I will be picking Jim up
No hotdogs
The last few hours today. The electronics box was missing a few inserts so I did the usual fix on that
Sorted
Engine covers on
Headlights in and ready for the bumper
Not sure if I've shown this before? On most cars you would use copper anti-seize grease with steel bolts in to steel nuts. Not so with aluminium threads in the D2 though, as the copper will accelerate corrosion, not protect against it. Instead, for the D2 I use aluminium anti-seize in certain places. The front panel to the chassis legs for example, the subframe to body bolts, or here for the main bumper bolts. The aluminium grease stops corrosion because it doesn't set up a galvanic reaction. There are some places where steel nutserts are used (the battery junction box for example). These do use copper grease, so its important to know which is which.
The headlight level arm was seized, as usual, and actually the wrong one. This is for the non-20" cars so was rattling around on the arm.
This is the last ever FE levelling arm. We don't want that though cos its rubbish.
Chop the bracket off - we still need that.
Oh looky - ball joints
Set the length and then apply heat shrink to protect the thread
Attached to the bracket
That ought to last a few more years than the plastic tat, and I can make as many of these as we need
Re-using the original bracket isn't ideal. I plan to print nylon versions instead.
The undertray was pretty nasty!
Much better
All back together and ready for the road test
I used quite a lot of degreaser
Out in the yard after the road test. I haven't fitted roof rails - that's my A6 almost perfectly obscured
The final step - setting the headlight aim
72 hours all told. That's rather more than I planned for since there was an awful lot of cleaning to do, but a good result at the end. The engine is lovely and quiet now, and in fact starts up more smoothly than mine!