Heater removal, gauges, OMEX shift light and brake compensator valve.

Well I've had a couple of busy days in the garage. I was very lucky on Friday that we had a big thunder/lightning storm which woke me up at 3am, and then just as I was about to drop back off to sleep the baby woke up and wanted his breakfast at 5am. Normally he doesn't wake up until 6.30 then goes back to sleep for a while, which means by the time ive fed him, its time to go to work so I don't get any time in the garage. However, 5am feed was perfect, he was back asleep by 5.30 which meant I could get a good couple of hours in the garage.

I figured Id start by finishing off the welding under the passenger side sill.



You can see the state of it in this picture here. Its not too bad really, just a few holes so I will weld in a new piece here.

With welder at the ready and baby monitor close to hand I can multi task!

Unfortunately at that point the end on my welder where the wire comes out decided to weld itself to the tip and in getting the old tip off it looks like the swan neck is cross threaded so I need to get a new one. With the welding off the cards for today I turned my attention to the rear brake compensator you can see on the left..

Its pretty rusty. Its held on by 2 13mm bolts which you can see from under the passengers side right wheel arch. As per usual the one which is easy to get to undid a treat but the top one was a nightmare. In the end I had to hammer on a 12mm spanner and use that to undo it.

Its times like this im pleased I have some ratchet spanners.

You can see the difference between the old one and new one here in the pic on the left. On the right ive got it fitted to the car. It was a nightmare to try and get the bolts through the bracket, through the metal shield and into the compensator. The new one is a slightly different shape and looks like the one on normal Renault 5`s. However Renault list this part number as the correct replacement now for the 5 GT Turbo`s one. I ordered this one from France via French Ebay for £35 which I thought was a bargain compared to the £95 some of the UK GT Turbo Specialists wanted. Once fitted I could start doing the new brake pipes. Im using polished copper nickel pipes here. They certainly bent a treat by hand and look ace. I've new braided HEL brake lines here too which go on the flexi-pipe bit between the car body & the rear axle.

That was it for Friday morning. Fortunately I managed to get Saturday working on the car also. 3rd Saturday in a row! Amazing! I decided to now rip out the heater. I figured I don't really need it, it will lighten the car and will free up some space on the dash for me to mount my gauges. Firstly I started removing the dash. This was fun... lots of bits to take off - steering wheel, centre console, ash tray... you name it. The dash is held in by one clip each side and 3 along the top. I didn't realise you have to reach under and release the side clips so a bit of force on my behalf meant I ended up breaking one. Once id done that, the other one i released properly. The top clips I read were notoriously hard to undo. However I found them really easy. The RH one you can see with the speedo out. 

A screwdriver to lever this out and the dash popped out easy. The middle one, I just reached under with my screw driver and levered roughly where it was and again it popped out. The LH one was buried behind the glove box etc. For that, I just pushed the dash up and smacked my palm hard on the front of the dash. Hey presto it popped out.

The next stage was under the bonnet. The picture above is where the coolant pipes attach to the heater. I cut the old pipes off and with a bit of violence and some mole grips the original clips came off.

The next step was to remove the heater fan. You can see this in the bulk head. The plastic mesh screen undoes easily with a couple of plastic wing nuts. Then the white fan which also contains the motor simply pulls off. The main heater unit is held to the car by 2 10mm bolts at the top which you unbolt from inside the car under the dash. Then the whole unit drops out - its pretty big as you can see below.

In fact didn't actually have to remove the dash in the end, simply pulling and lifting the LH side of the dash up, I had enough room to pull the heater unit down and into the passengers side footwell. Watchout as there is coolant in the heater matrix which may come out.

My plans for the holes the heater left in the dash were to fit some gauges in the top vents and where heater controls were I would mount a couple of new cool gadgets ive got. Namely a OMEX rev limiter with launch control & an OMEX sequential shift light indicator.

Looking around the garage I needed a bit of metal or plastic 23cm x 6cm and 24cm x 6cm. I happened to see an old number plate and hey presto it was perfect. It even had a black backing, so I wouldn't even have to paint it. I cut 3 52mm holes using my hole cutter attachment for my drill and offered it up. As you can see, it looks pretty good.

The shift light ECU fits perfect here. It has buttons on it so you can adjust when the 4 sequential led lights come on. The lights are in a separate small little pod which I can mount in front of the speedo. The rev limiter / launch control ECU should be the same size and can sit nicely next to it. Strictly speaking once you have set the rev ranges you never need to alter them, so in the long term I can move these somewhere behind the dash and use this space for something else.

Gauges mounted! Ive an AEM AFR gauge on the left, an AEM Boost gauge (goes upto 35psi) on the right to replace my old 20psi boost gauge and in the middle I have a mechanical mocal duel oil temperature / oil pressure gauge.

Both the AEM gauges come with their own loom which is really nice. All the gauges ive fed their wires/feeds through the big hole in the bulkhead where the heater fan was. I`ll weld in a panel in to cover this hole and feed the wires through using some grommets when im finished. Ive an AFR probe to fit into the downpipe, oil pressure and temp sensors to plumb in, and the OMEX ECU`s need wiring up to the coil. So ive quite a bit of work to do under the bonnet next. Ive wired them upto the old cigar socket which is a switched live, so they all light up and have power once I turn the ignition key. Ive some old wiring I need to remove from behind the dash and then I can refit the speedo/cluster.

So all in all a couple of productive days.

Final couple of pictures... on the right we have what was a £50 set of lockwood white dial kit which is now more of a gold/yellow kit as its faded over time. Ive a new set of dials to fit in here. Although I that the needles have also faded so not sure what to do about them, whether I can repaint them or not as they are see thru plastic. And below we have just a small piece of the sound deadening I took out. There was literally tons and tons of this heavy stuff so I expect ive lightened the car by about 50kg just by dumping this stuff!!!

Once upon a time I bought a Renault 5 GT Turbo.....

The story begins way back in about 1995. At the time I had an 1972 Austin Mini which id had for about 3 years whilst I was at college/University. It was an old banger which I bought for the grand sum of £20, and as you can imagine it needed a bit of work. Still, having no money I bought a Haynes manual and so the start of my tinkering began. I learnt everything about car mechanics from that old car and ended up rebuilding it in my parents driveway. I remember pulling into the drive one Friday night after work and to my mums horror promptly started stripping the car down in order to get the engine out as the clutch needed replacing. She reminded me id needed the car for work on Monday, so no pressure! Still, clutch was done, head decoked, engine repainted and all back in the car by Sunday lunchtime in time for work the next day.

That little mini ended up turning into a rally replica, complete with full 6 point roll cage, buckets, harnesses, a dash with more gauges & switches than you could shake a stick at, massive wide alloys which were nearly wider than they were tall (10" alloys back in them days) and various other bits like cooper S disc brakes, cooper drums at the back, LCB exhaust, bigger carb etc etc etc.

It soon got to the stage where I wanted more power and the limit with the A Series engine seemed to be about 100bhp, any more and things would start to get very expensive. So, I decided it would be cheaper & easier to move onto a hot hatch.

At the time, the main hot hatches were the Golf GTi, the Metro Turbo, Peugeot 205 GTi, Fiat Uno Turbo, XR3i / RS Turbo Escort and the Renault 5 GT Turbo. I went for the GT Turbo for 3 reasons, firstly it was quicker than all of the others. Secondly, around my area they were very very rare. And thirdly, they were incredibly easy to modify and get more power cheaply. You could in fact increase the boost from the standard 8psi upto whatever you fancied by poking a hole in one pipe under the bonnet. Okay, so any more than about 12psi and you`d be blowing the intercoolers plastic end caps off, and risking running too weak on the carb.

So, I sold my mini off and went out and bought a black 1988 GT Turbo Phase 2. I learnt how to tune it up and soon had it running around the 150bhp mark (Stock car has about 120bhp). I then decided that I really wanted a blue one and more power, and rather than respray a really nice black one, I went out and bought a shed off an red 1987 Phase 2 GT Turbo and started work.

Unfortunately enthusiasm outweighed the desire for photos so I didnt get many. One of the earliest photos is after the car came back fresh from the bodyshop, nicely repainted in Peugeot Miami Blue.

You can see here, its got the stock suspension/ride height and even the original 13" wheels/tyres.

Looking quite nice! The only mod I had the bodyshop do was to remove the door locks, as the GT Turbo had central locking as standard. The actual central locking used some sort of infa-red system, which also meant I could code it to my remote control wrist watch and lock/unlock the doors by pressing a button on my watch!

So, then the mods started. One of the first things I did was to drop the suspension. On a GT Turbo its pretty easy. They use normal spring/shocks up front and the back has shocks and a torsion bar system the same as what you find on a lot of Renaults / Peugeots. I lowered the back until the rear arch was level with the top of the back alloy and dropped the front using jamex springs.

That was fine for a few years, but eventually I swapped the old standard shocks out for a set of adjustable SPAX.

Engine wise, I strapped the intercooler to re-enforce it, then fitted a GT Tuning stage 1 kit which effectively gave you an in car adjustable boost control, a bigger 135 carb jet (I think the original is 120), I fitted a pipercross air filter, a Ford Escort Cosworth dump valve (£16 from Ford at the time as an off the shelf stock part), I free-flowed the intercooler (they have a flap inside which only activates the intercooler once the air temp has reached a certain level), a lower temp radiator sensor to ensure the fan kicked in early, a new copper cored radiator and I removed the thermostat completely as I wasnt bothered about the car warming up quickly, I just wanted cool coolant flowing around quickly.

The in car boost let you go from a stock 8psi upto about 20psi which is really the max the stock turbo can handle. Baring in mind at this point the car was running the original turbo and had done 80,000 miles.

The first problem I had was that the car had just had a brand new clutch fitted before I bought it, but at anything more than about 14psi the new clutch started to slip. So, I fitted an uprated Group A clutch which was rated at about 250bhp if I remember rightly. That solved the problem at the expense of a very heavy clutch pedal and snapping clutch cables roughly once a year.

Next problem was the previous owner had over tightened one of the spark plugs thus damaging the threads, so occasionally the spark plug would blow clean out of the head if I was running anything more than stock boost. This became annoying after a while and no amount of superglue or JB Weld would stop it. Only solution was to have a helicoil fitted in that plug socket. Only downer with that is that a helicoil was a couple of quid, but on a turbo car they recommend you remove the head as any debris left from fitting would get blown through the turbo as soon as you start it. So, I then figured, well if im going to have to remove the head, i may as well get the head, carb, manifold all gas flowed and ported out at the same time.

I did some research and called up Portformance (Warrington based) who at that time had just done the head on another GT Turbo from the owners club and whilst it hadnt been rolling road tested to see what power, they measured 17% more flow through the head on their bench testing machine. I think I was the 2nd GT Turbo they did. I sent all the bits off in a big box and a few weeks later they arrived back.

Fitting it all back to the car was fun as there were hundreds of boost pipes, wires, coolant pipes, but luckily I videoed the engine bay before & after so I had a reference. I also needed to workout what carb settings to use, so a quick call to GT Tuning and they suggested a 160 main jet. In order to get one, you just get a 1.6mm drill bit and drill out your old jet. Easy! After all fitting I popped down my local garage and got them to measure the emissions to make sure they werent running too rich and they were spot on.

Performance on the road was literally amazing. The bigger turbo lag you normally get when running higher boost were compensated for by the extra instant power the gas flowing / porting out did. It felt like I had 160bhp when running standard boost. Portformance estimated maybe 200->220bhp at 20/21psi.

The proof was in the pudding and on the road the car was pretty unbeatable. Ferrari`s, TVR`s, Lotus, Sierra Cosworths, Fiesta & Escort RS Turbos would be blown away as they didnt have enough power to catch me or pass me.

Other bits I fitted were uprated discs & pads. If i remember rightly I used Kevlar pads which wore discs out quicker than the pads. A GT Tuning quick shifter went inside the car and a boost gauge so I could more accurately see what boost I was running. A full Scorpian big bore stainless exhaust was only £170 at Demon Tweaks so that finished the car off. I kept the car looking pretty much stock visually except for the lowered suspension. Until eventually after getting through several sets of the 195 x 13inch tyres I managed to buy an entire set of TSW 15" wheels with tyres 2nd hand for less money than replacing my worn out stock tyres.

I kept it in that form for a while, until one wet day I was using the amazing torque to spin the wheels up in 4th when the car overboosted abit and blew the standard turbo. Still, it had a good life! So I replaced the stock T2 with a T25 which was designed to handle the higher boost more reliably, although it did increase off-boost turbo lag a bit. At that point I swapped out the Cosworth dump valve for a Group A one.

All in all it was a cracking car, although the mpg went down from 36mpg from the stock car on my 40 mile commute down to 20mpg in the later days. Also, the car was a pig in traffic, the heavy clutch, the cooling fan on to keep the temps down and no air con!

So off the road it went, and into my garage...... with the idea that id just turn it into a fun track car.