OK OK Nick. You've spurred me into action
Well, let's start with the boring stuff.
Back in about May I drove the car up to Heathrow one miserable, very wet morning. Everything fine. Left the car overnight in the car park. Got back, fired her up, everything fine. Then.....got to the motorway and she kept hesitating, then the power would bang back in. I managed to coax her home by constantly varying the throttle which seemed to stop it losing power all the time.
My initial thought was electrical, probably due to the wet weather. No warning lights or anything. The problem was I had to drive all the way up to Liverpool in 2 days time so I just bit the bullet and bought brand new coil pack, HT Leads and spark plugs from Renault.
This seemed to cure it, no problems at all on that trip. But then 2 days later it was back. I managed to snag a new style RS Tuner pretty reasonably priced, so I plugged this in which showed a front lambda fault. Thanks to a group buy on here, I got a genuine new lambda and, after a lot of swearing, got it installed. Hey presto! Running sweet as a nut again.
Other than 2 new front tyres and a handful of fir-tree clips to replace the missing arch liner clips, that's about it for maintenance.
Now onto the fun stuff....
Well an interior conversion had been on the "to do" list for a long time for this car, even back to when Nickson had her. I'd been looking for all the parts to come up reasonably close and finally Llewellyn on here put up a for sale ad. I managed to get pretty much everything I needed from him, all interior plastics, black carpets front and back, door cards front and rear, full dash, steering cowl, centre console, handbrake surround etc. etc.
I then sourced the required heater control and dimmer/headlight adjuster panel from ebay as Llewellyn had the climate control and ESP switch panel which I couldn't use.
Luckily I borrowed work's van to pick everything up from Slough, as when laid out it's quite a lot of stuff!!! This is only part of it....
I basically lost use of one room in my house for a few days...
What's that at the bottom of the photo you say? They'd be the new seats which will be going in post-interior change. Corbeau Revolutions, bloody narrow but having done a few events in them in another car, I knew that they're actualy supremely comfortable for these kind of seats.
This is how she started, standard apart from the OMP wheel..
First things first, pulled out the seats. In this photo I'd laid in a couple of subframes which I didn't end up using. I still can't believe you have to undo the exhaust post-cat to get to the passenger seat bolts. Is that normal or something to do with having an aftermarket exhaust??
Next up, dash top off...all pretty smooth sailing so far and nothing particularly challenging.
Wheel off, much harder than it should have been, it was well and truly wedged on!
Centre console out and diagnostics socket bracket removed.
Clocks out, stalks removed. As you can see, I was pretty meticulous with labelling wires. This project could go horribly wrong if you don't.
Lower dash coming out...not too difficult but would be easier with two people to lift it off the rear mounting points.
One thing you soon realise when doing this is that there's a couple of random plugs which aren't connected to anything. This one was in the centre console area, just in front of the gearstick. No idea what it does or would do if connected...anyone know? I found another one of similar shape and size behind the clock in the central dash.
And this is the end of day 1's progress. I have to say, looking at it like this before leaving it for the night...I did wonder if I'd bitten off more than I could chew.
So next morning, bright and breezy. First thing I tackled was the carpets as these would have to be all replaced before I could get on with replacing anything else.
Before that though, I decided to do a proper job of all the airbag connectors which wouldn't be used anymore. 3.3 Ohm resistors from Maplins do the trick.....
....and this was worth its weigh in gold! Does an awesome job of soldering in the car. Highly recommended.
So, this was a good feeling. Finally making progress. Out with the god awful blue, and some nice neutral black. You can clearly see the difference between front and rear....
Rear carpet in too....good stuff!
Now, wanting to do as good a job as I could, I removed the VIN plaque from my old dash and transferred it onto the new one. It's different shape slightly and the Ph2 plaque's are heat welded onto the dash. Therefore a bit of glue came in handy.
The photos reduced in quantity at this point as the heavens opened. The next parts of the job well truly awful as I was inside the car with all the door shuts trying to get on with it. I did come across quite a few discrepancies between my reality and Rob's guide. Particularly the alarm. Mine has a red flashy light which had been spliced into the loom and made some of the wire relocations even more tricky. Anyway, once I understood what Renault UK had done it wasn't too bad. But a warning to others contemplating doing the swap, it isn't quite paint by numbers!
Getting the lower dash back in was a real arse. I could push it back far enough to get it to locate onto the 3 main points. I couldn't really see what was stopping it, but it seemed to be the main loom. I took a dremel to the back of the dash and cut away some material at this point. This fixed it and it went relatively smoothly from there.
A load of j-clips come in very useful. For instance, there's no holes for the passenger side upper dash to secure. J-clips allow those fixing points to be used (with a bit of dremel work) which should keep rattles to a minimum.
Once the dash was in, work continued...changing out all the light grey/blue plastics to the newer charcoal/dark grey may seem easy but is very time consuming!
Door cards changed too, makes a massive difference to the looks.
New seats in too....on fixed subframes for now but looking to add sliders soon...
Purposeful...
And that's pretty much how she stands now.
I sold off my old interior (although still got all the plastics and carpet if anyone wants them??) so the rear is stripped at the moment.
I'm torn between getting harnesses and leaving the rear stripped, or getting tilting subframes and a phase 2 rear bench. What do you guys reckon?
MOT is due next Friday, so just got to get through that. Slightly worried about MOT rules and airbags not present etc but hoping it'll be OK.
Next big project is hopefully wheel refurb...finally finally.