Sorting the interior out - stripping out sound proofing & a repaint.

Well its been a while since ive updated the blog - 2 months to be exact. And thats not because ive been lazy its been purely because ive had very little time to get into the garage due to work & family commitments. I did manage 4 hours one Saturday and a couple of odd hours here & there, but not really had the time I needed to make some decent progress.

However, I did manage to make some good progress on the interior. Id already stripped all the stock interior out way back about 10 years ago, but there was still a lot to do. Firstly I had to chip out all the bitumen slabs which makers seem to glue on the floorpan in the car. Theres no end of it. All in the boot floor, and 3 separate slabs under the seats. The best way I found to do this was just a screwdriver & a hammer. Most of it chipped off cleanly. Some bits were a nightmare though, especially around the gearshift tunnel, so for this I used a blow torch and a wall paper stripper tool.

  

 Above you can see the car as im nearly finished. The black squares are where bitumen came off leaving the black original shell paint. I also stripped out the remaining red carpet and tons of foam soundproofing from behind the dash.

Once done I painted the whole inteior with some rustoleum grey paint. Its pretty good stuff. I opted for grey as I thought white would be a bit too reflective and highlight any imperfections. Black would be too dark. So grey is a good halfway house.

 The grey actually turned out lighter than it looked on the tin which was an added bonus. I painted all the cage and rear strut brace also. The grey actually seemed to blend in nicely with the rest of the remaining original inteior like the door panels. Ive not decided yet if to keep them or replace with something else.

I then drilled all the mounting holes through the re-enforcement plates id welded to where the cage bolts using 12mm drill bit, and used some brand new high tensile m12 bolts to bolt it all into place. Screwfix turned out the cheapest place for the bolts. Fitting the actual cage wasnt too bad. The rear half bolted straight in nicely. My cage also bolts to the top seatbelt fixing points which were a bit tight, so i had to hammer the floorpan slightly down to give clearance. The front cage and the doorbars fitted fine, but I did have problems with the top parts of the cage which connect front to back. They needed some "adjustment" with a lump hammer and pry bar before it all lined up. Still, its all done now.. and wont be coming out again in a hurry.

I also now need to workout how to bolt in my seats. Ive a pair of old Cobra Monaco bucket seats in blue (one here pictured lying down in back of car, hence the rollbars looking strange). I can either buy some universal subframes and try to get them positioned correctly, or just weld some cross members/angle iron/boxing across the floor pan and bolt them to that. Either way it might take some experimenting to get the positioning right. Im also now wondering if these seats are a bit too tatty for the car. They come complete with lots of fag burns and marks from the old owners. Will have to have a think...

Clearing out the boot

Thought id make a start on the interior a bit. It needed a lick of paint. First of all I had to clear out the rubbish id left in the back. An old battery charger, some old bits of wire, some oily racks to mention a few bits.

But I did find a brand new OE oil filter and these 2 bits which I was very pleased to find.

The missing towing eye cover!!!!! These are pretty rare as nearly 99% of Renault 5`s I see have them missing. And also a brand new door catch which I desperately need as my sagging doors have shredded mine!

I also found a new braided oil feed hose for the turbo. Sods law really, as id already bought another one as I couldnt find the one I bought years back. Still, its handy to have a spare, or I can always sell it on.

Result!!!!

New dials/gauges.

I had a bit of spare time in my lunch hour today, so I decided to make a start on the dials. As you can see in the picture above, id fitted a white dial kit many many years back and it had long since faded into orange. So I bought a new set of lockwood white dials and fitted them. Its a pretty easy job if you take your time over it. The clear perspex front is held on by 4 clips top & 4 clips at the bottom, pop them off and you can get to the dials as above. The speedo & the rev counter have 2 small screws holding the face in. The other 3 gauges use small rivets. The needles can be levered off using a fork from the kitchen! But, make sure you note the position of the needles before you pop them off.

As you can see, the improvement with the finished result is much better. Above is a spare set of OE gauges I have. I swapped some of the needles over as mine were a bit more faded, but you can see in the pic above just how faded the OE dials get. You can get a replica set of OE dials from the RTOC website. They are made by lockwood who made my white dials above.

Pic below of the finished item fitted back in the car. I just need to screw it down at the top. You can also see the OMEX shift lights. Im going to glue that to the underside of the sun shield top part of the speedo housing. It should look fine there.

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!

Exhaust & handbrake. Plus a start on the RH side.

I was hoping to get a good day in on the car this week, but other things have come up and ive also not been feeling too great, so havent managed to put much time in. I was up at 5am again today, so after feeding the baby and cats I managed to get in the garage for 7am.

First thing I managed to do was to remove the exhaust. I was running an after market Scorpian stainless system which I think is about a 2inch bore. This system comes in 3 parts so is easy to remove. The downpipe is bolted onto the rest of the system using 13mm bolts and springs. Easily got to from underneath the car. Im replacing this with a 2.5inch side exit system. You can see the difference here in the 2 pictures below. The new system looks like its been thieved from a lorry or something, it looks huge in comparison!!!

Apparently the 2.5inch system is good for 250bhp so it should last me a while. Very annoyingly I missed out on a tubular exhaust manifold today on ebay. It went for just 80quid and I was prepared to pay upto £100 for it. Oh well, i will keep my eye out for another one.

With the downpipe removed you can see behind the engine nicely. And see the starter motor. Ive changed this before, many many years ago, and normally the best way to get to this is under the drivers wheel arch. Ive a high power one to replace this one, so thats another job on the list, but will have to wait until I can get under the drivers arch - still with the downpipe out, access will be much easier.

After removing the exhaust I was looking to see what next I could do. Finishing off fitting the new LH handbrake cable was a good start. Under the car you can see the handbrake adjuster below. Theres a 13mm lock nut, then a 11mm nut and a knurled adjuster. I was expecting these to be completely seized, but to my surprise they werent. I did notice they were on max adjustment though. So I slacked these off completely which allowed me to remove the old handbrake cables from the pivot bit. I lubed this up with plenty of copper grease and cleaned it all up. You can see in the 2nd pic the new handbrake cables fitted. I will adjust the handbrake up after ive finished with the rear brakes.

Whilst under the car with the exhaust removed you can see the brake lines & fuel lines going from the back of the car to the front.. you can see they look a bit rusty. Im going to replace these.

So I then decided to make a start on the drivers side of the car. I pulled the car away from the wall a good bit and jacked it up on axle stands. I was hoping the drivers side was better than the passengers side, but unfortunately not. Jacking point at the front is shot, and mega rust along the sills. The back bumper mount below left is completely rotted away. So looks like I need to buy some more steel sheets to weld in!

Also under that side you can see the fuel pump & filter. Im pretty sure this probably the original fuel filter! Ive a high capacity fuel filter and a more powerful fuel pump to fit here. Ive sprayed all bolts/clips with penetrating oil so hopefully they will come undone easier.

Whilst i had access to the drivers rear side of the car I stripped off the rear brakes. Only took a few minutes. The bits are below. As with passengers side, ive new disc, caliper, pads, lines & hoses to fit here. I did feed the new handbrake cable through the rear trailing arm so thats all ready and did make a start at trying to remove the original brake lines this side. They are proving hard as the reserve fuel tank is in the way which is messing up access to the lower brake line. The top one came off easily enough after cutting the line off and using a 11mm spanner on it. Anyway, thats it for today, a good 2 hours work. Hopefully will be able to put some proper hours in next week.

turbo oil feed pipe & rev limiter

 Well I really didn't get much time spare this week in order to work on the car, only a couple of hours max if that. One thing ive been meaning to do for a while is to fit a braided oil feed pipe. Its the pipe on top of the turbo which feeds oil to the bearings. This comes from the front of the engine as you can see in the picture below.

The big spacer bit you can see on the bottom of the hose is actually a one-way valve. Apparently these can fail and cut off oil to the turbo which then causes the turbo to blow. What I did here was to remove this valve and drill the insides out, effectively removing the one way valve. I then re-assembled it, using my new braided hose. These connectors are 19mm and its much much easier to get to them after removing the radiator - so I had to remove the new alloy race radiator I fitted first in order to get to this. Still, its another job to tick off the box.

That out of the way I had about 45 minutes spare, so decided to fit the rev limiter. That was really easy as it uses the same connections as the shift light unit - i.e. connected to the positive and negative terminals on the coil & a decent earth. It mounts nicely next to the shift light unit. The launch control button I will need to mount on the steering wheel, ive left plenty of wire from the unit to the button so I can try and make sure it don't get tangled when driving etc. Will workout a mounting bracket once I get the steering wheel back on the car.

And that was it really for this week. Bit disappointing that I didnt get as much time, but I did manage to get out on my Ducati 996 for a short ride out over the weekend. Hadn't been out on it for a couple of months so I was missing the thrill of the open road.

Unfortunately the ride wasn't quite as enjoyable as I wanted, there were millions of lycra clad wannabe Bradley Wiggan`s all over the nice bendy local roads and if it wasn't them it was people towing caravans off on their holidays. I also had a bit of an unsettling moment when the back tyre slipped out on a LH bend under power. Not sure what's happening there as its the 2nd time that's happened and it doesn't inspire confidence. The suspension is all set up nicely so I suspect it might be just the tyres. Will have to swap them out for some decent ones. So what I was hoping to be a nice long ride out turned out to be a 25/30min quick warm up. Maybe next weekend!

AEI unit, coil, rear brakes

 I had a couple of hours spare last night so thought id get some more work in on the car. The first task was to swap out the old AEI unit for a newer one. My car seems to be kind of what is known as a phase 1.5. Its 1987 so one of the early phase 2`s and apparently they used up a lot of phase 1 bits in the process. My AEI unit was mounted above the turbo inside the engine bay. Its a Bendix 209 unit which is what the phase 2`s used but its in the phase 1 position. My previous 2 GT Turbos were both 1988 and by then the unit was moved inside the bulk head next to the battery to avoid heating problems from the turbo. 

You can see in the pic here of the engine bay, just above the header tank the AEI coil unit inside the engine bay.

I bought a later phase 2 AEI, mines a 209 B this new ones a 209 C. Im not sure what the differences are, as the main difference is between phase 1 AEI 208 and Phase 2 AEI 209 which has a different ignition map and 500rpm higher rev limit.

I firstly opened the unit up and undid the 2 torx screws holding the coil in. Reason being is that my rev limiter & shift light units need to be wired directly to the coil. The coil once you pull it out you can see 2 terminals either side of the spade connector on the front. Handily they are labeled - and + so you straight away know which ones are plus and negative to wire the gadgets to.

I drilled a few mounting holes inside the bulk head and mounted the coil up. I then had to extend the TDC and knocking wires to reach, plus drill a hole for the main king coil lead to reach through. Luckily the lead set I bought was for the phase 2 so it was plenty long enough. I have to admit I do now feel a bit nervous as to whether the car will start now. Im always reluctant to change to many things at once incase of having to narrow down any problems!

Pictures here of the new shiny AEI unit and the old worn one.

I then couldnt resist fitting the back brakes, so I fitted new EBC disc, new calliper, new EBC green stuff pads and bearing.

 Looks pretty good! I then had to fit the brake line which goes from the flexihose on the beam (replaced by new braided HEL line) to the calliper. Luckily I had kept the old brake line so I roughly knew where the route was. I also hadnt broken any of the mounting clips in removing the old line so could re-use them. The new copper-nickel line was really easy to bend into shape and you can see in the pix, looks lovely.

 I also fitted new handbrake cable whilst I was at it. It looks like the pivot on the adjuster under the handbrake is seized so I need to free that off, but new cable fed through the rear swing arm and to the calliper a treat. I need to get the rest of the exhaust off first before I can get better access to the handbrake adjuster/pivot.

So thats about it for this update, more later!