After a long week at work I had a deep need to do something actually useful and to make a bracket. The coil packs need moving so they don't hit the shiny new strut brace or the intake manifold so they seemed like a good candidate for some Friday night bracket action. Being a tight-arse I wanted to only use stuff from the scrap bucket, here's what I had to work with:
After a bit of swearing, some measuring and a good bit of thinking, this is what I ended up with:
Compared to the previous bracket, the coil packs sit on their sides and are much lower profile. The old bracket is alloy and the new one is steel but there's hardly any weight difference between them
Aaaaand here it is installed on the motor, much nicer!
Massive amounts of strut bar clearance now, I'll probably pack the bracket up a few mms for extra intake clearance
At the other end of the car the boot and rear seats are out in prep for the battery relocation. Sound deadening is coming out too. It was surprisingly easy to lift with a scraper and mallet! about 2 hours to get the three areas that are exposed back to metal.
I've got 5M of #0 AWG cable to run forwards, which is probably overkill but the last thing I want is for the car to catch fire because the wiring was under speced.
The battery itself will sit on the drivers side, which is kind of annoying for weight distribution, but it's about the only place it'll fit without blocking the spare wheel.
I really don't want to run a completely stripped interior as it simply doesn't look great, so the plan at the moment is to modify the side plastics to remove the seat holes and have a flat floor all the way through to the front of the rear seat base. Not entirely sure how it'll work just yet!
Lastly, this little bunch of goodies finally turned up:
Microsquirt piggyback ECU, 3 bar MAP sensor, air intake sensor and wiring harness. Just need to get a coolant temp sensor and maybe a wideband O2 sensor to get everything working nicely
This thing is tiny! should be pretty easy to make a bracket for it somewhere under the dash. The challenge is going to be the wiring and setup. It's a little scary but slow and steady will win this race.
Next on the to-do list is to get the battery all wired up and run to the engine, get the new sensors in and grab some gauges so I can wrap the wiring loom in one go. There's a catch can and boost distribution block on the way so they'll go in soon too. The finish line is getting closer!