This story begins back in September when I did what all "health conscious" Zed owners do before summer...clean out their cooling systems. Stage 1 consisted of: - Getting the radiator rodded and power flushed - Replacing the end cap as the flange on the upper pipe had snapped off - replacing the bypass hoses (thanks K-Zed and Zed4life) - fully flushing the cooling system - replacing the lower radiator hose with a nice shiny aluminium one - replacing the 0.9 bar crusty radiator cap with a new 1.2 bar one Things were working well after that...for a while. My fresh cooling system was holding its pressure well...a bit too well. After shutting down the engine I noticed a smell of roasting inhibitor and a "pshh...pshhh...pshhh" sound under the bonnet (that wasn't my BOVs). On closer inspection I could see coolant leaking from the back of my engine block and drop by drop falling onto the hot left turbo. My under plenum coolant hoses had started to leak. Thankfully I had caught it before the hoses had fully split. This saved me a new engine! So Stage 2 began. Take one incredible dirty TT engine (I will never take my Zed rally driving on an advanced driver training course again): And all the messy wiring left over from before the manual conversion: And immerse yourself into a solo-effort plenum pull. Ok, plenum removal on your own is a BIG JOB!!! I took things pretty carefully as it was the first time that I'd delved into that area of my engine bay. There are some bastard hoses to pull from the base of the plenum and the injector plugs took me about 45 minutes to remove the damn clips and pull them. Nevertheless I managed to have the plenum off by the afternoon. What I found underneath the plenum was my coolant leak. I doubt she would have driven much further without frying the engine. In the following images you can see the two coolant hoses on the base of the plenum. They'd already started leaking and one hose had a split in it. Below you can see the coolant stains on the left side of the engine block. As I lifted the plenum, coolant actually flowed out of that crevasse on to the garage floor. And how about what I found inside the under plenum coolant pipes? My EGR pipes were blocked full of dirt and oil. After an attempt at rodding them and trying to work out how to pull the hoses off without removing the engine I just pulled the vacuum hose to the EGR. It didn't work before and with my safe boost levels I shouldn't need it. Did I mention that I was taking this opportunity to clean up my engine bay? 1 vacuum hose down, countless other hoses to hide, wires to tidy and dust to clean out. From a manual alternator loom that I picked up at the wreckers I made my own loom that connected the gear box switches to behind the left headlight. I left the original auto wiring from the alternator in tact as access to these plugs was impossible, then developed my own loom for neutral, speed and reverse functions. The TV was moved into the garage for Bathurst and Indy. This allowed progress on the Zed to continue steadily. With the alternator wiring tidied I spent the day painting the HICAS, power steering fluid canister, rocker covers, balance and fuel pipes. While the plenum was off there are a couple of tasks that you must do: - replacing all the PCV hoses (mine were solid) - cleaning out the PCVs (I got away with just soaking mine in degreaser rather than purchasing new ones) - replacing all the fuel lines (especially the under plenum ones) - replacing the gaskets on the EGR, IACV, plenum, rocker covers Then you can either replace all the under plenum hoses or do a bypass. About 2 metres of 6mm coolant and vacuum hose and you'll never have to worry about under plenum hoses splitting again. To replace the fuel hose that joins the 2 injector rails together I had to pull out all of my injectors. I'm glad I did because it looked like my injector o-rings were in need of replacement. What do you think? Old and new o-rings... No wonder I had a fuel smell under the bonnet all the time. Not any more though. The next stage was "Project Bling". Remove one shabby looking plenum, apply some grinding, sanding, more sanding, more sanding and....many hours later "Project Bling" is complete. A HUGE thanks to Chewy for his amazing polishing skills. I now own the only (mobile) Chewy polished plenum!!! I think you'll agree that his attention to detail is immaculate. The centre section of the plenum is extremely difficult to polish and will covered up by the throttle cable cover. Replace blinged up rocker covers and shiny plenum and I'm now back on the road. When puling your plenum make sure you label everything you remove (plugs, screws etc) and taking some photos of your progress helps to jog the memory about where bits belong. So my tips are...make sure your car is ready for summer. Those bastard hoses under the plenum should have been changed in my 100k service (just like my bypass hoses that I changed the other weekend)...but...well we don't all know what our mechanics do and don't replace. So for peace of mind it's not too hard to do it yourself. There are some great tech articles on twinturbo.net. A big thanks to Chewy, K-Zed, zed4life and PSA (passenger seat accessory) for their help whilst I've been off of the road. Stay tuned to the forum for zed4life's tech article on the Zed cooling system.
wow that looks great. Very tidy engine bay now. well done! polished plenums are sexual. if only i could afford one!
Maaate! :thumbsup: What a top job! And you did 99.9% of it yourself with a limited toolkit. Of course your attention to detail, Mike, is matched only by that of Shanus Polishus ... beautiful plenum Chewy! :|
The Chewy Plenum gets the looks from the Magna guys??? In fact it gets more comments on the Magna forum too :embarrassed: Click here to see what the Aussie Magna guys have to say about it. Time to source some more bling.
