Playing the Sardines Game

Did I mention that space is getting tight on this Monza?

Case in point are the headlamps. Sure, it came with a nice four-lamp system, but these days you can get HID headlamps and they give much better light (which is great since I'm not getting any younger and I need all the light I can get at night!). We put HID lamps on the Manta a few years ago and that gave the "fishbowls" a new lease of life. With the Monza I thought I'd go one better and give it HID low and high beams, so I need to find a home for two HID kits.

On the driver's side it should be pretty easy as there's a reasonable amount of space available. On the passenger (right) side it's a different story, with the injection airbox and air conditioning pipes crowding in on the available space. Add to that, I'm trying to mount an electrical item that generates some 23,000V so I need to be careful not to get it directly in the flow of water when it rains (yes, I know the ballasts are waterproof, but would you trust it?).

I did a little measuring on the passenger side this evening and found a solution that I think will work. It's not very pretty, but it does miss existing components and I think meets the "not underwater" requirements. What do you think?

View from the side. The small box on the floor of the inner wing is the main beam lamp ballast and the larger one hiding behind the airbox is the dipped/main beam lamp ballast

View from the top. You almost can't see the dipped/main ballast and the main-only ballast looks reasonably neat

Tomorrow I'll think about the driver's side and then it's back to the endless wiring while I try to make this look like a factory installation!

Even the Arches Are Full

This Monza rebuild makes me realise how simple a Manta is. Think about it, I've spent the weekend putting wheelarch liners in the front arches, but to do that I had to first mount the oil cooler in the right hand wheel well and the charcoal cannister in the left wheel well, and while I was there I re-clipped the brake hoses to ensure both the brake hoses and the ABS sensor cable missed all the rotating bits at both locks. Anyway, enough whining, here's the progress.

First order of the day was to trim the right side wheelarch liner that I put in yesterday. The liner fitted well enough, but it got a little close to the top of the strut and the oil cooler piping. It also hung a little lower than I liked in the front, so that it would have stuck down into the airflow instead of being shielded by the airdam. I thought about that one a little before I started to cut the liner back. The liner actually bent forwards into the airflow, so there's an argument that it might have been designed that way to scoop air up and over the inside of the liner to ensure airflow through the wheelarch. Try as I may, I can't believe they would have thought about that!

Upper part of the liner showing the trimming near the spring (left)

Front of the liner trimmed, just missing the lower oil cooler pipe

With the wheel reinstalled, you can see the tyre misses by a country mile

OK, so with the liner trimmed on the right side, it was off to the driver's side to repeat the job, but first I had to site the charcoal cannister. For those of you in Europe, charcoal cannisters have been required fitments on cars since (I think) 1966 to prevent hydrocarbon emissions from fuel tanks. The one in the Manta is clipped to the inner wing on the left side behind the headlamp and the one in the Monza was mounted to a modified washer bottle bracket, holding the tank between the washer bottle and the engine. Of course, that was all well and good right up to the point where I fitted ABS and had to swap the washer bottle for one that missed the ABS pump.

Luckily there were two solutions I found; first was for a Gulf countries Senator A / Monza and the other was for an Omega A / Senator B. Interestingly, both put the tank in the left side wheelarch as far as I could tell, so that seemed like the obvious place to put it on my cars, especially with the engine bay being so full. Ah, but there was a twist - I was using wheelarch liners, so I had to fit the tank between the front part of the liner and the back part of the fog lamp, there really isn't much space left in this car for any other accessory I want to add!

So it all went smoothly enough, right up to the point I thought about how I was going to secure the tank to the frame rail. Opel say to use two of the nut inserts that they use on fuel pump assemblies, but to do that I'd need to punch a hole a bit like an Opel Blitz and 14.5mm in diameter. I actually have a 14.5mm punch from RS Components so I thought this was going to be a simple punch followed by a little Dremel work to open out the "wings" of the Blitz and I'd be done. Yes, but how on earth do I get the bloody punch in place when I can't get my hand to the back of the area where the hole needs to go? Yup, there was the problem. I'm sure it's possible to punch the holes if you've got a chassis rail on the bench, but by the time it's in the car you can kiss that idea goodbye.

In the end I managed to get the thing to fit, but Andy and any other self-respecting engineer out there is going to cringe... The lower (front) mounting hole I could actually just get to with my long 13mm spanner, so a bit of masking tape on the end of it to prevent the M8 nut falling off the spanner and I could just thread it on and tighten it right up. The upper (rearmost) mounting hole was a lot more difficult because, try as I may, I couldn't get the spanner trick to work. I thought about it for a little bit longer and realised that I had another solution. The hole in the bracket was just big enough to take an M10 screw and I could easily open up the 9mm hole to a 10mm tapped hole with an M10 tap. It was into sheet metal, but more importantly it was into 2 layers of sheet metal, giving me enough thread to hold the screw in with.

And that's how we ended up. The front mounting screw is M8 with a screw and nut. The rear screw is M10 and screws into the tapped chassis rail. Since the tank's so light and held closely to the chassis rail, I think that's going to work for us.

Charcoal cannister finally mounted in the inner wing

The rest of the liner install was the same as the other side, with the only gotcha being that one of the mounting screws hit the brake servo (it's a real tight fit on later Monzas) so I had to cut the screw down to miss it. What would I do without a Dremel tool?

Avoiding the rust

It's pouring down outside so it's time to get back on the Monza; I thought I'd give the electrics a miss and instead put in the wheelarch liners.

Achim got these for me from Lokari in Germany, they're the chaps Bernd Bannier used to buy his from when he supplied them, but now he's stopped selling them we just go direct. I've got a set of these in the silver Manta in the UK and I'm slowly adding them to all the cars.

I've had the liners sitting in the arches for a while (they hold themselves in without screws, they fit that well) to allow them to mould themselves better to the car's shape; they come slightly folded so they need to relax back to the original shape if they're going to fit properly.

The instructions are in German, which is fine if you're Achim or Louis, but crap for the rest of us. I read them slowly and got the general idea, then threw the instructions away. Here's how I did it...

First I put them in the arch and got them aligned as best I could. They fit really well as I've said, so it's not that hard to do. The instructions suggest securing the liner to the arch lip using some S clamps they supply, but they look awful and the liner fits nicely behind the arch lip anyway.

Next I got a 3mm drill and drilled a hole through the dimples on the liner that mark where you put the screws. On the Monza right side liner there were four dimples.

- One dimple was aimed directly up into the footwell
- One up into the area next to the heater blower
- One into the chassis rail
- One into the area next to the rear-inboard air cleaner bracket

The good news was that the only one you could see from the engine bay was the one next to the aircleaner bracket, and I decided to put the securing screw in from the engine bay side and use a sheet metal nut to hold it to the liner.

The only other points that the liner looked like it needed securing was at the wheelarch lip, with one at the lower front corner and one at the rear. When Andy did the liners on the Manta he used 3/16" (4.6mm) pop rivets and I think that's the best way with the Monza. Until the liner goes in for the final time (i.e. the car is finished) I'm using a couple of temporary screws so I don't end up drilling pop rivets out all the time.

Just one hole at the front and one at the rear of the arch should hold it

OK, with the 3mm pilot holes drilled I had a look for some screws that would fit and found some nice black screws I got from Halfords in the UK that had a big head on them to better hold the plastic with. They needed 3.5mm holes so I just opened them out with a 3.5mm drill, with a 4mm drill used on the screw hole that was to come in from the engine bay.

Next was a quick break with the paint can (no point in having rusty holes!) and then a tart up with the Dinitrol 4941 black underbody sealer to seal up the parts that were looking a little dodgy.

Tarting up the underseal...

Once that lot was dry it was just a simple case of refitting and attaching to the holes I'd already made.

Finished liner install - front side. I think the holes are for the (optional) self levelling suspension pump

There are a couple of places I need to trim the liner. I guess the liner is correct but our car has 200,000 miles on it and I'm sure things have moved in that time. Should be pretty simple to clean it up with a dremel tool.

The liner fits a little close to the spring at the back. It's actually because the liner's not exactly square on the strut tower but the rest of it fits against the wheelarch so I suspect it's because these were designed for the Rekord instead of the Monza and the two have different strut angles.

Lower front edge - too close to the oil cooler pipes

That'll do me for today. Tomorrow is the driver's side but that comes with a bit of a twist, I need to find a new home for the charcoal cannister before I fit the arch.

Frameless

Remember the A pillar angle problems I've had with the silver Manta? When we first put the car together we couldn't get the windows to fit anywhere near properly, so we compared the silver Manta to Jo's Exclusive and realized we needed to bend the A pillars upwards. Well after Andy did the necessary bending he managed to get the doors and windows to fit, but they were never quite right as you'd need to slam the doors to get them to close, and that just felt like a recipe for breaking the windows. It was no fault of Andy's, I did the measurements but they still seemed to be out. Add that to the fact that the driver's door skin started splitting at the top because of the pressure from the window, and I knew I had something serious still to do. I got myself a digital inclinometer from Amazon and measured up the shell and orange Manta here.

Measuring the A pillar angle, thank God for magnetic bases..

Last month we went back to the UK for a week and I was determined to spend a couple of days on the silver Manta to work out how far out the A pillars were. I measured both Mantas (Jo's and the silver one) and compared the numbers to the ones I had taken in the US, it was interesting...

The orange Manta in the US and Jo's Exclusive were pretty close, with the right side of the orange Manta being a little off (as it had had a shunt on that side at some point in the past) and the silver Manta was surprisingly only a couple of percent off them. Even more surprisingly, the brand new shell was way off the numbers for all the other cars. I had to think about that one, and I'm assuming that the shell is different because it doesn't actually have a suspension to sit on, it's sitting on a chassis dolly on its jacking points. If it was built up into a car and sitting on its suspension it would probably bend under the weight and match the others.

Anyway, back to the silver Manta. With it being only a couple of percent out, I still had to work out why the windows weren't fitting. Andy luckily had some Manta side glasses in stock, so I grabbed them out and fitted them into the upper window rubber to see where things weren't fitting.

Passenger window - the gap was just at the top/front of the glass

Driver's window - the gap here is the lower front

So the gaps didn't look too bad, and I figured I'd actually have a chance if I just bent the upper window channel and filled the gap between the body and channel with Dum Dum, there'd be only a couple of mils to fill anyway.

I started on the passenger door. First job was to pull off the upper window rubber, unscrew the channel and remove the A-pillar trim. The trim just needed re-sealing with Dum Dum and refitting, and then I bent the upper window channel to lower the upper front edge, just where you can see it misses in the first photo. Then it just needed Dum Dum-ing along the upper edge (with more on the bit I'd just bent) and screwing back into place.

Now the channel is adjustable, so I needed to set the window and channel so that the two met properly, and I decided to do it by getting the window to fit into the opening with a consistent 1/2" gap all around the edge (about the thickness of my fingers) and with the window fractionally inboard of the channel to ensure a good seal. If I had all that, then when I put the rubber channel back in it would all fit and seal.

Well that was the theory. I just couldn't get the window far enough back in the door to get the consistent gap all the way around the opening, and finally I worked out why. There's a guide that glues onto the bottom of the door glass, and that was fouling the rear window channel inside the door. From the look of it, it had been glued recently, and a quick call to Andy confirmed it. The guide glues onto the bottom of the window right at an angle in the bottom of the glass, but Andy had glued it about an inch further back, meaning I couldn't slide the window far enough back in the door. Rats.

I temporarily put in the spare glass he had and the window magically fitted. Perfect! Now all I needed was to break the hold the Araldite had on the glass or get a new piece of glass. Not an immediate problem, I moved onto the driver's side.

The driver's side went pretty much the same way as the passenger side, except that there was no problem with the guide on the bottom of the glass. There were a couple of gotchas though. First, the door lock was hitting the glass when the door was closed, causing a "clang" sound which wasn't very encouraging (that was cured by gently pulling the door skin away from the frame). Second, the door had been forced down due to the ill-fitting windows and I had to lift the back edge of the door to get it to hit the striker square on and close easily.

After a couple of hours of adjusting, I'm really proud of the door. It closes relatively easy (it is a Manta, after all, so you do need to be firm) and makes a nice clunk rather than a clang. And, best of all, after spraying the closed door with water for a few minutes I now know it's waterproof!

The car still needs more TLC, but the scary stuff is hopefully coming to an end. The paint has cracked in a couple of places because of all the door slamming and so it's got to go and see Keith the painter again, but for the first time we have working doors and windows.

Now if only the alarm and central locking worked!

On, not in

With the re-foamed seats in the Monza it was only a matter of time before we did the same to the Manta. The grey Recaros in the Manta felt like new in 1998 when I put them in, but that was over 100,000 miles ago and there wasn't much padding left in the base or the lower back.

I put the new seats in over the weekend (complete with heaters, of course!) and today's commute was the first we tried with them. The funny thing is that they look like they've got loads of support, but compared to the pre-refoamed seats you're definitely sitting *on* them now, rather than *in* them. Makes the first few corners quite exciting as you think you're about to roll off the side of the seats.

Re-strapped and foamed seat base, complete with heater controller and wiring

I guess it's like a new pair of glasses. Once you get used to them they're fine, but the first few outings are a lot more exciting than you were expecting!

In case you're wondering where the heater switches went - the centre console was the obvious choice

Overloaded (or, the case for a bigger dictionary)

There's a tendency to borrow words and give them whole new meanings in any industry, and the computer industry is world class at doing this. The problem is that there are so many branches of the computer industry all doing the same thing, you really can't discuss something with anyone outside your own little branch without creating misunderstandings.

Take a nice simple word like "provisioning" for example. If I were to talk about it to most of you, you'd think that I was talking about going down the supermarket to buy groceries for the week. In the computer industry it takes on a whole range of meanings.

I used to work in storage networking. There, provisioning meant making network disk shares that people could use. But if I use that word in my current job it means creating a user and adding all the security rights they might need. If we talk to John R, he'd probably think of configuring a phone line.

See what I mean? They all really mean "configuring" or "supplying something in a configured state".

This becomes a problem when you might want to buy (for example) a provisioning system (a computer program that would help you configure whatever it was you meant by provisioning). How do you make sure management understands what they're getting for their money?

One solution is to stop overloading words. If we gave different actions different names we'd all know what was going on.

For example, we could call one type of provisioning "erk" and another "pwill", then we'd be buying an erking or pwilling system, not just a provisioning system. A more universal system might erk and pwill (and even squee or gunge), but at least you'd know what you're getting. Isn't that easier?

The two most logical languages I know are German and Japanese, you can almost guarantee that there's a DIN or JIS standard for naming conventions that they use, and a court for arbitration when the same word is used twice...

International Events

It really annoys me how people complain that US news doesn't report on world events, preferring instead to send live reporters to the site of a broken water main in a nameless suburb. It's just not true; only yesterday on the 10 o'clock news they had a tragic human interest story about an albino squirrel from Dorking, Surrey, who was run over by a car. Admittedly they didn't fly over their top reporter to interview eye witnesses, but it is a start.

Repercussions...

We were on our way back from SEMA in Las Vegas last night and I was enjoying myself. We had the car loaded up with parts and chocolate from Louis and I'd just got to the point where the 92 joins 880. There was a BMW behind me on the on-ramp and I was determined to show him what an old Opel can do.

OK, so there's no point building up the suspense as you know something's going to happen... Going round the corner (slightly downhill, but fast) there was a thud from the back and the car shook, so I backed off a little until I'd worked out what had happened.

Clearly it wasn't a bottle of water shooting across the rear footwell (seems to be a female thing these days, you can't go anywhere without a bottle of water, and I'm afraid Jo's caught the disease), and it sounded a lot heavier than a bag moving around in the boot. We guessed it must've been something kicked up from the road, but I didn't remember seeing anything in the road ahead of me so I wasn't convinced.

The car felt fine and drove in a straight line without a problem, so we kept down to a reasonable 70 and got home. I was thinking that it must've been either a spring breaking, a shock blowing the gasket or maybe a bolt that holds the anti-roll bar shearing, but I'd check later to find out what it was.

We were both knackered after SEMA so it was later when I finally got the axle up in the air to see what was up, but I didn't have to look for long. The left rear spring (the corner that jumped the kerb first the other day) was broken at the bottom, I could feel both broken ends. Rats. Well, at least I had two spare sets, having bought one spare set recently when I realized I was down to just the single set.

Changing the springs is almost trivially easy, and I did it on the driveway rather than bringing it into the garage. First you loosen the wheel nuts and jack the car up as high as possible to get it on axle stands. Then take off the wheels and lower the axle until the shocks are fully extended; that will allow you to take off the shock lower screws easily. Next simply lower the axle right down and you can pull the springs out.

Well, that's the theory, but the left side spring fell out while I was lowering the axle and actually came out in three pieces! Checking the spring it looks like one of the breaks was last night, but the other one had to have been a few weeks ago, based on the surface rust that was starting and the dirt on the break. I wonder why I hadn't seen that after the accident? I had checked the ride height of both sides and it had been the same.

Left side spring - notice the shiny break on the left two pieces and the dull break on the right two...

The answer came when I had finished dropping the axle, the right side spring came out in two pieces too! The break was dull this time so it was again a break that had probably happened when it jumped the kerb, and that might explain why the car seemed level, it had matching breaks on each side.


Anyway, the new springs went in without a hitch and I took some time to treat the underside to a few Dinitrol underseal and cavity wax patches to help it through the winter. I also topped up the rear axle (maybe 100cc) to avoid an expensive axle rebuild in my future.

The rear looks a little high (its usual stance) but the ride is a whole lot better. It even seems reasonably flat in corners, which wasn't what I was expecting as Mantas always roll like you're on the high seas...

"That old car is really burning oil"

We were sitting at a set of traffic lights on Fremont Blvd on our way to an Indian hole-in-the-wall for a Dosa, behind an old Acura Integra and beginning to notice a smell of burning oil. I'm usually over-paranoid and always blame fuel and oil smells on the Opel, much to Jo's amusement, as generally it's someone else. Of course, this time I decided to skip the derision and blame the Integra.

Jo agreed, it had to be the Integra because, as soon as it got further away from us once the light went green, the smell went away. Simple. Bloody cars should be off the road...

Paranoia returned when we got to the restaurant and I sniffed the engine. Yup, burning oil. Crap, and tomorrow was a 100+ mile journey down to Laguna Seca for Jo's driving course.

I couldn't wait to get home and find the problem as I was expecting another weekend of rental cars. Jo couldn't wait to get home either as my conversation was mostly of what could be wrong with the car!

Back home we found the source of the smell - there was a nice brown streak along the bottom of the downpipes. At least it wasn't oil from a cracked gearbox casing from the off-road excursion.

On the topside of the engine I could see the problem, all around the valve cover it was black with oil, and the oil had leaked down the sides and back of the engine, making the bellhousing black too. The other thing I noticed was that the rearmost exhaust manifold bolt was missing, and that might explain some of the vibrations we'd been getting from the engine.

First course of action was to get the valve cover off and replace the gasket, as that must be the problem. I'd had slight leaks off the back of the valve cover ever since we put the 2.4 in back in 2002, but I thought I'd finally fixed that about a year ago... clearly not. I had the front left screw off (the one that holds the spark plug wire router on) and I was pulling off the one behind it when I realised the screw was loose. So was the back one behind that. and the rear one on the other side, and...

Yup, they were all loose, so loose that we had a slow oil leak that had just spread over a period of a few days until we noticed it as it hit the exhaust.

The problem with the 2.4 is that it's a bit of a buzzy engine. We had this one balanced, but I think I'll pay for the 0.1g tolerance next time as we've had a lot of screws loosening up over the 7 years it's been in. I had a case last year where the alternator bracket screws loosened off and the alternator stopped charging due to the poor ground that resulted, and the lost manifold bolt was another example.

Anyway, back with the Manta and I had the screws tightened up and Gunk out pretty quickly. We cleaned it off and dried the car and I've just returned from a long (7-8 mile) trip round the block to see if it's cured, and so far, touch wood, there's no signs of oil. Even if there's a slight leak still, it'll hold for the 200 mile weekend run and I'll replace the gasket on Sunday after the Grand Prix.

The interesting thing is that the slight vestiges of idle hunting has finally gone away. If you remember the last California Column in Manta Magic I was talking about my coil grounding problem, well that mostly fixed the weird idle effect, but lately it was more noticable again, especially returning to idle where it would drop to about 500 rpm before picking up. On the brief test drive that seems to have completely gone now.

I guess that's reasonable. If the valve cover was loose enough to let oil pour out, it was also loose enough to allow air in, and that constitutes an air leak, as that air could get into the intake through the PCV hose. Now the air leak's gone, the random weakening of the mixture would have stopped and the idle could stabilise again.

I wonder if it will stop the car starting on 3 cylinders too?

Tyres and shrubbery

I think I told some of you, but one of us backed the Manta over a kerb on an on-ramp and ended up in the bushes the day after the first rain of the season. I guess these things happen, but it would be nice if it didn't happen to us...

Actually, if truth be known, I'm thinking it might be the new tyres. I've bored most of you to death in the past about tyre compounds, but I really think this time it was down to those. We have a weird tyre size on the Manta at the moment (205/55x15) and, especially here, it's difficult to find anything decent in tyres for wheels smaller than 16". If I changed to the more normal 205/50x15 I'd be better served, but the Manta just doesn't ride well on 50 series tyres, not surprising for a car designed in the early 70's.

We used to be lucky, our first tyres on these wheels were Bridgestone S-03 Pole Position, and superb tyres they were too. They wore so quickly that they almost left black lines behind you, but they gripped way more than either of our abilities. And what was funny for summer tyres, they gripped in the cold and wet almost as well as they did in the heat of the summer. We've still got sets on the GT and Jo's Manta in England, but unfortunately they're the last of the line as Bridgestone don't seem to care much about cars with 15" wheels anymore.

Our next try was Michelin Pilot Exalto PE2's, and we've got those on my silver Manta in the UK. Not as grippy as the Bridgestones, but pretty decent tyres, all in all. Of course, you can't get them in 205/55x15 over here.

But about six months ago I needed new tyres for the Manta here, and went to Tirerack as normal. Choices were severely limited, to say the least, with only a handful of tyres I'd consider buying. The best of the reviews was the Yokohama S.drive, but I'd not had much luck with the old AVSes in the wet in the past so I wasn't rushing to order a set. Still, the reviews said they were OK and after checking other online tyre retailers I realized they were pretty much my only option (all the others had wear ratings that meant I'd never weat them out!), so I bought a set.

They're definitely OK in the dry, which is what they're advertised as, but they really don't like gripping much in the wet. Straight after the shrubbery incident I took the car round the block to make sure everything was OK, and it definitely liked losing grip at the back end a lot more than I remembered. Not too bad, I suppose, if you can catch the back end before things get too bad, but if you can't it's a visit off-road or worse.

I think I'll try a set of 205/50x15 on the Manta when these wear out. I really love Bridgestones these days (we have 225/50x16 RE050A Pole Positions on the Monza) and they've brought out a new tyre called the RE-11 which is available in the right size. The wear rating's a lot better too - 180 for the RE-11 vs 300 for the Yokos.

Oh, and we're doing something about catching slides too - we're off to Laguna Seca for a handling course next weekend! Pictures and story to follow.

Hot buns

We've got new Recaros in the project Monza, but the ones in the Monza we're restoring are at least 100,000 miles old because we bought them used and the car's done that distance with us. We got them in England so the driver's seat was pretty good (it was the UK passenger seat, right?), but after a pair of averagely hefty Californians had used them for 10 years they're sagging nicely.

While we've got a great guy in the UK to do our upholstery (Darren at Suffolk County Mantas), we've not had any luck with auto upholsterers in this country. There was one guy in Redwood City but he couldn't even finish a steering wheel recover in 9 months (we just gave up on him), so we just soldiered on with the seats the way they were.

I few weeks ago I went looking for a local Recaro agent as I remember someone telling me a while back there was one in the Bay Area. I finally found Sid's Custom Upholstery. It sounded an awful lot like Gabe's Custom Upholstery of American Hot Rod fame, but I thought I'd give him a try anyway.

Sid (real name Hugo Sanchez - go figure) gave us a warm fuzzy feeling so we dropped the seats off with him a couple of weeks ago for a re-cushioning and new strapping under the seat. I also remembered to ask for seat heaters to be added as the Monza's original leather armchairs had them and I've preserved the wiring. It's not really cold enough in California to warrant it, but they did come in useful when we drove the car up to Lake Tahoe in a snowstorm so you never know.

We got the seats back last week, complete with seat heaters, and a nice job it seems to be. It was fun trying to get Jo out of them while I had her checking them out for height! Then the problem of how to finish them off began. Opel just put in simple heating mats that take 12V and convert to a nice warm feeling. These mats were a little more flash, with a built-in thermostat and two temperature settings (38C and 41C). The question was where to put the bloody temperature switches...

Seat base showing the wiring. The block of wiring at the top is the thermostat controller

First idea was the centre console, but it's getting so busy there now that we didn't really have the space. I thought of the side of the console (either side of the gear lever) but Jo said that was a little funky and I have to agree. We discounted the door / armrest (way too much wiring to squeeze through the door) and finally settled on the seat console. Pretty obvious when you think about it - it affects the seat so why not put the switch on the seat?

So I've done one seat so far, and you can see it below. The dash mounted switch turns heating on and off as per Opel's original design, but now the switch on the console chooses heating level I or II for each occupant individually.

View of the seat console with the switch mounted in it. We thought it might be a stretch to reach down to it but it actually worked out OK.

I should start a pool to bet on the final weight of the car with all these bloody options in! It actually does matter - allowable California emissions is calculated using the weight of the car as a factor. The heavier the car the lower the allowable emissions... :-)

We tried them out the other night and you could definitely feel heat coming through, but it wasn't earth shattering heat with either setting. I'm running the car off the battery only at the moment (of course) so it might be that it's not that impressive with just on 12 of the 14 Volts the controller is expecting. I'll put it on the charger at the weekend and try it again.

Welcome to the 21st century, the email list is no more. :-)

Even though we're well into the rebuild of the Monza now, I thought I'd start the blog off with a post I put on the Autobahnstormers forum last weekend, at least it's a good intro for anyone else who happens to come across the blog in the future.


About 18 months ago I started noticing the car wasn't having a good time. The left front tyre was wearing badly on the inside edge, the bonnet was beginning to have a V shaped gap between it and the left wing and the left (driver's) door was starting to touch the B pillar at the top. I couldn't work out what it was until I moved a wiring loom on the top of the left inner wing, between the strut and the outside edge, and saw a split. A little more investigation and I noticed that the spot welds that hold the brace (runs from the strut tower area to the door pillar) to the inner wing were pulling off too. In fact, the front suspension was being held up by the wing rather than the brace!

The car got parked up and a brief 9 months of denial followed, during which time we used our Manta every day.

Eventually I took the car over to the local body shop and they agreed to do the work. The only problem was that they needed pretty much everything north of the A pillars taken off the car to be able to get to the inner wing to do a proper job (TM), so that meant a lot of dismantling.

You're probably putting 2 and 2 together by now and working out how to match the title and the last paragraph, right? Yup, there were a load of projects I'd been holding off for years because we used the car every day and because each one of them needed more than a day's work. With one thing leading to another here was an ideal opportunity to do the lot at once. Here's the list:

• The dash had loads of cracks on it and I had had one recovered a while back down in LA (http://www.justdashes.com/HowWeDoIt.htm). It's a pig of a job with all the wiring on the Monza so I'd decided to wait for an opportune moment.

• The heater had started to gurgle strangely. I'd assumed it was just hard water choking the flow, but to change it needed the dash to come out...

• I had a 3.6 crank, rods and pistons sitting in the garage and the engine had done 240,000 miles.

• I wanted to convert the car to use ABS, but that was a big job to do by itself.

• I also wanted to convert the car to use either the Monza catalyst injection system or the one off the Gold Top Senator to try to help me through the emissions tests here, but that would have to be done with the ABS since they share the same loom

• The seats needed re-foaming and re-strapping. I'm probably most kindly described as a lardy-arse (lived in California too long) so 100,000 miles with me driving hadn't helped the Recaros.

• And on and on

So a couple of weekends of dismantling and it was off to the bodyshop again, with a trail of power steering fluid coming from it because the steering box was about the only thing left in the car!

Here’s the inner wing off the car. You can just make out the brown line outboard of the label on the strut tower and the tear in the side next to it.

At the bodyshop with the new bits attached. Luckily I had a strut brace they could use to hold the whole lot in the right orientation.

A few weeks later I had it back in the garage and the long slow reassembly started. First off was a brand new firewall insulation mat that I’d scored off OCP. It’s not the exact right one for the car (it was for a Diesel Senator) but it modified easily and really made the car look new. At that point, any chance for a quick rebuild disappeared and it started to be a full-on restoration!

Insulation just held in place with nuts and bolts. Looks good, though, doesn’t it?

A short while later and I’d got it modified to suit the car. Power steering, pedal box and braking system were next to go in.

See how bad it got? EVERYTHING is being cleaned and painted or renewed

As I said, it’s getting really bad now. Since I was in full-on restoration mode everything started coming out of my stock to make it look perfect. Things were either cleaned and painted or brand new bits were used. I’m also a sucker for cad plating, so all the plated parts were painted in clearcoat to keep them that way!

I got a little fed up doing the engine bay so I moved onto the inside to keep the interest up. I’d removed all the insulation when I dismantled it as it was either brittle and had fallen apart or would have done so when I put it back in. I’m also a sucker for Dynamat (I used it on the silver Manta that Andy Clears restored for me) so I got a load more and started on the Monza.

First layer of Dynamat

Second layer of Dynamat and then the A/C system and wiring could start

My car was used as a demonstrator for a chap who was going to import them into the USA so it has absolutely every option available for 1983, and every option needed wiring. Yup, it was going to be epic.

First off was the injection loom. Previously the car was just a simple 3.0E with a home made oxygen sensor add-on box to keep me legal over here. Now I had ABS and a different injection system to use. The major choice was which injection system. I hummed and haa’ed about it for a long while until a friend of mine in the Netherlands (Louis van Steen) called Irmscher for me and found that they had one last C36NE ECU and I could have it for a nice price too.

Well, that solved all the problems since there’s nothing easier than just assembling bits that were meant to go together, right? Pretty much. But I now had an automatic C30NE (Gold Top) wiring loom and a Monza 3.0E Jetronic wiring loom for cars with ABS to blend together. Luckily I’m not at all worried by wiring so I spent a “fun” weekend in the garage, stripping the two looms and making one new one out of it.

The problem was, now I had a nice new looking loom sitting in the engine bay, all the other looms were looking decidedly down market, so I ended up stripping and rewrapping most of the looms in the end.

Engine bay with most of the new looms in place

Back inside the car I started on the alarm wiring. I’d bought a Toad Ai606 in the UK a while back as I had them on the Mantas in the UK and they work pretty well (although Andy didn’t think so when the one in my black Manta went off half a dozen times outside his house one night!). Like this post, that was one of those epics that seemed to go on forever and I must’ve put a good three or four weekends into it. Still, finally I got it in and the new dash could go on and it started looking more like a car again, rather than a box of bits.

Finally got the dash on

The car had tinted side and rear windows when I got it, but I wanted to change it over for something a little better and so had the sides tinted with 3M Crystalline film. You can’t see it on the car but it makes one hell of a difference in the sun. I’ll get the front and rear done when the car’s drivable. Anyway, last weekend I decided to build up the doors, so the glass went back in (carefully, it’s got a scratchable film on the inside!) and then I spent an inordinate amount of time cleaning, re-greasing, Dynamatting (of course) and refitting. And of course there was the ever present wiring – the doors have electric mirror and window wiring and I have tweeters on the front corners of the door.

Would you believe you could spend several hours getting a door built up?

So that brings me pretty much up to date. The last thing I did last weekend was to test fit the centre console and of course had a problem. The console wouldn’t fit under the dash and when I had managed to force it there the angle of the bottom of the dash didn’t match the angle of the top of the console. I think I’ve finally worked it out. The dash was put in with the windscreen in place, so it probably isn’t fitting as far forwards as it was originally. Since the dash is held onto the dash panel by a couple of screws, that means it has rotated downwards compared to where it should be, and that’s why it’s too low and the angle of the bottom of the dash is wrong. Add that to the thickness of the Dynamat I’ve used and you can see it wasn’t going to fit.

A quick engineering solution was to use a strap with a ratchet on the bottom of the dash to pull it upwards and outwards. I’ve left it under tension for the week and it does look like it’s getting better. Over the weekend I’m going to get the instruments back out and loosen off the nuts holding the top/front of the dash below the windscreen and hope that I can muscle it back in place with a bit of grease and a plastic scraper. Still, I thought you’d like to see the lash up with the ratcheting strap… :-)

An engineering solution to the problem…

More when I’ve got some time.