Despite the cold weather, I've managed to get quite a lot of garage time this week. The extra silicone/ali hoses have arrived, and so has the replacement brake calliper. I might not have mentioned it above, but the rear passenger side calliper had seized. I duly ordered a replacement only to get confused when it arrived - it was for the wrong side. Yup, like a donkey, I'd forgotten the hubs are swapped so ordered the wrong side. The replacement has arrived now and I'm just waiting for it to warm up a bit before painting.
Anyway, with the radiator lower mounts now on rubber as suggested above (hint: turns out they can be salvaged from a few brackets that used to reside in the engine bay of the MX5), the dog leg hose duly cut and armed with more silicone/aluminium, I continued to mock up the cooling pipework.
And the join for the overflow and throttle body:
Finally, the coupling hose for the top pipe:
When the weather warms up a bit, I'll spray them black and look at some way of securing the longer sections.
I'd also been fitting the main wiring loom. Really, everything else I've done has been a way of breaking that endless task up! Started off with this, all nicely labelled up still:
And then roughly placed over the car to get an idea of what will go where.
From then on, it's been a case of investing many hours, mostly in stripping off the tubing and thousands of miles of tape!
Whilst wondering what I could do instead of all that, I figured out I didn't really need access to the footwells any more, so the side panels went on. How many rivets?!?! God bless the air rivet gun!
And what can be fitted after that? The tub
It needs trimming a bit because on the Mazda SDV the dash hoop is in a different position. The tub needs to go back a bit in this photo to get the required 400mm gap in the boot area.
Cue hacksaw, file and lots of orange dust
It's almost car like
Oops, hit picture limit!