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?