Ok so last Saturday I continued the strip down of the 4200 cooling system to replace all hoses and the radiator.
Started at the header tank, easy enough just the one small breather hose at the top and the larger supply hose out the bottom going down to the water pump, removed the header tank and mounting straps too; the only difficulty is the single use hose clips on the small pipes but able to get to these to break them out ok.
The breather hose goes to a T and one to the top O/S of radiator with just the single jubilee clip to undo, the other branch disappears under the back of the plenum and is secured by a small single use clip, no real chance of seeing what you are doing so a call to Jeanette to hold the torch and peer in one side whilst I fell my way in from the other with a pair of pliers, a nip, twist and hey presto the clip was loosened enough to let the hose be pulled off the metal pipe (balloon end only not a barb thankfully).
You can just make out the pipe by the blue clip under the plenum!
So removed the heater matrix return hose (sod of a job single use clip) and reaching through the hole where my headlight is out, undid the jubilee clip on the water pump end and extracted the hoses.
Next is the fun bit, heater matrix feed hose is another single use but accessible on the bulkhead. Follow the feed hose down behind the engine and sitting across the top of the bell housing is a silver T-tube with a rubber right angle single use clipped at each end to the back of each bank of cylinders. The N/S one is reasonably accessible against the engine = it only took me an hour to fight with the clip with every tool in the kit before finally getting it off! The O/S one is near impossible to get anything to, especially when you have JCB hands! I ended up taking the breather pipe off the cam cover and the vacuum pipe off the brake servo just to give enough access to do some work. There is no possibility of getting pliers or anything with cutting capabilities in there I ended up using a flat file and literally with just a few millimetres of movement filling the bump off the clip = it took near on three hours though!
Onto the radiator; unclip the two big hoses (nice big jubilee clips
), jack the front of the car as high as possible, try and undo the cowling bolts (4 x each top and bottom) snapped half of them! Undo all cable connections to fans and resistor (more about this thing later) and withdraw the cabling out over the wing. Remove the fan assembly bolts and drop the fans out the bottom. Removed the power steering radiator bolts and cable tied it to the bonnet shut.
Removed the bolts to the A/C radiator and half of Thetford forest dropped out from between the radiators (that'll make a big difference to cooling), note to self to put some spacers in on rebuild! Cable tied the A/C radiator to the inner wings. Finally removed the bottom then top radiator mounting bolts, top N/S cushion mount sheared off though! Removed radiator out the bottom and then removed the remaining two big hoses from the water pump and thermostat housing.
Next job is to remove the auxiliary belt but as I have not done one of this type before I had to work it out first, located the tensioner wheel and realised it is an offset cam wheel so you simply put a socket (15mm) on the wheel and leaver it away to take the tension off the belt and off comes the belt, nice and easy…
Now the resistor…. What is this a resistor for? Anyone know? Should it look like this or should it be covered by the green stuff as I suspect it should be?
