The Trials of Trials: All The Fiddly Bits

July 7th 2013

Now that I'd got the main lump installed I had to fit the accessories.

Exhaust
The exhaust was the first obvious thing to do. The existing cast iron manifold wasn't bad and buying a Vitara downpipe gave me the flange and Y-piece to re-arrange to fit into the car. I bought some mandrell bends in the correct-sized pipe to allow me to get the curves I needed and set about cutting it all into bits and rebuilding it.
It was a bit like juggling jelly as everything moved about until I got some tack welds on.

Then I put it in the vice and welded it up

A coat of stove paint and fitted it to the car

The next job was to make a heat shield to protect the oil-pressure gauge pipe which runs just behind the exhaust manifold. Luckily I had kept a bit of alloy heat shield from the previous installation, so used that.

With the body panel replaced it looks fine.

The cooling system
...was quite different to the last installation, but I used the same radiator and re-piped it using silicone hoses. I don't know why really as the car only gets used 20 or so times a year, so rubber hoses would have done and, as I found out, the silicone hoses are more difficult to get water-tight connections with.

You can also see the new fuel pipe coming through the bulkhead. It was on the other side of the engine for the Imp installation. You get a good view of the remote clutch fluid reservoir and pipe as well.

The next two items to sort were the cam cover which is shabby and has a breather pipe on the top which will make my bonnet bulge to cover all this, even higher. I also needed to make a recess in the bulkhead to accommodate the distributor whilst maintaining the fire retarding properties.

The Cam Cover
In order to lower the height I needed to cut the pipe off the top and relocate it on the side.

The inside of the cover is heavily baffled so I couldn't get to the inside to collect swarf from the drilling. I didn't want it swarf hiding in there and then getting flushed into the sump when it started running so came up with a cunning plan.

I cut the pipe of with an angle grinder using a 1mm disc and placed the pipe where I wanted it on the side.

Then I welded that on before drilling the hole. When I drilled the hole I put a magnet into the cover through the hole from the old pipe location.

This collected all the metal swarf.

Last job was to weld a bit of metal over the old hole, and paint.

Bulkhead
You can see in the above picture the sealing strip on the bulkhead takes a detour around the distributor. I had to modify the bulkhead panel to achieve that.

The first part was to cut and bend 3 bits of alloy to clear the distributor and form a flange for the rubber sealing strip (which seals against the underside of the bonnet)

With the rubber fitted you can see how the seal is made.

You can also see in that picture how the HT lead from the distributor goes through the bulkhead to the coil. The coil is the only bit of the electronic ignition that remains from the Imp installation as the ECU pack is actually inside the distributor on this engine. That took a bit of Googling to work out how to make it all work. I didn't want to wire it up wrongly and frazzle the ECU. The wiring diagrams all over the internet show the Vitara with a modern horseshoe coil with multi-plugs, which I didn't have. However, joining a Suzuki forum at Suzuki4U and asking the question brought some answers from people who know about these cars and it became obvious the old-fashioned oil-filled coils were originally fitted to this engine. Great help there. Thanks.

The car was now in a position to actually try firing up the engine. Don't forget, I don't even know if it runs yet. The motor arrived on a pallet.
I connected everything I needed except the fuel pump. Took out the plugs and whizzed it over on the starter. The oil pressure picked up and went to over 50 psi just on the starter.
I put the plugs in, connected the fuel pump.
It started straight away! The oil pressure showed at 80 psi. There was no throttle cable or choke control, so I set a fast tickover and I managed to move the car backwards and forwards to make sure the clutch was clearing properly (there had been concerns the driven plate and the clutch cover wouldn't match).

Bonnet Bulge.
To cover over all this work may see sacrilege, but it has to be done. I needed to form a bulge in the bonnet to hide it all from view.
I stuck bits of expanded polystyrene on the bonnet and carved it roughly to shape with an electric carving knife.

Then followed layers of plaster, car filler and papier mache to get the shape I wanted.

I smoothed it all down and painted it with household primer and smoothed and filled it again until it was pretty smooth. Some people suggested taking a mould from this and using that to make a final version. I preffered the idea of just layering up the grp on this and using that as the bulge. My reasoning was that it was less work and finished article would need modifying anyway to get a good fit.

So that's the way I did it. The outside was of course rough grp, but I put flow coat on that and flatted it down and car filler etc etc.

The paint was a failure. I have a spraygun but for the amount I needed (small) I thought aerosols would be as good.
No. Halford ones were very rubbish. Carplan were better but humidity stepped in and robbed me of a gloss finish. The nozzles blocked easily as well. I ended up flatting it and compounding it, so I may just as well have got some cellulose and done a proper job with my spraygun.
Anyway it looks half decent now.

The final bit "up top" (for the moment) was to fit an air filter.

Skid Plate
Meanwhile, below, I decided that a skid plate would be a good investment. I seem to bash rocks quite a bit, so something to limit any damage would be sensible.
I got a sheet of 6mm alloy treadplate and had the guy put a bend in it in his hydraulic press. Then made some brackets from the new engine mounts (I had planned this so had extra pieces below the engine already there) and also the gearbox rear mounts.