UPDATE #1- RESCUE MISSION!It's been a long time since i've updated this thread..... mainly because i've done nothing with it for a couple of years!
Owning this Montego has been disasterous so far, but a mission to return this car to the road was recently launched!
Before we get to that though lets bring you all up to speed:
After the excitement of that first drive I was keen to get stuck straight into modifying it, and decided that the first thing to look at was the intake.
It wasn't a slow car, but I wanted to investigate weather it could be made better
This is the hole that Rover allocated to sucking in all the air for the engine.
And heres the back of it. A pipe is attatched to it to capture every molecule of air going through......
.....but still, it's far too small for the O series to get a good lung-full I thaught.
My plan was to cut away the area marked out.....
.....Which should help this no end
But of course the old pipe that attatched from the peep hole to the airbox will need to be replaced, so I went to B&Q and came back with this:
And....
And....
To create a cold air feed.
I fed the pipe through the new hole and into the grille area to ensure it got the finest cold air god could throw at it.
But theres more to do!
I cracked the airbox open like a Kinder Egg, but instead of finding a toy to assemble, I found this to dis-assemble:
It had a pipe inside that lead any air lucky enough to get through to the airbox on a right merry dance before hitting the sizeable filter. Great for noise reduction, lousy for performance. Do it had to come out:
With the pipe removed the airbox was literally a big open box with a filter through the middle, can't get more efficient than that surely!
The remaining pipe wasn't thrown away though:
I bolted it to the front panel and then cut it down a bit to create...
So how did it perform?
I never got to find out! Once i'd assembled it I started it up and it was overfualling like a mother
The previous owned had reported an intermitent overfueling problem on the way to delivering it to me, and said that if it returned he'd come round and help me sort it, which he did.
We replaced, over a period of a year, EVERYTHING! And try as we might we couldn't get the thing to stop overfuelling.
The previous owner became convinced that the wiring to the ECU was faulty, so took away the whole wiring loom to check over.
Because I was in my final year of Uni, and because he lived so far away I didn't get the loom back for about 6 months.
When I did get it back, I refitted the loom and the damn thing wouldn't even send power the starter motor!
So I now had a brand new problem to go with the overfuelling
At this point I got very annoyed with it and I left it in the garage.
Then to make things worse I moved 50 miles from Lincoln where the dead car was kept making it even more difficult to work on, so it's sat there ever since
FAST FORWARD TO YESTERDAY!My daily driver had died (mk3 Escort 1.1- RIP) and I needed a daily, fast! Remembering the montego in Lincoln we hatched a plot to go and rescue it!
To make things easier I sourced a replacement loom so that we don't have to mess about with circuit testing etc. I also packed a whole batch of spare fuses and relays, and a replacement Airflow meter (which I now suspect is the reason it was overfuelling).
We set off on saturday morning, destination lincoln:
First of all I had to find the keys! Lost them for about a year but here they are (a bit rust now!)
The trip was made with my bro Benzboy in his stacklight:
And we arrived at the garage that I hadn't even looked in for over a year!
It's pretty much how I left it, covered in old tat!
The replacement loom, I was sure, would sort out the starting issues:
My camera wouldn't take pics in the dark garage so this is the only shot I have of taking out the old wiring and plugging the new loom in.
After a bit of toil we got to the stage of plugging in the last couple of plugs....... and at this stage we realised it was the wrong f*cking loom !
Must have been off an earlier or later car or something
We thaught about splicing the new loom into the old but it would just create more potetial problems we thaught.
I tried to repair th origional loom in desperation but it's been butchered too much! All the wires near the plug to the ECU have been stripped back which has resulted in the wires bieng a few strands broken in each wire, which we think is confusing the ECU because it's not carrying the right amount of electrickery... or something
So the mission has been aborted until I get another replacement loom. I refuse to give up on this car! It
WILL be my daily driver this year! ;D
The banded steelies i've located may be a bit small in 13",
