been very slack at updating this... the good news is that work on the car is still getting done!!
I've got more pictures somewhere but struggling to find them at the moment
I had initially planned to have the thing on the road for may this year...that might have been a little optimistic! I've now dragged the girlfriend in to give me a hand with things!
a brief summary of the last few months work...
-front subframe is bolted & bonded onto the car
-mk2 escort pedal box fitted, with bias bar (these are the pictures i'm struggling to find)
-front & rear brake lines are largely done
-rear trailing arm box's remade, painted & fitted with captive nut plates on the inside
- driveshafts mocked up and sleeves machined so i can temporarily fit them to check clearances.
I've also recently (may 2016) bought a ford focus with a 1.0 ecoboost 125 & 6 speed...exactly the same as i'm trying to fit to the quantum
currently i'm waiting for some metal to arrive so i can fabricate the engine mounts..for the final time I hope!! One thing i've been struggling with is clearance. Although the engine block of the 3 cylinder will fit on an a4 piece of paper, once the twin cam head & ancillaries are bolted on its actually rather large. This coupled to the 6 speed gearbox really doesn't leave much room. What i've recently discovered (entirely by accident!) is that if the engine & gearbox are tilted back a few degrees it free's up space and generally fits in the hole better! anyway, this is the story so far...
subframe bolted back onto the shell, shiny paint & shiny stainless washers!
one of the jobs i was dreading was fitting the brake lines under the car, but I actually found it to be one of the more satisfying tasks!
view of the engine bay and brake lines routed
've completely done away with the fieata setup, partly because I haven't got the space in the engine bay for linkage & M/C. The mk2 escort pedal box i've got is a bias box so it has 2 master cylinders - one for the front brakes and another for the rears.
The rear trailing arm boxes were in very bad condition with some very heavy corrosion. So I decided to make some replacements, 3mm steel and TIG welded.
one of the problems with the swap i'm doing is the gearbox change. The old ford BC5 gearbox and the IB6 (the one going in now) do not share the same splines. I tried a number of combinations but nothing was working. So currently i've got a mk3 focus driveshaft poking out the gearbox, and a mk2 fiesta xr2 driveshaft poking out the hub. Some sleeves were machined to enable me to temporarily join the 2 in order to make a pattern which i can then send off and have made into one proper shaft.
this is the long driveshaft that goes along the back of the engine. On the left is whats left of the fiesta shaft, in the middle is the sleeve (girlfriend did well on the old myford!
), and on the right is whats left of the mk3 focus driveshaft after i'd attacked it with the grinder.
the same was done for the other side.
so as you can see it's no where near being on the road, however i've made some progress! And i'll try my best to update this more often!
on a side note, I'm really impressed with my new focus. exactly the same oily bits as I'm putting into the quantum and it's certainly no slouch in a car that weighs around 1300kg. also doing 40+ MPG all the time with a mixture of driving, mostly stop/start. Driving the focus gave me a much needed kick up the arse to progress with the quantum!