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Well its been a while since my last update and boy have I been busy with sorting the car out first of all sorting the wiring out for the EFI conversion has been a complete pain, I have had to totally redo the spits electrical system including adding new fuse boxes and adding lots of relays then on top of all this I have had to add a fuel return from the engine bay for the fuel system as well as plumbing in a swirl pot and all the piping required for the fuel injection pump system.

 Then I have had to get the EFI brain installed and get that running which has been no easy task in itself first of all I had the engine turning over but it would not start as it turns out I was not getting any fuel to the cylinders so first of all I had to check that I was getting the correct fuel pressure so I could rule out the pressure regulator as being the problem, this was found to be acceptable so the next area that to be checked was the injectors themselves as it turned out the entire set of injectors had jammed up and none of them where letting any fuel though at all so to save myself some money in the short term I have taken the injectors off my BMW 735 plus a couple of spare injectors I had for the 735 and installed them on spit.

 After this was done I then found that two of my coil packs had been miss wired and this had to be corrected, so as it stands I have got the engine fired up and running today but the idle speed is far to high ( 3000 RPM ) and nothing I do to the idle control valve changes this, so now I have got to check that the idle control valve is working correctly and if it is I have then got to go looking for air leaks and if not it is either a faulty idle valve or there could be a wiring fault or a software setting fault.

 Once this is all sorted out I then have the fun job getting everything running right and getting the fuel and spark tables set up properly.

   

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No videos at the moment as I still have to sort out the idle. That still is the golf rad it seemed to do the job with both of those fans cooling it but I might buy one of the golf alloy high capacity racing rads later in the year just to give me a bit more cooling capacity ( plus if I remember correctly they are only about £150 ).

 Another job that I might be doing soon is to replace the back boxes on the exhaust system as I have managed to damage one of my existing back boxes on a speed hump earlier last year ( the baffles have been knocked loose inside ) and when at idle the car now makes an irritating metallic rattle from the damaged box, the current lead contender is a pair of 2 inch or 2.5 inch cherry bombs which will fitted to my existing system ( I will be upgrading the entire system including home made 4 branch headers later this year ) or I might use a pair of 2 inch or 2.5 inch jetex rear boxes instead.

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if I may offer some advice...

 

for efi you really need to use decent crimped lucar connectors preferably soldered too.

 

those coloured compression crimps can go high resistance giving all sorts of signal problems later on.

 

the more permanent you make the connections the more reliable it will be.

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All looking good. The engine looks quite at home in there.

 

Yep, there certainly is plenty of work involved with getting wiring and plumbing sorted - totally agree with the above post on the importance of decent connectors.

 

The 3000rpm idle will be an airleak.  It won't be a very big one either - it is amazing how little air is needed to give a 3000 rpm idle!  Does that breather go to the engine side of the throttle?  If so, is that canister on the rocker cover where it connects a PCV valve or just a flame trap?  Just wondering if your excess air is getting in that way........

 

Nearly there anyway - just needs mapping now!

 

Cheers

 

Nick

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  • 4 weeks later...

Not much of an update as its been a little cold outside.

  I have nearly got the air leak sorted out, first of all I found that when I removed the water heater unit from the plenum it was held on by four bolts what I did not realise these bolts went all the way through to the inside of the plenum so these holes where plugged up this brought the idle down to around 850 RPM but it still would not go any lower.

 Next I tried putting the PCV pipe work to how it was with the carb ( separate inlet on rocker box ) but it still would not go below 850 RPM, so next I tried disconnecting the PCV system totally and blocked the PCV connection to the plenum and left the rockers connections open to the air and this did the trick it now idles at 750 RPM which is fully controlled by the idle control valve and the loud whistling noise I had has vanished.

 This has lead me to believe that the PCV valve has gone faulty, so I have got a new one to try and if this lets to much air pass at idle what I will do is make a air restrictor ( either a piece of bar with a hole drilled in it or a piece of bar with an old carb fuel jet in it ) and fit this in line.

 Then its back to fiddling with the fuel and spark settings on the MS and tracing down a water leak on the hardtop ( my floor pan keeps filling up with water after heavy rain.

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  • 1 month later...

Well it turned out the PCV was faulty and a new one sorted that problem out and I have managed to sort most of my water leak out, it turned out that the water was getting around the rubber seal between the top of the door glass and the hard top a slightly larger rubber seal sorted that out.

 Since the leak has been sorted out I have been able to put the interior back in the car and because the interior is back in I have been able to take the car out for its first drive today, and even though the map is still not perfect the car goes like a scalded cat and the exhaust tone is a lot deeper now even though I still have not changed the back boxes yet, and the car gives a definite grin factor.

  So all I have to do to get the car properly driveable is to finish sorting out the cold start settings, sort out the accelerator enrichment settings ( have got a slight stumble off of idle ) and then I will have a go at improving the fuel map settings. The one thing that is causing me problems is that the Idle Control Valve keeps sticking closed if the car is left for a couple of days, so that may yet get replaced if it continues to act up.

 The other job on the car I am now trying to sort out is to get the soft top back on the car for this spring, but this is being very trying as I am having to totally refurbish the hood frame ( straightening it and sorting out rusted joints ) and then I have got to select what type of hood to go for and then get it fitted, luckily I have been quoted a very good price to fit a hood if I supply the hood and the person who gave me this quote will also repair and modify my tonneau cover as the zip is busted and it does not fit around my rollcage.

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  • 4 weeks later...

After much mucking about I found out that my idle problem was down to a setting fault ( I had not set the idle home position ) but after that the car still had an off idle stumble and was having tuning problems as the AFR would jump all over the place and after much head scratching I decided to pull the plugs and  have a look at them, Bingo it turned out that four of my injectors were leaking and fouling my plugs and not only that my fuel pressure regulator kept giving me low fuel pressure.

  With all this information in hand I had to bite the bullet and buy a set of reconditioned injectors and a new fuel pressure regulator, I was lucky that I managed to find a place on EBAY that did a set of EV6 injectors that would suit my engine for only £105 ( bosch 0280 155 746 ) and I also decided to buy a adjustable fuel regulator ( sytec motorsport ) to enable me to adjust the fuel pressure to what I wanted.

  With this now installed and set up the car is now a lot more drivable, the off idle stumble has gone and tunerstudio is having a lot better time adjusting my fuel tables.

  Another job I have done is to replace most of my exhaust system, I have replaced the backboxes with a straight through silencers and the piping of the system has been increased to 2.5 inches, I will be making a set of custom shorty headers to match the rest of the system at a later date, even so the exhaust tone has a very sharp bark to it now.

   The next job I expect to sort out is the soft top as I have reconditioned and painted the hood frame ( including all new bushes ) the top I am looking at is either a canvas or mohair hood.

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Hello Pomwah,

 

"It's the V8 car Triumph should have built but somehow ended up with a Stag! :)"

 

While the Stag could have been better it's leagues ahead of a chassis based car, particularly a chassis designed originally for a small four cylinder engine. Not my cup of tea.

 

Alec

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OILMAGEDDON or days where you think why do you try.

 

 Well up until today things have slowly been coming together, I have been adjusting the fuel and spark maps a little at a time and the car was getting nice and drivable no hesitation no jerking good acceleration and then on a run out to datalog the engine on the latest settings I suddenly get clouds of white smoke from the engine bay.

 Well what has happened is one of the pipes on my oil cooler has moved out of position ( a cable tie holding it in place has vanished ) and come in contact with my alternator pulley and the said pulley has carved a lump out of my oil hose hence oil all over the engine and not in it.

 I might be lucky Because I managed to get the car home with it still showing oil pressure but the dipstick was showing no oil on it, so now I have got to get some new oil hose and sort out better routing for the oil hoses so this can not happen again and I will not know if there is any damage to the engine due to lack of oil until the remedial work is done and the engine is fired up with the oil topped up.

 The only conciliation I can say about this is that it happened now and not when I was going any distance in the car on a main road, also now this has happened I may be keeping my eye out for another rover V8 lump as a spare as the car was coming together quite nicely with the current engine ( possibly a 4.6 might be on the cards ), anyway I am hoping That there is no damage and I can use the car this summer without having to do any major work on it. 

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Had a similar problem years ago.

On highway I drove into a sharp valley

what stressed the connection SD1 oil pan/connection sheet welded on it

to support underside of gearbox.

The sheet is connected with two bolts to underside of gearbox.

 

Some of the spot welds between pan and sheet must have been bad

and the last handfull did not stand the stress and were popped out.

A little hole occured that oil dripped out. Managed to get home but on the

last metres the lamp popped up.

 

The Rover V8 is so foregiving on oil pressure that nothing bad happened.

Drove this engine, a 3.5, for several years.

So as long as you had oil pressure there is no bad effect to expect.

 

Would you like to show some VE tables to us?

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Well I fitted a new hose and made certain that the hoses will not move or chafe in future filled it up with oil ( 4 litres ) and then came the moment of truth on starting, no knocking on start up and good oil pressure when warm ( 35 PSI when warm ) so hopefully I have avoided any major damage and time will tell if there was any minor damage due to lack of oil.

 On a lighter note my soft top has arrived, I decided on a high quality vinyl top as the car lives outside and a mohair or canvas one would be a lot of agro to look after ( plus a lot more expensive ) the only pain is that when I ordered the top I was assured that all the durable dot fastenings were included but when it arrived the fixings were nowhere to be found so one phone call to the supplier later I am now waiting for the fixings to arrive ( should be f.o.c. but we will see ).

 And lastly as asked for my megasquirt maps, just remember these are not my finished tune as the car is still running rich in some areas and lean in others 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Well the fixings arrived and as promised f.o.c. so on wednesday last week being nice and hot I decided to have a go of fitting the soft top, and then ran into a whole heap of problems.

 

  The first problem was that my reconditioned hood frame would not fold down without hitting the roll cage so out came the roll cage for now, the next problem was that the clips on the b-post where fitted to low so they had to be raised, so now the hood fitted on the body and then was promptly fitted to the hood frame per the instructions and fixed in place with glue and the metal channels for the rubber seal, this where I came across  another problem, the rivets that had been supplied to hold the metal channels on when fitted where to long and pressed on the underside of the roof when the roof when the roof was in the raised, so these had to be all drilled out and shorter rivets fitted, after this was done the roof was left up for the night.

 

 The next days job was to refit the roll cage, to miss the hood frame I decided to move the main hoops legs in a bit to miss the folded mechanism of the hood, this was done and the soft top was dropped and the roll cage refitted the hood was raised and promptly it would not fit. So the roll cage was removed believing this was the problem the hood was raised again without the roll cage being fitted and still the hood would not fit. the top would only just fit to the of the windshield frame but it would not connect to the b-post fixings, the only thing I could think of was that being colder out than when the hood was fitted was that the hood had shrunk a bit.

 

 On further inspection of this problem the next day it became apparent that the problem lay with the hood frame that had been reconditioned as the roof was far to tight on the section between the b-posts and the frame needed to be lowered, the only problem was that the frame was fitted as low as it would be adjusted so the only solution was to enlarge the holes the fixing bolts went through to enable more adjustment. This was done and the hood now fitted fine across both the b-posts and the windshield and aligned around the door glass better.

 

 Next job was to refit the roll cage and a decision was made to make it fit the car better as it had never fitted very well ( hitting the roof on the hard top and the bottom bolt mounting plates not aligned with the arches ) so 3/4 of an inch was taken from the bottom of the main hoop on both sides and the mounting plates where cut off and remounted in a better position. All this was done and the roll cage was refitted to the car and now the mechanism does not catch on the roll cage and the hood fits fine.

 

 The other problems I have had with the car are to do the running of the car, first of all my lift pump has started acting up ( Holley red ) so this is being replaced with a red top facet and I have decided to relocate all of the pumps to underneath the boot floor to aid with cooling, the other problem that I have got is the car keeps on surging at idle, I have tried various things and it still will not go away, coincidently I have noticed that my throttle spindle bushes are worn and the throttle plate is shifting at idle by a small amount so the bushes are going to be replaced and we will see if this clears up the idle problem if not I will have to look else where.

 

  One last thing doesn't Microsoft drive you up the wall, the other day I am out in the car with the laptop connected to the megasquirt and I have been adjusting the maps for about an hour or so when all of the sudden the car starts jerking all over the place, what had happened was that windows update decided to update its self and shut down the laptop as I was driving down the road with tunerstudio running losing all my adjustments and settings what I had been putting in for the last while forcing me on the next start to go back to my last saved settings, isn't technology wonderful. 

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There can be a lot of fun when the USB connection is bad.

I use the MS2 with USB to serial converter and WIN XP.

Most of the converters work properly when engine is off

but only a few work reliable when car is driving.

 

Once with a very bad converter I shot the whole MS on the road.

Was lucky to find a place to rest and was fully disappointed

until I noticed after some time what had happened:

 

The converter found a way to shoot not only the settings but the programming, too

and the worst also the msextra option to reload programms by software boot mode was destroyed.

 

I had to open the box, set the jumper, load the bootloader, load the MS-extra programm

and than the last settings and than hopefully the system was ready to use.

I was so lucky to find the reason and had all the required software on board.

After that, I must be honest, took the converter and smashed it with a big hammer

and today only use the FTDI chipped converters.

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Yep, also have found that USB/serial converters with FTDI chipsets are the most reliable. I have an actual FTDI lead now.  To be fair, I also have a lead with a Prolific chipset that works fine  - I think those with genuine Prolific chips are fine - but there are lots of knock-offs, which may not be and some of the driver software seems to be crap too.

 

Further possibilities include electric interference messing with either the ECU or the lead.  You may recall the issues I've written on before with my friends TR6.  THis is in fact a double issue as there is clearly something wrong with both the car and the ECU because:

 

- His ECU (MS1 v2.2) in the TR6 is hopeless - will corrupt it's firmware within seconds.

- My spare ECU (MS1 ver 2.2) in the TR6 is more or less ok though we have had one corruption incident (no issues in the Vitesse in 10s of thousands of miles).

- His ECU seems fine in the Vitesse, I ran round for a month with it fitted and had zero issues.

 

Datalogs don't show any voltage spikes, we've tried adding a couple of suppressors, changing to resistive plugs and plug leads which hasn't helped.

 

Most odd...... highly irritating!

 

Nick

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Hi Nick,

I never had an issue with the laptop disconnected.

Maybe the serial cable, USB converter or BT adaptor

must be away from the MS, too.

I had MS1 with the last version MS-extra in use to have access to Tunerstudio.

Also MS2 never lost data or programm when data cables are disconnected.

Did you experience problems with simply using a working MS in the car during driving?

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With the bad ECU in the TR6 firmware corruption would occur, every time, within 30 seconds run time whether the ECU was connected to the laptop or not.

 

The TR6 also managed to corrupt the firmware in my good ECU on the open road with no laptop connected.  It ran afterwards, but incredibly rich.

 

I've never had a firmware corruption issue with any ECU in the Vitesse.  In the very early days I had some connection issues and resets, initially caused by a crappy Lucas alternator giving 40v spikes and later caused by a dodgy set of spark plugs.

 

Nick

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I also had a similar incident once. I have MS1 extra and a Chinese RS232 bluetooth adaptor which connects to the lap top a tablet and my phone (but not all at once).  One day I connected the tablet up and MS got seriously corrupted, I had to pull the fuse to the fuel pump relay as it was firing it so much I thought it might kill it in  the time it was taking me to sort the problem out. Luckily I was at home and was able to cable my laptop to MS and reload a previous restore point. Also, after its winter hibernation/mammoth repair session, when I first reconnected it was fine, withTuner Studio dash displaying ok , a day or so later, second time nothing. It said on the devices it was paired (one at a time) but we had no info flow. Checked via hyper terminal all the setting on the RS232 BT adapter - all fine. So I reconnected and paired and it was all working again? 

It has been fine since.

 

Paul

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For help for anyone else...

 

I do a lot of my work with RS232 adapters low level programming with them, its amazing the quality difference between the ones you can buy off the shelves.

 

The most consistently reliable reasonably priced ones we found are startech ones http://uk.startech.com/Cards-Adapters/Serial-Cards-Adapters/USB-to-RS232-Serial-Adapter-Cable~ICUSB232V2. We run these 24/7 on plant equipment with no issues. There are a lot of other high end ones which we use as well but for home use the startech one is perfect. Windows XP and Windows 7 work perfect with these, Windows 8.1 is a bit iffy but i believe they have ironed this out in the drivers.

 

A lot of the chinese ones suffer power drop outs and power spikes to the chipsets inside the device (if your lucky) we had a few which just would not be recognised as a usb device. A few had spurious shorting issues with some of the pins which caused very bizzare and impossible to trace UART errors.

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Well time for an update.

  After much thought I decided not to relocate the pumps to under the car as there is not enough space to fit everything where I wanted to put them but I did decide to fit all the fuel system over to one side of the boot away from the ECU.

 

 After replacing the holley fuel pump with the facet pump I was still getting problems with the fuel flow from the tank I decided that there must be a problem with the pickup in the tank, so I decided to modify an old tank that needed repairing. What I did to modifiy the tank was to fit a bottom feed and fit a screen around this pickup to stop any large debris blocking the pickup ( I do not have any photos of this mod as my camera decided to lose the photos of this work ).

 

  When I got around to draining and removing the old tank from the car I found what was the source of my problems, the tank was full of large lumps of rust and there was also water in the fuel, the only thing I can think of is the fuel station where I have been filling up has got a problem with there main storage tanks as the rust and water cannot have come from my tank as the tank was totally cleaned out before fitting 2 years ago, the size of some of the rust is up to 5 mm across.

 

  With all this sorted out the car is running much better and is not leaning out like it was ( due to lack of fuel ) also I have traced out my problems with the surging on idle and the surging while driving at low revs. The surging at idle was being caused by the accelerator enrichment kicking in and sending the fuel AFR all over the place, this has now been adjusted so it does not do this any more. The surging at low revs was being caused by the AFR table running to lean in the low rev area, this has also been corrected. I am still running the AFR map a little rich at the moment but when main fuel table no longer needs adjusting at the current AFR settings I might try leaning it out a little to see what happens but I do remember when I was running a carb the engine liked to run a little rich. 

 

P.S. the engine has developed a very light knock but I do not believe it is the main or big end bearings as the oil pressure still reads around 25psi at idle with every thing warmed up, so it could possibly be a small end or something on the valve gear ( rocker or follower ) but for the moment I will live with it and see if it gets any worse.

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The accel enrichment came into my life with the MS2,

from time to time it was really boring, once accel was

not sensitive enough, once it kicks in all the time.

Sometimes I had both in one setup!

 

Did you try the Grant Slender 2.8 version based on ms-extra 3.3?

This was a real help!

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