I have not written a blog post for quite a while. The website tells me it was more than two years ago. Oops. The last sentence said “Next time I will hopefully have a lot more progress to show off.” I don’t really have much progress to show on the car, but I did get round to building a workshop to use. I assumed it would take very little time to refurbish two small rooms. I was expecting a couple of months from start to finish. It took closer to 18months, even now, they are not completely finished. Here are some highlights:
Some back ground first. The room is part of a stonewalled outbuilding, which has been many things since it was built. A vicarage, a dairy, a workshop and, as the above picture shows, a kitchen. Behind a wobbly wall hid a bread oven (on the left of the fire place) and a water heating copper (on the right). When I dug the floor out (quarry tiles on sand) I found a drain/toilet running right through the centre of the room. Apparently, people used to throw fire ash into them to stop the nasty toilet smells. I also found this.
Hidden under the floor, was a cellar. Full of contaminated water. The brown thing in the bottom left of the photo is a rusted through barrel of turpentine. There was about 7 cubic metres of water in the cellar. 10 weeks and a lot of money later, it was filled with 10cubic metres of concrete.
The above photo shows a stone wall rendered in lime. That took me 10 hours straight to do that, and 800kg of lime render. Not too bad for a first attempt.
I decided to be a bit whimsical with putting a sink in. I cast a concrete sideboard. Hat tip to Sam for the idea.
I also made some new doors. In hindsight, pine doors are not ideal for external doors, but hey-ho.
This is the end result. It is a dry area large enough to do things in, with power, light, heat and water. That’ll do. The majority of the reason this took so long is I had to teach myself how to do everything. Mistakes were made. Then rectified. Setbacks occurred, but were dealt with. I’ve learned a lot, and have some confidence I could build a house from scratch.
Anyway, car progress:
I dragged the engine/gearbox out from where it had been stored. With the aid of a Heath-Robinson ramp, and various family members, dragged it into the work shop. Where I set about stripping all the wiring off it, labelling everything as I went.
The above shows coolant temperature sensors and injector number 1.
Some earth cables and an oxygen sensor.
Injector 2,4,6,8. Some plugs were impossible to remove with taking the fuel rail and ram pipes off.
So I did. This photo looks down on the top of the engine. You can see all 8 petrol injectors, and all 8 LPG injectors. All disconnected from the wiring loom. You can also see the engine is extremely dirty. I mean filthy. Many gaskets need replacing. So the next job was to get it on the sand so I could wash it. See below.
I have a lot of cleaning/ degreasing to do. Some astute people might have worked out that my use of present tense means I haven’t done that yet… and those people would be correct. I haven’t started cleaning it yet, but I did instead separate the LPG ECU from the main engine harness and cut it out. As it turned out, it was really very easy to do. There were only 6 wiring connections to sort out.
The wires that had been taped had just been spliced into, the heat-shrinked wires were cut and diverted through the LPG loom to the ECU and controller etc. It was simply a case of cut the wires and re-join the correct colour wires together.
I did have to extend the wires, as the wires were too short to connect them without straining them. So I cut some wire from the LPG loom and used it to bridge the gap. Put heat shrink over all connections and taped the lot up.
LPG loom is separate. The car now only uses petrol again. No problems. Next job was to connect the engine harness up to the rest of the wiring loom, which I had already started attaching to piece of plywood.
Wiring loom is all connected. Next step is to check that the whole thing still works. The simplest way to do so is to connect a car battery up to the loom and start pressing all the buttons. If things don’t work, it is simply because no current is flowing. Either it is missing power or earth, or a fuse/bulb has blown such that no circuit can be completed. So, trouble shooting the loom is just a case of determining which is missing. Multi-meters at the ready. Time to see if I was careful about cutting the loom to pieces or not.
The wiring loom does indeed work, all functions still work, windscreen washers/wipers, wing mirrors, headlight adjustors, even remote central locking. The lot. The only issues with the loom were two broken bulbs and knackered horn, I am quite happy with that. I did have an issue with the key fob. The car wouldn’t remove the immobiliser, I thought I was going to have issues. But I opened the key fob, and it had no battery in it. Replaced the battery, still the same issue. But looking at the key situation, I have four keys. Two that unlocked the door (when it had them), and two that operate the ignition barrel. I also have two key fobs. I used the second fob, it locked and unlocked the car, and also disabled the immobiliser. I get power to the injectors, happy days. The wiring loom is ready to be test fitted to the car. I can then start moving things to where I want them to be, extend or shorten the loom, put on a single plug for the engine harness, so I only have to undo one plug to separate the engine and gearbox from the main loom.
One final bit of progress for this time, I split the engine and gearbox and put the engine on the stand.
I didn’t feel happy about just using the engine block to hang the engine, since it is still wet i.e. it is still full of oil. So, I made some alterations to the engine stand. Much happier about that. It is how it is hung in the car. I am happy to leave that where it is for what in all possibility could be another two years…. I hope not. Anyway, I need a trip to Rimmer brothers to get a load of gaskets to seal the engine back up. I will be checking the health as I go. I have a feeling I may replace the timing chain as a matter of course. Apparently they stretch a bit. I’ll check the camshaft, lifters, rockers etc. The engine has 100,000 miles on it. Apparently, it is not uncommon to need replacement camshafts at this age. If doing the camshaft, it is best practice to do the lot. If that is the case, I’ll try and find some 4litre TVR heads, I think people still make them. And if that is the case, I may try to find some forged pistons. As somewhere down the road, it may end up turbocharged. OR if that feels like too much hard work, I may go and find a Chevrolet engine, as it would probably be cheaper.
Anyway, I’ve written plenty.
