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!!!

Rear passenger side welding.....

So, after getting thoroughly fedup after wirebrushing down the rusty rear sill near the jacking point and just seeing how rotten it was I managed to finally pluck up enough motivation on Sunday to make a start on the cutting out & welding in that area.

 This is how it looked after a bit of wire brushing... Renault seem to have put about 1cm of sealant and stuff inside the wheel arch and it looks like the sill and archwork metal must have rotted from the inside out as the black end bit you can see is pure sealant. It was like a bit of rubber just sitting there holding it all together.

I didn't take a photo, but I cut this whole area out with the angle grinder and got it back to good metal. Theres also a small patch on the inner sill which needs doing, but its only about 1 inch x 2 inch so not bad.

Here you can see my dodgy welding once finished. It didn't go to badly actually. I welded a new bit of metal on the inner sill behind it all, then had to re-fabricate the inner wing piece and match the curve of the outer sill as best as I could. Finally once that was all in and id sprayed lots of paint inside it, I cut out a piece about 12cm square, tack welded it along the top, then hammered it around to match the shape of the original sill.

Remember all this will be hidden under the original bodykit, so I didn't bother grinding the welds down or tidying it up. Had it been visible I would have made more of an effort.

I also sprayed the radius / swing arm and beam a bit to tidy that up. Looks miles better now.


I was quickly out of time so I had another think about gauges and where to put them. If I ditch the heater/fan then that will free up a couple of areas on the dash where I can easily mount 3 gauges side by side. One area being where the original clock & heater controls go, just to the left of the steering wheel. The other area being where the air vents are along the top of the dash. Im not sure which would be best yet to ensure I can quickly see them without diverting my eyes too far from the road. Ive started making up a mounting plate out of an old number plate which Ive cut 3 52mm holes in. I`ll take some photos of it tomorrow.

In the meantime, some more bits arrived - new rear number plate lights, a phase 2 AEI unit which I need to mount in the bulk head, an alloy extender pipe for the top hose, my mocal oil temp/pressure gauge & fittings, and a big bore downpipe.

Co-incidentally I will no longer need the big bore downpipe as ive just ordered an amazing 2.5" all in one downpipe which bolts straight onto the turbo and eliminates the cast iron turbo elbow. Ive wanted one of these for a long time and they are pretty rare. A couple of people have made them over the years, mainly BMS and big jim. 2nd hand they are like hens teeth and fetch good money.  However, a bunch of enthusiasts have just commissioned a limited batch of new ones and so as soon as I heard they were ready to buy I was like a greyhound out of the starting grid and bought one.  I`ll finish todays quick blog update with some pictures of it.... its a piece of art and will bolt nicely onto my new 2.5" side exit exhaust system.

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....

One corner all finished!

I managed to get a very rare completely free day today and was determined to make some good progress on the car, as previously "completely free" days seem to end up just being 3 hours, rather than a full day.

My first job was to tackle the wheel bearing. I decided to try to make up a tool to let me push the inner hub out and so wasted about an hour doing this, and the tool ended up not working. So I resorted to my normal way of getting wheel bearings out which involves a lump hammer, a cold chisel, a couple of impact sockets, a vice, a 4ft bit of scaffolding pole and a lot of violence.

First I used the cold chisel and drove that in between the inner & outer hub. This got things moving. I then used an impact socket and the lump hammer to drive the inner hub straight out.

I then used a larger impact socket in the vice to press the remaining bearing out of the outer hub.This is wear the scaffolding pole comes in to give me a bit more leverage. It soon came out.

The remaining bit of bearing on the inner hub, I took the cold chisel & lump hammer to it and drove it off.

The old bit of outer bearing doubled as a perfect size tool to use the vice to push the new bearing into the hub.

Whole job only took about an hour.

I then rethreaded the top plates on the shock to ensure the new high tensile bolts i had would screw in lovely. Then it was time to refit the hub on the car. I refitted the shock, a new ball joint and new tie rod end at the same time.

Then onto the brakes....

I really wanted to go for some uprated 4 pot brakes, the 2 main options were the Brembo`s from the clio/megane 192 which need machined adapters to fit, or the Hi-Spec kit. Id heard bad reports about the Hi-Spec kit and the opinion of most people was that with the right discs and pads, the standard 1 pot brakes are more than enough. You can see the state of my old caliper here....

I was initially going to referbish it with new seals and piston, but price wise it worked out cheaper to just buy a brand new reconditioned caliper which is what I did. I painted the caliper up with some nice blue caliper paint from halfords and fitted EBC groved/dimpled discs. Pad wise, a lot of people recommended the EBC greenstuff pads so thats what I went for. Another popular choice would have been the Ferrodo DS2500`s. I also chucked the old brake hoses in the bin and replaced them with some braided HEL lines. Ive also got a full set of copper nickel brake pipes I need to fit too, and a new master cylinder, so they will all be done at some point!

It was really satisfying actually bolting on some new parts and making the big pile of new bits in the corner of the garage get a little smaller. So far I had mainly just been fixing rust and stripping bits off.

Heres the finished corner..

It was quite satisfying putting the wheel back on and lowering the car off the axle stands. Which then reminded me that i need to get the alloys refurbed. If I remember rightly the back two are buckled and the tyre fitter had fun balancing them and the front two are all scuffed - not me I hasten to add, but the previous owner.

Looking at the watch it was now only lunchtime! So, what's next? Time to look at the cooling system. Id replaced the OEM radiator with a copper cored one many years back and that had long since corroded and fell apart. So a new double capacity alloy rad was bought, with a high powered fan. You can see them compared below...

The new one ditches the build in oil cooler, so ive a separate mocal one. This afternooon I stripped out the old radiator, oil pipes and took the OEM sandwich plate off ready to replace it with the mocal one. Im replacing all the pipes with silicone ones, so rather than mess about undoing the old ones I took an angle grinder & a hack saw to them to let me quickly remove them.

It was here that I noticed that someone had redone the fan wiring by wiring a different solenoid in. It looks like the original bit of the wiring loom where the original solenoid plugs in is badly corroded which is why someone has rewired it a bit. I might be able to re-use the perc fan solenoid wiring/plugs as I will be ditching that.

Heres the front. Ive got to wedge the bigger radiator, the oil cooler and a big alloy intercooler in here. You can see the alternator to the LH side of the pic. (ive a brand new alternator in my pile of new bits!). As ive removed the stock intercooler, I can now move the radiator over the right a bit into the space the original intercooler used to sit. I`ll have to extend the coolant pipes, and drill a new mounting hole in the cross member, but it looks really easy. This will let me feed the boost pipe straight from the top of the carb and down to the intercooler.

The intercooler itself is an aftermarket one which I originally bought for a Golf TDI. Here you can see it and the new oil cooler..

Upon offering it up it will sit nicely under the lower cross member you can see in the front shot of the car. My main concern is that this intercooler has the inlet pipes coming out each side, which means I have to have a 90 degree bend to route them vertically. Unfortunately, it looks like the front subframe rails are right where this 90 degree bend needs to be. So I will either have to some how route them around this, or look for an alternative mounting spot or even a different intercooler..... time will tell!

Whilst the old rad was out, it let me get to the front of the block better. I can see that the block & sump are covered in gunk/oil so it took me longer than expected but I managed to clean that up a bit. That way if theres any oil leaks I can see them easier! I did offer the new radiator up and it will need to do some fettling before it will fit. So next on the list is to move the rad fan up an inch or so so it clears some pipe which comes out of the bottom of the engine, drill the new RH mounting hole for the new rad and trial fit that! Then I can see what space I have for pipe work and mounting the other bits.

All in all quite a productive day!!!! If I had 1 day a week like this every week, the car would be finished very quickly!