The big reassembly

Now the car was back in the garage it was time to start the reassembly process. Pretty much everythink went back on reasonbly easily (helped by labelling of all the bags that had the parts in them). I fitted the aluminium firewall to the rear of the cockpit and sealed the edges with polyurethane sealant

Should provide some protection should the tank rupture in an accident.
Also fabricated a propshaft tunnel cover out of aluminium to replace the ropey cardboard original

You can also see the new plastic gearbox tunnel which fitted well after a little fettling. I also managed to replace my lucas wiper switch with a proper "clear hooters" switch. The switch was actually a fan switch from a GT6 but I rubbed off the fan emblem with wet and dry paper. Then printed the correct emblems onto some transfer paper and slipped them onto the switches.. not perfect, but not too bad.

Also fitted a light tan interior (decided against black as I'd like the lighten the interior a bit.

 

Also fitted Mazda MX5 seats. They are currently in black velour, but if they suit me I have some tan vinyl and will get them recovered to match. My only impression at the moment is that there is a little less leg room as the headrest interferes with the rear roll over bar. I also fitted the injection system to the engine, but again it seemed not to idle well and the injectors needed a fair bit of bleeding. bit depressing so left it for a while and concentrated on the interior...... AND THEN

A Moss supercharger kit became available!

If you read the earlier posts you'll know that that aim had been to fit a Moss supercharger kit. I had fitted a camshaft to suit the supercharger and had reconditioned a low compression cylinder head to allow big boost. And then Moss discontinued the kit due to a lack of carburetors. Anyhow early February and a second-hand kit appeared on Ebay. I thought long and hard about it and then bought it! They are never going to make these again and so chances are I would not see one for sale again.

this one came from a re-imported US car and was hardly used. Even better it came with a head (the kit was for the narrow inlet head only used on early cars). So removed the PI, removed the old head.

Fitted the supercharger

Added the drive belt system (including new crank pulley, waterpump and alternator in addition to two idler pulleys.

 And added the fuel pump, replacing the Bosch PI system and PRV. I used the original PI supply pipe from the boot to the engine bay. I used the PI filter and also fitted a filter just before the carburetor

Then after some playing around with the timing and idle fired it up.

 

Unfortunately it didn't idle to well (sticking at 1500 rpm) de ja vue from working with the PI system. This was probably due to a vacuum leak from the manifold. So a bit of checking a solved by sealing the manifold to cylinder head gasket with some silicon sealant and replacing the servo which was leaking (perhaps this was why the PI failed to idle properly!)

Interestingly I also ran it with the rocker over off and you can clearly see some of the pushrods rotating as they run.

So all pretty good. The car seemed to idle well but when I finally got to drive it it "bogged" really badly when snapping... Damn....