So......been a while.....Any updates on this?
Wowsers It has been a while Long enough, in fact for me to drop off notification of updates on my own thread In my defense, I haven't been able to do as much as I'd like to the ol' girl because the past year and a bit has been mostly taken up with FD-wrangling and I couldn't risk starting anything that would take both cars off the road at the same time. I can offer a cheeky cut n paste from my thread on the FB forum though
So, I haz acktcherly done more stuff.
First up, I managed to get hold of a couple of alternators. Annoyingly, the Series 3 has a unique alternator not only completely different to the S1 & 2 version (which has an external bacon-slicer fan as the most obvious difference) but also different to the EGi FC that followed. So they're a bit hard to get hold of. Finally I got hold of a couple via the rotary parts mafia. Many moons ago I stripped down and polished the housings on my FD alternator (yep, different again) and I remember it as one of those jobs I swore "never again" over. Actually, I swore a lot more than that...
So, how to make my new/old alternator look nicer? Since the entire point of this exercise was to bring the alternator up to the standards of the rest of the bay, something needed to be done... and whatever it was, I didn't want to do it to my only working one and risk knackering it, hence the couple of spares. In the end, a perfect solution presented itself. I split them both, gave one set of housings to bezzy mate Ada to polish, because he's very good at that sorta stuff and life's too short for me to do it, and kept the other for myself to paint. Because I'm lazy. Then I'd have the best of both worlds; I could pop the painted one on for the time being and swap the polished one as and when it was finished. Idiotically, I kept one to paint and gave the refurbished one to Ada to polish, which was the wrong way round really as the latter was already painted and would have been easier to re-paint as it was just a bit scruffy. Never mind. eventually I ended up going from this
To this...
If you're wondering "why would I bother just to make it a bit shinier?" well, it's a good question. Apart from the obvious answer that shiny ones are just better, my old one I took off was working perfectly well and would average around 13.8 volts when the engine was running, plus or minus a bit for revs, loading, etc. The refurbished one with years of clag and carbon build-up cleaned out averages 14.2. That's why. And that's using no new parts whatsoever. Best kind of upgrade; free
Right, moving along. I'd been to a few shows which had given me an unparalleled opportunity to get stuck in some really tedious traffic jams, and this has shown up just how hot the car can get. The problem seemed to be the radiator shroud/fan mount, which we suspected might prove an obstacle when the weather got warmer. It's fine as long as the car's moving and even when in short traffic jams, but over a few minutes it seems once it gets hot the fan struggles to dissipate the heat even when I got on the move again. It's almost like the air through the rad would build up against the shrouding and then equalise pressure with the nose side so that no more air could pass through, and it just couldn't ditch the accumulated heat
It didn't help in the queues out of Goodwood that the bloody fan fuse blew and the car was climbing north of 120 degrees I had no choice but to pull over, and with no tools to get the slam panel off to get to the fuse I was knackered until a useful coach driver... who couldn't easily get past me anyway... let me borrow an 8mm spanner. As I was changing the fuse, leaning into the depths of the radiator front cavity, I wondered idly "what's that cooking pork sorta smell" and after a short time the pain reached my brain a while after the smell did. Yep, it was me, cooking on the top of the radiator
Doh. Scarred for life. Literally
Something had to be done, so after giving the nice coach driver his spanner back and trying not to let the pain show too much... cos I is a MAN... I went home and got the drill out. As you can see, the shrouding looks nice and gives the fan a firm mount, but it's occluding a large percentage of the radiator's overall area
I figured some nice big slats cut in would hopefully mean the radiator never got so hot in the first place, but would also provide a better cooling path to shed the heat once it did. So I did some drawing and got cutting
And once I'd ended up with hundreds of anti-holes (if matter and anti-matter cancel each other out when they come in contact then the opposite of a hole must be an anti-hole. Put these together with a hole and it disappears, see) I could join up the dots with a saw
Not the most desperately neat job ever, but it's done by hand and I was in a hurry so it'll do for now
It's a bit experimental for now, I'll have to see how it performs. The only worry is that when the fan does kick in, it may now draw air through the path of least resistance in the new slots rather than draw it through the rad itself. I might need to add hinged lightweight flaps that cover the slots. The air pressure when the car's moving will push them open, but when the fan comes on it'll suck them shut against the shroud and thus cool the radiator. we'll see how it goes, that might not actually be necessary in which case I'll make up a slightly neater shroud to replace this one that's now a bit secondhand
Looks alright enough once fitted, anyway
And just for belt and braces to keep an eye on what's actually happening temperature-wise to the radiator as well as just the coolant, I bunged on a couple of temperature-reactive strips (like what Mazda used on their Le Mans cars, as it happens. How cool is that?)
Soooooo, another thing that's always annoyed me about the car was the headliner. Specifically the bit on the sunroof. I dunno if it was condensation or what, but there were several patches where the grey fabric had kinda "blown" away from the foam liner and it hung down in a tatty and unsightly way. I had a spare sunroof for ages that had a sort of vinyl liner that was much nicer (to my mind, anyway) but it was in Series 2 blue, so didn't match my car on the outside. And it seemed a lot of effort and expense to re-paint the sunroof.
Yeah, missing the bleeding obvious here :oops: It was only when I was cleaning the car for Japshow that I lifted out the sunroof... and realised I could get my fingertips under the liner. Yep, it just clipped into place. Dunce. So a few seconds later, I whipped it off with only a couple of broken clips
Not a million miles away in colour, but the vinyl is so much nicer. In this side-by-side comparison, you can see where the fabric's gone all baggy and rubbish
And should anyone be interested, this is what the inside of the sunroof looks like sans liner, for future reference
and this is it fitted. Much better. Slightly embarrassing it's taken me about four years to twig it was this easy to mod.
and finally, a jaunt up to Ian's where he'd very kindly been holding on to some parts for me resulted in a car-load of stuff for the next round of project nonsense. And no, an FC bonnet doesn't fit in the boot of a Focus but personally I think Ian had secretly been itching to take his petrol-powered brick cutter to it for ages anyway
The bonnet is still a work in progress that one day may even see fruition. As to the overheating... well, time would prove that all this messing about with holes and flaps (oooooer) was a total blind alley and the real issue lay elsewhere entirely. And in a further update, we'll see why