Rear bumper. Rear brakes & fuel tank strap.

I decided to make a start on the rear bumper this weekend. You can see the state of the mounts here! The bumper is held on my 1 bolt each side under the rear wheel arch of the car and one at the back. The top mounts were so rotten that after undoing the bottom bolts, i could just simply pull the entire back bumper off the car with a bit of force!!

 The other side was just as bad as you can see here!!!!

 I cut out the old metal back to solid metal and treated all the rust with some rust-to-good-metal chemical stuff. Then welded in some new sheet metal. I then seam sealed it and painted it with industrial black paint. I will have to drill new bolt holes in it to mount the bumper back on once ive finished.

Whilst I was under the car I thought id have a look at the reserve tank strap. This is notorious for rotting through and falling off. As you can see in the LH picture, mine also has fell off at some point. A new strap is £45 online. Looking at the actual metal i realised i only needed a bit of steel, 3 or 4 cm wide and about 40cm long. Looking about the garage I found a suitable bit of metal in my scrap pile. I just chopped the right length off and welded it straight onto the old metal. (after chopping off the rotten bit). It easily bent around the tank to shape and after a lick of paint looked brand new.!

The funny thing about this is that after finishing it was puzzling me as to what the scrap bit of metal actually came off, as it looked perfect for the job. After a bit of head scratching I realised it was actually the fuel tank strap from a classic Mini Cooper which id scrapped many years back. Looking on ebay these sell for £28! Doh! So I didnt save quite as much money as I expected in the end!

I had a bit of spare time so I wired up the launch control button . I fabricated a small bracket and bolted that to one of the steering wheel to boss bolts, and positioned the button so its in perfect reach of my thumb whilst im gripping the wheel. Im pretty pleased with how it came out as you can see in the picture below.

A couple of other bits I needed to do was to finish the drivers side rear brakes. Id already fitted new discs, pads, callipers, braided hoses & new brake lines to the passenger rear side, so it was just a simple case of doing the same to the drivers rear side. They all just bolt straight on, nice & easy. The only hassle I had was the brake hose->line brackets, the RH side ones were completely rotten away so I had to fabricate some new ones - easy as you can see below!

And heres the finished result... completely new brakes at the back! Not looking forward to bleeding new fluid through this lot though as theres a lot of joints to check for leaks!

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.

A start on the rear passenger side....

I managed to get a spare hour tonight so started work on the rear passenger side.

The car sits pretty low so I couldnt see much until I jacked it up, got the wheel off and the bodykit off. I could then see that things were pretty rusty around there. My main concern was the bit you can see below...

Which is just where the rear beam bolts to the car. Luckily it looks like there is a re-enforced chassis member between the rusty sill and the beam. I checked from inside the car and thats all really solid around where the beam seems to bolt to the car, so it looks like its just the inner & outer sills here which are rotted away. I should be able to do the same as I did for the front jacking point and cut this out with an angle grinder and weld new metal in.

I got the old wire brush on it and started trying to clean it up a bit. You can see the dirt line where the bodykit sits and it looks like I am fortunate here in that any repairs will be nicely hidden once the bodykit goes back on. I wont know how bad / deep the rot goes until I cut the outer sill out. Unfortunately it was about 9pm and so a bit too late to fire up the old angle grinder for fear of upsetting the baby sleeping upstairs.

So instead I decided on a quieter task of scraping out some of the slabs of bitchumen which car makers seem to stick under the carpets in an effort to reduce road noise. There were 3 big slabs here, one in passengers foot well, one under where the seat mounts and one where the rear passengers feet goes. The quickest and easiest way of getting these out was to use a blow torch and a wall paper scraper. They came out nicely and I managed not to set fire to anything.  I didnt weigh the bits but they werent light, so im guessing ive lost a few kilo from the car just by removing them. Once the cars finished i`ll have to get it weighed to see how much of the original 850kg kerb weight ive lost.

Couple of other bits worth noting. Getting the rear arch off was easy as the 3 bolts holding it to the car were already ripped out it would seem by the guy who repaint the car previously, and he had just glued the arch onto the old bolts using some weak putty/glue/paste. After a bit of investigation I realised you have to undo and move the rear light assembly to one side which revealed a small screw holding the back of the arch to the car.

The 30mm hub nut loosened up easy as pie with my 4ft bit of scaffolding pole on a breaker bar, so thats a relief. However it looks like the brake calliper pipes and other bolts wont be as easy. Before I forgot I sprayed all the bolts I could see with penetrating oil and will do the same again a few more times in an attempt to make them a bit easier to undo. The ones around the rear brake compensator valve which is mounted on the rear beam look particularly bad. Luckily I have a new compensator valve, a new calliper, pads, new brake lines, hoses, brake disc and bearings to go on this corner, so most of the old stuff I can just cut off and ditch. You can see how rusty/bad it looks here:

I also notice I dont seem to have any anti rattle springs on those pads...

Finally, it looks like I will also have some welding to do around the rear bumper mounts... you can see in the photo below that it looks like that metal has turned into something which more resembles wet cardboard.... So the back bumper will be coming off next..

So all in all, not bad for an hours work. Will see what time I get tomorrow night....