Hurmeez

I might be being a bit thick but I can't see any adjustment built into the throttle pulleys? How are you planning to balance the banks to each other?

Are you planning on setting up any kind of protection/shielding for the shifter linkage assembly? Looks great at the moment but I imagine road grime and general detritus may not treat it too kindly?

I suppose I better start with the obligatory acknowledgement of the extended time between posting... Cool so with that out of the way, I started to make my first little bits of progress at the new house. And in the theme of progress, I figured the best place to start would be going backwards and redoing work I've already done. It started (as many bad ideas do) with me standing and staring at the car for a while. The more I looked at the radiator mounts and installation, the less I liked it. The top hose port of the radiator is above the fill point, and the big notch cut out of the lower cross member is just silly. The proximity to the engine also doesn't leave a lot of space for fans etc, and overall, the rad is just excessively big. So, what to do about it? Firstly, I decided to look into the engine to rad proximity issue. I went back to the very basics. If the gap is too small, why is the engine so far forward in the first place? Is the distributor too close to the firewall? Well, no. I'd assumed from the beginning that I'd remove the dizzy and either run batch fire or pick up a cam signal from the front of the engine with some other aftermarket solution. Ok, what about that IACV? Isn't that in the way? Yeah, it kinda is. Right, so why is it there? Do I need it? For these BMW throttles, yeah, if I want the ECU to be able to control the idle RPM. Ok, do I need these BMW throttles? Yes. ITBs for me are a hard requirement for this car. Sure, but do I need *these* BMW throttles? Well, no, not necessarily. @Roman and followers might see where this is going. Ok, so if I take the intake manifold and throttles off for now, then what is holding the engine forward? That would be the thermostat housing. Being as it is a FWD engine butchered into a RWD layout, the thermostat housing is now about as far from the radiator as it is possible to get. This is inconvenient from two perspectives; it means the coolant has to return from the radiator past a set of hot headers, and it also means the engine is held forward artificially in the engine bay. Right, so does the thermostat housing have to be there? Well, again, not necessarily. It's only at the back of the engine thanks to a long transfer tube that takes the coolant from the thermostat to the pump inlet through the valley. If I can figure out a way to get rid of that tube, I should be able to shift the thermostat housing to the front like a civilised engine. So I had a look at what that might take. The factory pump inlet is fed by the cast adapter on the right hand side of the above photo. I found that by removing the transfer tube, that adapter could be spun 180° to face forward and still bolt up just fine. Great, good start. The next big problem is the cam belt. (If you'll allow me to borrow someone else's photo for a minute) You can see how the belt path runs more or less directly through where the new coolant housing is. To get around that, I bought a cast aluminium elbow to get the tightest bend I could, then sliced the female O ring sealing surface off the pump inlet adapter and welded on the new elbow. To finish it off, I needed to make something to allow the thermostat to sit up inside the new elbow and do its job. Initially, I cut the flange off the factory thermostat housing, and tried welding it directly onto the cast elbow. This was a disaster. A combination of my severe lack of aluminium welding experience (this is my first time using the AC mode on the welder in anger), and a potentially dodgy casting made for very fizzy welds that mostly resulted in a goopy mess rather than a nice sealing flange. So I cut that off and tried again. This time, I turned up a new flange and tube stub out of a big chunk of scrap from work. The combination of nice fresh material, and my slowly improving abilities made for a much better welding experience this time. Even with the elbow though, it still wasn't enough to clear the belt. To make the clearance required, a section of 3mm sheet was cut and bent and grafted in to create a small notch. Note I've given quite a generous clearance gap here. I've seen how much these cam belts can flap under high load/RPM, and the last thing I want is to strip the teeth off the belt, or crack the housing or what have you from the two of them coming together. I was careful to ensure the cross section of the narrowest point was greater than or equal to the next smallest restriction upstream to try and reduce the chance of cavitation or overheating due to restricted coolant flow, but I suppose I won't know how successful I've been until I can actually get it running. Finally, I needed to provide a return for the heater core coolant supply. I cut supply female O ring boss off one of my spare coolant housings and welded it onto the back side of the pump inlet adapter. This will allow me to use the heater core supply tube from my spare engine as a return tube for this one. So then we have the final result: A slightly modified factory return tube can be used for the bottom radiator hose, and the top hose can connect directly to the standard top housing. I took the finished product into work and hydrostatically leak tested it to ~5bar (5x higher than the maximum allowable coolant system leak test pressure in the factory service manual), as well as leak tested it underwater with helium to make sure there were no pinhole leaks. All seemed pretty good to me. So then a bit of a debrief: The modifications should allow me to move the engine back about 60mm before more extensive firewall modifications are required. This will have numerous advantages. - More clearance for a radiator and fans - A rearwards moved shifter position (I was never totally happy with the stretch to reach 1st as it is) - Better sump capacity thanks to more clearance between the cross member and the rear bowl - Better intake manifold clearance thanks to the slope in the factory bonnet. The updated coolant path will also clean up the engine bay somewhat, allowing better clearance for the headers on the passenger side. As far as what I might have lost from changing to this setup, the factory thermostat is an automatic bypass style which blocks off the heater core and recirculates the coolant around the block until the thermostat opens. My new housing does not do this. To make up for it, I intend to use a bypass style heater tap from a early 2000s Commodore to control the flow through the core, and thereby control the heat itself. This will mean I can turn the heater full cold during startup to manually cut the heater core out of the coolant path and hurry the warming up along, or if I'm really desperate, leave it in the loop and warm myself up at the same rate as the engine. There's still one or two little things left to fully finish off the changes. I'm still of two minds whether I keep the existing fill port and use it as a bleed point, or cut it off and plate over it. I'll see how it goes. The bottom hose tube that comes off the thermostat housing also still needs modifying to mount it to the engine properly, as well as the two feed and return lines to the heater core. These should be simple enough to do once I have a radiator to aim at etc. If it doesn't work (leaks, overheats, cracks off and explodes etc) I still have a hail Mary solution of removing the water pump and going to an electric pump that is PWM controlled by the ECU, removing the thermostat entirely. That will take a lot more fabrication work and money spent on parts though, so I'll keep that in my back pocket for now until I actually need it. Thanks for reading. I have done more work on the car since the above, though I've been very slack about taking photos of the progress, so I'll see if I can scrape together enough for a coherent sequel soon. Cheers.

Made a little group project trophy/keepsake for a co-worker who was moving on. Each little figurine represents a project he had an especially large part in the success of. *I did the figurines. The "rustic" plaques were supplied to me at the absolute last minute.

For what it's worth my money is the oil pump getting into some weird harmonics and shattering into a million bits. Bet it sounds excellent on the way up to it though.

Possibly a silly question, but aren't a lot of roll cages/space-frame chassis welded chromoly tubes? Or is welded tubing fundamentally different enough from a monolithic material like a flywheel for the process to not really transfer over?

Good shout. I am intending to back up the flange where I can regardless, just very paranoid about blowing through. My mig is a very cheap Bunnings jobbie and I'm pretty shit at MIG regardless all things considered.

Yep pretty wild. It went from me taking the piss out of my mates with puddle pictures to us leaving with babber on our backs in waist deep water in the space of an hour and a half. I think once the drain on the road blocked up it was all over. The house was below road level and we ended up with a torrent spilling over the footpath and down the driveway. I've struggled with motivation and time after the wee one turned up tbh. Trying to light a fire under my own ass with a wedding date in just over a years time, so we'll see. It is fun to be posting again though.

Thanks mate. It could have been a lot worse. We were only renting so we had the relative luxury of being able to just bug out and not have to worry about it long term too much. Our landlords were really good about it too and there was no stress between us as we all delt with the clean up afterwards. We are also very lucky to have generous family support so we were safe and dry as soon as we got out the night of. There were people who lost a hell of a lot more than we did so we can't complain at all.

The next detail to think about is the mounting flanges of the quarter. Even though I used an 8mm spot weld drill and was pretty careful about the removal process, it's hard to get away from the fact that an 8mm hole is a pretty big one to fill with a plug weld when it comes to reinstalling it again. To get around that, I've opted to replace any part of the flange that I've had to drill out. I started with the easier shorter sections. Then I went on to tackle the longer section along the back of the door. I made this section by folding one long straight length of steel, then tweaking it and manually stretching and shrinking it in the vice as required to match all the contours of the existing flange. Ended up with a pretty neat fit. But then it was time to go inside to make some tea. And then it started raining Some of my mates from work were posting in our group chat that their streams were rising and they were getting worried. In solidarity of course, I sent them a photo of alarmingly sized puddles on our back pavers at that time. But then it kept raining. And raining. And blow me down it just didn't stop. I jacked the car up as much as I could, lifted everything worth saving onto the work bench, and we retreated back to the house (which is raised ~1m above ground level) to wait out the standoff. We blinked before the water did. Once it got to mid-shin in the kitchen, we decided it might be prudent to find somewhere dryer to sleep for the night. The next morning, we returned to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote. The water got up to the bottom of the bench top. My nice new birthday-present-to-myself welder missed the water by this much. Note the tide line on the tail gate. My daily was totaled, and my partner's Corolla missed out on a similar fate by only a couple of inches and the fortunate placement of Toyota's ECUs on the top of the passenger strut tower. Subaru's incidentally instead put them under the passenger front footwell. So yeah, remember how I mentioned the KBS on all the internal cavities and how two coats was probably overkill for interior panels. Yeah, well, glad I did it now. The immediate triage for the Escort was to pull the seats out and leave them in the sun to dry out as much as possible. I also drilled some drain holes in the lowest points of the floor boards, and mopped up the standing water as much as possible. Everything got doused in CRC 556 (probably not the best idea in hindsight when it comes to painting it, but such is life) and I borrowed some big 5ft floor fans from work to try and get the garage dried out as much as possible. Longer term, we had to move out. The house was toast and almost all our stuff was wrecked. We've managed to find a new place, with a slightly better laid out garage and enough room for our little girl to run around. The car has mostly been on hold since the flood. I've been focusing on all the work around the new house to make it comfortable and setting up the garage to try and make the best of the limited space I have. I think I've got it into a pretty usable state now though. I have the means and motivation so now there's no excuses. We're back to real time now though, so updates will likely return to the more sporadic rate you'll be more accustomed to. Thanks for reading my ramblings to bring it back up to date in the mean time.

Lol nah course not. I don't think I explicitly said so back when I did it, but the deal breaker back in the day that convinced me to cut the quarter panel off was the state of the outer sill. I was considering originally just doing my best to panel beat the quarter on the car, but when I started poking around the sill, I found the typical (for this car) 10mm of bog covering a totally munted panel work. As part of cutting off the quarter, I separated the sill off into a discreet section, which I then also cut off and chucked in the bin. So now the job is getting a good replacement panel in its place. For this, I shelled out for a new replacement panel from Palmside. Pretty cheap and not too far off the correct shape considering the price. Figuring it would be too unwieldy to manage the full sill and quarter panel as one unit, I cut the front section of the sill off in a nice straight cut that would be easy to weld back up later on. That done, I started offering the sill up to the quarter and trimming both to fit. Once I tacked the front of the sill back on and offered it back up to the car, I realised the alignment wasn't quite right and the panel gap between the bottom of the door and the sill was expanding the further forward it went. Being the anal retentive prick I am, I wasn't able to just let that go. I zipped through the tack welds and make up a couple of brackets (jigs? Work holding thingies?) with holes of various distances from a central point. This let me swing them fore and aft and finely adjust the relative position of the front and back of the sill to zero in on the gap I wanted. Once I had my alignment, I was able to tack it all up again, double triple check it all, then start welding it up. I had aimed to run it all in one continuous bead to minimise the differential distortion. Ended up having one stop/start in the middle, but the HAZ stayed relatively uniform and I did manage to keep the warping to a minimum. That done, I spent a day or so hammering it up and filing it back as best I could until I got it well within a coat or two of high build primer. I was right initially, it does make it pretty awkward to handle the whole panel now, but it's not an absolute deal breaker. Still some small tweaks to do on the quarter yet, but it's coming along.

To meet the two part seat improvement brief, I opted to focus on the comfort half first. The main issue with the current layout was the totally level seat base. I'm not sure why I decided on this back in the day when I first did the mounts, perhaps it was because that was how the seat sat on the ground when I was trying it out. Perhaps it was because it allowed the rails to work relatively easily. Perhaps it was because I was like 15 and didn't know any better. Either way, the end product was a seat that put a load of pressure straight onto the bones of one's arse, and left one's thighs flapping in the breeze. So, the most important aspect to improve the comfort would be to tilt the seat base down at the back (or up at the front if you want to look at it that way). I decided to base the angle of the seat base off my flat mate's Mk6 Golf R, which are pretty aggressive at about 30 degrees (above the horizon assuming his car itself has little to no rake), but really comfortable. As per usual, I started with cardboard. Which made a design that would work, sure, but fuck it's ugly. So I revised the design to a more conventional crossmember/seat box with individual upstands for each seat mount point. Note also the diagonal braces that pick up on the sill jacking point and gearbox mount to make a single unbroken structure (including the gearbox crossmember) across the whole car. Happy enough with the shape, it didn't take long to get it formed in steel. The upstands ended up a bit wider than I really would have liked, but they had to be in order to meet the area requirements for certifying the mounts. Before welding everything in, I went back and reworked a dodgy high school era patch that I am by no means proud of, and converted the floor replacement panel lap joint to a proper butt. I intend to coat all the inaccessible cavities of these new sections with KBS as well, but there is no point in putting in all the associated effort to later burn the paint off with welds after the fact. So I put in a lot thought as to the order of operations. First was to stitch weld the chassis rail to the floor at all the points that will be covered by the seat box. The plan is to fully stitch weld the chassis eventually, but this is enough to save the paint for now. Yes I know, stop tacking it and just weld it you poof. I'm not very good at MIG alright and this was overhead and Mercury was in retrograde and shush, it'll hold just fine. Similarly, the car will eventually need a drive shaft safety hoop. The ideal location will overlap this new seat mount somewhat, so I made sure to install a doubler plate now while it is easy to get to. Big thick SOB but I'd rather overkill it than have to go back in later to replace it in order to meet the regs. Next was to assemble the seat box and brace assembly as far as practical, again in order to minimise paint burn off later on. Finally paint! Did the full prep and two coats. Again, probably overkill for an interior panel, but might as well (more foreshadowing). While this was drying, I also knocked together the two rear mounts for the seat and got their undersides coated up as well (this is a lie. I was doing all the metalwork in parallel and it took ages to get all the nice little sill hugging details on all the plug weld flanges right). Finally, with all the component parts finished, painted, and ready to go, I chucked a coat of paint onto the appropriate areas of the floor pan, waited the requisite hours for it to dry, then measured measured measured and welded the buggers in for good. (Note that the rear inner mount was not welded in. This will be remade in 1.6mm steel after the verdict from the certifier recommended as much if I want to use the built in seat belt anchor on the seat. Which I do. The factory Escort ones are at a weird angle and not very comfortable to use.) And would you believe it, I have no photos of the seat in place once all the mounts were fully welded in. You'll just have to take my word for it that it looks just like it did in the cardboard mockup shots. Heaps comfy now too. It does have the feature (bug? Not sure, hard to say) that it raises up now as it moves forward on the elevated seat rails. This might be useful for any short arse that needs their seat moved forward to see over the dash anyway, since there is no discrete height adjustment in these seats. Regardless, it's at a perfectly comfy height for me when I sit in it, and beyond that who else really matters? Next mish will be to weld on the sill brace panel I fabbed up in the last post. Before that, the brace and sill both got generous coats of KBS, weld through primer in the appropriate spots, and "Hurmeez woz here" tags before getting closed up for good. Then I welded the panel on, had a baby, moved house, setup a new smaller garage, ground the welds back, and took some lovely photos. Phew. It must be time to weld the quarter panel back on now right? ...Right?

These posts are getting fewer and farther between as the years go on. Every time we get stuck into a project at work I'm piling on the overtime, promising myself that as soon as it's done I'll take a week of leave and get some hours in, only for us to go barreling off head first into the next thing with fewer guys, tighter time lines, and ever more ridiculous demands. Add to that a brand new babber in the mix, and the time that I've had spare to spend on this thing has been getting less and less every year. Hell, even this post has been sitting in my notes for months as I slowly find the time to write it. (I wrote the above passage in September 2022 and every part of it remains true ten months later. I'll add wee notes in the post in brackets as I re-edit it now.) But you're not here to listen to me moan about the shit that we all have to deal with, you want to see what I have actually managed to do, so I'll get stuck in. Bear in mind, all the work in this post was done mid to late last year (2021). The whole reason I pulled the quarter off was to give myself the best possible chance at fixing all the crap underneath, so I had a crack at that next. I started by unpicking all the spot welds on pretty much all the component panels until I got right back to the floor pan itself, then started working my way back out from that blank canvass. First thing to be rebuilt was the jacking point and support brace. I acid dipped the factory doubler plate overnight in phosphoric and reused it, otherwise everything is brand new. Everything inaccessible is covered in two coats of KBS Rustblast so I have no concerns about any of the rust coming back (Foreshadowing lol. Stay tuned on this) Next was to move out to the inner sill brace panel. This was probably salvageable but it made more sense to just replace it for the four or five folds that it would take. I elected to make it out of two parts butt welded together, cause I didn't have any raw stock big enough to do it in one go. The more complex shape on the one end would also be much easier to re-produce as its own part and weld it on again afterwards. Note that the butt weld was made on a diagonal to maximise the strength of the joint and was in no way intended to be a straight weld until I made the first fold on the long panel in the wrong direction. Buuut then of course before I welded that on, I wanted to take care of the lap joined replacement floor pan that has been in there for years. I was never stoked with how I had welded that in, and I decided if I was going to do the rest of it right, I want to do this right as well. So out comes the grinder and out comes the inner sill. Then zip zap zoop, in goes a new one. I formed the new panel over the edge of the bench with a length of angle iron clamped on top and patient tapping with a hammer dolly as required. It has ended up with a fairly distinctive hand made finish, but that's kind of endearing in my eyes so I don't mind. You may notice too, that as part of the sill removal the seat mounting cross member was also removed. This was originally intended as a temporary measure to make it easier to do the sill welding, but while it was out, I thought it might be good to improve the seat mounts. Thinking about it with the benefit of hindsight, mounting the seat bases dead flat and with M8 bolts, while legal, is neither the safest nor most comfortable way to do it. So the brief for the new seat mounts: Make it more comfortable, and make it safer. Perhaps here is a good spot to end the post to keep it digestible. Now that Reddit is unusable I have no excuses not to keep the thread updated. More to come.

It's been a long while since the last post and I don't feel like I've done enough for a full post yet, but I do want to put something up to show what I've been working on and to say that neither me nor the project is dead yet. I had typed out a nice post but then the browser crashed and I lost all of it so this might be a bit less polished than usual as I try to rush it out. I carried on from the driver's side guard lip by doing the same to the passenger's side. It didn't take long to get the lip cut out and the new one tacked in. You've seen this all before so I shan't write too much about it. No sooner had I tacked it in, that half the bloody car fell off in my lap! I let myself be convinced by those less directly invested that this would be the best way to tackle the whole thing. To be clear, I agree with them, but damn is it not confronting to see it on the floor like that. This way I can get good access to properly panel beat all the welds, as well and ensure all the inaccessible cavities are properly sealed up and corrosion protected before I put it all back together. For example, see here the bare metal and (house) paint flaking off the inside of the lower window panel. I can paint this up properly and have total piece of mind when I weld the quarter panel back on. You can see also how much better access I have to cleaning up the weld on the wheel tub as well. With the quarter off, I had a nice easy down hand weld to get the arch final welded, then I stripped the panel inside and out. I then spend the next 50 hours panel beating the lower rear corner to clean up the patch welds and sharpen up the body lines that run back from the rear of the wheel arch. It's sitting with a guide coat at the moment so it looks far more wavy than it is. The welds themselves are pretty hard to spot at this stage if you didn't know they're there. I'm not very good at it but I'm enjoying the process. I still have the whole of wheel arch weld itself to handle as well, hence not feeling like enough progress to warrant a full post. Hopefully by the next post I'll have it welded back on the car and looking straight as an arrow. Here's wishing everyone a happy new year since it will likely be after that at this stage. Cheers.

Thanks man. I think I'm slowly getting better at it with each panel that goes on.