Thought it was time for a bit of an up date, since the car has been at its new home for a little while and it has been getting some sort of attention most weekends.
The first move was to get the car up on the ramp and had a good look at the underside, the scrapes from the move will not cause any problems but taking the decision to wax oil the underside 5 years ago was in my view a bloody good move.
Damage from the move, exhaust took a bit of a scrape too.
The sills are in better condition then I remember but will need some professional attention which I might get done sooner rather then later so I can put it up on the wheel free lift. A lot of what you can see flaking away is the wax oil and not rust but this doesn’t mean that are anyway from perfect underneath.
Near side sill
Off side sill which is a bit worse
A bit further along the off side sill, mainly surface coming away but no holes in the area.
Mrs Dorris has also been busy polishing my nuts
as I put a coat of wax over the body work to help keep the water out. Unfortunately the rust has gotten into the tailgate around the window seal so my plan will be to just find a replacement tailgate minus the corrosion.
Reunited!
Over the last few weeks most of the work has been putting it back to a condition I can start from again after the 12 month lay up especially in and around the engine with most of the ancillaries coming off and lots of cleaning, polishing, oiling, greasing or painting going on.
With that small piece of loom being in such a mess and what I thought was the cause of the initial running problem and over fuelling I tried to sourcing a replacement, but the ones I did find where in the same sort of condition or worse then the one I had so made the decision to make a new one using the one I have and parts from a 182 which happen to have the same sensor caps and colour coding and for some reason generally be in a much better condition.
Whilst I was waiting for the bits of loom to come through (Big shout out to Skiny from Northern Ireland) a little more work was done, mainly finishing off the engine clean up but sadly its not at the standard it was when I first rebuilt the engine but its clean and tidy again and workable, in time little things here and there will be tackled to tidy it up even more but at least its not the block of corrosion it was a few months ago.
Whilst the charge cooler is off I decided to lag the under side just to help reduce the heat soak, I've been thinking about doing this for a while and just happen to stubble across some insulation blanket which was ideal, so I cut it to shape and attached it with some high temperature silicon adhesive.
I know ideally it could do with the insulation coming up around the sides of the charge cooler but this would of been to unsightly for my liking so kept it just to the underside.
This picture shows better just how reflective it is.
Over the last couple weekends it has been a definite case of one step forward two steps back!
I fitted the new loom and put it all back together, went to get the battery, no battery! Turns out it was put out for scrap by mistake and someone has walked off with it before it reached the scrap compound. *bleep* off? Extremely! Not at the fact it was a relatively new battery put out for scrap as that was a genuine mistake and the battery will be replaced but the fact that in such a short space of time someone has been rifling through our waste containers nicking our scrap. Oh well what is done is done.
Not really an issue to get the car fired up I just used the battery out the Lexus, put it in, lots of power and nothing on the starter? Turns out the starter had stuck so a quick strip down, starter motor out, freed it up back together and bingo car fired up lovely and sat there ticking over nicely by its self with no assistance from my self woohoo! Although a little high on the revs but not concerned as the ignition timing hadn't been set at this point but my hopes were soon dashed when I went to rev it. Anything above tick over the engine hunts extremely and dies above 2k RPM.
Next step was to get the ignition timing looked at, bridged the TE1 and E1 port stuck my timing gun on it and my timing gun started playing up before it failed completely so cant confirm if I got the timing bang on but the symptoms are still there.
I let the car sit and tick over and come up to full temperature and every else seems to be ok there, got a fair bit of condensation and soot out the exhaust but then id expect that with the massive over fuelling I've had in the past and now getting some heat for the first time since its rebuild. The other issue I have is the radiator fan constantly runs as soon as the ignition is turned on but im hopeing this is just a switch so not a brilliant weekend really and I walked away somewhat frustrated with a big dent in my motivation.
Now to do some thinking, homework, recharge my battery and find out what's going on and why.
I'm convinced the over fuelling is sorted with the new bit of loom but not sure if this new problem is either ignition or still a fuel problem, it might even been cam timing but I'm not convinced but checking that might be a place to start just to rule it out.
Now time for a very long and big cup of tea lol.
Not got much done this week as I've been laid up with man flue but I did manage to get the AFM off today as that felt stiff and almost like the gate was damped so I pulled it apart to make sure all was working as it should expecting to find congealed grease or oily grime only to find this!
Not quite what I was expecting but after a good clean up its looking a little more like what the internals of a ST185CS AFM should look like.
The gate its self had a little play in it so took Mooks advice and went 2 clicks up on the spring which has put just enough tension back in the spring to fully close the gate again but before it all goes back together and gets resealed ill give the spring a light oil along with the hinge.
I also removed the bottom plate to give the gate and inside a good clean too, with 20+ years of use there was enough grime to cause the gate to just interfere with the bottom plate which might have been the cause of the stiffness I mentioned previously.
I'm not convinced that this is the cause of the running problems I'm getting but all that corrosion and grime is not going to help, with a good clean and a retightened spring this is only going to improve things and stop problems occurring further down the line. Of course Ill put it back on and try it before I go any further and then I'll take things from there. Dorris