Roasty toasty

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Sitting in heavy traffic on the M56 into Manchester today, no worse than on the M25 but today the weather was truly HOT. This seems to have made the difference as the coolant temperature went up to ~120 degrees which is a bit on the warm side. It cooled down towards 110 when the traffic started moving but clearly the new radiator & original Spal fan (385mm) are struggling to cope in standing traffic on a hot day.

Options under consideration are changing the fan (from a single to two [smaller] ones). removing the blanking plates on the rear ‘kidney’ shape bonnet vents and/or… drilling some holes on the rear face of the bonnet where the engine bulge drops down towards the bulkhead. The latter is a bit drastic but a possibility if the other options don’t do the trick.

How was it for you?…

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So things have been building up to my triumphant collection of the car. What’s happened in the intervening few weeks? Well… quite a lot! Generation III of my Mantis has had an eventful birth, & best described after the dust has settled.

  1. Drive to Lewes in the Pug, stopping off in Bedford overnight to drop my daughter off. I will, Shhhh… miss it! (The car that is)
  2. Get to Chariots on the Tuesday, see Jay, see Mantis gleaming on the ramp, see about 20 Wedding cars, several Bentleys, a Model T, lots of vintage & not-so-vintage bikes and… a 50s Electric Milk float (with 1/3 pint glas bottles in wire baskets). Am hopeful my car is the quickest out of this lot.
  3. Car sounds lovely when started on the ramp & pleased with Start button. Connolised leather looks amazing in real life, & I am told the chap who did it spent an entire day masking off the piping before bringing the straw leather back to its original glory. Cool! The Dark Green Samco hoses are a remarkable match for the paint & look great.
  4. Go for a spin. Sounds & drives like I imagined 6.2 litres would! Very fast with bottomless torque & silly acceleration. Also unfeasibly pleased with the OSRAM Daytime Running Lights (combined DRLs & Fogs), which really update the front of the car. And gosh… it’s loud!
  5. Back to Chariots to catch up on the snag list. Frustrating after a five month wait but nothing terminal: Rev Counter only reading half actual value, Speedo not working at all, original LS3 A/C won’t fit around the steering column so retro-fit electric motor fitted, a few Samco hoses missing off expansion bottle.
  6. Spent Wednesday driving around Brighton & Eastbourne in blazing sunshine. Visit Beachy Head – holiday mode fully engaged! Stuff gets tightened/loosened etc as car shakes down over the day. Jay’s hospitality is faultless with beer & meal each night.
  7. Thursday is all about waiting for the new Speedo gauge to arrive from Smiths. I kill time taking the car out, but UPS have mis-sorted the Package & it has black-holed. The prominent fuel smell from the Generation II engine is still there, prompting some furtling with the fuel tank breather pipes & the replacement of a faulty one-way valve. At this stage in the day, I need to head back to Bedford as part of the paternal taxi service.
  8. Pay bill. The old alarm didn’t survive removal so a new one has been fitted. In the best traditions of Grand Designs, it has gone over budget… but, heigh ho!
  9. Off to Bedford – the M25 is a bitch & I discover how hard it is to drive an unfamiliar 500BHP engine in stop/start traffic for 50 minutes, knowing that the fast road cam isn’t helping. The car is also guzzling fuel so I bail off the M25 to find a petrol station, only to overshoot it & break down at rush hour in the centre lane of the A408 as it feeds onto the M25 & M4. Yikes! The car won’t start & has all the symptoms of having run out of fuel. I am not impressed!!! Under telephone guidance from Jay, I press the bleed nipple on the offside fuel rail & get air not fuel, which seems to support an empty tank & the fact that I am a pillock. Friendly copper pushes car to roadside & I await The AA, who arrive & thoroughly nice chap emerges from the van to announce he has worked on the LS3 engine before. Hallelujah! He does exactly the same trick with the bleed nipple but leaves it open a few seconds before fuel emerges. The car restarts & I am left a bit bemused until AA man explains this is a ‘vapour lock’ which is a new one on me… Journey to Bedford resumed.
  10. Taxi service from Bedford to Suffolk to Manchester and finally home.
  11. A couple of short local drives including one into work (bad standing traffic experiences again) where I take an ex-Marcos owner colleague for a spin, with very complimentary feedback.
  12. Home. Battery is dead when I go to take the car out for the weekend. Charge it up & it happens again. Then several hairy moments as I lose clutch pressure while reversing out of the garage. This is enough for me & The AA are summoned once again.
  13. The AA flatbed the car back down to Lewes to be worked on & it’s back to work with no car again!
  14. Several weeks later, I’m off back down to Lewes, collecting the car from Jay. Although the Rev Counter is still misreading, I have a smart new programmable electronic Speedo from Smiths. The centre console has also been rejigged with a much improved fit. The big improvement though, the ECU has been remapped with several significant changes to the factory settings (Fuel Trim from 39 to -1) which results in a much improved, smoother driving experience and a predicted 33 MPG(!). More M25 angst on the way back to Manchester but no hattrick with The AA & I only have to fill up twice before I ‘m home, achieving about 200 miles with 40 litres.

    Pete comes up trumps with this top notch LS3 badge to replace the original ‘Quad Cam’ one.

And now, so far so good except the oh-so-predictable rain every day. The plan is to get some more experience driving the car (albeit in grindingly sloooow commuting traffic) then wind up to the Tatton Park Classic Car Show in three weeks time, then the big one… Le Mans 24 hour & CBW!

Wish me luck!

Cool news

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No sign of the SamCo coolant hoses still but the AirCon is now plumbed in & running. Coming in at -2 °C which is as good as it’s ever been. After a passing remark from comment from Jay about the blower I am hoping he will have time to update that from the 80’s technology currently used. Nice!

In the meantime I had the leather re-Connollised as there’s no sign of Muirhead offering the original straw leather again in the near future. I am looking forward to seeing it in person but in the meantime this picture shows a big difference from the interior I handed over back in November last year.

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LS3 first run

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Potentially good news on the Racing Green Samco hoses which may now arrive next week instead of in three weeks. In the meantime Jay has fitted some of the standard Samco blue hoses and… started the engine!

 

OK, so Jay needs to spend some of his hard earned cash on a phone with a better camera but… that looks great and (although the exhaust doesn’t seem to protrude from the back at all) sounds… well, greater!

 

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Hosed down

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Good stuff: Booked our room at the Holiday Inn Ashford on the way down to Le Mans in June.

Bad stuff: The Samco coolant hoses won’t be ready until 07-April, pushing the collection date back almost a month.

Exhausted 

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JP Exhausts have finally finished making up the manifold & exhaust! I hared over to see the car before it was collected by Stuart from Chariots (who left Clayhill at 0330 hours to get up to Macclesfield, poor chap!). The car was sitting in the workshop and to my surprise (& slight concern) the exhaust was laid out next to it. Yikes! Had it fallen off already?  Did something not fit? Fortunately it turned out to be a second system commissioned by Chariots for Jay’s Mantis… And my friends, it was a thing of beauty!

After a good peer at the unassembled system, it was time to have a look at one in-situ. Kyle kindly raised the car on the ramp to allow me a good look at his handiwork. Apparently getting the manifold around the steering column was a real bitch & took over a day and a half by itself. Very nice, thinks I.

Definitely a big bore system in my book! It looked stunning in virgin stainless steel, & amazingly Kyle had managed to keep it higher than the bottom of the engine, which means the Mustang engine/exhaust set up was lower. Well done that man! 😎.

Look at that manifold. Automotive art that is! 😉

Unfortunately the drooling had to come to an end as I needed to start work, which consisted of jumping in the Pug parked outside JP, cranking up my laptop & dialling into the first of several teleconferences. 90 minutes later I had a break between (but also hyperthermia!) which allowed me to pop back into JP’s office to pay up. In the meantime Stuart had turned up & pinched the car to head back down south. Oh well! Hopefully I will be able to pick it up in a fortnight. In the meantime I will send Jay some pictures of his new exhaust system… it would be cruel to make him wait another five hours for the flatbed to get back!

‘Snow joke

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I love the snow but did it have to arrive the one morning I needed to rush over to Macclesfield to drop off some old (Ford 4.6L) engine bits & the new Start button?! Trip postponed to tomorrow morning after overly-exciting 300 yard round trip in the Pug! Yikes.

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An exhausting wait

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So…  JP have only just started working on the Mantis exhaust which is pretty disappointing & puts things back at least two weeks.  I will now be lucky to get the car back in February. Inevitably it has been unseasonably dry & mild this week i.e. perfect driving weather. Oh well! In the meantime I have decided to go for an unbranded aftermarket button for the Engine Start. It’s quite low key (pardon the pun) & with a red LED; the black collar will be similar to the Smiths gauges. There were nicer buttons but they were stainless steel which doesn’t really match anything else on the facia, & a gorgeous black anodised billet aluminium one but… I need to import it from the States & it would have cost over £100. Yikes!

Looking on the bright side, travel for the Le Mans 24 Hour is now booked with the outward bound crossing courtesy of Eurotunnel & hopefully in convoy with another three or four Marcos, all in time to get to the gite for a good night’s sleep prior to the tour of the 1906 French Grand Prix circuit on Thursday morning. The return journey was harder to choose but eventually I went for the Dieppe-Newhaven ferry which should mean travelling with some of the Essex owners & also arriving back in the UK at a half decent hour to then slog our way back to Cheshire.

We also have a design for the Marcos LM24 decals which incorporates the Classic British Welcome logo. It took a few iterations but I think the final design is splendid – thank you Lou & Phil in Luxembourg!

 

A fleeting glimpse

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So the Mantis is at JP Exhausts in Macclesfield & today I had arranged to work from a colleague’s house in the town then walk up to JP & see the car for the first time since it was kidnapped at the end of November 2016. I was quite excited as I would finally get to see the new engine in place.

We found JP easily (thank you Google Maps!) & wandered in to immediately spot the Mantis on a ramp. It wasn’t being worked on, so I introduced myself to one of the staff, Kyle (who it turned out would be making up my exhaust) then went over to have a look. The car was a bit grubby from being transported up but after a quick study of the driver’s seat leather repair (a good colour match) I was pretty keen to get the bonnet up & check out the LS3 in-situ. It looked… big! I was surprised at how few wires, hoses & pipes there were but have since found out that Jay has not fitted most of them to maximise access for JP when fabricating & fitting the manifolds & exhaust. Clever chap!

             

I also had the chance to physically compare the Audi, Nissan & after-market (Pivot) Engine Start buttons side by side for the first time. The Audi button is not flat which is unfortunate as that was my first choice. Not massively enamoured with either of the others & so will find an alternative, but this time without any reference to ‘Stop’ as I’m not going to get this functionality from the button.

Kyle kindly raised the ramp so I had the opportunity to view the car from underneath as well… Always a voyage of discovery for me! I got a great look at the engine & transmission, as well as the propshaft & the cleaned up chassis. It all looks very low but Jay assures me it’s higher than the old Ford Mustang engine. (I will find out pretty quickly when I park at work & have to navigate the prominent sleeping policemen in the office car park). Time was short however as my colleague & I needed to get back to work, so after a few more minutes peering round the car followed by a quick ‘Hello’ to the manager at JP we had to head off. Well worth it to see the car, but also to remind myself that it’s a 20 year old vehicle in regular use & not some pristine concours Marcos where everything to do with the new engine needs to be perfect or top-of-the-range.