MKIII #5369 "Refresh" Thread - A bat spit shine!

[David Hodgkins]

In order to polish and engine-turn the firewall, I had to remove it from the car. Step one drill all the rivets. I hate to admit this, but I put that sucker together with 1/8" rivets. Believe me, the firewall was in there SOLID, but I'll drill those out to 3/16" when I put it back together. I had a few issues getting the firewall out. First, I had 2 hardlines routed through it. The rear brake lines and the clutch line. Luckily, the rear brake line has a union just below the bottom of the firewall so it could just be unhooked. But the hydraulic clutch line was a single piece between the master cylinder and a short soft line connection at the clutch arm:



OK so there's a union way down next to the 4" tube. The point is it's too big to pull with the firewall and so I cut it out and ordered a new braided softline from Fortes. It's plug and play, a real snap to install. It doesn't route through the firewall, but goes through an existing slot at the top of the footbox. It will occupy a space currently taken by a to-be-rerouted wire loom. Plus with the 90 degree fitting at the clutch the line isn't as exposed as before. It went from this connection:



To now, roughed in, it looks like this:



The second obstacle that stumped me initially was the silicone between the firewall and the frame. I ended up using a screwdriver to pry the two apart, but it took some force. I proceeded carefully though and the firewall came out without any bends. It's too bad FFMetal doesn't make these anymore.

Once I had the firewall out I pulled the rear cubby wall, f-panels and front splash guards, and set up the ol' polishing station. They, plus the upper rad shroud and front nose shroud, all needed a ton of additional work to bring them to full shine:





continued...

[David Hodgkins]

...setting down the polisher for a moment, I started on the wiring. The first thing I did was drill out the rivets (and pull a CLECKO - grrr) holding the EFI harness, which had the sensor and wiper harnesses zip tied to it. Then I stripped said harnesses and figured out which wires were going across the engine bay.



It turned out to be the wires for the MAP sensor and the coil, in two separate looms. The coil wires ran down the front harness to about the f-panel, where they exited the harness to attach to the coil. One of the coil wires was joined to a wire going to the distributor at the rear of the engine so the decision was made that the coil wires would follow the path of the distributor wires and cross to the coil from the front of the engine. I used a small screw driver to disassemble the coil plug and carefully fished the wires out from the front harness loom. I then merged the coil wires into the distributor harness and fed it under the intake to the front of the motor.

Another change I'm making is to shorten both power cables that feed into the cockpit by routing them through the bottom of the firewall instead of following the harness out to the edge of the chassis and back. That saves 2 feet of thick wire (X2) and with those gone I should have enough room in the original harness loom for all the sensor wires. Once I re-loom everything you should see how much difference dropping out that big sensor loom is!

Speaking of looms, when I hooked up the motor originally I laid the looms on the top of the motor along side the fuel rails. By re-routing all those through the valley under the intake the whole motor will look a lot cleaner. Just halfway through the process on the driver's side, you can see the intake below the fuel rails now, a much cleaner look: