Despite numerous distractions, another good day was spent in the shed on the car with visible results.
After finding a few errant upper manifold bolts in my rats nest, the manifold is now bolted in place. Had read off the ford forum the two outer edge short bolt locations pose some risk of cracking the manifold.
I torqued the four main bolts and then hand tightened the last two without any drama. When I got the manifold polished initially I did in fact note a crack into cylinder 5. Testament to the advice I guess.
Had torqued up the exhaust bolts yesterday whilst till easier to access (HA HA) and set up the ignition leads to suit the new coil pack location.
A question though on the lead location. In the photo above and below No. 8 lead has been run amongst the normal loom. Is the spark pulse likely to cause some issue through the normal wiring? In other words should I run all the leads around the outside?
The shift in coil pack location means I've re-arranged leads to be able to reach cylinders for now. I might work towards getting a set made to suit as an improvement down the track.
I've now found a couple of my braid lines could do with shortening to improve their layout too.
It's now also apparent that the rear of the manifold is now quite a hectic area with coils, leads, braid lines and loom all interspersed. This is evident in the photo below. Still better at the rear of the motor than up front.
The other interesting result I managed today was to install LED globes into my reverse lights. Am running ancient VW reverse lights for the old style look as per below.
But was never happy with the crappy pale yellow light output from the traditional globes used in the lights.
They weren't cheap but I bought LED replacements and the LED output is great as seen below.
Will have to go out to the shed later in the dark and really see how well they light up behind.
Anyway have another shopping list of bits to get and I'll be ready to tackle the next bits of the car over the next long weekend.
Enjoy and cheers
Steve