1985 Rover SD1 Vanden Plas EFI - Now running Speeduino EFI

Straight after the show on the weekend, when the car was running the best it ever has, I pulled it into the garage, and pulled it apart. *sigh*
This is it, Speeduino has begun. Pulling the car apart when it was running so well, instead of just enjoying the car kills me, but I can’t put this project off forever.

The first job was to remove the radiator fan, as I needed that off to remove the fan shroud, and radiator, in order to get the crank pulley off. This was a real pain in the to do, it just would not come free. It is a reverse thread 32mm nut, I used a huge spanner, a long pry bar, and a hammer. Lots of CRC and Freeze spray was used too.


I did eventually get the damn thing off, after fighting it for ages. I ended up putting a longer bolt through the pulley so that I could use my super long pry bar to wedge it solid.


I can now also confirm it is the wrong fan and clutch, so that’ll not go back in the car.


With that out, it was just a matter of draining the coolant for the 3rd time in as many months, removing the fan shroud (which has someones idea of a sick joke for lower shroud bolts. They don’t use captive nuts, and you can’t get a spanner at the nuts. Not sure how I’ll get it back together, but that’s for future me to work out), and then pulling the radiator out.




Of course it wouldn’t be a British car without pouring coolant everywhere. One large coolant tray, and two ice cream containers couldn’t catch it all. Who needs a drain plug on the radiator anyway?



Lots of room for activities with that out of the way.


So out came the rattle gun, an extension and my 15/16″ impact socket, and off came the crank pulley bolt. It is NOT reverse threaded. This was actually a lot easier than expected. Go Go Cordless Rattle gun.


And then it was a case of removing both belts, finding the PS belt stuffed, removing/breaking the diagnostic sensor mount and then removing the pulley. The pulley just slid off, didn’t need to lever it or anything.


Being a silly sausage, I didn’t think to set the engine to TDC before taking it off, so had to refit it, set it to TDC and then remove it again. I did find that the markings on the distributor cap (that someone had written) for each cylinder, didn’t actually match up to the ignition leads 😑


Mounting the Crank Position VR sensor was a pain. I went with the universal bracket in order to ensure that I could make it fit. Unfortunately if the sensor is located where its meant to be, it tries to occupy the same space as the power steering pump pulley. Obviously this is an issue, so that wasn’t going to work.


There was just nowhere else I could fit the universal bracket, so this means I had to put my special hat on, and get my fabrication juices flowing. Keep in mind, I’m not skilled at this and this is really the first time I have ever properly designed and fabricated something….

I knew where I wanted the sensor


And I knew there was a bolt hole right there too….


The trigger wheel is going to be installed behind the thick part of the pulley, so if I could locate the sensor there, it would be perfect. I got some cardboard, and got my CAD on again. Which in turn got transferred to alu plate.


And cut out, and folded. And then I had a mount.



It’s a bit rough around the edges, but I’ll tidy that up. I also want to weld or braze that triangular brace to the base of the mount, to give it some strength (and hopefully reduce vibration). It looks really close to the PS pulley, but there is a few mm clearance there, which is plenty.


With the sensor located, I could then mark on the crank pulley where the sensor is in relation to the TDC marks. This allowed me to pull the pulley apart, and install the trigger wheel. The missing tooth needs to be 5 teeth passed the sensor.


And bolted back together, ready to install tomorrow.


Hopefully that is one of the harder bits out of the way. It’s really the part I have been stressing over. Next up is the coil mount (which will be a prick to cut out of the 3MM plate, like the sensor mount), and then wiring.

A milestone was hit today, and I am very pleased. The coil mount is finally done.

I starting making the coil bracket a few days ago, but ran into a rather large problem when the time came to actually test fit it. The bolt that holds the alternator mount to the head would not budge. I hit it with a couple of duggas from the rattle gun and that still didn’t move it, and I don’t want to snap the damn thing off in the head. This bolt was one of the main mounting points in my original design, so straight away I was buggered.


Once I knew I couldn’t proceed with the original plan, I changed gears and started looking for an alternative. The one I came up with was lopping off all the mounting tabs, and bolting it directly to the two bolt holes above the alternator. One of the holes is used for the main ground strap, so I will need to relocate that to the alternator mounting bolts, but that’s not major.

Today I began work on making this revised plan work. Although I’m using 3mm aluminium plate, which is quite thick, I still needed to reinforce it and make sure it wouldn’t bend and vibrate. I decided to aluminium weld/braze a strip to the underside to reduce flex.

I had some Christmas money to spend on tools, so I went out and purchased an oxy/gas set. This mixes oxygen and mapp gas to make a really damn hot flame, allowing me to melt an aluminium filler rod and stick some bits of metal together.


It’s ugly as, but it works. The plate is pretty rigid now. Not bad for my first time sticking metal together in about 10 years.

I also tried to stick the crank sensor bracket together, but I wasn’t talented enough to bridge the gap that was far too large, so it’s not stuck together very well. It is solid though, so that’s a plus.


With the plate stuck on, the next step was to mark on the plate where the bolt holes would be going. How do you do this on a solid plate? Grease on the bolt heads.



I knocked off the tabs, drilled some holes, and test fitted.


Looking promising. I then drilled more holes in the plate, but this time it was to mount the coils in place. These required me to cut down some aluminium rod to act as spacers. I made the spacers 30mm which gives me ample air space under the coils for cooling. Some 100mm long M6 countersunk screws hold the coils in place.
[img src="i0.wp.com/www.tasteslikepetrol.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/DSC09078.jpg" style="max-width:100%;"]


I made sure to position the coils in such a way that they don’t obscure access to the two bolts that hold the mount to the alt bracket, which means I can remove the whole lot quickly without making a mess.

I made more spacers, and bolted the second coil on.



And here they are, FINALLY bolted to engine.


The bracket needs some work on the edges to tidy it up, and I will eventually paint it black, but for now its all about function over form to get the car running.



Tomorrow I will begin the wiring. The EFI loom needs to come out, and then I’ll start running new wires.

Today was far too productive, what, with me pulling the loom out, and now also finally doing the rocker cover gaskets.

I have known the gaskets were in bad shape for a while, it’s been leaking oil down the back of the heads, and when I did the oil change it leaked my fresh oil straight out the front of the cover, and down the engine.

With the plenum top off for the EFI loom removal, it makes it far easier to do the cover gaskets, as it limits access to the LH cover due to the throttle body with it fitted.


The covers are very easy to remove, just four screws each. Two long screws on the outside, and two shorter ones inside. I purchased all new screws and washers from Rimmers with the new, updated, rubber gaskets.

With the cover off I could, for the first time, see what state the top end was in. Thankfully, it’s in good shape, with only minor oil staining, but no sludge or anything bad.




It was obvious straight away why the LH rocker cover was leaking…. 😑


The gasket doesn’t even remotely fit, it was completely open at the front of the engine (LH side of pic)


And there was a crack in the gasket at the rear


You could see from the state of it that the gasket had been letting oil past, even in places it wasn’t damaged. The cork was hard as a rock and very brittle.

In contrast the new rubber gaskets are very soft, and actually have a recess in them that the cover sits into, to help locate and seal it better.



This also gives a quick visual indication if rubber gaskets are fitted or not



The RH side wasn’t much better. Both ends of the gasket had shrunk, leaving huge gaps for oil to pour out of. It was also cracked at the rear. There was a lot of “fresh”, wet oil at the rear of the cover, hopefully this is the source of my leak down on to the exhaust.




I figure this will probably help a couple of issues, like my idle speed, as the whole breather system wasn’t sealed with the old gaskets.

It was a quick and pretty easy job to do. If you still have cork gaskets I would recommend checking, and likely replacing them.

I havent been updating this much, but progress has been steady. Over the past few days I have been working on making the new loom, wire by wire.

Every day it’s been a case of coming home, having dinner and then spending the rest of the evening out in the garage working on the Rover. It is finally coming together though.

I started work on the new loom on Monday. The basis for the loom is a Megasquirt wiring bundle from DIYAutoTune (although if I were to do it again I would use the MS3X loom as its labelling is more relevant), two 7M rolls of 3mm yellow wire, and a roll each of 10M 4mm red and black wire. I used the yellow wire as my power feed from the resistor to the injectors, as it’s not overly important which injector it goes to, and its also a heavier gauge wire than the DIYAT wire.

The first wires I laid down were the ground triggers for the two banks of injectors. On the standard Lucas system the injectors are banked left and right (odd and even), but these days it’s better practice to group them based on the firing order. In my case I grouped 1467 together, and 2358 together. This is apparently the same as some Chevy engines.


This made actually running the wires a little more complex, but it’s not hard when you get your head around where it’s all going.


In hindsight I should have left it on the engine and built the rest of the loom around it, but hey, live and learn. I have also decided that zip ties are only good for guiding the cables into bundles (guiding the wires where you want them), but not actually for bundling the wires together, good quality insulation tape is better for that (although use it sparingly and temporarily).

This is the basic plan I was working to



Next up was the power wires for the injectors, from the resistor pack on the LH inner guard.






From there I just kept adding more and more wires to the loom. TPS, Coil triggers, power feeds, grounds, etc etc. This was also the point where I was sick of looking at the ugly old ignition leads, so off they came.





Coil wiring. Power feed, ground and trigger wires.


Crank position sensor shielded wire and bracket (which still needs some tweaking so it won’t eat the insulation)



I had a rest yesterday as I was waiting on an order of some more yellow wire, and instead fixed the fuel leak on Project Mustang, and mowed the lawn. Started first pull when cold, which is amazing for an early 70s mower I picked up from the junkyard.

Today I had my wire arrive so I got stuck in and ran the rest of the wires for the loom. I haven’t put them through into the car or trimmed them to length yet, so it’s huge.




With all the wires going where I needed them, I did some temporary taping to hold the wires together, and then removed it from the car ready for final tweaking and then having the loom tape and braided sleeve fitted.




I did some basic future proofing too, but running a third wire to the Extra Air Valve, so if i choose to change to a proper Idle Air Valve to control idle, the wire will already be in the loom. Same with me running a trigger wire for an electric radiator fan. Although I’m not running one now, I may in the future and it saves me running the wire from the ECU later.

Once its all looking nice the loom will go back on the engine, the wires cut to length and then plugs added. I still need to do the end of the loom that goes in the car, and the relays, but I’ll get there soon. Some brave pills will be needed to cut the loom in half so I can install the connectors that make the loom two sections.

BIG UPDATE WARNING!


Gather ’round children, let grandpa Kelvinator tell you a story.

It was a warm summer’s day….

Well yeah, it’s been damn hot recently, and since my last update I have been working on the Rover every single free second. This is going to be a long post in order to catch up on what I have done.

Having the loom basically laid out, I took it into the house and began to wrap and sleeve the wires. I’ll tell you now, braided sleeving is a bit of a pain to do. It’s very time-consuming, it’s hard on your hands, and not much fun. When I had mostly sleeved the wires, and wrapped various parts in self amalgamating tape (which in contrast is awesome. Its a strong rubber tape that sticks only to itself, and doesn’t leave any horrible residue like insulation tape) I quickly laid it over the engine and cut the wires to length.



In order to wire in the injector resistor pack I needed to somehow obtain the weird plug. I sourced one from a Jaguar a while back, which is an exact fit, but unfortunately as the Jag is only a 6 banger, it was missing two injector feeds. I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t find the weird little female pins it uses by themselves, so I had to de-pin and cut two off my spare SD1 loom.




With the additional wires




That was the final piece in the plug finding puzzle, so I started assembling the loom and adding all the connectors I need. First up was the JPT injector connectors.


These are proper sealed connectors with seals and boots. To actually crimp them properly you really need a proper crimping tool. I picked up a ratcheting tool and the correct dies from Aliexpress.


It works mint.


The boots are bloody hard to put on though, but the plus side is that they won’t come off in a hurry.


I used the same crimping tool to assemble the TPS waterproof connector



Injector connectors


Once all those connectors were in place, I took same brave pills and cut the loom in half.

I needed to add in a pair of large waterproof connectors in the engine bay so I can split the engine and interior sections in half. It was a lot of crimping, that’s for sure! Because I needed two connectors, I used opposing connectors so they cannot be incorrectly connected (both sides of the loom have both a male and a female connector).



This is the half of the loom that goes into the car through the firewall


With the main connectors fitted, I refitted the engine harness once and for all, and reinstalled the plenum.









You may notice in the last photo that the TPS is missing. I took my original one off because I was loath to cut the plug off and ruin my perfect working original one. I remembered that I had a spare in my boxes, with the connector already missing. I figured like mine before I fixed it, this one was probably suffering worn tracks too.

I opened it up, and sure enough it was badly worn. I wanted to try fixing it anyway, but it looked pretty bad, a lot of the track was missing.



In comparison, this is my one that I fixed


I trimmed off the wiper, and used some quick-setting super glue to move it slightly.



Unfortunately during testing after my repair, it failed my tests. There just wasn’t enough good track left to save it, and the wiper couldn’t make a perfect clean sweep.

So once again I was thrown into “Plan B” mode. I purchased a new Wabash generic rotary sensor a while back, as with some fettling a couple of other SD1 owners have managed to fit them and then they had a nice reliable, easy to source, replacement. Fitting this takes a lot more work than just changing the plug, so I initially wrote it off as too hard for now, but now I didn’t have many options. Cut the plug off my good original TPS, or make this one fit.

I made it fit.

I started with the bracket the original TPS mounts to on the plenum, and traced around it and through the holes onto some scrap aluminium plate



Good old coping saw came into play again. That thing really gets my “tool of the year” award.



This is the sensor


Test fitting the plate


It needed to be spaced out from the plenum in order to fit the screws that hold the sensor to the plate. A test fit with the sensor in place was on the cards



Two things. I don’t have any photos of the finished product, but I did end up painting the plate in low gloss black like everything else, and if I were to do this again I would use the sensor that has the flying leads instead of a connector. There is little to no room between the sensor and the two throttle body coolant hoses for the plug. I did make it fit, but at some point I might just end up looping the coolant hoses and doing away with them.

With that in place it was finally time to get the interior loom in place and test fit the Speeduino.


With the Speeduino wired in I tested the cranking, and sure enough the coolant temp sensor (once calibrated using Ramons specs), intake temp sensor and most importantly, the crank position sensor all read correctly. I did have an issue with the TPS reading backwards though, but swapping the Vref and Ground connections sorted that issue and the new TPS calibrates perfect.


I couldn’t try starting the car though as I was missing one kinda important thing. Ignition leads. Because I was ditching the poxy distributor and going for custom coils, I needed to make a set of leads as an off-the-shelf solution doesn’t exist.

I purchased a universal lead kit out of the States made by Pertronix. I got the kit to suit the GM LS engine, as they use the same coil terminals as the VW coils in using. They also have 45 degree boots (I wanted 90 but couldn’t get the perfect combo).

All the leads connected to the spark plugs on the Odd bank of cylinders, as I ran the wires to gauge length




With the leads roughly in the place they will be when running, I took them off one by one, cut them down and added terminals and boots.

I got a flashy MSD crimping tool for the job, that you use in the vice, but it really didn’t work well for these terminals. It had a habit of crimping one side down and only bending the other slightly. I had to finish the crimp with pliers. It had a good cutting guide though, for stripping off the insulation without cutting the core.



First four leads done



The now useless distributor cap is in the way, but at some point I will either buy or make a Dinky Dizzy to replace the whole distributor, but keep the important oil pump drive. I’ll need a donor dizzy from a later RV8 if I want to make my own.

Dinky Dizzy (Photos courtesy of Megasquirt V8). It’s really just a full distributor cut down above the bearing, with a cap on the top to keep dirt out.



And all the leads installed


The current mess under the dash. It works, but it’s ugly (for now)


The plan is to take the interior loom and Speeduino out again, so I can add plugs on the ECU side and mount the Speeduino in the housing. That will tidy it up a lot.

Today was the day. I have been having some issues with the fuel pump not priming, and the coils not being configured correctly, but it seems like at least for now, its working.

This happened when I turned the key for the first time with everything connected


I needed to check the static timing, so with a timing light and lot of cranking, I wound it back from 200 degrees ATDC, and ended up at 157 degrees ATDC, where the TDC mark was sitting right under the pointer. Woo.

With the timing now correct, I tried it again


For almost zero tuning, and with the cranking advance incorrectly set to 0 degrees (forgot to change back after checking timing), it actually started and ran really well. Responsive, and pretty smooth. Idle is high, but that’s to be expected (I had to increase it heaps when i got the car, and the rocker cover gaskets wouldn’t be helping in the state they were in).

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be my car, or British, if it didn’t choose to celebrate in its own way….





Apparently the auto trans pump made enough pressure in that short run to rapidly eject a bunch of fluid from the (blocked off) cooler hose when I shut the engine off. Ah well. I plan on servicing the auto anyway, lol.

So that’s where I am tonight. The car starts and runs. Great success.

Next up is installing the radiator and fan, then jacking the car up and pulling off the exhaust so I can fit the wideband O2 sensor. Been putting that off, there is an awful lot of coolant and now trans fluid under the car.

The final step in the hardware part of the Speeduino install is to fit the Wideband O2 sensor. This requires the exhaust being removed.

A Wideband O2 sensor is a sensor in the exhaust the measures the oxygen content of the fumes going down the pipe. This allows it to work out the air fuel ratio, so that I can tell if the engine is running rich or lean and tune from there.

It is installed in the exhaust pipe, and in my car, about half way down the car just after the Y-Pipe joins the two banks of exhaust. You can have it only measuring one bank of exhaust (or even two sensors doing both), but I prefer the mix of both for a more complete overview.

I purchased a 14point7 Spartan2 controller and Bosch 4.9 sensor. It’s a nice bit of kit, well made, although it took flipping ages to send/arrive and the communication from 14point7 was badly lacking. Thankfully I didn’t need it in a hurry.

To fit the sensor I need to remove the exhaust from the car so I can have the bung that the sensor screws into welded into the pipe. The first problem with this is that the whole exhaust from after the downpipes, to the section over the rear diff is one big heavy section. The factory exhaust would have a slip joint half way down the exhaust, but my exhaust is solidly welded.

I have been procrastinating this job for a while because I knew it was going to be a pain in the bum to do, but yesterday after playing with Scooty Puff I jacked the rear of the Rover up and put it on stands. I needed the back of the car in the air the most, as I need the rear axle to hang down and give me enough space to get the exhaust out from above it.


With the car in the air it was only a matter of undoing the six bolts for the two flanges to the downpipes, the three bolts for the rear flange, and two bolts that attach the brackets to the trans. After that, in theory, the exhaust should come out, but being one bit piece I also needed to drop the crossmember in the middle of the car so that I could slip the exhaust out.



With that section out I marked where I wanted the hole, and used my awesome stepped drill bit to whack it in.



I’ll be able to have the bung welded into that quite easily. I drilled it slightly above center, so the sensor tip will be pointing down and won’t hold condensation.


Having the whole exhaust out will also finally allow me to fix this damn dent in the tailpipe. Its bothered me for a long time.



It’s a pretty ugly exhaust, and parts look like it was welded together by a bird that ate too much hot curry, but it works for now. It’s not aging well either, so at some point I will need to look at getting a new system made up that is a bit better designed and built.

Now to wait for the kind offer of my neighbour to weld the bung in, and then I get the fun of refitting the silly thing. Once the O2 sensor is in place and hooked up to the Speeduino I’ll be able to start tuning the car properly, and maybe even get a drive or two in it.

It runs, it drives. It’s good.

So yesterday I mentioned an issue with the engine leaning out badly. As it turns out, this was due to the Injector Duty Limit being set down at 13%.


It should be set much higher, something around 85% is good. Basically, the injector duty cycle is a percentage of time the injector is supplied with power. 0% means it doesn’t open, and no fuel flows through the injector. 100% is wide open, and pouring fuel through it. 13% means it’s open a fairly small amount and letting only so much fuel through. As the fuel requirements increase, so does the injector duty cycle. More fuel, more duty. Capping the injector duty at 13% means that even if I told the engine to run richer, it physically couldnt as the injector would only ever pump in 13% worth of fuel. This results in a horrific lean condition as the air to fuel ratio starts to sway heavily towards lots of air and only a small amount of fuel.

This isn’t a setting I recall ever changing, so no idea why it was that low. This also meant that I didn’t know the setting existed. The awesome guys over in the Speeduino community had a look through my logs and tune file, and concluded that the duty limit was too low, and I should increase it. Sure enough, increased it to 85% and the engine revved out properly, and felt a lot better.

Today after work (at 9PM) I just couldn’t help myself. Before even thinking of dinner I jumped in the Rover, laptop in the lap of my lovely assistant, and off we went. We did a couple of laps around the neighbourhood to see what was up.

During this drive I was using VE Analyze Live tuning to tweak the VE table as needed.


It’s REALLY hard to get into high RPM around the back streets, so it spent most of its time in the lower half of the map. I tried to cover as many cells as possible.

On the RH side of the picture there are two boxes. One with yellow/green and the other red/blue. The top one indicates the cells (a cell is each of the little squares in the map with a number in it) that I have entered into when driving (depending on revs and intake vacuum). The darker the green, the more time spent there. The lower box is the cell change. The red indicates leaner, blue richer. So the good news is that my VE table was quite rich, and its gradually leaning the map out for me. There is a small patch that wanted to go richer. I wasnt so sure on the big jump, so I interpolated it with the cells around it and smoothed it out a bit.

During the drive I was also logging to a file to review later. The one thing I wanted to look into was the Acceleration Enrichment. Upon giving it a whack of throttle the engine would bog and then catch up and off you go.

This is what it looked like in the log


The vertical line in the middle is the current data being reviewed. The white line at the bottom that makes a HUGE jump upwards is injector Pulse Width. Pulse Width is similar to Duty, except it’s the measurement in milliseconds that the injector is held open for. The longer it’s open, the more fuel. A big spike like that means it’s asking to dump lots of fuel in a short time. This is reflected a short time later where the red line that overlaps the white one down the bottom takes a steep dive downwards. This red line is the O2 sensor reading. Lower is richer, so the engine goes horribly rich and bogs down.


You can see from the full screenshot above that this happens when the Throttle Position Sensor reading (which is the white line in the middle section) increases. Its seeing the TPS increase and thinks “hmmm, he’s put the hammer down, it needs more fuel”. This is the work of a badly tuned Acceleration Enrichment function. I have tweaked it a little now to hopefully pull some fuel out of it, but it’s recommended not to put too much work into it until the VE table is nice and tidy, as it’s all related and one will change the other.

So, todays conclusion?
Stunning. Already, even untuned, its running better and stronger than it did on the Lucas ECU. It feels like the engine has freed up; it’s much stronger to accelerate and feels like it has more power/torque. It revs out well, and just keeps pulling.

It does have this horrible resonation from the intake on deceleration through. It’s a really deep droning noise. Not pleasant, and I’ll need to look into what to do to shut it up.

I’m really looking forward to refining the tune and seeing how good I can make it. Theres still some serious work to be done, but it’s coming along well so far.

It’s been a while since my last update, so here’s what I have been up to.

I have now done about 240km on Speeduino, with constant tuning and tweaking of the ECU. For the most part, its driving really well.

Important disclaimer. Please remember that these settings are ONLY suitable for my own car. I can tell and feel what it does and doesn’t like, and the results may be undesirable if used on a different car. I post these here to explain how and why I am doing things to my car. Take my advice for what is it, and use it to find settings that work for you.

There isn’t much to show, but the seat-O-pants meter tells me it’s running a lot better than the old Lucas ECU, not to mention that if the current rate of fuel consumption continues, I should be looking at a decent reduction in fuel consumption from the Lucas setup. To think, I may be getting better fuel economy from the Speeduino than the Lucas, and I’m driving the absolute hell out of the Rover trying to hit as many tuning cells as I can.

I have had a couple of little issues. I have previously mentioned my troubles tuning the Acceleration Enrichment. I decided the other day to completely disable AE, and see what happened. The results were clear, the car drove a lot better, with a complete absence of any form of bogging when accelerating. I did note that the AFR did swing a little lean for a second when accelerating. This indicated to me that AE was still needed, just to iron out that lean out, but it needed to be a small amount.

This is what I have settled on for now. It’s enough to counter it leaning out, but not so much that it causes the over-rich bogging.


TPSdot is basically a measurement of the rate of change in the throttle over a period of time. The quicker you open the throttle, the higher the TPSdot will be. Even if you go Wide Open Throttle, slowly, the TPSdot will be lower than if you opened it half way really quickly. If you open the throttle quickly, the engine gulps a huge amount of air in a short period, so needs a quick shot of fuel to counter that. AE is much like the old school tuning of the carb accelerator pump.

I still have some tweaking to do, but now its at a point where it doesn’t bog no matter how big or quick the throttle opening is.

The other issue that came to light today was that the Inlet Air Temp sensor has been spiking randomly, and causing huge bogging as the IAT compensations kick in, and retard timing and cuts fuel.

You can see it in this log capture


The very bottom yellow line is the IAT reading. It goes from about 21 Degrees (normal) to about 178 degrees. You can see the overlapping red line, which is the AFR reading, goes very lean at the same time (higher is leaner). Above it, the green line that takes a dip is ignition timing, which is being hugely retarded. The very top white line is RPM, which you can see has a corresponding dip, where the car bogged down and made me go “wtf just happened”.

Heres another time it happened


My trusty assistant was watching the Tunerstudio dials at the time and noted that the IAT gauge was all over the show. The high point in that graph is 175 degrees! This was a good indicator of what was happening, and where to start looking.

Later on in the day when I was checking my timing (more on that soon) my trusty assistant was once again watching the dials whilst I plugged the injector resistor pack back in (which is beneath the IAT sensor) and noted the IAT gauge went crazy. With her watching the gauge, I started to wiggle various bits of wiring until I narrowed it down to the IAT plug itself. When I purchased the sensor I got the plug as a pigtail, not as a bare plug with pins (like I should have) and I soldered the wires to the loom. As it turns out my soldering on the ground wire for the sensor was a bit rough, and the wire had worn through the self amalgamating tape (Yes, i should have used heat shrink but i forgot) and was shorting directly to the signal wire. A quick tidy up with some snips, and wrap with more tape, and back into the braided sleeve it went. No more issues since. Such a simple thing, but a pain in the backside.

Speaking of checking the timing, there is one thing I have been a bit curious about since I fit the Speeduino. When I did the initial setup, I used the timing pointer on the engine to check TDC. I did a rudimentary check of cylinder 1 to see if it was at the top of the cylinder. It sort of worked out at the time, and I set my base timing to that. I had my trigger angle setting at 157 ATDC.

I was never really convinced the TDC was correct. Today, I decided to check it properly.

I removed cylinder 1 spark plug, which looked pretty good


Introducing Chopstick-cam (patent pending)



Connected to my phone


And then stuck the camera in the spark plug hole.



So apparently the CROWN of my piston is covered in a nice layer of carbon. MMMmm.

Using the chopstick-cam, I checked when the piston got to the top of its stroke.


And from there, I checked where the pointer was when the engine was at TDC.


Ah. Ok, well that’s not ideal. The TDC mark is above the pointer in the photo. The pointer is about 5 degrees ATDC. So that throws my whole spark map out by 5 degrees. Woot.

Since I knew where TDC actually was now, and the pointer is adjustable, I backed the screws off an adjusted it. Damn, now the pointer contacts the back of the pulley. The trigger wheel has pushed the power steering pulley closer to the engine, and it doesn’t clear now.

I removed the pointer, and filed it down until it cleared.




Now that it cleared the pulley, I installed it correctly


And using my trusty 10+ year old timing light (purchased for my Marina), I checked the trigger angle.


With the cranking angle set to Zero, I needed to back the timing off to 152 ATDC for the TDC mark to line up again.


So, did it do anything? Yes. The car feels more lively, and a bit smoother to drive. The VEAL is also taking big whacks out of the fuelling again, so obviously the timing difference is enough to make a difference. It still doesn’t start easily when warm, but I think that’s something I will need to work on gradually.

This is my current spark map


Its based loosely off my research of other Rover V8 engines running Megasquirt, and what my car likes. You can see that below idle (the 600 and 800RPM columns along the bottom) take a big jump up in timing advance, I built this in to help with the idle when in gear, and with other load on the engine (PS, lights etc) so it wouldn’t stall. An advanced timing makes the car run stronger, and increases RPM. The higher the number, the higher the ignition advance in degrees.

It’s not an overly aggressive map, but the car seems to like it. I have tried a couple of different maps out, and this is the one my car likes the most. I will start working more on the ignition timing map once I have the fuel dialed in more.

My fuel map is all over the place


Once again the idle cells have been manually set to what the car likes, based on how it feels. I have the idle at a nice solid tickover at about 1000 +/- RPM, and 800RPM in gear. The rest of the map is a combo of the table generator making a base map, me manually tweaking various parts, and then using VEAL to change the map to what the car needs. There are a lot of cells I have not had VEAL touch yet, so my mission is to keep trying to push the car into weird running conditions and see if I can hit them. This means a lot of up hill driving at high RPM with my foot on the brake to load the engine up. The table is all about Volumetric Efficiency, but long story short, the higher the number, the richer, the lower, the leaner.

So whats next? Well, I’m still going to be working on the maps for a long time yet, and I need to fix hot starting as its taking its toll on my battery cranking over and over. The battery was on its last legs anyway, thanks to the previous owner letting it sit flat for a week, so that’s on the list of things to replace before I leave my current job (where I get staff/trade prices).

Other than that there are a few other things to want to look into, like blocking off the plenum Over Run valve, as I think it’s giving me an overly lean mixture on decel, and I would rather alter that via the ECU than the mechanical setup that uses. I still need to look into the horrible resonation from the intake too, its loud and gross.

No, the Rover hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s still chillin’ here. Unfortunately I had to wait for the replacement water pump to arrive from Rimmers, so it’s been stuck under a cover for a couple of weeks. Sadface.

The pump arrived the other day, along with some other bits (like all the bolts for the waterpump, as they are known to break off on removal), so this weekend I’ll be swapping waterpumps, and filling the system with yet MORE fresh coolant (must be the 3rd or 4th time since I got the car now).

Since the car leaks coolant the moment the engine is fired up it’s been stuck under a cover in my driveway. Uncovering it for the first time in a couple of weeks made me happy, I have a proper attachment to this car now. Feels.

Once uncovered, it was time to fire it up and move it into the garage. Seems my cold start tuning in Speeduino isn’t too bad. It had a little backfire into the intake (which I still don’t know the cause of) but started and idled good.


Hello old friend


It seems like almost every post has that same photo, lol, but I assure you this is current.

I didn’t have the time to get ripping into the cooling system today, but I still wanted to hose down all the bolts in WD40 to try to make them come out easier tomorrow.

But there was also something else I needed to attend to. The other week I finally received my new washer bottle strap from the SD1 Club in the UK. This was the second try as the useless postal service lost the first one, but anyway, this meant I could finally tidy up the bracket and get rid of this ugly DIY solution a previous owner made.

This is the current strap. Some weird rubber ziptie thing. You can see one of the two round snaps the standard (and replacement) strap attaches to.


And the reason I need to tidy up the bracket?


Some previous (curse word) owner made a complete hash up of painting it in the past, and the paint is literally flaking off and exposing the rust that is UNDER the paint. No prep at all before it was painted. This really pisses me off.

Taking it off the car is easy enough. I chose to remove the mount from the strut tower as that was also in bad shape, so one nut on the strut top, and two bolts down low and the whole lot comes off.

Thankfully the inner guard is solid, just needs a clean



Removed bracket


Some chunks of paint


They didn’t even mask or remove the bolts


Or strip off any old paint


Oh well. I’ll do it right and have it looking good again. It’s the little things that make the biggest difference. The bracket is currently sitting in a box in the garage covered in rust converter, and tomorrow I’ll prep and paint it in my usual high temp satin black.

I have a few other little things to do on the car whilst it’s in the garage this weekend, one of them is look into what chemicals I have that will dissolve/remove the glue that has been slapped on the underside of the bonnet to try (and fail) holding the bonnet insulation up. I need something that will remove this unidentifiable yellow glue, without damaging the paint. Once I work that out, the insulation is going in the bin.

Stay tuned.