Sunday 20 June 2010

DHC report nr. 102; Finishing touches part 3

Haven’t spent much time on the DHC over the past week. After having spent so much time on her over the past year and a half, I have enjoyed a few free evenings. But as the weather forecast for yesterday wasn’t great I asked Robbie if I could use his workshop to sort a few of the remaining jobs on the car.

First thing to get sorted was the permanent burning low-coolant-light. Knowing that you can’t trust the coolant light on these cars even gets me slightly nervous. As mentioned a few days ago I suspected my own work on the main wiring loom to be the cause of this problem. So after raising the RH headlamp, disconnecting the connectors I could pull the loom clear for inspection. Sounds easy but wasn’t as I did a pretty thorough job of wrapping up the loom. Took me well over half an hour to remove enough of the wrapping tape to find the two suspect wires. I indeed had just cut of the (unused) connector, isolated the wires and wrapped them inside the loom. Luckily sorting the problem was easy with a spade connector and a crimping tool ...


Before re-wrapping the loom I applied some heat-shrink tubing over the connector to isolate it. After which it was fiddling the connectors back through the front panel’s hole (not easy with the headlamp motor in position) and reconnecting everything. A quick check revealed that the lights still worked but also that the coolant level light now switches of as it should.

As the car was on the lift in Robbie’s workshop I used the opportunity to check underneath the car. This actually was the first time the car was on the lift so a good opportunity for some pictures ...



First I went over all the suspension nuts and bolts. Most needed a little bit of tightening but nothing worrying. Only the nuts for the front struts lower ball joints needed more tightening. This is probably caused by the fact the struts themselves have been powder coated. And as this coating is wearing of through use, this gives some play between the ball joint’s stud and the mounting point on the front strut. Something to keep an eye on for the next few miles.
Last thing I checked was for leaks, there were none ... yet. Only the water pump is weeping very lightly. Hopefully that will go away after a few more miles.
And, clearly visible in one of the pictures, the fact that the centre exhaust box (still) has a tendency to slowly rotate under engine load.

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