7 June 2009
Having to strip down the front of the car to get to remove the timing cover to check for possible pressure relief valve problem I decided to replace the ugly rubber oil hoses with better looking braided type from Earls. As I am making the hoses up myself I have cut the hoses for a better fit. This took me morning to complete and well worth the effort I think. I later took these hoses back to Earls to get them pressure checked and there were fine at 400PSI!
As you can see the hoses do not protrude beyond the oil cooler unlike the Westfield supplied ones.
Remote filter head, the 90 degree unions are actually a little closer aswell.
I have also employed some proper alloy hose separators
For comparison, here's a photo of the standard solution
21 June 2009
Session 291 - Oil pressure problem
A couple of weeks ago after I started my engine up for the first time I commenced to tune the fuel and igntion maps, etc. Whilst doing this I lost oil pressure which thankfully I noticed pretty much immediately and turned the engine off.
I have spent quite a bit of time over the last weekends, stripping down bits of engine to explore and remedy the problem. Cutting a very long story short the problem turned out to be quite literally the last thing I checked, the oil strainer. So convinvced that this was not the problem! Anyway it transpired that one of the Rover OEM strainer to block bolts was 2mm longer and that I had installed this in the threaded hole closest to the crank bearing cap! As these bolts were OEM I had note measured the lengths of the bolts of the threaded hole. Lesson here, never, never, never assume the bolts are correct even if OEM. Unfortunately the bolt was only 0.75mm too long meaning it would not have been obvious and torquing this bolt up would not employ suffient clamping force under the bolt head leading to the bolt loosening as it did.
Today, I finished off re-assembling the engine, re-filling with oil, well expensive millers 20w50 racing oil. Re-fill of coolant. Engine was fired up again. It survived, whoah, what a strong engine. No more oil leaks.
27 June 2009
7 hours
Yesterday I discovered that the oil I was using 20w50 is for the earlier rovers with the cam driven oil pump. The crank driven oil pump can handle a lighter weight oil which gives better protection for winter starting; 10w40 semi synthetic. So I done a quick oil change, i.e only the sump oil, that's still 5 litres! I oiled my conical air filter with K&N oil. Changed my spark plugs, the others so quite fouled from sub-optimal tuning and they are cheap enough not to bother cleaning them! I used the opportunity to conduct a compression quick which indicated 195psi which is superb.
My main effort today was tuning the fuel mixture at idle and also improving cold start enrichment, etc. I suspect I will be doing some more tuning here but for now I think it is pretty optimal. A fellow member of the v8 forum was kind enough to email his map as a base for me to start. His engine configuration is very similar to mine although he used much bigger injectors which initially gave me problems trying to get the fuelling right.
As I am super paronoid I decided to check the CO emissions from the exhaust using a loaned gas analyser. I did this to confirm that my lambda sensor and the readout are telling me the correct information. They were so close to one another it was unbelieveable!
Running engine up to temperature I observed that the radiator fan came on at 89degrees. Spot on.
I managed to drive the car out of the garage and back in again, only on idle as I still have the throttle bracket to make up. Idle is around 950rpm which was no problem even on my sloped drive.
Whilst the car was out of the garage I cleaned my garage floor it was a bit oily! I even cleaned the Westfield for the first time in 4 years, hadn't realized how yellow it was.
final tuning efforts today are here
Go to July 2009