Kinked Brake Pipe and Water Rail

When I fitted the brake pipes originally, I managed to get a kink in one of the pipes and even though I had been able to sort of get it out, it had been bothering me.  A while ago I noticed that I had actually got 2 kinks in the same pipe so it really had to be replaced for the sake of safety.  I also don't know if the braking performance might have been reduced so it failed the IVA test or even if the examiner might have failed it on the kink.   Anyway, it was time to change the pipe.

Today I set about removing the old pipe.  The picture below shows how horrible and gnarly it was.  It didn't look neat the way it was run either.

I decided to run it a slightly different route.  Instead of going round the drivers foot well and back in and under the cross member, I thought I would go straight in to the foot well and keep it up out of the way before going in to the master cylinder.  This also meant that the run had less corners so fewer bends in the pipe.

This shows the pipe at the front fixed to one of the front chassis uprights and then joining the flexible pipe to the caliper.  It was here I found one of the kinks.  No kinks here now.

This picture shows the run through the drivers foot well.  As you can see it is a much straighter run.  You can see it p-clipped to the chassis rail on the other side so well out of the way of my feet.

The job took me all of about an hour to do and was not the onerous task I thought it might be.  Accordingly I had a bit more time in the garage to do some more things.  I decided that I would fit the Raceline water rail to the engine.  It seemed very straight forward so I hope I have done it right.  It is 3 bolts and a gasket at one end and a bracket at the other to fit it.  The filler neck has 2 bolts and a gasket and a thermostat and that is it other than for a few little plug screws.

This is before.

This is after.  Not much else to say really.

I also removed the crank breather box, on the advice of GBS, and covered the hole with this nicely machined blanking plate.

I am really at a bit of a loose end now.  The next big task is to fit the engine but I can't do that until I can fit the gearbox to the engine and I can't do that until I have done the gearbox mod to move the clutch actuation arm into the right position.  This can be achieved with a modified thrust bearing that you can buy from Westfield Sports Cars for about £70, or you can do a modification with a bolt.  I don't have the right tools to create the thread for the bolt so I am taking the gearbox up to GBS when I go on my next parts run and they are going to do the mod for me for about half the price of the modified thrust bearing.  Unfortunately, I can't go until the third week in September, the week after the Stafford show, so I will only be doing some tinkering in the mean time.