160,000 Mile TVR Chimaera
Discussion
B'stard Child said:
Excellent Update - I'm guessing that took some time 
Thankyou and yes it did! Getting the body back on actually wasn't too bad, but I had some issues getting the body to line up with all of the chassis mounting holes which took a lot of time to sort out. Rob-c33sg said:
Wowzer that's a lot of work. I like how the body went back on as if it was a breeze 
I'm interested in the process of this, might well send you some DMs for help with the Tuscan!
Well done keep it up.
Thanks Rob, body on/off I wouldn't say is that hard but you just spend half the time cringing at the various crunching and creaking sounds it makes I'm interested in the process of this, might well send you some DMs for help with the Tuscan!
Well done keep it up.
Feel free to give me a message about it, if you aren't on the TVR forums on here I'd have a look over there also as there are some very knowledgeable people on there.
That is a very impressive rebuild you are doing with great attention to detail. However you have a problem with the alternator belt routing...quite a common mistake actually.
The belt should go from the alternator to the underneath of the water pump then back up to the power steering pump, not straight across from alternator to power steering pump.
Like this.
Not like this.
What you have done would work but you haven't got much 'wrap' on the alternator pulley.
The belt should go from the alternator to the underneath of the water pump then back up to the power steering pump, not straight across from alternator to power steering pump.
Like this.
Not like this.
What you have done would work but you haven't got much 'wrap' on the alternator pulley.
Edited by Hedgehopper on Wednesday 10th February 17:56
Thanks for the comments all!
let's hope they're less fragile than the originals?
Today I also fitted my battery and fitted a small bus bar to the positive side, as I didn't like having so many cables run straight to the battery:
Final battery location:
I just need to modify the small "kick panel" that goes in front of the battery as this never really fitted right anyway, then the passenger seat can go in
FrazDav said:
Great work, I’ve followed your thread from the beginning and you’ve done a great job so far.
I did smile when I saw the photo of your new chassis with “Fragile” tape on the outrigger corners - the irony
I didn't actually spot that I did smile when I saw the photo of your new chassis with “Fragile” tape on the outrigger corners - the irony
let's hope they're less fragile than the originals?Hedgehopper said:
That is a very impressive rebuild you are doing with great attention to detail. However you have a problem with the alternator belt routing...quite a common mistake actually.
The belt should go from the alternator to the underneath of the water pump then back up to the power steering pump, not straight across from alternator to power steering pump.
What you have done would work but you haven't got much 'wrap' on the alternator pulley.
Thanks and great spot, I just went out and corrected the routing appreciate the tip The belt should go from the alternator to the underneath of the water pump then back up to the power steering pump, not straight across from alternator to power steering pump.
What you have done would work but you haven't got much 'wrap' on the alternator pulley.
Edited by Hedgehopper on Wednesday 10th February 17:56
Today I also fitted my battery and fitted a small bus bar to the positive side, as I didn't like having so many cables run straight to the battery:
Final battery location:
I just need to modify the small "kick panel" that goes in front of the battery as this never really fitted right anyway, then the passenger seat can go in
Hi all, another update for you.
Unfortunately a bit of a lack of photos this time as the majority of what I've been doing is playing around with the megasquirt ECU. I've also been in Israel for quite a while so progress has been a little slow.
So first of all I had to re-use the old seats temporarily as the new seats weren't due to arrive for a while due to covid delays, then I had issues with fitment on the drivers seat which will need to be addressed in the future. Let's take a look back at my list:
-Brake caliper needs to be replaced at the rear, and the brakes need to be bled
-Handbrake needs adjusting
-Clutch needs bleeding Needs a second bleed as it isn't dis-engaging all the way
- Fit seats (still waiting for new seat rails to arrive)
-Fit battery bus-bar, this is something I added to try and further get rid of the old wiring mess in the passenger footwell. This way only 2 leads need to be run to the battery.
-Fix coolant leak at the heater matrix Done, but wow was this a pain. I had to replace all of the clips with fuel line clips to get it to seal correctly!
- Rev counter not working,
It seems that the electronics for this were not added into my wiring loom, so I will probably need to breadboard a little circuit to get this going.
-Touch up chassis paint where it got scratched in places during building up the chassis done and covered everything in waxoyl for good measure
-Seal fuel hoses into the body
-Fit the rest of the exhaust and weld new bracket exhaust is fitted but, after attempting to weld the new bracket, I decided I need a better welder as the chinese one I have is really not up to the job.
After all this was done, I started preparing for MOT time. For a long while this consisted of me failing to understand how the ECU works, and repeatedly running the car out of fuel idling on my drive But eventually I found some excellent tutorial videos from Matt Happel on youtube for megasquirt tuning and started to get my head around things. After a LOT of trial and error, I finally found some decent idle/warm up enrichment/stepper motor settings that worked well. I also invested in the "auto tune" feature for the VE table (fuel table) which allows the ECU to make changes to the fuelling to target certain air fuel ratios which is kind of essential when you don't have anyone in the passenger seat.
Eventually it came time to book an MOT and just see what happened! The first attempt at this was a total failure I got maybe 1-2 miles down the road, at which point some faults became apparent:
- Rear view mirror loose
- Speedo not working
- Overheating
- Wideband 02 signal showing 44 AFR
- Washer jets not working
So I booked it in for a few days later and fixed the above. The clip had gotten broken at some stage on the rear view mirror so that was epoxied back into place as the clips are not really available any more. The speedo hall sensor was cleaned and adjusted and came back to life. For the overheating issue, I bled the system for maybe the third time using the "bible" method and removed a hilarious amount of air from the radiator, seriously I don't think there was any water in there at all! After that I assumed that my old dodgy LC1 wideband controller had failed, however on removing the 02 sensor it was totally clogged with carbon due to my earlier "mapping" attempts and running very rich for a long time. Cleaned out with some EGR cleaner and worked perfectly.
For the washer jets, it seems like a ground got missed for the pump on re-assembly somewhere. I found a spare ground on an un-used plug in the same area, and temporarily spliced this to the washer jet ground to get it going.
After all that, it was time for another MOT try!
After a wash:
Set the ride height properly on the front, it had been wrong for years:
[/url]
After all that work it did manage to make it to the MOT test centre OK, fuelling was a little (well, a lot) off, but the autotune was constantly improving things. Unfortunately the car did fail this attempt, but only on emissions (tester said it went off the scale on everything lol) and handbrake.
[/url]
So I got the car back home and adjusted the handbrake the best I could, on all Chimaeras the handbrake is very poor. It did work just didn't show enough effort on the machine. Then I had a play with the fuelling which is done at 2500-3000RPM for the emmissions test, and got the lambda as close as I could using my AFR gauge on the driveway. After this I gave it another go, the tester helped me out and said I could tweak the map on the emissions machine which was very helpful.
So I drove it over and...
[/url]
Result!!
The car still needs to be mapped properly at some stage, but the plan is to get it driving OK first and drive it into a rolling road tuner. It already feels very peppy compared to before and I suspect it wasn't running right and down on power for a few years. Oh and the shunting has decreased massively so something has worked there, maybe better fuelling or more timing. Oh, and I'm 99% sure the brake line advisory is because they are cable tied to the chassis, which is exactly how it was done in the TVR factory so I'm not too concerned.
So the plans are now:
- Wheel alignment, this is terrible and the car tries to drive itself off the road over every pothole!
- Convert the car from Apha N fuelling to hybrid Alpha N, for those non nerds of you out there this just means I need to connect a map sensor so that the ECU can see engine load as well as throttle position for better fuelling control
- Set up EGO control - this is basically fuel trim at cruising throttle to achieve better fuel economy
- Fit new seats, the seat rails need modifying on the drivers side
- Fix spongy brakes
- Re-bleed clutch
- Fit trim around battery
- Fix rev counter
- Repair some holes in the floor under the seats
I have also bribed my friend who knows about paintwork to come and help me machine polish and wax the entire car, after watching some paint restoration videos on youtube I'm convinced the paint can come back to look OK on this car so it's worth a try. Oh, and the one part I thought would let me down, the LC1 wideband controller, has proved totally reliable despite being sat in a box for probably 10 years unused!
See you out on the road hopefully
I can try to get a quick video of it driving if anyone is interested.
Unfortunately a bit of a lack of photos this time as the majority of what I've been doing is playing around with the megasquirt ECU. I've also been in Israel for quite a while so progress has been a little slow.
So first of all I had to re-use the old seats temporarily as the new seats weren't due to arrive for a while due to covid delays, then I had issues with fitment on the drivers seat which will need to be addressed in the future. Let's take a look back at my list:
-
-
-
- Fit seats (still waiting for new seat rails to arrive)
-
-
- Rev counter not working,
It seems that the electronics for this were not added into my wiring loom, so I will probably need to breadboard a little circuit to get this going.
-
-
-
After all this was done, I started preparing for MOT time. For a long while this consisted of me failing to understand how the ECU works, and repeatedly running the car out of fuel idling on my drive
But eventually I found some excellent tutorial videos from Matt Happel on youtube for megasquirt tuning and started to get my head around things. After a LOT of trial and error, I finally found some decent idle/warm up enrichment/stepper motor settings that worked well. I also invested in the "auto tune" feature for the VE table (fuel table) which allows the ECU to make changes to the fuelling to target certain air fuel ratios which is kind of essential when you don't have anyone in the passenger seat. Eventually it came time to book an MOT and just see what happened! The first attempt at this was a total failure
I got maybe 1-2 miles down the road, at which point some faults became apparent:- Rear view mirror loose
- Speedo not working
- Overheating
- Wideband 02 signal showing 44 AFR
- Washer jets not working
So I booked it in for a few days later and fixed the above. The clip had gotten broken at some stage on the rear view mirror so that was epoxied back into place as the clips are not really available any more. The speedo hall sensor was cleaned and adjusted and came back to life. For the overheating issue, I bled the system for maybe the third time using the "bible" method and removed a hilarious amount of air from the radiator, seriously I don't think there was any water in there at all! After that I assumed that my old dodgy LC1 wideband controller had failed, however on removing the 02 sensor it was totally clogged with carbon due to my earlier "mapping" attempts and running very rich for a long time. Cleaned out with some EGR cleaner and worked perfectly.
For the washer jets, it seems like a ground got missed for the pump on re-assembly somewhere. I found a spare ground on an un-used plug in the same area, and temporarily spliced this to the washer jet ground to get it going.
After all that, it was time for another MOT try!
After a wash:
Set the ride height properly on the front, it had been wrong for years:
[/url]After all that work it did manage to make it to the MOT test centre OK, fuelling was a little (well, a lot) off, but the autotune was constantly improving things. Unfortunately the car did fail this attempt, but only on emissions (tester said it went off the scale on everything lol) and handbrake.
[/url]So I got the car back home and adjusted the handbrake the best I could, on all Chimaeras the handbrake is very poor. It did work just didn't show enough effort on the machine. Then I had a play with the fuelling which is done at 2500-3000RPM for the emmissions test, and got the lambda as close as I could using my AFR gauge on the driveway. After this I gave it another go, the tester helped me out and said I could tweak the map on the emissions machine which was very helpful.
So I drove it over and...
[/url]Result!!
The car still needs to be mapped properly at some stage, but the plan is to get it driving OK first and drive it into a rolling road tuner. It already feels very peppy compared to before and I suspect it wasn't running right and down on power for a few years. Oh and the shunting has decreased massively so something has worked there, maybe better fuelling or more timing. Oh, and I'm 99% sure the brake line advisory is because they are cable tied to the chassis, which is exactly how it was done in the TVR factory so I'm not too concerned.
So the plans are now:
- Wheel alignment, this is terrible and the car tries to drive itself off the road over every pothole!
- Convert the car from Apha N fuelling to hybrid Alpha N, for those non nerds of you out there this just means I need to connect a map sensor so that the ECU can see engine load as well as throttle position for better fuelling control
- Set up EGO control - this is basically fuel trim at cruising throttle to achieve better fuel economy
- Fit new seats, the seat rails need modifying on the drivers side
- Fix spongy brakes
- Re-bleed clutch
- Fit trim around battery
- Fix rev counter
- Repair some holes in the floor under the seats
I have also bribed my friend who knows about paintwork to come and help me machine polish and wax the entire car, after watching some paint restoration videos on youtube I'm convinced the paint can come back to look OK on this car so it's worth a try. Oh, and the one part I thought would let me down, the LC1 wideband controller, has proved totally reliable despite being sat in a box for probably 10 years unused!
See you out on the road hopefully
I can try to get a quick video of it driving if anyone is interested.
Linky if anyone is interested
Ebay Listing - Clicky
Best of luck with the sale OP - price to me seems very reasonable for the work carried out in this thread
Ebay Listing - Clicky
Best of luck with the sale OP - price to me seems very reasonable for the work carried out in this thread
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