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...