She Runs... at Last.

Apologies for no updates for a couple of weeks, but a fair bit of progress has been made on the car.

Firstly of course Tony Law has completed the fabrication of the exhaust, and typical of TLE it is very nicely fabricated. interestingly they hav opted for a 4-2-1 exhaust rather than the TLE thier collective experience. However if it is wrong it looks eay to convert as only a short link pipe will be needed. Unfortunately they forgot to weld a boss for the lambda sensor onto the new exhaust so I'll need to do that later.

So with the New exhaust fitted there really wasn't any sort of excuse not to fire the car up and see how she runs. This took quite a while to do as I hade to build up the induction gear, fill the oil and coolant circuits, connect a set of auxillery instruments and 20 other little jobs that needed doing before I could thumb the start button. However having turned her over on the start only to establish some oil pressure (a nice healthy 20PSI under cranking only) I took a deep breath and his "start". After 20 seconds or so of cranking to pressurise the fuel rail away she went. Cold Idle oil pressure is about 24PSi hot is around 14, no oil or coolant leaks,

Fantastic. The new exhaust is nicely rumbly and it is fair to say she burbles nicely at idle. I did have a massive airlock in the coolant system though. Characterised by a rapid spike in the indiacted temperature as the water boilded in the head, and the coolant pipes not heating up correctly. Hoever I eventually managed to clerar this and even on a warm and sunny march day she sat and idled quite happily for 30+ minutes before getting anywhere near the point where the fan should cut in.

Good, it is nice to have some success at last.

The other thing I got sorted out today was, the reverse control mechanism. This operates on a lever at the back of the car. The easiest way to do this was via a push pull cable from Cable-tec.co.uk and a T Bar handle in the cockpit.