Rear passenger side brakes, radiator, header tank and oil cooler.

I was fortune to have some spare time on Saturday so managed to get a good 5 hours in on the car. I started investigating the rear passengers side corner a bit more hoping to make a start on removing the rear brakes/pipes/hoses etc

I made some fairly good progress, got he rear brake disc, calliper, brake line, backing plate and all the bits off. I'm replacing everything so just cut the old hand brake cable off in the end. The new discs come with bearings as they are pressed into the actual brake disc rather than a hub.





I then dropped the spare wheel cage down from under the car and removed that, don't really need it for my use of the car. It came out easy enough and the old michelin mxv tyre which bald and probably one of the original tyres off the car looked quite worse for wear.

At least now I could see the brake bias compensator valve in more detail. It looks pretty rusty, but I've a new one to fit also.

Every came off easy enough except the rubber brake hose which connects the pipes from the bias valve to the beam. Its wedged solid into the mounting bracket. Ive soaked in in penetrating oil so will give it another go another day.

After looking at the rust on the rear passenger side arch I can see i will need to do some welding from under the car on that side and the out side. I started to feel abit fedup about rust so moved to the front of the car instead to tackle something else.

Ive a bigger alloy race radiator to fit, so I thought id make a start on that. It mounts in the same style as the original with 2 pegs at the bottom which slide into the cross member. Unfortunately whilst there are many holes in the cross member, only 1 seemed to be in the right position, so i had to drill a new 18mm hole for the RH mount. I also took the opportunity of moving the radiator over to the right by about 9cm which will give me enough clearance between the alternator on the left and the radiator to feed a 52mm pipe down to a new intercooler.

 Another problem with moving the radiator over is that the silicon blue top hose you can see in the picture below is now too short. Ive ordered a bit of alloy pipe which will let me extend this hose by about 9cm and should resolve the problem. Ive not looked at the bottom hose yet, but may have to do something similar there.

The original Renault 5 GT Turbo rad had an oil cooler / heater (some debate as to what it actually does) built in to the side of it. The new race radiator doesn't, so fitted a separate oil cooler. The pipes went nicely around the RH side of the radiator to the sandwich plate on the oil filer. Some people seem to route the pipes over the alternator and they can short out on that. This way also frees up the space i need near the alternator. It was at this point I wish id screwed these pipes into the sandwich plate before I fitted it to the car as accessibility isn't easy now. I managed to get one pipe done up but will have to wait until I remove the alternator and the water pump before I can get a spanner on the LH sandwich pipe! Still it all looks nice.

 Unfortunately I then realised mistake number 2 (and 3). Firstly I've a replacement braided oil feed pipe for the turbo and need to remove the 1 way valve on that pipe too. I cant really get to this well with the radiator in, so will have to remove it again in order to get to it. The last mistake was that the position of the oil cooler is too low to actually get any air through the stock front bumper. If you look at some of the pictures of the front of my car earlier in the blog, the oil cooler is sitting nicely behind where the front number plate is sitting. Ooops. Only alternative really is to either raise it up and try and mount it off the top cross member or just cut some big holes in the front bumper like the cup cars used to. I'm leaning towards this 2nd option at the moment. The 3rd option would be to mount it under the cross member, and mount the intercooler in front of the radiator.... i`ll have to give it some thought.



The original header take looks pretty rough, so I've a new replacement one of that, and whilst I'm at it i thought id relocate this from the passenger side front wing up to a new position up in the bulk head in front of the driver. This will free up some space in this side of the engine compartment for the air filter.

The header tank slots into a bracket on the passenger side of the engine bay and a rubber strap holds it onto the bracket. I simply got out the angle grinder, and cut a portion of this bracket off.


A bit of grinding to make it level and folding over the bottom part of the bit id cut off and it was perfect to just weld in the bulk head ready for the new header tank to sit.

I`ll take a picture of the finished item later.

Next I will have to drill a few holes into the firewall panel for the 2 or 3 pipes from the header take to go.

I was quickly running out of time but the last thing I wanted to check was just what was the spec of the carb. Id had it all flowed/gasflowed out at some point including having the choke flap removed. But I was worried it might have been turned into a "group A" spec which isn't ideal. I took off the lobster shaped carb top and took a photo (above). It looks here like its been flowed nicely, but is still running the standard 25mm. I will be taking the carb off at some point and overhauling it but want to see what AFR I'm running first in case I need to alter the jets etc.