Hoses

Every post seems to be starting like this, but it seems you can only find upper and lower cooling hoses in the US.  But there is a company in the UK that makes full hose sets for the MK1 Fiesta XR2, and most of the hoses will fit right up.  I also ordered 3 meters of vacuum line.  Don't bother getting them off of ebay.  They just drop ship from the manufacturer and you can order it there yourself.

Roose Motor Sports makes these to order, in your choice of colors, from silicon or a classic black fabric wrap.  It takes a few weeks to make and another week or so to get it to the US. You will have to pay import duty of about $12, plus the price of the hoses.

Now that the engine is in, I can start mounting all the goodies I've been collecting for the last 2 years.

Engine Installed with Lowering Kit

I got the engine bolted back into Betty today complete with the engine lowering kit.  It went in pretty easy, Just 6 bolts.  I used an engine hoist and a floor jack to steady it in place while I got it bolted up.   I   noticed a small oil leak from the oil pump cover plate.  It's just 3 small bolts and an o-ring so will tackle that next.

Front engine mount

Rear Engine Mount

Transmission Mount

Top Engine Mount

Top Engine Mount

Engine Lowering Kit

 I was able to piece together the pieces to lower the engine by 25mm. A couple notes about this.  There is a special spacer bolt that bolts onto the upper RH engine mount bolt and extend the treads upward another inch.

This custom bolt is built for a 10mm mount.  The US Fiesta had 12mm mounting bolt.  I was looking on ebay at the mounts in the UK, and the bolt just looked smaller, so I questioned one of the sellers and sure enough the upper mounting bolt was10mm.  So I bid on it and won it for about $8.00 + considerable shipping from the UK...although less overall than what US mounts cost from BAT.

I also didn't have both cradle spacers, so I bought a 1" square aluminum bar from metal by the foot, and drilled 2 holes with my trusty drill press.  I thought that it being aluminum, that I would be able to saw through it fairly quickly by hand with my hack-saw...wrong.  If you are going to do this,  have the supplier cut it to length.

Once I got the engine mount, the bolt was about 1/2" too long to seat fully onto the custom lowering bolt.  I just cut off about 1/2" with a hack saw.

You probably won't find an actual mount bolt, but they do make 12mm sleeve nuts in grad 5 and 8 from Granger.  This is the only really custom piece.  The rest of the parts are just hardware and could be simple to fabricate with nothing more than a drill press and a hack-saw.

This will lower the center of gravity, and level out the drive shafts, so that torque steer will be reduced.