v6Max Clio Build Stuff

[Jamesv6]

The whole aspect of using the professionals opens up a big can of worms.

I found using those in the know a mixed experience. They knew the techy stuff, but failed with care for the car overall. Also, I suspect different experts will have different ideas and perhaps limit a project to what they know and are comfortable with. I would like to have the ability to do all the work myself, but as you say Max, assistance from others is needed. Being on hand to watch over them is seldom an option, and more than one company is often needed. You can't be standing over all of them 24/7.

You and I would probably be thinking of the state of the car once the work is done, some of them think only of the nuts and bolts and often don't bother about taking care in getting the dirty work done. A happy medium has to be reached, and I am pleased to say I found this with SGM. Scott does excellent work and keeps in mind the car is not to be trashed in the process. While it is nice to collect and find no damage, I don't expect the car PC Polished every visit. (but wouldn't argue)

 

[v6Max]

Ok here we go with this weeks update:

First job was to actually get the console installed in the car - this was on the "critical path" because the wiring could not start in earnest until it was in place. As in all things this was a seemingly simple job that started to grow out of all proportion and once again down to the need to "fix" issues introduced by others.

In this case it was the gearstick mounting; it had been moved back by about 2" to place it closer to the me and the steering wheel but lets just say that attention to detail had been somewhat lacking which meant some corrective work was required. The first problem was that the rear mounting point had been placed about 20mm off centre (now I accept build tolerances but 20mm is a big, big tolerance!). The other problem was a detail issue - the mountings were a combination of M8 and M6 nuts each of different lengths - ok this is not a major thing but I'd expect better to be honest - anyway with the help of my recently appointed "spanner monkey" (my mother, no seriously ) I was able to sort the gearstick out returning it to the centre of the car and therefore making it possible to move on to the fitting of the console.

Fitting the console was a bit of challenge in so far as I wanted it attached securely and this would need brackets fabricating and some accurate drilling. The 2 front mounting points were made from aluminium angle bolted to the chassis using rivnuts and then fitted with chimney nuts allowing me to bolt the console to them through the console sides (easy to write, not quite to simple to actually do).

The rear mounting points were slightly trickier as they needed to be where there's a hole in the chassis for the handbrake (which I don't have). The solution in the end was to fabricate a bracket using aluminium strip which I bent to form a wide U shaped bracket. This bracket was screwed to he chassis using self tappers and then the console was attached via aluminium bolts into rubber rivnuts. The end result was pretty neat and the console is definitely attached.

With that job done I could actually do some wiring. The first task was to take the ISIS cells and their supporting rails off the car since I needed access to the rail so that I could add a small plate that would allow me to add 2 convoluted tube bulkhead fixings.

With the plate added and the 2 bulkhead fixings installed it was time to actually prepare the input loom. This is supplied as part of the ISIS kit but I needed to get it to the console and I was also not using all the possible inputs. To get the loom to the console I chose to use convoluted tubing - with bulkhead fixings at both ends the tubing would support the loom ensuring that the loom itself did not have to support it's own weight.

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At this point there are some choices to be made; do you do it quickly or do you do it with a certain attention to detail. Well I chose the latter because I want this to be neat, reliable install and that meant I needed some additional supplies; braiding and heat shrink.

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The braiding is an expandable woven tube that fits over the loom - this provides protection from mechanical abrasion. To secure the braiding properly I used heat shrink tubing. I also used heat shrink tubing to form a "jacket" around the loom where it entered the bulkhead connectors further reducing the possibility of mechanical damage to the loom.

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Ok back to the input loom; as I said I wasn't using all the inputs so I split the loom into 2 groups; I group was the inputs I was going to use, the other group was all the spare inputs. The first group make their way to the console through one of the convoluted tubes which will not then be used for any other parts of the loom. The other group use the other tube and will share the tube with things like the battery isolator switching etc.

Back to that subject of attention to detail; where the loom enters the console I used the same preparation technique as at that Mastercell i.e. braiding and then heat shrink.

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Some of you may have been able to tell from the pictures that the input loom is actually not long enough - this was a problem I knew I was going to face and the solution I'm going to use is a multi-way locking connector. This actually brings with it the advantage that it will make the initial wiring of the switching easier and then will make subsequent maintenance easier because I'll be able to simply unplug the input loom from the switching in the console.

I've used Excel to create a wiring chart so that I can keep track of all the various wiring colours and which loads or inputs they're assigned to. In addition I've got a label printer that will print directly on to heat shrink which will allow me to label up the loom making fault finding that much easier.

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Next week I'll be preparing the output looms - at least 2 of these need some special work because I need to supply feeds to the DASH2 so that the tell-tales for things like indicators and main beam work.

 

[TRW1]

Full of admiration for you for taking this on......... [smilie=icon_eek.gif]

 

[v6Max]

Thanks Tim

 

[Mike T]

unbelievable - its like a well organised italian pasta dish

 

[v6Max]

Not mad yet Tim...although I may be at the end of the project

 

[v6Max]

This Easter weekend was to be the first fix for the wiring which basically meant that my plan was to have all the major parts of the loom(s) installed by the end of the weekend. I'd not actually be terminating the loom(s) at any loads at this stage...

First job was to re-visit the mega fuse mounting solution; the mega-fuses provide protection for the dual power cables that feed each Powercell so in my kit there are 4 of them. As you'll have seen in an earlier picture I'd original attached them to the plate which normally provides access to the air conditioner and fan but I now needed to add an extra mega-fuse and also a place to mount a remote switched battery isolator so a new solution was needed.

In the end I used the same solution I'd used for the Mastercell and Powercell; aluminium rails bolted to the front bulkhead using rubber rivnuts. A picture is worth a thousand words so...

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This, I think is a much better solution and still allows me to keep the battery +ve run as short as possible. The extra mega-fuse is to provide power distribution for 3 things which are not under the control of the ISIS system; PAS pump and the 2 radiator fans. The fans will be switched by the ECU and the PAS pump via a switch on the console.

Just a quick note on the preparation of the power feeds you can see in the picture above (labelled Powercell 1-A etc) which should give an idea of where all the time seems to go; Basically the preparation goes like this; install full length cable; find out actual require length and cut appropriately; add braiding, add heatshrink x 2, print and attach label, add another heatshrink, strip 10mm of insulation, crimp on 10-8 battery ring terminal (I have to post a pic of the crimpers you need to use for battery terminals; they're, well, big ), slide the last heatshrink you added down over the crimped connector; slide the other 2 over each end of the braiding and then shrink all heatshrink and the label. That's just for one cable...

The battery isolator was a compromise between the affordability of the standard FIA master switch and the 'how can it cost that" much non affordability of things like the Cartek solid state battery isolators. The key thing is that the isolator is remotely switched so I don't have to run dirty great big battery cables into the cockpit and then back out again. The isolator is turned on or off using simple low current momentary action switches - I'll be mounting these in the small panel on my centre console.

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Next job was to sort out a mistake I'd made with the wiring to the centre console; basically I'd not provided any spare capacity and I'd forgotten about the wiring needed for the wipers so I took out the loom runing to the centre console and then recreated it. This was around a 3 hour job but to be honest it was worth it as I've now got some spare capacity in the loom, the split of the loom from the Mastercell end is now much neater etc so I didn't really mind...

After sorting out the centre console wiring it was time to create the output looms. Each Powercell provides up to 10 outputs which are split across 2 multi-way connectors. Simple enough but I also needed to provide "tell tale" feeds to the DASH which meant some slicing 'n' dicing was required. Taking the sidelights feed as an example the basic process was to cut the feed about 10cm away from the Powercell connector; add a label; add a butt-splice connector complete with a feed to the dash; crimp the connector. Once I'd done this for each tell tale I then braided the loom, heat shrunk the braid and then finally added another heatshrink over the top of the butt splices.

In the picture below the Powercell is the box on the left and you can just see the 2 sub looms that provide the DASH power and tell tales:

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With that done it was time to install the rear Powercell. The length of the pre-supplied parts of the loom meant that the most sensible location was over the aperture where the rear NS speaker would normally be. Fortunately this is one of the few flat bits of metal in the Clio so I was able to simply mount the Powercell (again via rivnuts) directly to the plate:

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Then it was time to do the output looms from the rear Powercell - done in the same way as the front except that one of the looms was divided into 3 groups; one traveling to the rear of the car where I suspect the ECU will be going, another to the rear of he car but containing spare (not assigned) outputs and finally one feed for the fuel pump. The other output loom was simply run straight to the back of the car because it will be responsible for providing power to the rear light clusters.

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Then I ran out of consumables I now need some more heat shrink, some more braid, some more battery crimp connectors etc so I finished the weekend off by installing the cable tie bases which allowed me to then use releasable cable ties to get the various looms tied into position. This is very much the "first fix" so there'll be intermediate cable ties as well and 2 more looms from the rear to the front of the car.

 

[Mike T]

[smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif] [smilie=bowdown.gif]

 

[v6Max]

Thanks guys

 

[v6Max]

Ok I missed last weeks update and this weeks will be somewhat shorter than normal because I've not got much done due to real life making an unwelcome intrusion!

The first fix of the wiring was absolutely, finally, definitely finished the weekend before last and I'm pretty happy with the end result with it looking nice and tidy. I still can't believe just how much of a difference going to a CANbus solution has made. I've a largish crate in the garage that contains 90% of the old loom with the other 10% still lurking down at H's - the new loom would fit back in the small(ish) cardboard box it was supplied in.

To give you some idea of what the system has actually meant in terms of a reduction in both the weight and complexity of the loom - the OEM main loom connection to the rear of our cars runs under the car and is something in the region of 60 wires in a bundle. Then there are other sub-looms running to the rear from the front of the car in the inside. ISIS has allowed me to reduce this to a total of 10 wires with 7of those being purely for delivery of information back to the DASH.

The programmer for the system turned up last week and all credit to the Littlefuse guys; they promised it would be free and it was which reduces the total cost of the solution to below 1k.

This weekend was supposed to be bulkhead fabrication time but personal issues meant that I only spent about 3 hours on it in the end. The bulkhead in my car is a real challenge due to the roll cage. There is a large X shaped section immediately behind the seats and attached to this there is another X shaped section that rises from the rear suspension turrets and then on each side a further 2 tubes running from the turrets - in other words there's an awful lot of pipework in there.

This is challenging for the obvious reason that any bulkead needs to accomodate these various tubes (which are all travelling at different angles) and the other reason that any bulkhead has to actually fit through the pipe work so that you can actually install it. Measuring it is also very difficult because there's not a lot of room! Fortunately my side windows are not there at the mo so with some stretching and cursing I was able to thread my head, 2 arms and a tape measure in through the gap between the tubes and do some measuring.

It quickly became obvious that is was simply not going to be possible to accurately measure, mark-up and cut a bulkhead around the pipe work so a slightly different solution was needed; In the end a compromise had to be made and this means that my bulkhead will actually travel at a steep angle from the structural beam across the top of the engine bay to the top of the X section behind the seats. 2 panels either side will then enclose the tubes passing from the rear turrets to the X section.

The gaps between the cage tubing and the b-pillars and the roof will be taken up with the roll cage padding so in the end the job was simplified - well to some extent! The main bulkhead needed to be measured and cut and this was done yesterday and I also made the cut out for the acrylic panel which will then be let in and will sit on a rebate (plunge router and expensive rebating bit on its way to me).

I went back to plywood as the material of choice using 9mm section which will allow the 4mm acrylic panel to sit in the rebate and still have plenty of material to bolt it to. The other reason I went for 9mm was that the 4mm and even 6mm section didn't seem stiff enough. There is an inevitable weight penalty with this size but the finished part is not very heavy at all especially with the dirty great big hole in it for the acrylic panel.

The rear of the bulkhead (i.e. the bit in the engine compartment) will be covered in a product called reflect-a-gold which is a light weight, self-adhesive heat shield. Some bold claims are being made about it but basically it can withstand 850degrees and will reflect back 80% of the heat that reaches it...

The front of the bulkhead is more of a challenge but it looks like I've found a supplier of automotive alcantara - so it's likely I'll cover it in black alcantara which should enable me to make a nice job and won't dramatically increase the weight of the panel.

The other challenge I face before I get to do the finishing jobs on the bulhead is how to attach it - you can't drill the cage - even sleeving drilling and sleeving is not something I'd want to entertain with a safety critical component. I won't glue the paneling in place because I like to be able to remove things where possible - I think I've got a solution but we will see.

Those of you who have been watching the Group Buy on the 2 piece discs from Compbrake already now what a balls-up this is turning into, those of you who don't know take a look. This is pretty much par for the course to be honest; I've had similar experiences with a whole range of suppliers doing both the Clio and the 205. Sometimes you really do wonder how this "industry" functions at all.

With the Compbrake/disc issue I took every sensible precaution that I thought I could; the parts were ordered months in advance of the time I would need them, they were ordered following extensive phone discussions with the suppliers covering lead time, cost etc, I sent them an OEM disc to take the measurements from and yet they still made them wrong, took 2 weeks longer to deliver them than promised and then despite promising to collect them on Friday manage to send Parcelforce to the wrong address. Seriously this is not atypical...

Anyway enough moaning - this week should see the arival of the CNC router from Germany - with typical teutonic efficiency the machine was completed last Friday as promised some 2 months ago - that should give me something to do in the evenings when I'm not working on the car! Should also be getting the Trophy spoiler this week as well which I need in order to finalise the fitting of the pins that will hold the lightweight tailgate in place.

 

[v6Max]

Received a call from the people working on the engine today - went something along the lines of:

Them "Hi Max"
Me "Hi, hows it going"
Them "Well we've got the engine stripped and there's a problem"
Me "Should I come down"
Them "Yes - probably best"

So I jump in the car and get down to the workshop were I'm greeted by the encouraging site of activity around the engine but then the phrase "bore wear" is mentioned along with "too much" and "especially for a 50k engine" followed by "can anyone smell petrol"...

It would seem I have bore wash, well not me personally but the car. The oil stank of petrol and several of the cylinder liners were showing signs of excessive wear - you can feel it with your finger which is not a good sign!

Looks like I need to have the block bored and honed and then 6 new pistons. The boring and honing won't be too much but 6 new pistons may be and I/we await the call from various potential suppliers with anticipation.

The likely cause is the ECU fault which ultimately is responsible for this entire chain of events - we suspect that the car was locked in cold start enrichment and had been merrily throwing Shell's finest down the cylinders as fast as it could.

I try to remain positive!

 

[v6Max]

Cheers TIm.

I should know more next week and there is the potential that if we end up going for a 3rd party supplier for the pistons we could change the design slightly and increase the compression ratio.

 

[Mike T]

or decrease it and accidently slip a turbo in!

 

[v6Max]

Ok - updates have been somewhat lacking recently and the reason has been that I've been banging my head literally and figuratively trying to solve the thorny issue of a bulkhead for the car.

So the challenge, just to give some context: changes to the induction on the engine mean that the engine covers will no longer be useable. Having driven the car around without the covers on once before I already knew that this was not something that I'd want to do too often so some kind of bulkhead would be needed. The problems with any bulkhead design would be a) the cage, b) the cage and c) the bl**dy cage; al those pipes traveling at different angles and restricting how, when and where bits can actually be fitted.

Over the last 3 weeks I've decided on a "final solution" probably 4 times, cut my way through a not inconsiderable amount of the Earth's reserves of wood and sworn and awful lot. Finally (I think) I've got a workable solution so without further ado here goes...

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The bulkhead is made from 9mm WBP plywood which is strong enough to support its own weight but not so thick that it adds a whole load of weight and can't be "encouraged" around the various bits of pipework. It's divided, horizontally, into 2 sections to allow it to pass between the pipework that forms the x-section behind the seats.

The lower section has a large cutout in it which will be "glazed" - this was done simply to keep the weight down and to also increase the flexibility of it which is required because it's a bit of tight squeeze getting it into the car. The lower section also has the bottom part of the cutout for the main window which meant that the marking up and cutting had to be fairly accurate to ensure that once the lower and upper sections were joined together everything lined up.

The upper section was the part which caused the most problems because it needs to accommodate 4 tubes, have a curve in the top that follows the roof curve fairly closely and needs a large cutout for the window. I made the upper art twice this weekend - having made a mistake with the 1st one that didn't become obvious until I was already 4 hours into the "build".

If you look at the photos you'll see that there's plenty of clearance room around the panels where pipe work passes through them - this is intentional and when finished you won't see the gaps because they'll be filled by roll cage padding. The reason they are there is because the cage is not in the car symetrically (not surprising), to get the upper part in you need the "play" the clearance gives you and finally because I don't have a milling machine and can't hold a drill at exactly 30 degrees x and 45 degrees y.

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Fixing the bulkhead in is also a challenge - you can't simply drill a hole into the cage and then whack a self-tapper in (well you can but that would be very, very bad) so another solution is required. The best I could come up with given a 1 month waiting time for alloy brackets from the States was exhaust clamps. By drilling a rebate into the rear of the bulkhead I've been able to attach the bulkhead in 4 places. The photo below shows how the mounting works...

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I don't want the perspex to sit on top of the bulkhead instead I want it to sit flush with the top surface so the solution has been to use a router with a bearing guided rebater to cut a rebate into the bulkhead a detail of which is shown below:

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The rebate is about 11m wide which is plenty of room for the ally bolts that will clamp the perspex in position.

Next week I'll actually do the finishing jobs which include installing the perspex, covering the front of bulkhead and installing the cage padding.

Other news; the CNC mill turned up on Friday - hopefully I should have some stuff to show in the near future (going to be doing some test cuts in CF and will run off some Clio logos). New pistons should be with me in around 6 weeks - we've gone for custom made ones given that they have been quoted at HALF what Renault want

And finally...

2 photos that give a flavour of my last 3 weekends consisting, as they have, of mainly sawdust, various power tools and lots of noise

A days worth of dust
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The aftermath
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[k1ano]

Great work on the bulkhead Max - the exhaust clamp idea is good outside the box thinking

Martin

 

[SimonLM]

Any chance you could send me the details for the piston supplier, mines suffured the same problem I think with bore wash because of the over fueling.

 

[v6Max]

Ok, updates have been, shall we say, a little intermittent recently due to the complications of a busy work life and a dysfunctional personal one getting in the way of things, however this week has seen a return to some normality.

First job this weekend was to finish the final prep on the bulkhead so it can go away fro flocking - the original plan had been to cover the back in heatshield and the front in alacantara but lets just say that of all the jobs in the area of car preparation that I may consider for a future career, trimming is definitely not one of them. The net result of my aborted attempt to trim the bulkhead was a load of time over the last week using a variety of unpleasant chemicals to remove large quantities of contact adhesive and then more time with the sander and filler to get the bulkhead parts into decent shape for flocking - with that done it was on to the next job...

Remember that some time ago I wrote about having to sand off the old adhesive from the rear windows and finally this week I got around to preparing the metal work and laying down some high build primer. Not a particularly difficult job but patience is required to get the masking just right and then get the primer on. I've literally just ordered a bunch of paint related consumables so that I can finish the job, if the weather plays ball, next weekend. I can't actually put the windows back in until the bulkhead comes back from flocking but getting this prep out the way now should mean that it's a days work to get the bulkhead in and then the windows in and at that point it may actually look like I'm getting somewhere.

Next job was to fit the bonnet pins for the tailgate - I didn't want to fit a normal boot lock so bonnet pins seemed like the logical solution. Fortunately the existing holes in the body work for the rubber buffers for the tailgate are the right size to take a standard bonnet pin. Anyway this is one of those jobs that I can see people may fancy doing themselves so I'll give some detail because although on the surface it sounds simple there are some little gotchas that can ruin your day...

The main challenge is that irrespective of whether you use a normal tailgate or a lightweight one you need to get a slot accurately made in the tailgate surface through which the pin tops can pass. The problem is that the tailgate is formed from 2 skins with around a 10 cm gap in between them - even if you can mark the internal surface accurately it's unlikely that you'll be able to accurately drill through both skins and if you don't you have a problem. The easiest way round this is to do it this way; First take the existing rubber buffers out of the body work, then bolt the pins in temporarily, use a hole saw to drill out the area on the tailgate that rests on the rubber buffers, extend the bonnet pins so that when you lower the tailgate you can hear/feel them hitting the inside of the outer surface, stick a small blob of grease on the top of each pin - try and get this as close as possible to the TDC of the pin and don't use too much, lower the tailgate making sure both pins touch the inside of the outer surface, lift the tailgate. At this point you should have a small blob of grease on each side showing exactly where the pin hits the tailgate so now you can drill knowing that you're in the right place... If you've got something like a Dremel than the neatest way to do this part of the job is to use the flexible shaft and use a small diameter bit to drill through the skin. Then working from the outside of the tailgate use a spiral cutter, file, cutoff wheel etc to gradually make the hole into a slot - test fitting frequently. What you're aiming for is for the tailgate to shut without hitting the pins but without making the slot/hole enormous. Once that's done you can attach the locking mechanism - the best way to do this is with them oriented horizontally - if you try and fit them vertically you'll have problems with the curvature of the tailgate. The locking mechanism(s) have three fixing points and are usually supplied with self-tapping screws and some plates which the screws go into - my personal choice was to use 4mm stainless bolts with nylocs on the inside - it was an akward job but I prefer the look and it I can be confident they wont shake themselves back out.

Next I did the final fix of the spoiler - I'd managed to get hold of a duck-tale type spoiler and the combination of that and the lightweight tailgate meant that some more time with the Dremel was required in order to get a decent fit. There were 6 bolts to hold the spoiler in place and only 2 of those actually lined up with the holes in the tailgate. Simple enough process to get the spoiler in place using the 2 bolts, mark off the where the other holes needed adjustment, spoiler off, Dremel out, spoiler back on and the job was done.

The last thing I did was to get the dash top out of the car - I decided that I may as well have that flocked as well, that way I don't end up with a multitude of different surface finishes inside the car.

Other news, well as some of you may have seen in the Group Buy thread, Compbrake have managed to exceed my patience threshold, I ordered 2 piece discs from them back in early January, supplied them an OEM disc for measurement purposes and paid up front and here we are in late May and the second set they've sent me are still wrong; the discs are too thin and the holes in the bells in the wrong place.

I won an auction on eBay for a compressor so yesterday I borrowed a mate with a trailer and went off to Essex to collect - so for the princely sum of £200 I now have a 3hp 100 litre compressor. Should start to cut my power-tool costs and make some previously challenging jobs much easier...

 

[Mike T]

stick a charger on the compressor - be up to 4.hp in no time!!

 

[v6Max]

stick a charger on the compressor - be up to 4.hp in no time!!

Hmm - I like this idea

 

[Mike T]

bet I have a spare somewhere - I'll look in the boost boxes!