1985 Rover SD1 Vanden Plas EFI - Now running Speeduino EFI

The work started quickly. I don't mess around. The car had a really bad surge when i got it, especially at cruise, so i took a look into it.

Since getting the car, it had a really bad surge at cruise. Internet wisdom pointed towards the throttle potentiometer/position sensor.
It’s an easy part to get to, and apparently they can be fixed. So following Ramon’s great guide, I got stuck in.

First step is to mark the location of the pot, so you can put it back where it came from, as it is adjustable. I didn’t have any paint pens, so just used a vivid marker.





There’s meant to be three screws holding it in, but mine only had two. Remove those, disconnect the plug and pull it out. Once on the bench, there are three really small screws holding the whole thing together.


Take them out, and it all comes apart, and the issue becomes obvious.






The metal wiper had just straight up worn right through the carbon track, meaning the readings being sent back to the ECU at that throttle position would be all over the place.

As per Ramon’s guide, the trick is to move the wiper over slightly, so that it contacts a fresh part of the track and gets a clear reading again. To do this I cut the plastic tabs off with a knife, moved the wiper slightly down, and then used superglue to hold it back in place. Hopefully it holds OK, but i’ll probably look at changing to a more modern, reliable unit when I fit the Speeduino anyway.





I reassembled the unit and refit to the car, making sure to give everything a good clean down, including the electrical connector.

A quick test drive showed that the surging is gone straight away, it pulls smoothly and even idles better now. I wont tell if its gone 100% until I get on the open road again, but with a battery that was flat, a jump pack that also needed a charge, and anywhere between “E” and 1/4 in the gas tank, I couldn’t risk going far at the moment. It’s a success so far though.

Heh, I'm ready for the inevitable breakdown in the dark. I bring you, DAYLIGHT!




#MadeInBritain

The box of bits from the previous owner arrived, so out goes the pod, in goes the original filter.


Back in the NP70 days I had some issues with the original air box having the incorrect filter fitted, and strangling the engine. A quick fix was to chuck a fully sick red pod filter on the AFM…. and boy did it make a huge difference. The engine could breathe again. It also made lots of loud noises, such as an annoying whistle.




I sold the car with the pod on there (and the original box in the boot) because it wasn’t worth my money or effort replacing the standard filter.

Fast forward many years, and I'm back in an SD1, and sure enough, it too has a pod filter installed.



Its ugly, looks out-of-place, is sucking hot engine bay air, and it whistles like crazy. Certainly wouldn’t be my choice to install these days.

Thankfully, the previous owner still had the original air box and filter, and it was a condition of the sale that he sends them my way. Today I received the package, and went to work installing the original air box.

It was dirty and looks like it’s had some touch-ups in the past, but its complete and in good condition. The filter inside wasnt dirty either, so ill reuse that.



It even still has the original Unipart sticker 😀


I gave both the whole air box and the area on the car where it will sit a good clean and degrease.


And removed the pod filter. Just the one clamp to remove it.


With some wiggling and jiggling I got the air box, its trumpet and the rubber hose all fitted up, with some new hose clamps. I then gave the whole lot a quick splash of 303 to make it look nice (and to condition the rubber hose).




Over all, much much happier. It looks the part, and will hopefully make the engine sound a bit less silly. I obviously haven’t driven it yet though due to it curse word fuel out everywhere, but that’ll be fixed soon.

Whilst under the bonnet I took a few seconds to just tweak a few things and make it look tidier. I cleaned up the ignition leads, and tucked away the vacuum hose on the top of the plenum.


Looks a bit better than it did. Its the small things 😊

Speaking of fuel leaks, the hose arrived today, so not long until I can fix it. This is proper SAE R9 high pressure, ethanol safe fuel hose, in the CORRECT ID of 7.6mm.



Just waiting on parts from Rimmers, and the hose clamps, then it’s all go.

I’m slowly working through the list of things that were wrong with the car when I got it. Todays task was to remove the 30-year-old radio, and look into why the RH rear window is dead.


First job of the day was to pull the battery out, again. I noticed the other day when I was under the bonnet that the little condition indicator had gone from red (bad) to white (charge), but started the car like a champion. I have taken it out again to give it another good long whack with the charger and see if I can bring it back to green.

I have almost managed to source a proper battery hold down, just waiting on payment details; no more rope, yay! Since the battery is out I will also be replacing the rather crappy condition original main ground cable from the battery. The wire where it joins the terminal on the guard is badly frayed, and only about half of the strands of wire are actually being used. No good at all.







Probably doesn’t help that for a period of time the negative cable was the only thing holding the battery in place. I do have some new wire to go in, I just need to buy some terminals and make the cable up. I didn’t really want to use the last one I made up (from one of my skylines), it was a tad…. flashy.



With the battery out and on charge, I was limited to things that didn’t need power. I have mentioned in the past that the speakers are curse word…. well, the front ones are, they are both blown…. and the rears are gone (one was hanging by the cables, so I pulled it out). I have purchased a set of Pioneer speakers all round, with 4″ in the front and 6×9 in the rear. To get the most from this setup ideally I would run new wiring to all the speakers, but since I'm not overly crazy about audio quality, i’m going to reuse all the original wiring, including the fader in the center console.




The standard cassette tape headunit had to go though, and will be replaced with my JVC headunit from the MX5. I can change the color of the buttons and display to match the standard backlighting, and has all the goodies like bluetooth.

Looking at the face of the original headunit one would presume that you stick some rods in the fours holes, and the whole thing slides out. Nope, I just couldn’t get it budge.


So I went into full Rip-It-Out mode. Pulled the LH knobs off, and undid the little retaining ring under the volume knob. The faceplate then folds down, and you can gently pull the ribbon cable out.



With the faceplate off, its kinda obvious what’s holding the damn thing in now. Its four little locking tabs, each with a ramp to release them. Obviously the tool I was using just wasn’t special enough to trip the ramps and unlock them.




Even with the faceplate off I couldn’t release the damn things. More disassembling was needed. Off came the plastic surround trim, revealing a metal plate with two screws in it.


Whip those screws out, and GENTLY pry the metal plate forward. Being super careful not to pry against the heater controls, as all the plastic there is fragile. With the metal plate off, the radio finally slips out and can be removed.



With the radio out you can see the tabs that lock the thing in place.



The radio was made by Motorola England for Austin Rover Group.


The whole lot is wired in with two standard RISTS connectors. I can’t seem to find any plug-and-play ISO adaptors for these, so my only options are to chop the loom, or chop the plugs off the radio and reuse them. I know which one I will be doing….


I wont be using the standard radio ever again, but I will keep hold of it, and will be sure to leave enough loom on the radio that the connector can be spliced back in if ever needed.

I’ll build the loom and install the new headunit once the speakers arrive.

Moving right along, I also decided since it was such a lovely day outside that I would also take a look at why the rear window doesn’t function correctly. It drops an inch or so by itself (and can be pulled up and down by hand, by that much), and doesn’t go up or down. The relays click when buttons are pressed, but the motor is silent.

Taking the door card off was easy, there is one screw on the front of the door card, in the carpet section, and a screw in the door handle. Take both of those out, and then using a trim removal tool, carefully lever the door card off the clips and then lift the whole door card out of the window channel at the top. The window switch needs to be disconnected too.





It was pretty obvious with the door card off, that I wasnt the first person in here….


I suspect that no matter how bad BLMC build quality was back then, duct and masking tape probably weren’t original equipment for the moisture barriers. One of the relays was also just floating around, not attached to the bracket.

The window motor wiring had a big ziptie around the plug holding it together, but the motor is still riveted to the regulator so I suspect it may be original and someone tried to fix it and failed. everything in the doors looks good, no obvious rust, and all the rails etc look good. It’ll need a thorough greasing, but I need to get the motor working first.



I tried feeding 12v directly into the motor, but nothing happened. I tried feeding 12v in via an even bigger supply, nothing. I tried percussive “persuasion” whilst feeding the motor power, nothing. The reason for the window moving by itself seems to be related to the motor too. All the linkages are working, but the movement is where the main gear meshes with the motor. I don’t know what part is damaged there, hopefully its the motor.

I’m currently trying to source a replacement regulator and motor now, and will have to change it over. Not a job I’m looking forward to. In the meantime, the tape is back on the glass, and the door card is in the back seat. Classy.

Finally, the weather let up for a few minutes today, so I carried out some more work.

The past week has just been a complete write off. First NZ was hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, and although it was in the South Island, about 400km away from where I live, my city still took some damage. Thankfully we are OK, no damage at home and life goes on. It did slow everything down and cause disruption for a bit, especially when waiting on parts from the South Island, where there is very limited transportation options due to major infrastructure damage (IE: The main state highway up the Island is complete cut off by massive landslides and broken up roads).

Then, the next day, we got hit with massive flooding. Only some minor leaks in my garage, and the Rover ended up with some water in the boot… but due to flooding and slips it took a heck of a long time to get home, once the roads even reopened. Its been a crazy week.

Anyway, the tape on the Rovers window held up and kept the water out. During the week a replacement rear window regulator and battery hold down arrived; Many thanks to Gareth at SD1 Travelled Spares for supplying these. I also picked up a new ground lead from the battery, and a new negative terminal.

The first job on the list was to install the new negative lead. I got a 4GA lead with ring terminals on each end, and a brass terminal with a stud and wing-nut on it for quick removal of the negative lead. This new lead is about twice as thick as the old one, and much better condition.



I also fit the original battery hold down. It’s a weird design, and its no wonder this style isn’t used anymore, but hey, its original and better than rope 😆



It was a bit of a bad joke trying to get the hooks to stay in place whilst you hooked the other one in. Got there in the end though.

After that, I got on with fitting the headunit to fill the gaping hole.

Cut the plugs off the standard radio, leaving enough on the radio that I could join the plugs back on if needed.




Chopped the radio harness up, as it still had all the bits from the MX5 wiring, like the steering wheel controls (which for obvious reasons aren’t needed).




Soldered it all together.


Note the two speakers connected to the harness. Fronts only here, the rears are powered by the same output via the factory fader control in the console.


Also tested the stereo bracket in the standard garnish. Looks mint, almost like it was made for it.




The next fun thing was to get it all into the dash, and test the wiring. One thing I wasnt sure of, because the wiring diagrams I used didn’t mention it, is that the purple wire with brown trace is for the auto antenna trigger. Everything else is as per this diagram.





I plugged it in, and bam, it worked straight away. Stoked.


Fitting the frame was bit of a prick. Limited space, rivets in the way, and it had to go in on an angle so it cleared the dash. Got there though.




Worked like a charm (although I forgot to plug the external mic in for bluetooth so it needs to come out again). The front speakers are buggered, but sound still came out of them and the radio reception was good. Bluetooth audio worked too.

I had a quick look at fitting the rear 6×9 speakers, but sadly they are WAY too big and I need to go back to the drawing board and work out what to do there. The standard speaker is a 4″ in a mount which IIRC is about 7×4. Apparently 6×9 will fit and its been done before, I just don’t know how.




Since the weather was still holding out and not raining again, I made a split second decision to replace the failed window regulator. It was seized solid, and the window wouldn’t shut. No real pictures of this process because it was very messy, and there were no hands free since my better half was holding the glass up from slipping down and smashing.

The process is easy though. This is the door,


Start by removing the door handle mount. Disconnect the linkage at the bottom, buy popping the little metal clip holding it in, up, and the pushing the linkage out of the plastic clip. Two screws on either side (not the three in the middle).


And then remove the lower rail. Another two bolts and the rail plate comes out. Take note of which way around it goes.



Then get your lovely assistant to hold the glass, as well as make life easier for them by strapping the glass to the frame with lots of tape. Once they are comfortable with the glass, undo the four bolts holding the regulator and motor to the door. Make sure the motor connector is disconnected of course, and before I did this I used a battery to activate the motor on the replacement regulator to try to get it into the same position as the failed one. Once the four bolts are out, all the weight of the glass is on the regulator, tape and assistant.


The only thing left to do with the old one is to disengage it from the rails, and then pull it out. There are two rails on the bottom of the glass. Slot the replacement into the door housing, and engage it with the rails. I found I could only get it to engage in the rails from the front edge of the rails (edge towards the front edge of the door). These are the rails (albeit after I had greased them)



Bolt it in, refit the lower rail, reinstall the door handle plate and away you go.

I suspect the reason for the original failure was due to the complete lack of lubrication on any of the rails. All of them were completely dry, and the main gear had only traces of dry grease, but some heavy wear. Before fitting the new regulator I applied grease to all moving parts, and anything I couldn’t get grease into, I sprayed liberally with a sticky liquid lubricant that won’t wash away. I also applied grease to the rails. I sprayed lubricant on the runners and tracks inside the door that the glass runs on too.

This is the old seized regulator. The only traces of grease you can see are where I hosed it with lubricant to try to free it up (without success, even out of the car its dead). The regulator appears good, but the motor is stuffed.




It’s now the world’s quickest window to go down, but is a bit lethargic going up. Its getting better though, it started really slow and almost stalled half way up, but now it goes up without fail, it’s just not fast. This is testing with the engine off though, and apparently they are faster with a bit more voltage going to the motors. It’s good to have the glass going right up, and no more tape.


I still have to refit the door card, but before I do that I have some new door handle gaskets on the way as all of mine are long gone. I will be lubricating all the window regulators as I take the door cards off to do other work, like the handle gaskets and front speakers. A little maintenance would probably have saved this regulator before it died, but i suspect the window seized in its rail without being completely shut due to lack of lubrication, and then someone just kept holding or pressing the UP button until the motor died.

Thanks. It is surprising really. Most people tend to go with what they know and what is more available i guess; Megasquirt. There isnt a huge following for MS here, so it was well worth trying out Speeduino. its been in the car a couple of months now, and runs great.

For now though, there is still a lot more to catch up on in the cars history, but i need some sleep. Ill post more tomorrow.

Cool car! Bit of a curse word with the knee there!

As an MS person I was intrigued to hear of Speeduino - I have just spent my lunchbreak googling and firing off links to my youngest brother who is an Arduino bod. He wants to do his Series 3 Landrover now, thanks for the headsup!

Its taken three weeks, but I thought it was about time I reassembled the door….


I’m sick of looking at the sad little Rover, with the door card off, and the boot all in a mess.

The first step was to install the door handle gaskets I purchased. The original gaskets are something similar to cardboard or cork, and quite simply ceased to exist on this car years ago. Original gaskets can be purchased from the UK, but Gareth at SD1 Travelled Spares has created the dies to actually make the gaskets out of rubber, which is a far better material.



The rears are easy to change, with the door cards off. Two 7MM nuts hold the handle in place, and if they are backed off slightly, the rubber gasket can be stretched over the handle and then the nuts are tightened. Done. My handle was super loose and moved when you opened the door, but now it’s firm, and solid.




Once I had done that, I began putting the door back together. The first step was to reinstall the moisture barrier. I pulled all the old tape off it, and taped it onto the door. Not flash, but it works.



I also reinstalled the door handle and relays. I refit the window button to the door card, and then fit the door card to the door. Pretty easy to fit, just need to hook the top of the card onto the door properly, and make sure the door handle surround clears the opening.


Since I was on a roll, and it was really nice outside, I replaced the door waist mouldings on the two right hand doors. The old ones were badly aged, dried out and falling to bits (literally like plastic instead of rubber). Pulling the old ones out was easy, they just pull straight up. The front door one started to come apart, so I gently levered it up with a plastic tool.

The old ones




And the new ones. Fitting wasn’t too hard, I used plenty of silicone spray to lubricate the seal, and then it just pushes into the holder. Its needs to be cut to fit, and the ends can take some time to get right.





The one last thing I wanted to do was to reinstall the speaker cover that I removed last time. This is what I was trying to do when I stuffed my knee.

I was trying to find the bolt to remove the side bolster on the seat. In my down time I enquired on the SD1 forum on how to remove the bolster and got some good hints, and told it was a Phillips head screw I was looking for. I managed to find the screw this time, and once I managed to get the screwdriver on it, it was easy to push the bolster upwards and remove it. Three weeks in the making. Finally.





With that out, I got the speaker cover back in, and put it all back together. Because of how curse word the access to the screw is, I decided not to refit the screw. If I have to take the back seat base out, i’ll put the screw back in then, but until then it’s not going anywhere.





Still a lot of work to do, and I really need to focus on fixing the fuel leak now.

Following on from the first days work, I jumped back in and started putting it all back together again.

I left off having removed all of the injection system, and painting some parts that were a little worse for wear.

With the retaining plates and fuel rails looking a bit nicer, and all the corrosion removed from the injector seal recesses, I cut the new injector hoses to length and began fitting them. In hindsight, I would make the hoses slightly shorter as it’s a very tight fit with the plenum base now (the hoses set the height of the rails). I made them slightly longer presuming that the old hoses would have shrunk. They obviously didnt.

You can really see the difference between the correct 7.6MM hose, and the 8MM hose that everyone in NZ tried to sell me. No matter what they say at Supercheap or Repco, no, 8MM is not “close enough” to 7.6MM to work well. The hose clamps require a lot more force to clamp the pipes correctly, crushing and biting into the hose. 7.6MM doesn’t have this issue.



And with lots of pushing and twisting, all the hoses and clamps went on the injectors. The injectors were then fitted into the retainers, with new seals. Don’t do what i did and fit the upper seals to the injectors before the top plate in on, as it doesnt fit over the seals, you will find yourself removing all 8 upper seals and doing it all again.



Which then went onto the rails, which had new hoses too.



With a bit more wiggling and jiggling, the whole lot went onto the intake manifold and the bolts were torqued to 11NM as per the manual.



I took a quick break from the injection system to change out the thermostat. The old one was causing the engine to warm up really slowly, and the “operating temperature” was too low.

Easy enough to change. Top radiator hose off, two bolts and the housing pops off. There should be a paper gasket on the housing which is a bit of a pain to scrape off the housing, and my old thermostat was stuck in the housing and required some persuasion to get out. The old one was stuck partially open, as shown by it weeping coolant when cold. The old thermostat was 84c, and the new one is the correct 88c.




Its bit of a fiddle to keep the new thermostat in the recess whilst putting the housing back on. My new thermostat also came with a rubber seal ring around it, which is not needed.

Moving back along to the injection system again, I started working on the plenum base, getting it ready to refit. It needed a really good clean to get the oil residue out, and all the old remnants of the liquid gasket removed from both the top and bottom. I don't know what sealant was used last time, but it had turned to a sticky gel in places.



I also removed and repainted the extra air pipe that runs around the plenum base, as it was badly oxidised and ugly.

Once that was in a condition I was happy with, I refit it to the intake manifold. As I mentioned earlier it took some fiddling to get in due to the tight clearances with the fuel rail. I also made sure to use a thin smear of sealant on the face of the base where it meets the intake. I chose to use sensor safe sealant, as standard RTV sealant can cause issues with wideband O2 sensors (which I will be fitting for the Speeduino).

The plenum chamber was a bit more work, as there are a couple of things that need work before fitting. The first one was to remove the over run valve, and to correctly set it as per Ramon’s detailed information. 5 turns from fully home. Mine was a lot further out than that. The old gasket was split in a couple of places too, so a new gasket with a smear of sealant went in.





After refitting the over run valve, I cleaned the breather inlet on the plenum. It’s notorious for getting blocked up with gunk from the breather system, and not working correctly. it’s a large diameter pipe which goes into a small right angle passage in the underside of the throttle body. I used a stiff wire, and LOTS of brake clean to blast the passage clear, and sure enough I got a lot of gritty black rubbish out of mine. Initially it was hard for the brake clean to pass through the passage, so it must have been partially blocked. The breather system is fairly simple, but it requires all parts to work correctly. In my case the inlet filter on the valve cover was missing too, so that wouldn’t be helping. A new one has been fitted.


The plenum was refitted, with all new hoses (except the over run valve to air rail hose, as the one supplied by Rimmers was wrong; far too small diameter to ever fit) and a smear of sealant on the face.




New hoses and fuel filter went on next. Much better than the old dodgy looking one. All up I used about 35 efi hose clamps. Glad I got some spares as I originally planned on less than 30!


Once it was all back together the only thing left to do was to bleed the cooling system. This was bit of a prick to do, and I think it might be because my heater core is blocked with gunk. I will try to flush and clean the heater core at some point, but in the meantime just having the cooling system working is OK (coming into summer anyway).

My issue seemed to be that even though the system was full and no longer burping air, it wouldn’t come fully up to temperature and even when the needle did rise up the gauge it would randomly decrease back down to stone cold. I suspect this was as a pocket of air surrounded the sensor, isolating it from the coolant.

I tried a few things, including using a hose and funnel to raise the highest point of the system, which did actually help and it burped a bit more air, but still wasnt enough. Note my sweet self catching overflow system 😄



I got sick of messing with it, and moved the car outside into the driveway. The driveway is on an incline, so I parked it nose up. I decided that I would over fill the coolant tank in the hopes it would burp some more air and take in more coolant as it cooled.

Sure enough I checked it this evening and it had taken more coolant, and seems to have bled the system. The temp gauge is stable, but now it looks like it’s over cooling the system as it will not go over the first white mark (which is 80c or so), when it should be running closer to the 100c mark. The viscous coupling and fan are incorrect for the EFI as it should have an 11 blade fan, but appears to be fitted with a 7 blade fan from a Carb car. The coupling also seems to be playing up, as it engages and locks when the engine is revved when cold and doesn’t freewheel. I can hold it stationary when starting the car, but cannot stop it when the engine is running. Replacing the fan and viscous coupling with correct (well, as correct as they can be when the original units are NLA) parts is next on my list, but I’ll settle for running a bit colder as long as it is sealed and doesn’t leak anything or overheat for now.



All in all its a win. The injection system is sealed and doesn’t leak, which is fantastic. The car also runs and drives well (although some room for improvement, likely with a service). With this out of the way I can now drive the car again, and get around to the other work I need to do (speakers, door handle gaskets, leather conditioning, fixing the oil leaks, and then Speeduino). Love the rumble of the V8 engine though, I look forward to driving this more.