One last job to fit in before I hit the rolling road was to try and address the fuel gauge which had stopped working since I’d got the car running again.
The temp gauge has also stopped working but I think this had stopped before the car came off the road. It’s happened before and was the sender.
I pulled the sender out the tank to make sure nothing silly like the float had come off or if I’d put it in the wrong way.
I earthed it out and put the float arm in various positions but still the gauge didn’t respond.
If I earthed the terminal directly the needle happily swept across the gauge to the full mark.
I think that puts me with a sender issue rather than the gauge?
The sender being a fairly simple thing I thought maybe I could strip it down, give it a check over and and give the contacts a clean but I discovered it was not a serviceable part.
I did my best at poking and prodding the contact arm onto a fresh section and making sure the arm was tight against the contacts….
It still doesn’t work.
The big day came to finally get on the rollers and anticipation was running high and so was the stress and and anxiety levels!
Of course it was overcast, freezing cold and drizzling as rolled onto the tail end of the Monday morning rush hour traffic.
I needn’t have worried as it drove incident free the whole way.
I then spent the best part of 8 hours standing in the cold while the mapping took place and it’s still not finished.
A chunk of that time was taken up with the idle and off idle tip in. The turbo and cam choice, which wasn’t really a choice, don’t seem overly happy with each other at these points but I’m being incredibly picky here and it’s still a X100 better than any big cam/carb combo would be.
Tuning was going well and we were upping the rpm and the boost until we got to about 4psi and the car stumbled, like a pipe had come off or something.
I couldn’t see anything wrong around the engine and the engine was ramped up again and at the same point a cloud of escaping boost and raw fuel engulfed the engine bay. 😕
It was pushing out between the manifold and the carb spacer.
This put a stop to proceedings but a big chunk of the tuning had beeen done and as long as I kept it out of boost it was more than drivable and gave me a tantalising taste of what is hopefully to come. 😉
All that time to kill and all I got was this useless photo.
The next day I got straight onto the gasket repair.
I pulled the throttle body and spacer to get access to the gasket expecting it to be broken but it was fine.
I think it was just a case of my own laziness coming back to bite me.
The gaskets either side of the spacer were old ones I’d reused from who knows how long ago. They were really thin paper and had been completely flattened.
I remade them in my current favourite gasket material and bolted everything back together.
By this point the fuel gauge had sparked back into life, it was reading erratically but there was life there.
I found a temperature sender in the junk draw but didn’t know wether it was good or bad but I swapped it out anyway and surprise, the gauge still doesn’t work.
The temp gauge has also stopped working but I think this had stopped before the car came off the road. It’s happened before and was the sender.
I pulled the sender out the tank to make sure nothing silly like the float had come off or if I’d put it in the wrong way.
I earthed it out and put the float arm in various positions but still the gauge didn’t respond.
If I earthed the terminal directly the needle happily swept across the gauge to the full mark.
I think that puts me with a sender issue rather than the gauge?
The sender being a fairly simple thing I thought maybe I could strip it down, give it a check over and and give the contacts a clean but I discovered it was not a serviceable part.
I did my best at poking and prodding the contact arm onto a fresh section and making sure the arm was tight against the contacts….
It still doesn’t work.
The big day came to finally get on the rollers and anticipation was running high and so was the stress and and anxiety levels!
Of course it was overcast, freezing cold and drizzling as rolled onto the tail end of the Monday morning rush hour traffic.
I needn’t have worried as it drove incident free the whole way.
I then spent the best part of 8 hours standing in the cold while the mapping took place and it’s still not finished.
A chunk of that time was taken up with the idle and off idle tip in. The turbo and cam choice, which wasn’t really a choice, don’t seem overly happy with each other at these points but I’m being incredibly picky here and it’s still a X100 better than any big cam/carb combo would be.
Tuning was going well and we were upping the rpm and the boost until we got to about 4psi and the car stumbled, like a pipe had come off or something.
I couldn’t see anything wrong around the engine and the engine was ramped up again and at the same point a cloud of escaping boost and raw fuel engulfed the engine bay. 😕
It was pushing out between the manifold and the carb spacer.
This put a stop to proceedings but a big chunk of the tuning had beeen done and as long as I kept it out of boost it was more than drivable and gave me a tantalising taste of what is hopefully to come. 😉
All that time to kill and all I got was this useless photo.
The next day I got straight onto the gasket repair.
I pulled the throttle body and spacer to get access to the gasket expecting it to be broken but it was fine.
I think it was just a case of my own laziness coming back to bite me.
The gaskets either side of the spacer were old ones I’d reused from who knows how long ago. They were really thin paper and had been completely flattened.
I remade them in my current favourite gasket material and bolted everything back together.
By this point the fuel gauge had sparked back into life, it was reading erratically but there was life there.
I found a temperature sender in the junk draw but didn’t know wether it was good or bad but I swapped it out anyway and surprise, the gauge still doesn’t work.
