It's all Greek to me

With the recent ice age hitting us,  it's just been too cold to go out until tonight. Brief hour drilling holes in the rear wheel arches for the lights. I was planning to fit them as well but guess what?  Go on,  guess. Yup,  no #%&%£* bolts of the right size! On order...

Spent most of the last week thinking about probably the trickiest part of IVA - emissions. I have my engine idling pretty well but it's unlikely to be producing the right CO and HC levels to pass IVA.

There are 3 routes to go to try get the right figures:

1. Hope you (or an expensive specialist tuner) can tweak the ECU map.
2. Fit a narrowband lambda sensor (about £40) in the exhaust and then fiddle with the map (but less fiddling needed than option 1).
3. Fit a wideband lambda sensor (about £200) which will help with emissions AND will also help setting up a power map to optimise engine power.

I'm not bothered with power (yet) so option 3 is out. I've been advised to do option 2 but Richard L did this and still failed IVA.

So,  my cunning plan (!) is to take the car to an MOT garage (when it's pretty much finished),  hook up to their gas analyser and try tweak the map to get the right emissions myself. I've emailed Emerald and they've sent me a cheat sheet on what to adjust in the map,  so I'll give it a go. If it doesn't work,  I will only lose the cost of an MOT and then I'll consider other options.

The easiest route is to take the car to GBS for IVA. They charge a minimum of 6 hours labour but could be much more if there are lots of failures. I reckon I could fail IVA at least twice (retest is £95 a throw,  I believe?) for that much.

And apart from the cost,  I do feel it's a bit of a cheat getting GBS to do it. I've done the build,  I should stand or fall by my own hand,  if that isn't too pompous.

We shall see...