On a more positive note..... sort of.....

[ruaricoles]

I may have a bit of an engine problem at the moment (see earlier thread) but on a more positive note, our 1994 500 took us 2500 miles round France recently without any problems and was bloomin' brilliant.

All the way down to the south coast and back up again, stopping off in various interesting places and doing the touristy thing.

We returned to the car in Monaco to find some careless numpty had rubbed their bumper down the driver's door leaving a nice scrape in the paint, although managing to sneak into the tunnel (partly closed as they were still packing up post-GP) for a noisy blat soon cheered me up. My much anticipated hoon down the Route Napoleon was rather ruined by an evil plot involving a thousand motorhomes and the weather was pretty miserable for the first few days, but otherwise a brilliant trip.

My fully re-worked cooling system was also great, fans never needing more than half speed even in long traffic jams on a hot day at the south coast, until the new thermostatic fan switch developed an intermittent fault at Maidstone services on the way home and the engine got rather toasty.

I hardwired the fans to fix the broken switch, but unfortunately in topping up the coolant and bleeding the air out of the rad, the bleed screw fitting sheared out of the end tank leaving us with a big pink puddle and a rather sad end to the journey on the back of a low loader. "Just think of the fuel you're saving...." my sister said in a text message. And at least it happened this side of the channel and on the way home.

Rad subsequently removed and fixed, dodgy thermostatic switch replaced FOC (and an over-ride fitted too, just in case), car re-assembled the night before Supercar Sunday, only to find en-route to Gaydon that all was not quite right after all - back to that slipped liner thread....

So perhaps that wasn't such a positive note after all. But anyway, it's still a great car

Ruari

[spend]

Do you think the 2 things are connected?

A pic of your pipework would be nice BTW.

Dave

[ruaricoles]

Hello Dave,

Yes, pretty sure the two are connected - well, as sure as you can be about anything engine related.... The car was running perfectly in France, cooked on the way home, then within 2 miles of being run again after re-assembly started chucking steam out of the exhausts.

I've got some piccies of my pipework and new fans etc. at home - will post them here this evening if I get the chance. Certainly it gives me the impression the whole thing is now much more robust [dodgy thermostatic switch excepting!], the new fans are nice and quiet at half speed and don't half shift some air at full speed! And half speed was enough for several hours of traffic in 30something degC, controlling top hose to about 90degC.

Incidentally, with a thermocouple in the top hose my dash temp gauge leaves a lot to be desired - not far off at 70degC, but if the gauge reaches as high as 90 the engine is really running at about 105..... Some recalibration needed, me thinks.

I've also changed the useless dash-lights-off switch to bring the fans on manually if required, currently to half speed; ideally I'd like a full speed over-ride but I think I'll need to fit a diode or something to let me do that. Just in case thermostatic switch no.2 decides to play up at some point.....

Ta

Ruari

[ruaricoles]

Some pics here Dave,

Firstly the new fans and cowl, and the relays to do the fan switching with 70A megafuse under the plastic cover on the right


then a close up of the 2-speed thermostatic switch (Intermotor jobby) and ali adaptor from x-eng


then the fans again with a cover over the relays (keeps rain off when splashing down bonnet and also hides from view), you can also just see the air intake moved into the LH wing (need to seal this off properly still to keep all warm engine bay air out)


and lastly my attempt at a splitter out of ABS plastic bent with a hot air gun - seems rigid enough to hold its shape at speed but bendy enough so that no damage occurs if it gets scraped


In terms of pipework, I've used a standard bottom hose arrangement but a length of flexible silicon hose to replace the metal pipe in the top hose - flexible section goes all the way from coolant tank to thermostatic switch adaptor.

I still want to fit a PRT and dump the standard thermostat at some point but this seems to work pretty well for the moment.

And hopefully it'll all look a bit cleaner when we get it back from V8D.....

Hope that's of interest!

Ruari

[spend]

Agghhh bugger, it was the PRT porno I was lusting after... most upset after scanning your pics - didn't read the text at the bottom

Thought it would have been easier to stick the thermostatic switch in the rad itself - I still reckon they work much better on the outlet side (parrot fashion - if I keep saying it someone will believe me... ).

Dave