Its been a little while and I have no pictures to show for it but here is how I've got on:
I was waiting for the winter holidays from uni to get a good two weeks or so in on the car but as with all things its the unforeseen issues that slow you down. About ten minutes into running the car getting ready to map on my drive it blew the gasket on the oil pump and pissed oil all over the drive. I managed to turn it off before I saw any oil pressure drop.
I took the front end apart and the oil pump off, the gasket I had used was obviously the wrong shape. I don't know how I had missed this but then again it was ~3 years ago that I built this engine and I have a better eye for detail these days. So I got my brother to use his micro-mill at work and o-ringed the pump so it should never leak again, made a new gasket and got it back together.
Having ripped my megasquirt apart to put in fan control to fix my temperature issue I was back and running again BUT having got the engine up to temperature something was wrong as the oil pressure would creep down until it switched on my 20psi safety light. Confused and tired at this point I dropped tools and went back to uni to study for my winter exams.
After exams I got a few days off so I pulled the sump on the engine. I had a hunch it was a problem with the pickup (same symptom on VW golfs when they get a gunky pickup apparently) and what do you know the filter screen had sucked onto the pickup pipe, very much limiting the oil to the engine when its hot. So I modified this so it would never happen again, sump back on and she runs smooth never dropping below 40psi.
So but for an expandy foam seat I havn't been able to do much else on the car, university work is full on at the moment but I plan to get a few weeks over easter to make and mount the back panels and drive it a little before its first autosolo on the 14th of April