I spent an hour or so today working on the car again. I wanted to do a bunch more, but I tweaked my neck during the week and its really been bothering me today. Bending over the car to work on wiring just wasn’t going to happen, but I didn’t want to lose a weekend.

While poking around the car for something simple I could work on, I decided to figure out a solution to the heater outlet on the intake manifold once and for all. A lot of wiring is done, and this is one part of getting ready to start the engine that just has taken a ridiculously long time to work out.

I have bought a bunch of various brass fittings, I bought a kit of brass fittings from Breeze Automotive and still hadn’t come up with a combination that worked. The spacing from the port in the intake to the closest runner is just too close for any of them.

What I ended up doing was using my bench sander to take four or five millimeters off the T-side of the brass fitting that came with Breeze’s heater hose bypass kit. Between that and beveling the corners and edges, I gained enough clearance around the distributor and runner to get it into the intake manifold.

An adapter fitting was sealed with Loktite thread sealer.

The fitting screwed into the top of the brass T-fitting, to give a spot to screw in the coolant temperature sensor.

The sensor was also sealed using thread sealent.

After threading the sensor into the brass fitting, I used the 90 degree fitting I’d previously worked up in my last attempt to get things to fit. With that and the hose barb from Breeze, I have the temperature sensor in the intake, and have a nicely tucked in outlet for the hot water going to the heater core.

That’s all I got done today. It wasn’t much, but at least a problem was solved that has been giving me fits for a year now.

I went to You-Do-It electronics in Needham, MA yesterday and picked up higher amp versions of the toggle switches in the dash to use with the seat heaters. At some point I need to deal with that wiring, but I’ll wait until after the engine has been started and I’ve go-karted the car.

Hopefully next weekend I can wrap up the dash wiring.