The last part of the engine installation was to fit the rest of the coolant hoses and the expansion tank. I couldn't do this until the scuttle was fixed and the wiper motor installed because I wanted to locate the expansion tank on the near side rather than drivers side as per the manual. The reason for this was to make the pipework a little neater and shorter.
The standard pipe from the expansion tank has an outlet for the heater. I don't have a heater so the instruction was to route the small bypass hose from the thermostat back into the top of the heater inlet. This would have meant a pipe looping up across the scuttle ... not too neat. I decided to move the expansion tank to the near side and then feed the small hose from the thermostat housing into the end of a new solid pipe and tee into this pipe from the expansion tank. The pipe then follows the normal route to the bottom hose/water pump pipe.
To do all this I needed to make up a new peice of solid pipe using some 15mm copper pipe a couple of 90degree elbows, a tee piece and some olives on the ends to stop the hoses blowing off. I'd borrowed some pipe benders from Andy so set about the bending and soldering. Here's my version of the pipe alongside the standard one ... you can see the standard one on the left with the heater hose inlet.
And here's the version after painting. I was very pleased with the results ... Andy will be proud of the solder work!
Installation was pretty easy ... I needed to add some spacers under the P Clips to raise the pipe off the scuttle. I'm very pleased with the final result ... looks a lot neater than the standard setup I think.
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