One way vacuum valve conversion. A left over part from Richard's E36 Compact engine conversion! Blocked off the hole in the intake boot and one of the two holes on the side of the throttle body and placed the one way valve in place of the very complex early E30 type layout. Taken the car for a quick spin on the drive way and all is well!

Idle

After much head scratching we purchased a Gunson gastester with build in RPM read out. Low and behold it turns out the engine is idling around 750RPM which is pretty much spot on. Its the gauge that has the wrong read out. It over reads near the bottom of the scale, sits about right at 2000RPM and above it under reads.

As it's overfuelling on idle the mixture needs setting, that's for another day as I can't find the manual.... :o)

Not done much this weekend, taken care of a few small things such as the battery holder. Also tried running the car with the original ecu chip - no difference which is odd as it should have a lower idle than the Zone chip. Must be a sensor somewhere.

One thing a number of people have said is: why didn't you rebuild the engine? At the time I lacked the confidence and skill to want to attempt it! The plan is to get the car on the road and after some shakedown time rebuild the engine!

The first parts for this rebuild arrived this week, a dbilas dynamic 282°/272° cam shaft and new up rated Schrick valve springs. Other things on the list are a complete replacment of all gaskets and seals and possibly an M52B28 crank shaft - this would stroke the engine to 2.8ltrs :)





Took some pictures of the bodywork as well:

Some pictures form yesterdays progress:


Throttle cable, engine side


Throttle cable, pedal side


Water heater switch bracket


Horns


Coil heat shield

Did loads of little things today which have been bugging me for months!

Brakes are now bled - took the car for a shortish run along the drive way, the brakes work really well :D

Fixed small fuel leak around the pump

Silver soldered the throttle cable to the threaded adjuster off the donor

Stainless clamped the throttle cable to the throttle pedal (hole cut into clamp to make room cable to go through - the way the cable can't jump out of the pedal when it's slack)

Bolted up brake pedal to servo properly

Installed a bracket for the E30 heater valve switch

Installed the horns

Took various parts off to paint exposed areas of metal

Heat shielded the the coil from the water pipes

and probably some other stuff I've forgotten!

Got new injector O-rings today. It was a bit of a bugger getting the new o-rings on the injectors, but fitting the injectors into the rail was easy with a bit of help from the wd40. Dropping the whole rail + injectors back on the manifold was pretty easy too. I had cleaned out all 6 holes with brake cleaner and then greased up with wd40.

The tank is now also plumbed in, so no more green petrol can with vapours everywhere!

On the plus side the engine runs a heck of a lot smoother and quieter. On the negative the idle still shows too high. Time to start hunting for electrical issues, it could be the idle is fine and it just the gauge showing wrong

I think it may be time to head back to doing some actual building otherwise the car will never get done, there's always be time to sort that later, the main thing is to make sure it will get through the emissions test!

The adapter that Robin sent me for the brake servo to master cylinder, now with the edge machined down to match the silicon mould I managed to create with my previous "botch job" solution!


Tank out again! For the final time, I hope! Time to mount the heat shield.
Heat shield in place - this will keep the heat of the exhaust away from the tank.


View from the back, hopefully the body will cover the shield so you can't see it


Time to Fix the old HT lead holder-y-me-jig - I did get a another one of these second hand but it was banana shaped and was positioned closer to the exhaust - perhapse it was from a pre face lift. Anyway I decided to fix this one by making new feet for it.


All the brake parts back in place and the HT holder mounted:

I pulled the injectors out of the engine today as part of trying to track down the high idle on the engine. The o-rings pretty much fell to pieces after prodding them a bit. So I'm guessing there will have been a vacuum leak from there.

Also one of the injectors wasn't spraying as well as the others. Put them in the in the ultra sonic cleaner for a good while. Unfortunately my local parts desk was closed by the time I needed new o-rings so running will have to wait until I get new ones!

I highly recommend pulling the injectors, cleaning them (or get them cleaned) and replacing the o-rings on such an old engine!

Been a bit of a slow month really, but after much shouting at it I've wrapped the manifold:



It was pretty, but noisy and hot - this was the solution! Heat wrap what a PITA messy job that was! I highly recommend using gloves and a mask as the fibres go everywhere!



6 branch wrapped



Still looks pretty with the wrap on it!and a bit of wheel size testing:I've done a bit of experimenting with the rear wheel off my daily driver. It's a 9Jx17 with 245/40/R17 tyre.



9J x 17 with 245/40/R17 tyres - damn good look from the back!



Fits under the arch quite well



Nice look from the side



... but here is the problem! The tyre rubs on the side of the bodywork. Our body work sticks a bit further out than normal due to the coil over install. I don't think it is practical to use an alloy bigger than 8.5J. You might get away with a 235 width tyre on a 9J rim but its very, very close.



Here's a comparison of size between the 9J and the standard E30 7J with 205/65/R15

Another small distraction off topic: The video of the Compact engine swap is finally done:

http://www.328compact.co.uk/328compact.avi (19Mb Xvid / MP3)