things have been busy, and have not found much time to do any blogging so i suppose i best catch up on where things have been going......
in my last update the car was finally moved from the workshop to the great outdoors where it got to see day light for the first time as a complete car, and i have to say i felt like it has given birth and become a proud father.
now with the car finally out the shed a few little more odd jobs were able to be sorted, the main one being able to correctly do the tracking using a gunsons drive over trackrite. this has been set to currently toe out to aid the self centering of the steering, and once the car has passed the IVA it will set up to its correctly alignment.
with the car now outside temptation took over and it wasn't very long before we found the car going for its first drive under its own steam just down the road and back. yes this was a big moment but it was over shadowed by the fact that some where on the ECU i had a bad connection that was causing the car to run rough every time i moved the ECU and unless it was in a certain position the engine wouldn't even run, during these issue the ECU kept throwing up a fault code to do with MAF sensor, so this was replaced ( altho it turns out the fault didn't actually lay with the MAF sensor the original one was dead any way )
trying to diagnose the fault took a little while but i eventually tracked this down to bad connection on the earth for the MAF sensor where it plugs into the ECU, so after a lot of swearing this issue was finally overcome. which then moves me onto the next problem....
After getting the engine to run correctly it was time to give the car a little shake down on a private stretch of road, every thing was taken very gently to begin with, but there was one big issue, it appeared that the engine was suffering heavily with air locks, which was not allowing the cooling system to work at all. now to aid problems with this, my temperature gauge gave completely the wrong readings, every time the engine was run after a few min the gauge would go off the scale, with no real way of telling what temperature the engine was actually running i have had to wait to get my hands on a laser temperature sensor.
after a bit of head scratching and some trial and error trying different ways to jack the car up and fill the cooling system up, last week i remade the blanking plate the covers my original thermostat housing, but this time with the addition of small threaded hole and a dowty washer which enabled me to jack up the front of the car, this in turn allows the head to be fully bleed and removes all the air from the system which had been causing me all the problems.
also today i fitted some ally panels to provide some ducting of the heat that is given off when the fan kicks in to stop the air intake sucking in loads of hot air.
other jobs that have also been completed....
Side repeaters have now been fitted to the front cycle wings to comply with the new IVA regs, now these were supplied by westfield, but in a fetching shade of chrome, these really did look out of place on the car, so with a little rub down and a can of satin black paint, these where given a much better look.
IVA caps have now been fitted to most of the parts that need to be covered for the IVA test, all the front suspension bolts etc etc along with some inside of the car.
Brakes - now this is a very interesting section that seems to high up on the much asked questions on the WSCC forum, how to bleed them correctly procedure?
After my initial fill up and bleed of the brakes it turns out there were rubbish, and i had managed to get a lot of air into the system leaving me with a very spongy pedal.
after another bleed it seemed that they were getting no better, so off the forum and have a look through the much asked questions and theory's on how to do this, now one post caught my eye which said that you needed to take the calipers off the mounts and try to get the bleed nipples higher than the pipe work that feeds them, so with this info in had i set about whipping them off and giving it a go...
now during this attempt to bleed the brakes with the calipers higher up, straight away this time i was able to notice loads of tiny bubbles being pushed out, so all the calipers were done in this manner and i have to report that so far the brakes are feeling so much better, the pedal is still not as hard as i think it should be, but at the moment i am not to worried as i fitted a new set of grooved discs, which these are yet to be bedded in.
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