Plumbing - Ugh

There is something about plumbing that I just don't like to do. I'm not very good at it for one thing, and it always seems that no matter how many parts you have on hand to fix a drain, you always need one or two more. Plumbing on a car is a little better, but still not one of my favorite jobs. In this case, I actually had MORE parts than I needed, which sometimes is just as perplexing - especially if you don't know which parts are the spares. So, I am happy to have this job out of the way.




When I got the frame from Keen Young, I also got an armload of aluminum tubes and rubber hoses. I started with 10 pipes. Two long larger-diameter pipes with 90 degree bends on one end and flats pressed around midway, another long larger-diameter pipe without a bend with a nipple soldered on to one end and a flat pressed in. Six medium diameter straight pipes with various lengths of hose attached to one end, and a single small diameter straight pipe. Some of them are shown here. If you click on the picture and look at the enlargement, you can make out the flat spots on the bigger pipes.



The location of the smaller pipes was pretty easy to figure out. There is a row of five holes along the bottom of the frame that is just right for four of the long medium pipes and the small pipe. The four pipes are for coolant - one pair for the heater core and the other pair for the chargecooler radiator. The smallest, center pipe is a vacuum line. This runs from the mechanical vacuum pump bolted to the engine to the brake power booster. These smaller pipes need to be installed from the rear of the car, as the front T section obstructs access from the front.

The big hole in the center is for the oil cooler lines. These are high pressure flexible rubber hoses that carry filtered oil to the front of the car and return it to the engine. I don't need to install these lines for what I want to do now, so I will leave them out. The smaller hole to the lower right is for the shifter cables.


The bigger tubes were the challenging bits. I assumed that the second bent pipe was a spare and that I was to install one bent pipe and the pipe with the nipple. The problem was, I couldn't find any parts manuals that showed that combination of pipes. I also missed an important detail in the '88-'92 parts manual that showed the two bent pipes in the cooling diagram. The drawing had some splits in the tubes that looked like a flanged pipe end and some 90 degree hoses. I put a post out on the turboesprit list for some help, and within an hour, alert reader Ed Young sent me an email with the relevant picture AND an enlargement of the pipe drawing. Thanks Ed!


The big pipes need to be installed from the front of the car, as that is where the bends are. It turns out, the flats are in the pipes to make room for the gearshift mechanism, as you can see here.







There are still some bits missing. There are grommets that fit around the pipes where they pass through the frame that will need to be replaced, and there are some high-tech sleeves put around the pipes where they run through some interior bulkheads to keep the bulkheads from sawing through the pipes. I'm not going to worry about those bits just yet, as the frame will come apart once again to be refinished before reinstalling everything for real.