This car had a whole list of things to do, and is going to be a very nicely set up track car that’s also usable on the road.

The main things added were power steering, some serious chassis braces, and a new ignition system that should work better at high boost levels.

I also removed the air conditioning to save some weight, made up an intake heat shield, installed a larger swaybar, race seat, fixed up the two stage boost controller, and sorted out a few cosmetic items.

This is what the engine bay looks like after painting the cam cover, installing the new ignition system, power steering, and the intake heat shield:

Underneath the car there’s a new swaybar, a diff brace, and this rather massive chassis “butterfly brace”

It bolts on over the original chassis rails, then the “wings” link the two. It looks pretty impressive, and being all stainless steel it won’t rust!

The only issue is that it reduces ground clearance a bit, especially in the middle where the brace has to clear the exhaust.

This car had obviously run over something hard, and it had caused a fair bit of damage!

The first clue was that there was no oil in the engine!

After removing the cover plate under the engine the damage to the sump was pretty obvious:

The driver’s side engine mount (the metal bracket) had been snapped in two:

The steering rack had some pretty serious damage. It’s amazing that it still worked!

The whole front crossmember had been bent up slightly on the impact side and was twisted due to the steering rack being on the front of it. The red line shows the approximate angle the steering rack should be at. Fortunately the car’s chassis was still straight.

One of the control arm bushes had been damaged, and the aluminium cover plate / brace was fairly bent.

The sump, engine mount, crossmember, steering rack, and control arm bush were replaced, and I was able to straighten the cover plate and it all went back together smoothly.

The water taxi has a hydraulic steering setup, which was connected to the engine with a linkage made from old GTR swaybar links and a piece of stainless steel rod.

The geometry wasn’t quite right and it could foul on the steering ram bracket when the engine was tilted, which caused it to break a couple of times.

I made a new linkage using some stainless steel rose joints, bolts, and tube.

It looks a lot tougher (and less rusty) than the old linkage!

This required getting the ex-scrap lathe up and running to make some aluminium spacers for the bolts

After a bit of a break due to being busy with other things, I’ve finally gotten back into the water taxi rebuild.

There’s not too much left now, but a lot of the small things end up being extra fiddly and taking longer than expected.

One of the next things to do was to get the hydraulic steering setup working and adapt it to the “new” engine.

The hydraulic ram that moves the engine to steer the boat was bolted onto a bracket which then bolted onto the old engine.

The bolts holding the ram onto the bracket were corroded and stuck, and wouldn’t come out without breaking them - so a new mounting method was needed.

Just to make it a bit more difficult, there’s no space on the new engine to fit the ram in the same way as the old engine - so when the engine tilts up the steering linkage needs to change angle quite a lot.

To mount the ram onto the boat I made up a stainless steel bracket that wraps around the ram and holds it solidly without needing any bolts.

The bracket then bolts onto the transom of the boat using the top two engine mounting bolts.

The actual linkage from the ram to the engine took a lot of working out, but ended up being fairly simple.

I used the ball joints from a Skyline GTR swaybar link and welded a longer stainless steel rod in between them. This connects the steering ram to the engine while allowing all the necessary movement.

After that the system just needed filling up with fluid and the air bled out - and it was up and running!

This one was pretty quick, just swapping a noisy and leaky power steering pump for a good one.

It was making some pretty bad noises, easily mistaken for serious engine trouble!

Swapping the power steering pump is fairly straight forward, apart from the ridiculously tight banjo bolt holding the pressure hose on.

It’s also a good idea to flush out the old fluid and refill the system with fresh stuff.

This car was making a nasty knocking noise from the engine, which sounded like it could be pretty serious.

After checking out the top end and having a good listen around I found that the noise was coming from the power steering pump!

That’s a lot easier to replace than the engine

Another job to do on the same car was replacing the fuel pump.

The pump is inside the fuel tank, and is accessed through a cover under the carpet in the boot.

Once the cover is removed, there’s another plate that unbolts from the top of the fuel tank and has a cradle to hold the pump and fuel level sender.

The owner had purchased a larger fuel pump which was already installed on a standard cradle, but the fuel level sender had been damaged in transit.

I just needed to desolder the cable on both and swap the good one onto the new pump cradle.

Because the new pump has its fuel pickup a bit higher in the tank I adjusted the fuel level sender to read empty a bit earlier.