Hurmeez

So following on from the last post, I had Rod come round and make his inspections. Overall he was happy with my process and workmanship, with just a request for doubler panels behind the butt welded sections of the quarter/A panel/windscreen post to turn them into lap welds.

I'd planned to butt these welds so I could properly panel beat them (the C pillar especially) and eliminate the potential rust trap, but I'll do what I'm told to keep the man happy.

That done, I'm ready to paint the inner panels and weld it on. I'm not going to though. Firstly, I'm a master procrastinator and I'm stalling the wire wheeling and acid washing I need to paint it properly. Second, I think it's wiser to leave these panels off for now while I do all the same work on the opposite side for ease of reference. I've got lots of photos, but you can't beat being able to see the actual parts in question.

So what am I actually moving onto? I thought I'd go for a change in scenery and start working on the fuel tank. I've known since I decided to put the V6 in it that I'd need to modify the fueling system to use a high pressure pump. 

Firstly I decided I'd rather not use an external surge tank. I prefer the simplicity of an in-tank setup. There's gotta be a good reason all the OEMs decided decades ago to do it that way. 

So I set about pulling the tank out of the back of the car where I temporarily installed it for storage years ago. It was strangely heavy and made a hell of a bang when I pulled the last bolt.

Turns out, it's sat full of floodwater for the last two years. When I went through the engine and box and drained all the water back in 2023, I completely forgot about the fuel tank. I left it with a rag stuffed in the sender hole after originally cleaning it which had since worked as a wick, pulling water up out of the tank and maintaining a perfect damp breeding ground for rust. 

 

It managed to rot a bunch of holes clear through the top of the tank. Needless to say, I was pretty annoyed with myself. Nobody makes these tanks new anymore, so if I've cooked it I'll have to wade into the world of trying to find a second hand one. 

But instead I thought of it as an opportunity. I knew I'd need to modify the tank for an in-tank pump anway, so I might as well cut all the rust out and make a new top that fits my needs. 

 

With the offending section cut out, the inside doesn't look too bad. Plenty of surface rust and build ups, but these crumble away to nothing, and the underlying steel doesn't look too bad. Probably good enough to be salvaged with a tank sealing kit. 

So I made a start on the replacement panel by roughing in the bulk radii.

Then the trick was how to make the raised sections. The best way I could think of was to cut out the inner section of each and gently fold up the edges. Then I cut out filler pieces from new material and folded their edges down to meet those on the parent piece. These could all then be welded together and hammered smooth.

 

You can see I made the semicircular section larger diameter than originally. This was pretty much just a stab in the dark as to the dimensions. I found various jars and pots around the shed and decided which was the smallest that still fit my hand. Then I took the diameter of that, added a healthy margin, and made it the diameter of the flat section. This way I can get inside the tank after welding the top back on to hammer all the welds properly. 

Next was to make the pump hanger setup. I looked at a few OEM hangers on Google and decided a Mazda 626 wagon unit looked ideal. 

It's relatively compact, a good diameter to fit my existing allowance, and all steel so it's easy to modify. The sender also allegedly has a similar resistance sweep to the factory Escort one so it might work with the factory dash without too much electrical trickery. Of course there's also the bonus of being the exact pump from the original engine's donor car so I know it will flow enough. 

First thing was to make a doubler ring with captive nuts. This was a simple enough job with the machines at work. 

Then I roughly cut out the center of the flat land to eyeball the pump location, before drilling some holes and bolting it into its final position. 

Once I was happy with its placing I plug welded it in place.

Finally I hammered the rough cut edge over and around the doubler plate to give it a nice OEM style radius on the penetration before grinding the excess flush. 

 

 

 

Very nice. 

 

To make the pump work properly, I need to extend the hanger to drop the pump down to the bottom of the tank. This was just a simple little extra section welded in. 

 

I've set it up such that it's touching the bottom with no gasket installed. This way, no matter how much the gasket squashes it won't be able to hammer the pump into the bottom of the tank. 

You'll note too that I've got some non-fuel rated low pressure hose on the pump outlet purely for mockup at this stage. 

While I was there I extended the float arm too so it should still bottom out near the bottom of the tank.

Fuel injection pumps don't handle surge well, so it's imperative I baffle the inside of the tank properly. I'm basically just going to make a little fenced off section of the tank around the pump with some small bleed vents around the base, and maybe a few additional baffles around the tank to hold the fuel near the pump. 

First I need to clean out all the surface rust and shit from the inside of the tank. 

 

 

Ahh bugger. Turns out the surface rust is actually pretty deep, and there's a bunch of pinholes across a wide spread of the tank. There's not going to be any point trying to fix these. As soon as I patch one section, it'll just blow a hole through the next. Like I said before, no one makes these tanks anymore and there's bugger all second hand ones on the market, so I guess I'm embarking on a tank building odessy next. 

 

What fun. 

 

Getting that bracing out of the way meant I could get back onto the list of pre-quarter welding jobs. As a refresher, this is what I mean:

- Pinch weld seam repairs IN PROGRESS
- Repair Cert IN PROGRESS
- Properly paint inaccessible areas NOT YET STARTED

Getting the last little bit before the repair cert done was a doddle. Because I used a home-made spot weld drill to unpick the majority of the seam welds along the quarter panel, the resultant holes were a bit scruffy, and the second layer had been a bit munched in a few cases. To sort that, I opted to replace the outer edge of most of the affected panels.

It's not a flawless metal-finished result, but it's well within a coat of high-build primer.

In some cases it was easier to outright fabricate and install a replacement panel:

With that though, all the pinch-weld seam repairs were complete. Nothing stopping me now but a close-out inspection by Rod, my repair certifier.
I flicked off an email to organise a visit, and no sooner had I done that, that I thought "maybe it's worth just sorting out that little bit of rot in the windscreen post before he turns up." I figure given how cramped my workspace is, it's in Rod's interest to come and look at the car as few times as possible. I relayed this through to him and he encouraged me to sort that out first and get him around afterwards.

So windscreen post rot then. This is the rust in question:

Given the structural demands placed on this panel, and the inaccessibility to paint the inside of any repairs, I decided early on that I want to replace the whole thing à la the original factory design. That means cutting down into the previously replaced A pillar panel, as well as the cowl patch I put in way back in 2017.
This is not actually the end of the world. I was very (let's say) naïve back then, so the A panel repairs (and indeed all the fabrication work) were pretty rip shit and bust and have been playing on my mind for a while. They could all do with ripping out and re-doing if I'm being honest.
So let's embrace the scope creep again.

First step was to cut out all the offending panels:

I used a spot weld drill again where appropriate and a slitting disk as required.
It was quite validating taking the A panel off seeing three or four plug welds had not penetrated at all. I was right to redo this work if even just for that.

Next step was to start fabricating the replacement panels.

First up, the inner A panel:

This came from a paper pattern off the old panel and extensive use of various hammers, dollies, and a cheap bead roller I picked up a while ago.

Next was the windscreen post itself along with a small internal brace. These were produced in the same fashion as above; paper pattern, cut out a steel blank, then a tipping wheel and various hammers and dollies.

I also was recently gifted some clecos by a very generous workmate. Can you tell?

On the home stretch now. Last big panel to cover is the outer A post. Same deal again: Paper-steel-tipping wheel-hammers-swearing-hammers-etc.

This one was bloody tricky I don't mind saying. The big shrink on the top left corner took a lot of beating and perseverance to get to come round. Got there in the end though.

I threw the door and guard back on to make sure I had the lines close enough to correct.

Pretty close.

There is a section that I assume is part of the factory roof panel that overlaps the top of the windscreen post and is leaded from factory. I made a small section to replace it that I'll weld on near the end.

The windscreen post panel and outer A post were (as far as I can tell at least) all part of a single piece that included part or all of the sill from factory. I intend to emulate that as best as possible which means joining my new A panel to the previously built windscreen post panel.

Pro-tip: an orbital sander makes any weld look excellent and makes you look like a great panel beater if you lack actual talent.

I've also made the doubler panel that goes on the inside of the A panel and mounts the door hinges out of 2mm sheet but I didn't get around to taking any photos. Rest assured, it's there.

The final panel I'll need to close this section out is a patch panel for the cowl. Given the slightly medieval methods I resorted to to remove the old one, it's harder to make a paper pattern off the existing panel. The existing one was already a hand made patch as well (see my posts from 2017 on page 2), so it's hard to trust it in the first place. Knowing that, I opted for a wire form buck in this case as a starting point.

It's made to match the profile of the back of the bonnet, guard, and door skin. I took the shape of the dished section from a series of flipped profiles from the driver's side, granted with some eyeball smoothing involved. Using the form, I was able to start with the paper pattern and continue in the normal fashion.

I was actually pretty shagged at this point so I left the roughing in to the sprog this time.

After a day of fine tuning and planishing, I got it looking pretty close.

You can see how much I've been struggling with flash rust in this damp wee garage in that last photo. Well that and how long it took me to make all these panels. I keep meaning to spray over stuff with some Zinc-it but I never get around to pulling the panels off the car and getting the wire brush in there to sort it out. I'll get there before it turns into an actual hole.

A closing thought here: If you have the means, I definitely don't recommend doing it all this way. The replacement panels for these sections would be a few hundred dollars shipped from Palmside. When you tally up all my hours to hand make them, and translate that to an equivalent hourly rate, it makes absolutely no sense to do it the way I did. I would have been better off doing a few hours of overtime and welding them all on over a weekend. However, I spent essentially $0 (if you excuse the material cost of the steel which I had already) which keeps the bookkeeper happy, and now have the job satisfaction of knowing I made every panel in this assembly. That can't be worth nothing. 

With that cowl panel done (or near enough. I'll do the final trimming and fitting once the structural panels are back on) I'm finally read for Rod to come and do his inspections. It's a very exciting feeling knowing I could be just a few licks of paint away from getting this side of the car totally ready for close out.

Then I just have to do it all again on the other side.

Thanks for reading.

Shortly after completing the above, I got sent to the states for a couple of weeks for work which killed all progress for obvious reasons. Still, I got to see a space shuttle and shit, so that was still pretty sweet.
Once I got back, it was a matter of ticking off house jobs for a few weekends and various other stuff, all of which meant it was a month or two between finishing the thermostat housing and getting stuck back into the car.

For reasons I've grown to despise, you'll recall I cut the rear quarter panel off the car over three years ago now. Given it is still not welded back on, this is still the main focus of the work.
So far the list of jobs I wanted to do while the quarter was off has included:
- Wheel tub outer repair DONE
- Rear jacking point rebuild DONE
- Inner sill brace section DONE
- Inner sill/Floor outer repair DONE
- Seat mount re-engineering DONE
- Outer sill replacement DONE

That leaves a very short list to complete before the quarter is ready to go back on. Namely:
- Pinch weld seam repairs IN PROGRESS
- Repair Cert IN PROGRESS
- Properly paint inaccessible areas NOT YET STARTED

That is unless I embrace a bit more scope creep...

As one does, I was excitedly showing off my progress to my partner one day (who is lovely but doesn't pay too much attention to how I burn away my spare hours) when she noticed that there are no rear seat belts. "Of course my love, it's a 50 year old car" was my almost truthful reply. It was at this point that I was informed in no uncertain terms that under no circumstances would my small daughter be riding in a death trap like that. Which sucks, cause I have many fond memories of drives with my dad in old death traps, and I'd hate for my kids to miss out on the same.
So we came to a deal. I'd put lap belts in the back. Diagonals were technically an option back in the day, but at the cost of a big ugly vertical bar the mounted the top hanger in the middle of the rear windows.
While looking at how I could do that nicely, it occurred to me just how little effort had been put into any kind of side impact protection back in the day. It makes sense of course. There's a reason these old cars are so light compared to new ones. But it still isn't great. Given my track record with RWD cars (stacking only the second one I've ever owned on the first day of ownership at 18), and the likelihood of catching a rouge mum in a Q8 blowing through a roundabout in Dorkland, I figured it would be prudent to at least have a go at improving it a little bit.

To begin with,  I wanted to improve the door structure. Any improvements in the door itself would be largely pointless if the impact was able to tear it off the latch, so that was the first point of modification. When we wrecked the Capella for its V6 waaaay back in the day, we saved as much of the interior mechanicals as was practical. Because of that, I have a perfectly good burst-proof latch assembly that just needed to be grafted in.
Initially, I just roughly mocked it up to give me a good idea of where the male part would need to mount.

Once I had a good idea of where things would need to end up, it was simple enough to make a quick cardboard template to mock up the latch mounting arrangement.

Note how it all tucks nicely behind the window track. Like it was meant to be there.
Transferred it to steel, and added a 3mm doubler behind it to give the whole area a lot more strength.

While I was in this corner I also took two seconds to fill in a speaker hole that I'm not planning to use.

Before I got too far ahead of myself, I took the time to sort out the linkages to make sure I could use all the standard Escort parts still. I had to make my own key by taking the barrel out and reverse engineering it from each wafer, but it worked out fine in the end.

Oh and splash out on a 3D printer. Been looking for an excuse to get one for a while anyway.

Once I knew that would work, I got stuck into the brace itself.

Each end is gusseted with 2mm sheet braces. The hinge/front end of the door already has a big 2mm spreader plate from factory, which the brace is welded directly onto, and the rear end is welded to the 3mm doubler I installed before. I opted to go for 25x50x3mm box, just cause I felt like moving the bare door around the garage was too easy and I could do with the extra weight training. Because I'm also a weak scrawny little runt though, I did cut a bit of gravity out of the inside face before installing it.

The window and latch mechanisms all clear, and it looks pretty good on the car.

So that's the door pretty much sorted. Next is to beef up the B pillar. It's all well and good having a strong door, but if the B pillar just folds in and drops the fence post in your lap anyway, it's all kind of moot.
For this, I used a similar design. 3mm doubler welded to the wheel tub, 2mm gussets to the main member, a 25x50x3mm box section, and another 3mm doubler behind the door catch to transfer the load from it into the vehicle structure.  

And that's it. I've taken to thinking of these braces as "open casket bars". God knows they're probably not going to save anyone's life, but at least they might help give my ugly mug an open casket funeral. I'm also mentally justifying the extra weight and time spent with saying they'll stiffen the chassis up a bit. Probably just going to make the car slower in the end, but ah well, I'm a great believer in the sunk cost philosophy anyway.

I've again got more stuff photographed and ready for writing about, but Imgur's hellishly poor usability totally killed my motivation to make updates recently. I've switched image hosts now, so I'll have a crack at writing a bit more in the near future to bring it all a bit more up to date.

Cheers

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.