Time for an update.
Made some good progress lately, but there is lot's more to do. Not sure at this point when I will be ready to finally drive the car, depends on how much time I can get to work on it. This part is a lot of fun, have been getting help and advice from my sons & car buddies, and making lots of trips to the local parts store.
It took a while, but finally came up with a way to plumb in the heater that has the hoses laying on top of the motor and also has a place for the water temperate gauge sending unit. There are a lot of different ways to achieve the same goal, we will see how this setup performs.
The overall setup.
Used a brass 'T' for tapping into the intake manifold from the heater core. Next ran a short hose out the water pump to a plastic 'T', then one end went to the heater core, the other to the expansion tank by routing it under the alternator bracket and fan belt. The downside of this setup is if the belt breaks, I need to disconnect a coolant hose, which is messy, but thankfully that does not happen very often. On the upside it does make for a clean installation.
This is the ERA supplied heater valve, it should work well. Added some shrink tubing to the battery cable terminals. There are a few different ways to wire the starter solenoid. One is using the solenoid on the firewall, the other is to use the solenoid built into the starter (if it has one). The setup here uses one side of the firewall solenoid, for a junction point for the battery cables. The starter I have has an internal solenoid, so when wired in this configuration, it's always has voltage. The small red wire, supplies voltage to the internal starter solenoid at startup. This setup with both solenoids is redundant, as I could just run a wire from the ignition switch to the internal solenoid in the starter. We'll see how this works.
The saga of the seats …
For those that have been following along, know that my original plan was to use the ERA street seat for the passenger side and a Kirkey seat on the driver's side. The car came with the street seat and man is it comfortable! Problem is, it puts me up a bit too high in the saddle so to speak for my liking, so I bought a Krikey seat. The Krikey vintage bucket fit well into the car, is very well made and put me right on the floor, nice! Downside was, even when adding foam bits here and there, I was not able to get very comfortable. It was OK, but I kept thinking of how good the ERA seat feels. What to do … well I talked to Peter and we decided to see what Jack (ERA's master upholstery craftsman) could come up with. What I was after was the look and feel of the street seat, but be able to sit a bit lower in the car.
The seat on the left is the standard ERA seat, the one on the right is a custom seat. Topside looks the same, the bottom side tells the story. The standard seat has a rubber membrane that provides support to the seat cushion. The driver's seat has some very resilient foam in the seat cushion that will compress under weight, but pops back up when the weight comes off.
The net result is a very comfortable seat that gets me just that little bit lower in the seat. Jack did a great job.
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