Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

The parking brake cable was stuck inside the L-shaped bracket on the
brake caliper.
And the two bolts holding this bracket were heavily corroded so
I had to be really careful not to sear them off.

I’ll replace them with the new one on installation.
If I have the time, will try separating the cable from the bracket but
not high priority at this stage.




The eng oil cooler.
It may look quite bad from this angle but actually, the top and side sections
were not too bad compared to some of the worst corroded ones that I saw
in the past.
I’ll take very good look at it once the engine is out of the bay.
I hope I can re-use it because it's very expensive and also quite often,
out of stock with a few months lead time.






The owner told me that he had leakage from the flex joints of the
OEM exh pipes so asked his local exh shop to have them fixed and
remove the CATs as well.

What they designed was that instead of inserting test pipe with triangle flanges
at both ends, they simply installed one very long exh pipe with very short flex joint.

May sound good idea and look neat but causing headache when it comes to
removing the engine.

You can’t bend it too much because the flexible joint is so short that it could easily
crack even at small angle.

The whole pipe is so long that the only place that can be disconnected is
either at the mating flange near the exh port of the cyl head or at the
connection point to the exh back box.

As you can imagine, all the exh bolts and nuts were heavily corroded over
the years especially at the rear bank so another headache factor.








After some consideration, I came to a conclusion that the only way to
safely make enough room for removing the engine was to take the
whole front exh pipe away and also remove the exh back box off the car.




The exh nuts on the rear pipe were so corroded that I didn’t want to
touch them before removing the engine.



After many hours, finally I managed to make enough room under
the engine for the removal.

While the front O2 sensor body looked fine, the rear bank one looked
rusty and corroded.
I may consider replacing them if not replaced in the past.
I need to remove the exh manifold from the cyl head any way.



Moving on to the upper side of the engine and
hope to take the engine out very soon.

More to follow later.

Kaz