Vulgalour's Vehicles - 10/03 Ignition Switch Woe

[rich.]

where did they all go? those little rovers were everywhere at one time.. my uncle owned a white vitesse version..

[Young Farmer]

A friend of mine has an automatic Vanden Plas version and there are only 4 others on the road.

[JPB]

..automatic Vanden Plas version...

One may have "arrived" at the thought of such a fine automobile. A Japanese engine that rotates in the wrong direction, combined with the badge of a Belgian firm, more usually found on ADO16s and Allegro-derived living rooms on wheels.

NEED ONE!

[Young Farmer]

It might be for sale soon. He is thinking of selling either the Rover or his MGF. I may be wrong but I think the Rover has a BL engine. The car is a genuine low miler and is in very good nick. If you are interested I will be seeing him this weekend and could send you his details.

[rich.]

pics please

[JPB]

Yes please, I'd like to know more about that. It'll either be a 1300cc Honda engine or a 1600cc O series derivative (S?), either way I'm interested as long as it's not too far off.


@ Vulgalour: Sorry about asking this in your thread, but SD3s do it for me and the prospect of a rustless, second-from-top-of-the-range example excites me somewhat.

[vulgalour]

No no, that's fine, you go ahead I was wanting one myself a while ago but they all had chronic rot under the back seat all the way across so I never did. I've got a 414 now instead.

Hold onto your seats, boys and girls, because I have updates to make for all three of my horrible fleet, things have been happening over the past two months.

[vulgalour]

I'm going to start the catch up on what is probably the most boring of the lot, the Rover 414 I use daily. Cracking car, I'm enjoying it muchly, there's never much to say because it just works all the time. Went to a couple of shows.

Sunderland and District.


Bourne, Lincolnshire.


SOCLOSE


There was another R8 Rover there, which was surprising, a 200 rather than 400.


After that I've just driven it really, had a little incident where I hit some diesel and burst a tyre on a curb (scary, but no harm done other than that) so got a pair of new tyres up front and the shocks wore out so I replaced the rears recently but haven't yet been able to have enough time to do the fronts. I'm borrowing my brother's Applause for a bit as the little Daihatsu needs some use and I want to do the cambelt on the Rover since it's not been done to my knowledge ever and when you're on this mileage, that's a bit dangerous.


It just looks good most of the time. It doesn't ask for anything. I've had it above a year now which surprised me when I realised it, I feel like I've had it forever and like I've only just got it, the new car novelty has just never worn off with this one.


Here's the little Daihatsu, for the sake of completeness. Much more fun to drive than its appearance would suggest and far too quick for its own good. If I'm not careful it's going to get me in trouble!

[vulgalour]

I think we'll visit the Renault next. When I left you all, we were pretty close to an MoT and it was very nearly all systems go.

15th June 2016
Important things happened today because the starter motor was returned all nicely refurbished.  I had planned to do the windscreen sealing since the new sealant arrived this morning but starter motor playtime was much more exciting.  Turned out the bearings were shot, the arm that engages the solenoid was snapped and it was half full of water.  Now it is not and works lovely.

 
Then set about putting the hoses back on and finding out what's missing or not.  The carb has a weird set up (to me at least) with a breather pipe from the rocker cover and what I assume is a vacuum pipe from the the manifold to  T piece.  The T piece is broken and the vacuum pipe has a bolt in the end of it but a replacement is already sorted.

 

 
Unfortunately after stripping the radiator down and taking it to a local company it turns out that it is knackered.  It's repairable if I can't find a brand new one, I don't want to buy a second-hand one.  The steel crimped section between the plastic ends and the aluminium fins has blown on one corner which is quite likely what contributed to the signs of the car overheating in the past.

 
Now for the important bit.  The battery was a bit flat when we tried this but nothing ventured, nothing gained, we gave the engine a quick go on the starter.  No fuel in the car and I haven't set the ignition timing, this was just to check everything turned freely.
http://vid845.photobucket.com/albums/ab ... 615-07.mp4
 
I'm still excited about that.

[vulgalour]

16th June 2016
Did a tiny bit more today:
Bolted anti-roll bar back on
Replaced flexible fuel hose between the pump and the hard fuel line in the inner wing
Put a couple of litres of fresh fuel in the tank
Mike helped me remove and refit the windscreen with some glazing sealant to hopefully resolve the leaking seal
Counted how many jubilee clips are needed
Fitted the radiator and fan temporarily more so bits don't get lost
Cranked the engine a few more times with freshly charged battery, discovered it has lots of lovely compression

Then ran out of time so couldn't do any more. I'm away this weekend too so I probably won't get it running now until next weekend but it is very *very* close.

2nd August 2016
Been a while but I finally got some time in on the Renault today and, luckily, my brother was free to help out too. We wanted primarily to find out why we were getting no spark at the plugs. We went about it methodically with brother doing the multimeter stuff because he understands electricity better than I do. We did find that one of the wires to the coil was badly damaged so spliced a repair in to resolve that. The negative and positive wires on the coil were also the wrong way around.

When investigating:
Battery - reading 12v or so
Wires to coil
- not connected to coil, 12v
- connected to coil and ignition on, 10v
- connected to coil and cranking engine, 8v

We determined that the battery was weak at this point, partly because it wasn't cranking so well, so we got the jump leads and ran them to the Rover for a bit which we tested some more but while the battery power improved, the figures were much the same. Next, we looked at the leads.

New leads - 2v
Old leads - 2v

That seemed very low and when cranking it dropped to 1.8v There was also no spark at the plugs even though we were getting power through the leads, not even a weak spark. A look at the book and a mention of fiddling with the points jogged my memory of someone mentioning 'flicking the points' which we tried, and discovered no spark still.

We were pretty baffled at this point. We swapped between the new and old leads, two different known good batteries (one of which is brand new) and two different brand new coils all with the same result. Then my brother noticed entirely by accident that the points looked wrong with the spring part touching the body of the distributor. He removed and refitted the points and we suddenly had spark and no more massive drain of volts!

Time was running out so I knew it was unlikely I'd get things running, but we tried anyway. We learned that the ammeter and fuel gauge don't do anything so that needs investigating, the dash fan sprang back to life which was nice, and the fuel pump is pumping fuel to the engine. We got as far as the engine proving it has spark, fuel and good compression, even putting a little puff out of the exhaust manifold.

Sadly that was it. Really very close to running now, it just feels like it's a case of getting the various fluids run through and getting timing set up and that sort of thing and we should be away. No pictures because, well, there was nothing to take pictures of.

7th August 2016
Today I was going to take the engine out to sort out the static timing issue.  Taking the engine out of this car is pretty involved and would take me quite a long time.  However, cutting an access hole in the bulkhead isn't and since this car is on a separate chassis it doesn't cause any structural issues, really.  I can always weld the metal back in too and with how long it was going to take me to pull the engine out that option is STILL preferable to me.  What I'll actually do is create a removable panel for this section with a seal to keep things where they need to be kept.
 
Previously, Scaryoldcortina had been and helped figure out what was going on so the engine looked like this.

 
 
With the access panel made inside the car, I could get to all the bolts that hold on the timing chain cover and remove it.  This is actually quite easy to deal with now, I can see what things are doing inside the car and don't have to find somewhere to put the engine while I work on it.

 
With the chain attached, the crankshaft and camshaft turn together with no problem on the key but you cannot turn the engine by hand.  I even tried using some force with a breaker bar on the sprocket nut but no go.  I didn't check the timing because I couldn't get things rotated to the point they need to be so moved on and removed the chain and tensioner to see if the crankshaft and camshaft would rotate freely.
 
The camshaft does turn very smoothly when the chain is not attached, both from the sprocket end and with the water pump pulley, which you can do by hand with no real effort.
 
The crankshaft won't turn by hand at all.  You can put a bolt in the end of the sprocket to turn it, but even with the breaker bar I wasn't getting any movement and didn't want to force it.  However, as soon as you flick the key in the ignition it rotates freely and without any horrible noises.  The starter motor does not struggle to turn the engine over.
 
I did try to rock the car in gear to rotate the crankshaft to the relevant timing position but just didn't have the strength to do it (not much sleep and hurting my arm this morning, probably not helping me there), even with Mike helping.  You can't get the timing mark in the right place with the starter because it always jumps just past where you need it, we did try that several times to no avail.
 
I don't know enough about this sort of work to diagnose the potential problem beyond suspecting it's something to do with the crankshaft being too tight even though that was done to the torque settings listed in the book for the 1181 engine, which this one is.  There's oil everywhere and the crankshaft and bearings were installed with assembly lube as directed by people who know better than me so I don't believe the crankshaft is stuck, just tight.  What's frustrating is that before putting the engine in the car you COULD turn the whole thing by hand from the crankshaft and the camshaft, that you now can't is baffling to me.

NOW
I haven't been able to do more on the car particularly. The engine crane and stand are both in use so I can't get the engine out of the Renault. What I've learned is the timing was off, something is jamming the crankshaft - either a bearing or the gearbox, as far as we can tell - I have good compression, good oil pressure, good spark and the majority of electrical things work as they should. It's frustrating to be so close to being running and yet so far away. Having to pull the engine back out of the car to possibly have to pull it all apart again is not something I wanted to have happen but knew was a risk. So, until I can get access to the tools (hopefully in no more than 3 weeks time) I can't go any further with the Renault. Not a huge problem, I have one more lost cause that needs attention.