Finished Coolant System and First Engine Start in Car

I cut and installed the two pieces of tubing that connect the radiator to the engine. I’m not sure we’ll stick with this flex tubing, but it will work for now. I also just loosely zip-tied the coolant expansion tank to the chassis. We’ll be replacing this with a larger Canton Racing unit that we’ll order later.

The lower tubing snakes under the x-frame and steering rack before coming over the front sway bar and connecting to the lower left corner of the radiator.

After filling the engine with coolant, I test fired the engine and for some reason it ran surprisingly rough. It ran perfectly on the dyno, and there were only a couple of things we’ve touched since then. One of the concerns we had was that we could have cracked one or more of the spark plugs while removing and replacing the headers. I pulled them all and found them fairly carbon fouled.

 

Here’s the second one from the left in the photo above (probably the worst of the bunch). We knew that we were probably going to have to adjust the heat range of the spark plugs, but I’m still surprised how fouled these are for the engine being run for no more than 1.5 hours at the dyno shop.

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