My main concern at the moment is the cooling system. I wanted to save some cash and make use of the standard Ford thermostat, rather than the £350 GBS water rail. However (concentrate, this is complicated) , the Zetec I have is one of the later ones that determined coolant temperature through the cylinder head using a sensor that is not compatible with the Emerald ECU. There is no provision in the thermostat to insert a coolant sensor which means the best I can do is fit a sensor in the main pipe coming out of the thermostat. But then, it will not read a real water temperature until the thermostat is open, when the engine is hot and thus the ECU will keep thinking the engine is cold for longer than it actually is, over-fuelling (holding the choke open, for us older people who remember chokes) and giving bad economy.
I'm going to ask Emerald how bad that is likely to be - I may have to get the darn water rail after all (GBS have an extra pipe between the engine and thermostat, which has holes in for the water sensor).
The engine loom is coming on slowly but held up by odds and ends I need (crimping tool, plugs etc). I've roughly put the wires I can in place round the engine bay. Once I've got all of them, I'll hopefully cut them to size and then I can take them indoors on a table and heat shrink and cover them.
I bought an original Zetec engine loom off eBay:
But most of this isn't needed as the plugs are for the original Ford sensors which I'm not using. However, the main plastic case is neat so I'm going to re-use that. Started by pulling it apart and retaining just the injector plugs:
I started what I thought would be a simple thread on a forum over whether crimping or soldering is better and it ran to 3 pages! The gist seems to be that either is fine and as my soldering skills are dubious, I'm going to crimp (note that Ford did some crimping between those injectors for the common terminal, in that pic above). Just have to wait for my crimping tool to arrive.
Before I fitted the plenum I screwed in what I thought was the air sensor but it was a water sensor - doh! When I tried to put the right sensor in, it won't go. I think it's just powder coat in the threads but have I got an M10 tap? Of course not. I've ordered an entire metric tap set as I keep find myself needing them.
About the only useful progress was fitting the HP fuel lines:
And modifying a nut for the clutch cable:
This is the only way to get a nut on the far side of the bell housing as the blob on the end of the clutch cable is too large to get through a nut.
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