Sunday 27 November 2016

Road trip #1

Finally sorted out the handbrake light; firstly,  I'd wired it the wrong way round - it's an LED so unlike a normal bulb,  you have to get the polarity right. Same for the battery charge light. Secondly,  I discovered the little microswitch on the handbrake wasn't getting pushed up enough to engage - I think I can just bend it to fix that.

Today was engine tuning day,  as it wasn't raining and the rest of the family was busy. Car rolled out the garage (new ramps did the job),  laptop connected up and away I went. I'd got some instructions from Simon (ex of GBS - he recently left but is still thankfully answering questions on the forum,  which is very good of him).

As with a lot of my work,  I'm not sure if I've done this right. I've had the engine running fine before using what I thought was the Power Map (as Simon called it) but when I loaded it up today and recalibrated the TPS,  I couldn't get the engine to idle at all - it wouldn't run without a lot of throttle and even then,  it popped away like mad. Very confusing.

So I loaded up the base Zetec map that came with the ECU and that idled fine,  thankfully. I tried following the instructions,  adjusting the mixture to get the most stable idle,  fiddling with the idle screw on the throttle until I think I got something decent; idles reasonably smoothly at around 950rpm.

I decided that reversing back into the garage is too tricky,  especially without mirrors so I decided to drive in forward,  which meant... a road trip!



OK,  the world's slowest and shortest Road trip but that's MY car,  that I built myself!

I did have a slight coolant leak but a quick tweak on the offending jubilee clip and seemed to be OK.  I've also made a start on the rear wheel arches...


Tuesday 22 November 2016

The good, the bad and the blue

The Good: my reversing light works. This might not sound like much but some people have found the reversing switch on the gearbox doesn't work. I couldn't test it while the gearbox was out the car because I couldn't the gear lever into reverse without the clutch pedal. If it hadn't worked,  gawd knows what I would have done because that switch is not easily accessible. So BIG relief...

The Bad: the handbrake light doesn't work. Might just be a fuse... needs more investigation.

The Blue: I wanted to use washers on the bolts holding the dashboard in because I'd had to widen the holes and so I needed to hide the gaps and also it's GRP so needs to have the load spread. But normal ally washers would just look a bit too industrial so I tried to find some blue ones,  to vaguely match the dash. I couldn't find blue bolts and washers but I did find these:


Supposed to be bling for engine bays but I quite like them:



Saturday 19 November 2016

The indications are good

I've been waiting for a few weeks to do the front indicators because I've had to wait for little niggly bits to be delivered; large washers,  threaded  tubes and rubber gaiters.

First step was to drill a small hole in the metal extenders to match the little lug on the indicator body. I then marked up the nose cone and drilled a 10mm hole, 400mm from the ground (350mm is the minimum for IVA) and 80mm in from the front edge.

Annoyingly,  I had to cut off the perfectly good spade terminals as they wouldn't fit through the threaded tube. If anyone needs it,  this is the combination of nuts and washers I used:


The gaiters are just bog standard,  generic driveshaft gaiters for a FWD car - trimmed off one end and they fit perfectly.

I used large washers to try spread the load as much as possible on the GRP of the nose (one on either side) :


Look as good as they can and feel reasonably sturdy:



Replaced the hub pinch bolts with longer versions and a nylock:


Finally,  knocked up some basic ramps to get the car out the garage:



Pretty rubbish but hopefully they'll do for a while.  Long-term,  I'd like to build a concrete ramp.


Thursday 17 November 2016

Fog on the Mole

I realised I hadn't actually checked my newly installed fog light worked,  so battery connected up and... nothing! Spent 20 minutes panicking before I realised I hadn't connected the switch to the loom! All working fine and so is my main beam flash button,  which I'm very proud of - means I'm getting the hang of the electrics.

However,  the handbrake warning light isn't working.  There is no power to the handbrake switch and I'm sure one of the wires should have a positive voltage - I'll have to check with GBS.

Dashboard off to try tidy up the loom. I could only find space for one big P-clip on the firewall and managed to re-use a hole in the firewall to fit a cable tie holder - those 2 hold the bulk of the loom in the centre. I just used cable ties to hold the rest in various strategic places - hope that's OK for IVA?

I wanted to replace the hub pinch bolts for longer versions so I could get a nylocs on the end. Some people say this is now required for IVA but I can't see anything in the manual and at least 1 person got through IVA without it but for the sake of a few quid,  no harm. No harm,  as long as you order the right bloody bolts! Ordered half-shanked versions but there is too much shank and it gets stuck in the threaded part of the hub. New,  fully threaded bolts on order...

Saturday 12 November 2016

Does my bum look big in these?

Short session to get the reversing and fog lights fitted. The fog light has to be perpendicular to the road and even though the reversing light doesn't,  it would look a bit odd to not do it the same.

So I started on the reversing light as practice because it wouldn't matter if I screwed it up. I decided to trim a triangular chunk out of the bottom of the light unit and then use the IVA trim on the top edge,  like this:


Seems to work ok - I used some of the smaller trim to tidy up the rest of the body unit:


Sadly,  I tried to do the same on the fog light but didn't do as good a job,  shaving off too much off the bottom of the unit,  meaning I had some extra work to do. Looks OK although neither of these feel hugely solid and they are butt-ugly :


Wednesday 9 November 2016

A bit of bounce

After the euphoria of my last entry,  it's been a quiet week.

I tried to make a start on the reversing light but,  as so often happens,  I haven't got the right length bolts - they're on order.

I did manage to get the Emerald software to talk to my ECU by installing it on my work laptop but I gassed the house out by running the engine for a minute in the garage,  so that will have to wait until I roll her out the garage next time. However,  I need to sort out some proper ramps for the garage - the lip is just too high.

I also went round all the bolts on the rear suspension,  loosening them a little to try get some movement. One in particular was very tight and took a lot of effort to loosen but I do now have some movement,  thankfully.

I had,  to my eyes,  too much negative camber on my front wheels. GBS confirmed that I should really have set the distance on the top rose joint to 50mm instead of 48mm that everyone else seems to mention in other blogs. Doesn't sound like much but after I'd partly dismantled the front suspension and wound the rose joint out a couple of turns on each side,  negative camber was down to about 2deg, which I believe is about right.  Definitely looks better...