Been a while

 

It's been ages since I posted. The combination of holidays, not getting a lot done on teh car, and then getting things done in fits and starts has meant that I am no-where near where I wanted to be at this point, but never mind. So, to recap; Last time I put something up, this was the state of the car.

Now I look back at it, in that time, I have done quite a lot. Not TOO long after the previous picture, I put the engine in with the help of another builder, Chris.

Now you may remember that I was refurbishing the engine last time I posted. I changed direction on that a little bit and got some professional help which I will do a separate post about in the not too distant future. The long and short of it is that I now have a nicely refurbished engine that is installed!

However, the fact that the engine is effectively a clean slate now, means I can't just throw some fluids in and start her up, I need to do a proper run-in process.  What that in turn means is that I need to have the electrics working, the alternator connected, gauges working so that I can monitor oil pressure, temperature and a couple other things. So, the majority of the last couple of months has been spent making that happen.
A lot of that work went very quickly. Running the new loom was pretty quick, getting the lights wired in was straightforward, and the basics went pretty quickly. I even wired in the blinkstop steering wheel buttons and the horn and the indicators worked pretty much straight away so I thought I had it nailed. But no - alas, a couple of little niggly errors (one of mine, and one being a mistake in the manual) have taken a really long time to fix. So in the last week, my ECU panel has gone from looking like this:

to this:

and now I am just in the process of making all the wires sit nicely and I can start putting things back together and get ready for engine start!

What else have I done. Well - the first bit of vinyl has gone on:

You can see from that picture that the rear arches are on - they are a bit of an ongoing saga as well - I'll write that up properly when its all finished but they are somewhat fiddly to fit!

I've also done a lot with the engine and the radiator, so it now looks like this:

Starting to look pretty trick!

As i said, the electrics are largely done so I have lights, hazards, foglights, horn, indicators, key start, steering wheel buttons for left/right, horn, main beam; and my dash now looks like this:

I reckon that'll do for a catch up. Hopefully more progress after next saturday when I have a whole day to work on this!