More Fiddlin'

 The first 2023 road trip is fast approaching & I've been fiddling with the car.

Thing 1 - It's never boiled over, but on the rare occasions that it sits in traffic the temperature goes up to 100 deg & pretty much stays there until I move off. So I got onto the good people at Car Builder Solutions & ordered a larger fan & a switch with a slightly lower temperature, they were fitted & when tested, the new fan came on at 95ish instead of 100 & actually cooled the engine & then went off.

Thing 2 was a more permanent solution for powering the nose camera, I'd established that the remote control would still work even through an aluminium bulk head, an engine fizzing with sparks & an aluminium radiator, but I'd just wrapped insulating tape round the wires & tyrapped it on to the radiator mount. Now I drew up & printed a polyurethane boot for each end & a "saddle" for it to sit on, so now I know the system works, it all looks a bit more permanent.

There is still a little tape & a tyrap, but it looks a lot better & is much more secure. I've just been on a little test run (to the Hogs Back Brewery if you must know) & it all worked just fine.....

.....Except - Thing 3 - the bonnet release was VERY stiff when I got back, which was a worry. It opened in the end, so I set about investigating it's stiffness. The latch itself seemed free enough, but the pull handle was grating. I disconnected everything & the handle seemed much freer, so it's the cable adjuster at the latch end then.

This has been a bugbear several times on kit cars, people don't seem to understand how a simple Bowden cable works. In this case the builder had gone to great lengths to drill a 2mm hole right through the length of an M6 x 30 bolt & used it as a cable adjuster - but while that stops the cable outer, it doesn't hold it in the right orientation, so it pulls sideways & binds up.

I was going to look in my box of bike spares, but even before I opened it, I found just what I was looking for lying on top, It was a proper cable adjuster & even threaded M6!

The cable outer was a little loose in the adjuster socket, so once again the 3D printer got fired up & in 3 minutes flat I printed a sleeve that fits over the cable outer & inside the adjuster, holding the cable outer in line & now the bonnet release is all smooth & nice.