Technically, this fully qualifies as another schoolboy error, but I'm calling it a leak test.....
I've been continuing my testing with the hydraulic system operating. I say 'operating' but the car is up on axle stands and without wheels so I'm not really able to test the 'bvh' side of things at all really. Same for the steering. The rack is fitted but not the steering wheel. And the linkage to the height correctors is off the car so I'm not testing the height positions!
All I'm REALLY doing is flowing hydraulic fluid through some of the system and looking for leaks. And it's been very successful. I found two leaks!
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| Gearbrain pipes to gearbox |
Tracking a telltale drips under the car, I traced one leak back to a pipe joint on the left side of the engine bay. It was this little bugger - from the brake 'tulip'.
It just required the joint nipping up and that seems to have fixed it. The other leak was more of puzzle though. Drips were appearing on the rear left side of the engine compartment - further back than the first leak I had tackled.
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| You can just see the drip |
It was very hard to see any signs of a drip on the shiny heat shield. In fact it seemed to be coming from behind the heat shield?
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| Tracing the path of the drip |
The wet hand test (grope around with your hand and look to see if it comes back wet) paid off. The leak was coming from the underside of my 'gear brain' - the hydraulic gear selector. I'd stripped and rebuilt the gear brain back in April (you can find out about that HERE), and so my first worry was that i'd buggered that up.
As it turned out, the leak seemed to be coming from where the pipes to the gearbox join the gear brain. This is a run of five pipes joined together which, at both ends, terminate on a single plate fixing.
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| Gear brain to gearbox pipes |
It's a fairly specialised run of pipes (though reproductions are now available) and I didn't want it damaged. For that reason I didn't bolt it to the gear brain before the engine was dropped in. I relied on being able to thread it into the bay after the engine was fitted. There looked to be LOADS of room to do just that.
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| Gear brain - alone in the engine bay |
With the engine in, I was able to weave the pipe back in along the side of the engine bay, but what I hadn't bargained on was that all the space around the gear brain had suddenly disappeared and I couldn't bolt on the ends! The fixing was on the bottom of the gearbrain - and one of the nuts was behind the pipes, facing towards the engine. The blind side. And on a LHD car, if the heater and steering column is fitted, you can barely see - let alone touch - the fitting.
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| It's that bit - right there |
And while you can see it, it's no easier to get under it on a RHD car apparently.
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| Enzo Pound: a fellow sufferer |
I didn't have to worry about the heater box or steering column, but with my big hands I found it very difficult to fit the sealing plate, pipes, washers, nuts and bolts needed to fix the pipes. I had to squeeze my hands between other pipes and could not manoeuvre them once through. On more than one occasion I dropped a nut, washer or bolt. Or all three.
Even when finger tight, there was zero room between pipes and chassis to fit a socket back there. With some careful setting up, I was able to get a spanner on the nuts and move them a *fraction" of a turn, before turning the spanner over and turning them another *fraction* of a turn....
I've since found several other photos of engine refits and the pipe run is fixed to the gear brain and left dangling until the engine/ gearbox is in place. I wish I'd done it that way......
Now with a leak, my assumption was that I'd simply not tightened things up sufficiently and so with a heavy heart I applied myself to more fractional turns. However over the last couple of days the leak has persisted and I concluded that as well as dropping nuts, bolts and washers when fitting, one of the little rubber plate seals must have fallen out. The only way to check that a seal HADN'T fallen out was to remove those damn pipes.
So.... with an even heavier heart - knowing I would also have to refit the pipes - I set about their removal.
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| Towel for the inevitable mess.... |
And this is what I immediately noticed!!!
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| Eureka moment! |
Can you see it? All the rubber crush seals are there in the sealing plate, but the holes in the plate don't line up with the holes in the pipe end. So they don't line up with the gear brain. Here's the same photo again.....
With the holes and seals not aligning, fluid was able to leak from some orifices of the gear brain. Other orifices were blocked. If I'd gotten as far as road testing, that would have buggered up gear selection. I wonder if i would have focused on that joint and plate in that scenario?
All in all I was pleased that this was such a simple (though stupid) problem and fix. All I had to do was to flip the plate over - and double check that all the holes aligned.
Yesterday I shared my mistake in the technical group on Facebook as I am doing here - just for the shared learning.
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| Mea culpa...... |
Okay - so it WAS a schoolboy error, I admit it....but I still got no sympathy from a couple of the seasoned experts there - but did learn that the trick is to make a special spanner - just for this job.
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| Fellow sufferers and expert advice |
By this stage I'd gone and bought myself a special set of teeny-tiny spanners with offset ends.
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| Small spanner with an offset end |
Using one of these made it marginally easier to refit the pipe - though the thin spanner didn't give a lot of purchase on the nuts and bolts so I'm still not surety pipes are on as tight as they could/ should be and will have to monitor for further drips. I might have to try and think about the design of that special tool as this run of pipes may need to come off at some future point.
