Sweat shop

Hottest day of the year and I spent 3.5 hours in my garage last night - 32 degC, too much body fat and light exercise don't make a pretty sight.

But a good session; the issues with the steering rack gaiters touching the suspension was because, early in the build, I added a spacer under the O/S end of the rack to add some clearance from the wishbone. However, I didn't put a matching one on the other side, which is why one end is up in the air, the other down low, almost touching the wishbone mount. So, I made up another spacer and fitted it to the N/S end of the rack to level it up and it's much better now - decent clearance all round. That also might improve my self-centering....?

I adjusted the O/S brake line to the caliper to remove the pig-tail that the tester picked up on and that forced a brake bleed (which I wanted to do anyway).

The tester also failed me on a brake line into the master cylinder but at the end of the test, I think he was having second thoughts. He was concerned that a graze on the side of the pipe (caused by the brake flaring tool I used) might fail but he admitted it might take years before that happened, if at all. He suggested I just cover the line so the next tester can't see it and it would be fine :-) So, I bought some special tape which is designed to repair cracked pipes and covered the offending pipe in that - hopefully that will be ok.

My biggest worry is how to sort out the brake strength - I failed because, at slow speed, my front brakes are slightly weaker than the rears (fine at higher speeds). I've booked into a local garage tomorrow morning and I'm hoping to simply put the car on their rollers and just brake on and off, to try bed the brakes in and make them stronger that way.

Just have the wayward rear brake line to tie up out of the way of the wishbone and the handbrake to adjust to try make it stronger. There is an adjuster built into the system and I remember I did have a small amount of adjustment left to make the handbrake stronger - just have to hope that's enough.