Wednesday 15 April 2015

Cool Air And Noise Reduction, part 2


With the alloy carburettor mounts fitted it was time for the last of my winter projects. Fitting the slightly altered air box and the new air filters. Al rather straight forward, save for some small problems. The first being the alloy ram pipes that have been hiding inside the open K&N filters. They only came with two mounting holes and I really wanted to use three bolts per carburettor to fit the air box's base plate. Easy but time consuming to sort when you only have light grinding tools (Dremel and good old file). And some dent removal ...


Next was fitting the lid. As I don't have a filter element inside the lid was a bit loose. First Idea was to fit the steel base plate of a discarded filter element with a small cross section rubber profile. But that didn't fit to well so in the end I opted for the easy and cheap solution, closed cell foam rubber, glued to the lid.


Remained the last two missing pieces, the filter's base plate plus new K&N filters and two lengths of 44mm air hose. The base-plate put up a bit of a fight. Because the area behind and in front of the headlamp mounting panel is not accessible at the same time by one person, I had made a small mounting plate with the nuts welded onto it (this plate is visible in the CAD picture I posted two months ago). I taped this to the front of the headlamp panel, after which bolting the filters' base-plate should be easy. At least that was the plan, but it didn't work. Instead I inserted a long 5 mm bolt backward through the top nut of the mounting plate and screwed that in a few centimetres. With that taped in place I was able to hang the base-plate over this bolt and tighten it up with a nut. After that aligning the lower bolt hole and fitting the two correct bolts was easy. Remained the air hose, cut to the correct length and fit in place. This really was as easy as it sounds ...




Quite pleased how everything fits. But the big question remained; does it work properly? Or is this set up more restrictive in comparison to the open filters? Only one way to find out, go for a drive. As the weather was rather fine today I enjoyed a few hours of open top motoring this afternoon.


But there were some doubts. The main one being a small coolant leak (well more weeping) from the head gasket. I noticed this while removing the carburettors from the car. As the car has sat idle in the shed for almost 10 months I decided not to panic immediately. So I put it down to lack of use for the time being. But while driving over some of the lovely country lanes in our area I sometimes smelled a whiff of coolant. Or at least I imagined smelling it!. As the temperature gauge behaved as if nothing was wrong I tried not to think to much about it. To cut a long story short, it was a rather enjoyable drive and when I returned home there was no sign of any coolant loss. Will see tomorrow morning when everything has cooled down ...
And there is another small issue, the new carburettor linkage needs shortening a bit as it opens up the throttle a bit, resulting in a slightly higher idle.

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