dial lights

now have the speedo and tacho dial lights working having got the missing info from the ever helpful and patient Mark at Westfield.

Foranyone else it's the orange/red feeds that you need to mate up to the red and white wire on the smiths attachment harness for the white dials.

Lets play..."guess that fluid"

Did a few bits a pieces on the car tonight, can't show the pictures as the blogger site seems not to be accepting them.

We spent a happy half an hour playing guess that fluid, by looking at what was being left on the drive and working out what it was. Steve came and helped - thanks again steve your advice is invaluable.

Found a couple of other minor little problems, and fix rather fewer, the current list is shown below.


2. Fix Fog Light
3. Fix fog light switch
4. Fix Dial lights
5. Cable up the speedo
6. Scuttle wiring loom feed hole
7. Make the six remaining dashboard holes
8. Fabricate nine dashboard retaining sockets and glue on
12. check if we have front springs mounted properly
16. Drill out acess holes for rivnuts on chassis
17. Nail the body on
18. check hand brake cable routing / tighten handbrake
19. check windscreen washer pipe routing and cut hole in scuttle for it
21. Restore covers to fuel pump connections
26. Cut boot box slots for roll bar
27. Cut boot box holes for saftery belt attachements
28. Fix boot box on
29 Fix Clutch
30. Change the bolt on the silencer mounting bracket
31. tighten oil pressure sender
32. find something to fill in the breather hole at rear of engine
33. adjust throttle idle (how?)
34. get new bulb
35. find leak at rear of engine
36. work out how main dial lights work

It's quiet(er) ...and it's lumpy

We fitted the silencer this morning, here you can see Chrissy doing just that...

We had a problem working out how to fit the heat guard that surrounds it, but then we found some huge jubilee clips inside a plastic bag containing windscreen wiper stuff, these seemed to be what was required.

We also fitted the roll bar and torque tightened that up (a virtual guarantee that we will be undoing it in the near future)

Starting the engine with silencer on gives a much more restrained note, but still a pleasant sound. In fact it was still noisy enough to set the neighbours car alarm off!


However the clutch doesn't seem to work, and the indicators have stopped working, and the engine is running even more lumpily than before and we have some fluid leking from somewhere... so that was a rather depressing note to leave it on.

Chrissy had to spend the afternoon on school work, (apart from watching the match of course) and Tim won't be able to work on it til next Sunday at the earliest... so no posts til then.

inertia switch (again) lambda (again) silencer (first time)

A combined six hours in the garage did yield some progress, albeit slow as always.
Our first job was to try and fix the inertia/fuel cut off switch. The original is bolted onto the chassis in the recommended (and almost only possible) location, but this means taking it off will probably mean removing the fuel tank - not nice now that is plumbed in and has the filler through the body work.

Bought a second hand switch from ebay in-case the problems caused by the original were just a faulty switch - see left.

The second hand unit came with the socket that was obviously meant to be used to connect to the switch this makes much more positive connection and in fact in turns out that the problem was that the awful westfield connectors just didn't have a good enough grip on the connection pins so no circuit was being made. therefore we soldered the traces on the socket onto the westfield wiring loom and thus were able to reconnect in the original switch and sure enough the pump whirrs when the ignition switch gets to position 2 - hoorah. I can even sell the other switch back on ebay.


Chrissy spent some time trying to make the other dial lights work, but an hour or two only proved that halfrauds crimp on spade connectors + homebase crimp tool = no good connections and spade connectors that fall out...





We drilled a hole for the lambda wire to go through the body work, intending to put a grommet around it, however the bodywork is thick here and the grommets we had bought would not work, so we resorted to convoluted tubing to protect the wire feed. The had to take off the connector that Tim had previously sweated and sworn at to allow cable to be fed through body and then had to reconnect connector once done...as a very wise blog once said, expect to do everything on a westfield twice.



Final job for the day was to make a start on the silencer. This is one of the better bits of the manual as it doesn't mention the silencer or it's fixing anywhere at all. I always thinking silence is so much more appealing than lies - don't you?

Anywhay the chassis has an extra captive nut (is this called a boss or a bush I never know) forward from the two similar fixings for the seat belt.
Of course this gives the problem of how to position the hole on the bodywork. We had already solved this by drilling a pilot inside to out using the flexible dremmel attachment.


Then we fettled out the hole to take an M10 bolt and ran an M10 tap up the captive thread, thus allowing us to put the bolt and it's brass spacer in...

a few small jobs

We acheived various little victories tonight, we fettled out the (six) holes for the roll bar, so it now fits through boot box, this did mean removing one of our previously installed body rivets and putting it back again.

We repaired the fuel tank breather pipe.

We drilled a hole in the body by sticking a drill bit in the flexible dremmel attachment and pushing it up the middle of the bush that will hold the silencer mounting bracket. This now gives a hole in the body at exactly the place the bracket has to go.

We also worked out how to get the dial lights working.

Things to do

...our immediate things to do list, which is all we have time for this evening as the footie has to be watched...

1. Repair Fuel Tank Breather Tube
2. Fix Fog Light
3. Fix fog light switch
4. Fix Dial lights
5. Cable up the speedo
6. Scuttle wiring loom feed hole
7. Make the six remaining dashboard holes
8. Fabricate nine dashboard retaining sockets and glue on
9. Understand coolant behaviour
10. Fix on new fuel cut-off switch
11. Fettle the GRP flanges where roll bar mounts to chassis
12. check if we have front springs mounted properly
13. Fix the silencer mounting bracket and silencer
14. Cut a hole for the lambda wiring (find/buy grommet)
15. Fettle boot box holes for roll bar
16. Drill out acess holes for rivnuts on chassis
17. Nail the body on
18. check hand brake cable routing
19. check windscreen washer pipe routing and cut hole in scuttle for it
20. Work out how we tell if the clutch is working
21. Restore covers to fuel pump connections
22. Copper slip the lambda sensor

measure three times and then c*ck it up

We struggled over the weekend to fit the roll bar, you have to drill three holes each side all on the same axis, these holes are 51mm through the boot box, 51mm through the grp flange and 12.5 mm through the thick metal plate that is welded to the chassis. A complicating factor (aside from the usual contradictory advice in Mr Manual) is that the GRP is of course not very symmetrical and so drilling at the same point on the boot box won't drill at the EXACTLY the same point on the chassis on each side. So measuring out took some time.


We were therfore rather disappointed that roll bar didn't fit neatly into the holes cut out in the GRP flanges.

Can't test the fit of the 40mm metal bolts yet that hold it on as inside of roll bar was a bit rusted and we needed to get an M12 x 1.75 tap to clean out the thread.

Good old ebay gave us a suitable tap set, and we have now cleared the threads but Chrissy's desire to crash meant we came in before trying it out.

We have fixed the horn, but the fog light still doesn't work.

We have a (very) long list of other things to do....

HOORAH! It works

At about 7pm tonight the neighbourhood was disturbed by two rowdy louts running their unsilenced car for the first time....

It started, and ran - the idling is a bit rough and pick up not too smooth but we did get oil pressure almost instantly having filled the gallery with oil (breaking the newly bought oil can in the process)...

Here is a picture of Chrissy that she would not like the world to see just after the car started...

chrissy takes keyboard
But I am planning on getting revenge on my father with his funny joyous dance when the car started which is recorded on video for posterity. Anna also insists on being credited as video camera operative.

Back to it (with Steve's Help)

After a bit of a break with Chrissy away over the summer Tim is back on to the car (Chrissy is busy paintballing in Scotland til Tuesday)

Anyway Steve came around and provide much knowledge and assistance.

Progress -

We have the fuel guage working
We have a spark
We Now have fuel - it seems the fuel cut off switch was doing precisely that even though the red button was depressed, anyway we have bypassed it for the moment, recognising it's going to be a right so and so to get out.

This now has allowed the pump to work and fuel to flow.

Important tip, there is a schrader valve on the top of the engine on the fuel system that you can push the plunger of (just like a valve on a bike tyre) and you can see fuel flow if there is pressure - see below.....









There are still some problems however -

1. We cannot get any oil pressure the guage does seem to be working but pressure isn't being generated. We took the oil pressure sensor out expecting oil to be spurted out when we cranked but it wasn't.
2. The cut-off switch see above
3. The starter motor sometimes sounds fine at other times sounds really grating.