NITRAM'S BUILD

[nitram]

My last build post was in November and I’ve already slipped down to page 5. This really is a dynamic forum.

I had come to the conclusion that there were still a number of jobs that needed doing in the engine bay and under and around the chassis that would benefit from the chassis being taken off again. So, I undid the bolts (AGAIN!!!), raised the chassis by about 50cm and supported it in this position using some old table legs.



In my small garage I don’t have any spare weather-proof space to put the exo to one side, so this solution allowed me to work on different parts of the project at two different levels.

Cut, bent, clipped and flared rear fuel and brake pipes.



Manufactured and fitted rear transverse brake pipe.
Drilled and filed out hole for throttle cable.
Shortened the clutch rigid pipe, by putting in a couple of bends, and connected this to the flexible pipe.
Fitted brackets for the expansion tank, ABS and PAS reservoir.

Cut, clipped and flared front fuel pipes.



I’ve now got myself a little bit side-tracked. Looking at the factory demonstrators, the red car has the exo at the side of the engine semi-blocked-in with a silver grill (image 8 on the Exocet gallery). The purple demonstrator does not have this grilling. Although I have been convinced on other posts that a grill is not required for IVA purposes, I like the idea of concealing my grotty little engine bay from prying eyes. So with a bit of experimenting, I came up with a set of black aluminium grills.



And from the inside



And then I thought I could extend the grill to the first little triangle in the thinggypit for mounting the side repeaters later



While I was in the metal bashing mode, I fitted the passenger side and centre front bulkhead panels



I also put in a number of smallish rivnuts in inaccessible places to take electrical looms later. The original PAS radiator refused to bend where I wanted it to go so I had to manufacture a new one and clip it in place.



The perceived wisdom is that you don’t chop anything out of the electrical looms until everything is working again. But the looms in the Mk2 are bulky and stiff.



I tried but I could not get them to roughly sit where I would want them in the car. Additionally, my loom had previously had an aftermarket alarm clumsily grafted on and equally clumsily partially disconnected. An alarm is not required by the IVA, but, if it is fitted, it has to be working. So with the need to lose a lot of the bulk and a non-op alarm, I ignored perceived wisdom and started pruning. But I was very careful; I discarded the unwanted bits wire by wire, carefully checking the colours against the wiring diagrams and exposing the whole sections on the cabling to ensure I wasn’t snipping out any circuits that had been soldered in part way down a cable.





The old alarm …



And the redundant circuits …



At this stage, a week before Xmas, the heat exchanger on my boiler blew up.



But that’s another story. The resulting electrical loom, now bound up with 1km of insulating tape was now much more bendy (bendier?) than before.



While the exo was still suspended above the running gear, I attached the second longitudinal loom to the frame (that’s the one that originally ran under the MX5 driver’s side carpet). This loom has a big connector just before the rear sub-frame. After experimenting with various waterproofing methods (like plastic Lurpack containers) I decided that the least bulky solution was to just tape the whole thing up with self-amalgamating tape.



I was now able to lower the exo again and re-bolt it to the running gear. After manufacturing the obligatory electrical tray, I threw the loom roughly into position and connected up most of the plugs and sockets. At this time I have brought together all the earth points that I could find – the green and blue spider in this photo.



The moment of truth. Time to check the electrical circuits I have butchered and where better to start the audit than trying to start the engine.

I made some temporary fuel line connections to the fuel tank and remembered to put some fuel in the tank. I filled the radiator with coolant, topped up the PAS and turned the key. After some reluctance the engine started – made a bit of a fool of myself running into the street and shouting that the engine had fired up. Rev counter and oil pressure gauge OK but it’s running a bit rough, loads of exhaust fumes and with the charging light coming on after 15 secs.

I’m very pleased with the progress so far but realise that my knowledge of modern engine control systems is non-existent. A list of suggestions would be much appreciated.

I’ll report progress when (if?) I make any.

[gwnwar]

One thing I did notice in the pics there were no fittings on the copper lines..tell me they were slid down the tubes below the clamps.. nice looking panel work.. Are you going to use a single ground place.. if so use a heavyer wire to the OEM #1 ground plate/bar.. Don't forget the ground strap from engine to chassic
exhause side.. Nice work so far keep updates coming..

[nitram]

Thanks for your helpful comments.

The copper pipes shown flared are the fuel pipes where they connect to the flexible hoses, so no fittings necessary apart from jubilee clips.

I have not made my mind up about earth points (ground place) yet. I may run cables to a common point making sure the wire gauge is as least as large as that on the individual circuits. Nice thick copper cables have more appeal than using the mild steel chassis.

Please forgive my ignorance but what is an OEM#1? I cannot find the abbreviation listed either in the workshop manual or the wiring diagrams.

[stubbers]

Its a generic car term, nothing specialist to the mx5 or Exocet

Original equipment manufacturer

Basically manufacturers original parts

Rich

[pincherrn]

Hi Nitram,

Nice build, my Exocet is also Yellow.
Take it you were at St Mawgan then. I'm ex-RAF too.
Just wanted to ask how many P Clips you used, looking at them on Ebay they come in 10s or 50 for the 8mm ones (Fuel) and 10s for the 4.8mm (Brake). The 4.8mm ones are much more expensive.

Cheers

Colin

[nitram]

Never at St Mawgan. Just retired by the seaside.

I have not finished all P clipping yet but my best guess at totals required is:

5mm for copper brake pipes - 20
8mm for copper fuel pipes - 30
16mm for flexi fuel pipes and some electrical looms - 10
25mm for some of the bigger electrical looms inc the big front to back looms - 20

These numbers allow clipping at about 200mm.

[pincherrn]

Thanks for that it was the Brake and Fuel Line P clips that were important. The odd one or two here and there are ok as I may be able to pick those up from work but bigger numbers of the smaller ones are harder to get.

Sorry, just made the assumption of St Mawgan. I currently work at Cosford.

Cheers

Colin

[scooby1929]

Pinchern a lot of people like myself are reusing the fuel brake line clips from the donar car

[nitram]

January was a cruel month. The engine was turned on for the first time and churned out loads of black, blue and white smoke. Looked like the flags of Botswana or Estonia - you can picture what I mean. Wellying the throttle got rid of the smoke after a while. Some threads suggest that the tappets gunge-up after a few months standing idle. Hopefully that is the end of the smoke. I've run the engine successfully on a regular basis. The only thrombosis moment was when it would not start - I'd run out of fuel. This business is so nerve wracking!

Of greater significance than the smoke was the battery light illuminating. I was convinced the alternator or the ECU had failed - both expensive options but it turned out to be a plug and socket not connected right at the back of the car. The diagnosis and help I received from the forum are detailed in my ALTERNATOR thread.

[nitram]

So, on with the checking of the electrics.

Electricity has a number of uses. The Americans use it to slay murderers and in more civilised countries it is used to revive the dead. But, if this forum is to be believed, it is primarily used to mystify and befuddle innocent kit car builders. But I don't subscribe to that theory. I believe that most reasons for a circuit failing to work can be attributed to something I have done, or not done. I don't believe that sub-atomic particle occasionally throw a sicky.

The battery in my multi-meter had failed. I could get a replacement battery on line for £3.50 inc p&p. Or I could get one of these.



Incredibly, this cost was only £2.99 inc p&p from China!  A bit of probing around showed that the power to the radiator fan was missing.  I had previously drastically pruned the mx5 loom and must have mistakenly removed this wiring thinking it was the thingypit heater fan wiring.  Never mind, easily re-instated and apparently the only pruning howler.  But there is only so much that multi-meter probing will do.  For example it will not tell me if the rear fog light will only come on when the headlights are on.  For that, I needed to connect up the lighting and I decided to crack on with this before more testing of the circuits.  I constructed some brackets



for the rear lights.  Shown here, the right hand side hamburger and rear fog.





Smaller brackets allowed the headlights to be mounted



and the LED repeaters simply bolted on to the grill with a balsa wood spacer.



Cost was the main drivers in my selection of lights.  I bought the hamburgers, rear fog, reverse and repeaters from Car Builder Solutions at the Exeter show and the headlights came from India!

I knocked up a couple of brackets for the instrument cluster and put this in place.






All the lighting tested out fine apart from one repeater which was as dead as a Dodo.  I'm expecting a replacement from CBS soon.

I am now reasonably happy that most circuits are doing what they should.  There are still three which will have to wait:
     The fuel gauge if reading empty but I have only been putting in fuel about 2 litres at a time
     The ABS symbol appears on the cluster but the ABS circuits are still not complete
     The brake symbol is on the cluster but as the handbrake shares this light with the low-contents indicator, this will have to wait        until the reservoir is filled. 


I realised at some stage that my electrical tray was non-IVA compliant (the under-dash radius was too small) so it had to be re-cut. No great problems.  The rearmost edge no longer protrudes below the exo frame while the front edge, engine side, is still quite deep.

I was also clear that the loom was not going to stuff into the tray while it was still bound up with insulating tape or trunking. Removing most of the  impediments allowed the loom to be shoved where it was required and then held in place with a few hundred cable ties.






I still haven't devised a mounting solution for the 4-way, cluster dimmer and rear fog switches nor the cig lighter (only for GPS). This is probably my next task which may or may not involve, biscuit tins, washing up bowls or Smartie tubes.  More update as it happens.

[squelch]

one small point if thats the rear fog light below the rear lights it'll probably fail the IVA as there is a minimum distance required of 100mm between the fog and tail light

[nitram]

Thanks for your comment squelch. I've just re-checked the IVA manual and confirmed that the minimum separation distance from the fog lamp refers to the STOP lamp, not the tail lamp. The arrangement I have for the hamburger is: top - stop; middle - indicator; bottom - tail. The photos I posted earlier were not that clear. Her is another showing that the clearance, stop to fog is about 109mm.

[squelch]

Always worth a double check, i have stop and tail in the same lamp position hence my thinking of tail to fog gap (and it was a year ago lol)
109mm will be fine (i had 104mm when he checked)

[nitram]

The brackets holding the instrument cluster to the steering wheel support structure have been shown a few pictures back.

The instrument cluster has enough spare lugs on it to mount some lightweight brackets. I am using the mx5 shroud so brackets are required to attach this to the cluster. Additionally, brackets are required to attach some side skirts to hide the wiring and assorted gubbins as the mx5 shroud doesn’t have any sides. Simple brackets are bent out of scraps from the ubiquitous left over flooring.





However, before the shroud can be mounted on the cluster, it has to be cut to size to avoid it overhanging/fouling the bonnet. The unthinkable alternative would be to de-mount the instruments every time I wanted to take the bonnet off.
So, cut the shroud:







And in position with a bit of knock-on trim hiding the ragged edge:




With the shroud in position, I can now visualize where I want the ancillary switches to fit ie the hazard flasher, rear fog and cluster illumination dimmer. Underneath the shroud, under the stalks seems OK (although I have thrown the wiper/washer stalk away). The bracket to get the switches where I want them is made up from a bit of aluminium bar and sheet. If I ever have to scrap this car, I will weigh the aluminium in separately!



And with the switches and trim fitted



Mounted in the car





And with the shroud fitted





Any side skirts need to be 3 dimensional and the only simple was I could make these was from some left-over mesh, with a bit of trim and held on with self-tappers. Here they are in position.







The left hand skirt is deeper as there is more gubbins to hide.



The last item of thinggypit electrics to sort was the cigarette lighter (which I will only use for satnav power). This I have mounted in the electrical tray, facing into the passenger footwell, so it’s not normally seen -so you don't get a photo.

Regulars to the forum will have noticed all the angst relating to the security of chassis numbers. My chassis came as a small plate tack-welded at either end. So I have now stamped the number directly into the chassis



Not very pretty, but I think it meets the letter of the (newly revised) law. Just a coat of clear varnish required.

[scooby1929]

Great job regarding your pod and love your idea on mounting the switches