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My 350i By
Mick Barrett I purchased the car in September 2000 form a guy in North West London. At the time of purchase it had just had a new ECU fitted at the TVR centre, Barnet, the passenger window did not work, nor did the electric mirrors.
After the test drive the right hand headlight refused to drop down and I discovered that there was no access hole to the underside. It appears that it was never cut out from new! On the way home the car started to run on four cylinders, which turned out to be a bad repair to the Fuel Injectors Resistor block on the inner wing. The window mech was also a wiring fault as was the headlight.
The mirror motors were burnt out and completely useless. However by doing a bit of detective work and working along the lines that an awful lot of the bits used in the car were from the Rover SDi I tracked some mirror motors down at a local breakers. I had to replace the front springs, shocks and bushes when I bought the car, along with a new Stainless exhaust. Over the winter period myself and a good friend made some jigs (measured off the old exhaust) and fabricated new Stainless Steel exhaust manifolds from high grade Stainless Steel (I work for a specialist fabrication company), which were then mirror polished and fitted. The manifolds fitted about as perfect as you can get. As I said before we used the old manifolds to make a jig, with a full set of holes to represent each cylinder head and a carefully positioned set of plates for the tubes to sit against. Once you have removed the manifolds they are actually quite flat with all of the tubes sitting in the same plane. We cut the individual
pieces and tacked them together and I took them home and fitted them.
I marked a couple of places where they were or would foul the chassis
and engine mounting (no more than a bout 5mm) took them back to work and
we adjusted them to suit. After fully Tig welding the pieces we had to
stress relieve them, then they were polished and stress relieved again.
The only mod I had to do on final fitting was to open some of the holes
out by 1mm, as despite the stress relieving they had still pulled enough
to make them very difficult to get the bolts in. Actually removing the old manifolds isn't that difficult a job, although it was necessary to remove the off side engine mount completely and let the nearside mount go. I then had to jack the engine up as far as it would go to get the manifolds through. It is also necessary to remove the starter motor from the off side. We tried to make the manifolds so that they were as far away as possible from the chassis tubes, starter motor and clutch slave cylinder etc, but we still ended up with some tight fits. I had to file 3mm off of the main cable pole on the starter motor to ensure that if there was any movement the manifold wouldn't cause the battery to dead short. I think that the biggest problem fitting the new manifolds was keeping all the individual gaskets in the correct place, whilst positioning the manifold and getting the bolts in. I also used some exhaust jointing paste to make sure that they didn't leak after assembly.
I replaced the front discs with vented grooved discs and new callipers, overhauled the rear callipers and fitted fast road pads, with DOT 5.1 fluid. A friend also re-trimmed the interior, no including the seats, as the original light Grey had been painted dark blue! A new wooden Momo steering wheel and Ford Granada Scorpio steering column completed the renovation. I am a mechanical
engineer by trade although I now work in a design office, so I found most
of the work fairly straight forward, and I have access to welding equipment
and a full range of tools. I will be pleased to help if anybody wants
more information on anything that I have done. |
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