Skoda Rally Blog

So, the back end was easy enough, but the front… is a slightly more involved affair.  This is mostly because of the remote reservoirs for the new suspension, which are an important part of it, giving much bigger oil and gas volume, and allowing a thermostat to be placed away from the suspension, giving consistent performance.  That’s all lovely, but they need to be placed somewhere, and that’s where the fun began.  On newer suspension systems, they come out of the top of the strut, making them fit easily in the engine bay.  But on these, they appear under the top mount, meaning that they are under the wheelarch.  Ideally, the reservoir should be in the engine bay for a number of reasons – cleanliness, adjustability and also avoiding damage.  The strut needed to be carefully placed to stop the hose from fouling the inner wheelarch (which took some time), but the next issue was finding a way to get the reservoir under the bonnet.  And here’s the problem:  The reservoirs are quite big.  Which means a big hole.  So, what started out looking like this:

A small hole...

Needed to be much bigger:

A much bigger hole

Which wasn’t that easy to do with a holesaw, but did look fairly neat after some tidying up.  The reservoir can now live inside the engine bay, on the filter cool air box wall, although the hose needs to be fixed in place to stop it doing something silly.  However, no progress has occurred today, because I’ve been doing something else – the garage roof had started to leak in the rain, and needed replacing.  I couldn’t afford to have someone else do it, so I did it myself with the help of a friend, and it took the entire day.  Hopefully there will be more progress tomorrow, with the left hand side getting done, and the car finally sitting on the Proflex all round…