New year... New car?

Happy New Year everyone. Hope you had a great festive period.

As well as eating and drinking too much, I managed a series of great performances at the workshop, and whittled the to-do list right down! A very rewarding Christmas present if I do offer it to myself.

Once more, lots of the snagging tasks, but some satisfying ones. First up, sorted the exhaust manifold out, so the lambda sensors no longer stick out and skewer unsuspecting pedestrians.

Removed the silencer and the two into one, which was very stubbornly held in place; and created recesses for the lambda sensors to sit

Reinstalled, all looking much smarter now.

It has had the fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your viewpoint) effect of moving the silencer back in, so I'll have to re-do the rear bracket again. More on that when I get the seats out.

Next job, throttle cable. I've never been completely happy with just having a square hole in the aluminium bulkhead, and it's been causing routing issues and kinking the cable causing the throttle to stick, and others have had cables snap due to fraying against the sharp corners of the square hole. So, back to the drawing board then. 

After a bit of thought, some inch box section, and a bit of MIG wire, I  came up with this:

Then painted and installed in the car

It worked rather well, if I do say so myself. What you can't see is a nylon block inside, preventing any fraying on sharp edges. I did have a bit of fine tuning to do as the cable was still a bit taught and causing a high-ish idle. After cutting a sliver from the end, got a bit of slack in the cable and a healthy low idle. This has had the extra bonus of making gears easier to select - methinks the 1500rpm idle was causing the clutch disc to spin faster and making it harder to engage. Once more, another noticeable improvement, might eventually get a decent clutch on this car in the end!

There is still some friction in the cable though, so might need to add a second throttle return spring to assist in closing the throttle - the routing in the kit car is obviously different from that in the E36 and causing extra friction.

Anyway, next job... Christmas! Hurrah. Some great presents that will help with the project! A helmet and some racing booties so I don't press all 3 pedals with one foot...

After the festivities, back onto the project. Made a coup,e of brackets to hold the BMW loom holder - aside from some minor cosmetic cable tying (for neatness rather than necessity) the engine bay is now complete:

Then, installing the savage switches into the dash, which is tricky as I don't think I left enough slack on the tiny cables. One of the future improvements might be to make that into a longer wire and a single connector multi-plug. OK for now though:

I also trimmed and re-painted the steering shroud, fitted here:

Plenty of other snags ticked off, but not really worth photographing or writing about. However, one that was, the seats.

I was never really happy with the rear sides of the seats, very poorly finished with dry mat, sharp edges, and a thin wash of colour...

So I re - gel coated them in black... (Left new, right old)

And left hem both freshly gelled, drying 

Might take some time to fully cure, ambient temp is quite low at the moment.

So then this last flurry of work saw the cockpit all but finished - most of the panels are now silicone sealed and fully riveted, and put the seatbelts in place

So, a very productive break all told. For anyone who is worrying, don't, the skirting boards in the kitchen were done as well, and starting tiling next weekend :-)

That is about as far as I can go for the moment - All I need now is the roll bar - which has been made, just need to get Peter to find a massive Jiffy bag and a shed load of stamps :-)

Once that arrives, then I really will be on the home straight; should be able to start filling out IVA application forms in the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading! We are getting close now....