Ti Motorsport

Some Additions

Those of you who have been here before, will remember that before the 504 went to Kenya, we had Bremax make us a bespoke competition wiring loom. This followed a few minor problems with the original 1974 Peugeot loom. At the time, I spec'd it to cover all that I thought we would need. This was based on the prospect of the car remaining in Kenya long term. For various reasons that has ended up not being the case.

A deal struck with Richard Phillipson, to contest some British Historic events, culminating on the Roger Albert at the end of the year, has necessitated a couple of additions.

The prospect of frosts on the Kenyan events, was something I hadn't thought of, but November in the UK is a whole different ball game. At the best of times, the heater in the 504 could be described as inadequate, so one of the add-ons is going to be a heated front windscreen. The other one is one of the Don Barrow LED lights, in fact the one that Stefan liked so much in the Honda

A 3 way [on-off-on] switch was fitted next to the fuse block. The 2 'on' positions putting on either the red led or white light as the need arises. Final location on the cage will be left to Stefan, when he comes in for a seat fitting.

 

As the heated screen is a one off special order, I am waiting for it to arrive before laying in any wiring, so watch this space, as it were.

Extinguisher Woes

As all of my extinguishers in the 504 needed new stickers, I took the bottles off to Raceparts and that's where it all went to the dogs. The Lifeline electric bottle was too old [over 10 yrs old], so too were the handhelds. It would have been nice to have been able to just replace the bottle for the electrical system, that would have been easy, but NO. The entire system has to be replaced. New nozzles & pipe specification, don't you know. The only saving grace was that I could retain our Bremax loom wiring for the system. Now, instead of 4 nozzles in total, we now have eight and instead of 8mm pipe we now have 10mm. sadly they didn't have one in stock, so while I waited, I tidied the floor pan and having filled the odd hole or two, gave it a lick of paint. The first aid kit went  in and  then  I turned  my  attention  to  the foot brace.

Historically, we have had a problem with keeping the washer bottle in place behind the foot brace, so time to do something about it. The addition of a removable strip sorted that out.

The new extinguisher system turned up a couple of days later, which timing wise, worked out very well. Working with the 10mm tube, was a bit of a struggle in places, much more so than the previous 8mm tube. The new

system runs 2 completely separate circuits, one for the 4 cockpit nozzles and the other for the engine bay. For the inside, I fitted one nozzle by the cage and one near the centre of the dash. You can see the blue nozzles here on the co-driver side. Drivers side is a mirror image. For the engine bay, I have one nozzle at the rear of the engine bay pointing at the carbs, one at the front of the inner wing, again pointing to the carbs, the drivers side is covered in the same way,  one by the master cylinder and one by the coils. As mentioned earlier, all of the firing mechanism from the original system was retained. This time I used 3M's Dual Lock to locate the control box. It's in a slightly different location this time.

With those jobs done, it was time to move on to a little bit of wiring.

A Little 504 Action

Time to say a fond farewell to my faithful old Monterey and get the 504 into the workshop, ready  to start prep for the season, or not, given the havoc created by Covid. What had started as a plan to do selected BTRDA rounds before a final hurrah on the Roger Albert Clark in November, has seen event after event cancelled. However there was a time when we didn't know all that and preparation got underway.

The car had come back from it's African adventures and sat around, patiently waiting for a workshop slot to open up. With the seats out, the amount of African dust imported into the country started to become apparent.

I had a number of little jobs to do, one of which was to shorten the window winder handle on the passenger side. I had modified the drivers side one in Kenya, so had an idea of what to do. Replacing the drivers handle, reminded me of a problem I had on the last event. The window would only go down about halfway and needed to be sorted.

Having removed the door trim, I took the mechanism out to find the issue.

That turned out to be a bit more difficult than I had anticipated. The unit is sealed with rivets. so the first job was to try to get it apart. Some little time later and things had sprung apart. A bit further in and the source of the problem became apparent. Having taken it all apart and cleaning the components, it required a dab of weld to rectify the ravages of 45 years of abuse to restore it to working order.

Refitted in the door, normal service was restored.