight glass. This took 4Litres in all ( with a new filter) and I now need to understand how much over fill is required beyond this point I'll be asking Andy Bates next week.

With the engine and drive line in place I was ready to move on to the brakes. My ultimate aim was to get the brakes sorted out, fit the drive chain and then have the beast move under it's own steam up and down the drive.

First up was the brakes. The trial fit of the calipers yesterday proved that they would fit under the wheels so I set about permanently fitting them up. However we did hit a problem. The Calipers are made of four major parts, the two halves are separated by a pair of aluminium spacers. In my case the spacers in both calipers were oversize and actually prevented me from fitting the pads. So it was time to disassemble the callipers remove the spacers and set about them with a file. so after a couple of hours of fettling I actually had calipers that fitted on the car AND to which i could fit brake pads. Then I set about fitting the brake lines and doing a first bleed of the brakes system. Unfortunately this revealed a leaking front master cylinder which took a bit of rectifying and burnt through the reaming time in the day. Still the engine is running and I have a largely complete braking system. Although another slight wrinkle is that the mintex 1144 pads are a bit too thick to fit when new.