Topic

A couple of weeks ago I bit the bullet and finally installed the PRT and Roose Silicone Hose Set I bought three years ago.
I finally located a 4-way connector on E-bay which was the missing piece of the puzzle.
As expected it wasn't a pleasant job and by the time I had finished my arms looked like I had been fighting with a cat!
The results are worth it though as the car seems to warm up more efficiently. With the temp senders in the pre-PRT circuit you get a proper reading of
the water temp, and the car does seem to warm up more quickly. (I get a reading from the oil temp guage sooner than before.)
One nice thing is that in spite of replacing over 20 hose clamps there are no leaks!
As a bonus I found the plenum gasket to be damaged and installed a new one and now the idle is much better.
Of course, now I want to replace the hoses at the rad end and the engine cooling manifold to intake hose to get rid of the old hoses there as well.
There is no end!

Here's the before:


And the after:

I wish that you'd done this sooner Rich. It's a beautiful upgrade job.

Me too! The results were better than expected. Other than not having the 4-way connector the only thing that held me up was not
wanting to mess with a car that didn't leak or overheat. When I did my annual oil change a few weeks ago I took a good look at the 18 year old coolant hoses and made the decision to go ahead. They were starting to show their age and some of them were getting a bit softer that I liked so it was time, before I found
myself in a big cloud of steam by the side of the road!

Can you show the 4 way connector? I have the same hoses to fit to my TF but I'm not sure that I understand where the missing piece fits yet.

I will see if I have a pic of the 4-way to add, but it is (sort of) in the picture above.
The black hose in the foreground comes from the 4-way fitting to the expansion bottle. You can just make out the fitting in the pic.
the other hoses go to the engine water manifold (stepped hose), the head water take-off and to one of the heater hoses.

Found a pic; This one is another angle with the expansion bottle hose pulled back so you can get a better view of the connector.
The whole hose system is pretty abstract, but once you get the 4-way in the correct attitude things sort of fall into place.
I was using one of the earlier Roose kits that didn't have the expansion bottle hoses so I just used the ones that came with the connector.
I had bought some bulk silicone hose but prefer the fit of the moulded original hoses.

This diagram was a big help in routing the hoses. It was done by someone on a forum but I can't remember who so if anyone knows please post a credit!
I had also downloaded a couple of pics showing a removed engine and subframe with the PRT hoses but with them all being black it's hard to make out what goes where.