Reporting in Gentlemen:

Decided to upgrade my radiator as the car had been overheating a bit when I was skidding it and also when it sat on 4000rpm on the highway on the way home. Purchased a twin core alloy radiator off eBay and 2 x 10" thermos and had intentions of just swapping that in and being done.

But, as always one thing leads to another, and so on, so forth.

Had to make new upper brackets for the radiator, and modify the lower ones to compensate for the extra thickness. No dramas, was always expecting to do this. However once the radiator was in, the throttle body was mm away from fouling on it, which I could just get away with, but the thermos wouldn't fit as the left side one hit the throttle body.

So I thought fuck it, I'll swap the abortion manifold that was in there for a cut and shut smallport one. Always wanted to do this, but never had the motivation or time to bother. At least now was a perfect opportunity to do it.

Anywho, got a tidy cut and shut manifold from a member on here and gave it a lick of crinkle black paint. Had to make up a bracket to screw the air temp sensor into the manifold where the cold start injector usually went. Turned out to be a pain in the arse to find a correct threaded nut to use as a bung. 3/4 BSP was like rocking horse shit to find in Wagga.

Got everything finally sorted and back together on the car. Needed to re-do the cooler piping. Got 90% of the welds done on it then ran out of gas...and also conveniently filler rod. So $300 later after a trip to get gas and filler I finally got the piping done.

Last thing to do was to connect the throttle cable...Oh shit, what's that, no throttle cable bracket on manifold?! Simple mistake turned out to be a prick of a thing. Didn't even realise when I was fitting it in the first place that it didn't have a bracket, so after more fucking around I removed the manifold and took it to a mate to weld am alloy bracket to it. I then had to repaint it and then waste more time refitting it a second time.

So what was supposed to be a little job of swapping radiators turned out to be a complete utter head fuck. At least it is finally done though!




Engine bay looks a fair bit different to when I first put the 4AGTE in!