I had the engine running for about half and hour today, got it up to operating temperature, and it behaved itself, keeping all the oil and water on the inside.
I have fitted silcon hoses throughout the cooling system, the only ones that are not are the upper and lower main radiator hoses, the OEM rubber is pretty thick and I have two spares for each hose as well. The silcon hose is rated up to +177 deg C, so should survived in the engine bay for a long time. The ceramic coating I had done works quite well. The EGT gauge was reading 110 deg consistanly but I could touch hold my hand on the manifold, whereas I could just touch the bare exhaust pipe further down. I had the coasting on the exhaust manifold, turbo housing, dump pipe and the exhaust brake, so hopefully that will reduce the heat in the engine bay as well.
There are a lot more pipes in my system than standard, mainly due to the water cooler turbo, the Webasto heater, and the rear heaters/calorifier-hot water system.
My primary alternator (OEM 55A) one packed up after just a few minutes of running. I was just going to rebuild it as it seemed fairly decent, but on taking it apart, the windings had corroded quite badly, probably from standing so long, so I had to get another one, only 12V one available was a 90A Bosch one, so together with the 120A on for the house batteries, I have 210A - it doesn't hurt having lots of spare capacity. I had to cut the "ear" off, do give it clearance from the radiator.
I am thinking of fitting one of these -
Sterling Regulator to the second alternator to charge up the house batteries to 100% capacity. Alternatively if I do decided to change over to Lithium house batteries, then I will fit one of their Alternator to Battery chargers -
Sterling Pro Alt C AB12130 I will only decide which way after a few months on the road
The house batteries will normally not be connected to starting battery, I fitted a Blue Sea Systems Magnetic Latch relay, and can control the connection between the two systems from the dash. I found out that if I had both alternators running in parallel, then only one would actually be charging, the other would be "lazy" just idling along due to the way the regulators on each alternator work. The one with the slightly higher voltage would do all the work. This way I can get both alternators to work, and still be able to connect the house to the starting battery together if necessary.
This is the big experiment - the big bag attached to the back of the cab is full of sound insulation. It is attached with quite a few strips of velcro, just in case I ever need to remove it. It's job is to prevent the noise from the gearbox from coming up into the cab through the rather large crawl through we have.
When the cab is down, it fills the gap between the camper and the cab completely, with only a bit of pressure. I can still move the cab relative to the camper by hand, but it is not as wobbly as before. I'm hoping it will stay in place. The heavy mudguard rubber is there to protect the bag which is made from 1mm reinforced truck side sail material.
We will see if it works on the road, hopefully in the very near future
