Engine connections

These past 2 days we have mostly managed to get the engine all connected up using a very useful diagram Derek (Thanks!) had emailed us around the time of our wedding (see below). We also managed to sort out some other outstanding items and once again decent progress was made!

Diagrammatic view of the connections for the engine.

One of the things I've now learnt as I write this piece is that the routing of pipes and wiring is time consuming. Especially considering when you think you've got it worked out and then you realise you've forgotten another connection is going through the same space, ruining your plan, or requiring you to cut a cable tie AGAIN and retie with the new connection! Frustrating, but also most rewarding when it's complete and looks 'proper'. The reason I say this to you is that it might not look like much has been achieved when you scroll down the page, but believe you me a lot of work has been done and we now understand our engine a lot more than we did at the start of the two days!

First off was the 'Submarine'; (see below) the manual mentions it but in reality we had no idea what this meant, or did.

This is a Caterham 'submarine' (except it's also the wrong type for our car)

We were aware of a couple of hanging electrical connections on the rear near the top of the engine, the diagram finally showed us that those leads were an the earth lead and a water temperature probe that fits into this 'Submarine'. But what did the extra T-piece do? Was there a pipe we were missing from the diagram? How to connect the earth lead onto the Submarine? Nothing was supplied. Turns out it's the wrong type of submarine for our car (It's for an old R500 model?) and Derek will send us a new one through the post. Phew.

With that riddle resolved we moved onto fitting the heater control cable, simple task, just had to deburr the hole through the firewall.

Heater control cable routing out of the firewall.

Heater temperature control knob, driver's side, under the dashboard.

Once this was done we then cut the relevant pipework to size (manual mentions 120mm), we cut ours to 115mm and 100mm respectively, to make sure the valve was correctly placed for the heater control cable to run between the battery and heater assembly.

Heater temperature control valve.

Connecting the cable to the valve was a little fiddly, we spent a fair amount of time adjusting the sheath so that the full throw of the cable fully opened and closed the valve onto its stops.

T-piece out of the left side of the engine.

We thought it would be a good idea to start from the lowest point with the rest of the pipe connections, as access would become increasingly difficult if we were to start from top down. With that plan in mind we connected up the modine pipes and ran them to their respective locations including the T-piece (above) on the left of the engine. We had to remove the windscreen washer bottle to help with pushing the pipes into place. Then it was the turn of the expansion bottle and the radiator.

Expansion bottle connected.

Whilst I was swearing at the lack of access and using a lot of rubber lubricant to fit everything, (then forgetting to fit a jubilee clip and doing it all over again) Dad drilled a hole for the oil breather bottle and fitted the rubber elbow and union supplied, we aren't happy with how the elbow sits on the bottle (it's twisting upwards). Perhaps we cut the pipe (on the left) too short, however we'll rectify this next time (plenty of pipe left over in the box to correct our error!).

Oil Breather bottle with elbow.

Next we finally managed to get the wiring attached to the starter motor, we'd been having problems with the nut not engaging with the threads (again see earlier post), however we managed to make it work this time.

Positive wires connected to starter.

One of the outstanding tasks today involved fitting the new reverse light switch to the gear box, which Derek had sent us to replace the one we had inadvertently broken (again see a previous post). Didn't take too long, although getting the thread started was a pain.

Broken reverse light switch replaced

One thing we noticed from the loan car for the wedding was that the bracket for the throttle cable was rusty (on a relatively new car too), so we resolved to paint ours. I removed the bracket from the plenum and primed it, ready for painting the next day, I'm not a painter, so it's a little rough and ready, but seeing as it's under a bonnet and rarely seen, I'm ok with that! We'll fit that and the throttle cable next time.

Plenum throttle cable bracket primed.

It was getting late on the last day at this point, so we didn't get to finish fitting the airbox and filter, it didn't help that there are no instructions for this in the assembly guide. However we found out from another blog that you need to fit a rubber seal to the airbox intake that seals to the corresponding hole in the bonnet. No pictures yet, but will show you what we mean in our next update.

Only thing missing is the airbox.