Back in a Lotus - 2006 Exige S
Discussion
It's something I was anxious about at the time because it wasn't labelled, but a number of people have verified my photos and reckon I got it right, and some toyota guys also said that it's not actually possible to get it wrong, as there's not enough clearance to bolt down the pressure plate.
As embarrassing as it would be, I wish I could find a silly mistake like that to give me a clear path to resolving.
As embarrassing as it would be, I wish I could find a silly mistake like that to give me a clear path to resolving.
I had a flash of motivation last night, decided if I wanted to fix it this weekend then I had to get the clutch out tonight to give me chance to buy another one if it was trashed.
On first glance all was looking well, no bits of clutch hanging in the bottom of the bellhousing and no missing pressure plate bolts etc. There was a small scuff on the face of the splined hub where it looks like it maybe took a glancing blow by the input shaft on the way in, but it pretty much wiped off with my finger, no damage to speak of.
I took the pressure plate off, I decided (not sure why) to undo the bolts sequentially, sort of "following the clock", I loosened 3 off, then removed three, then did the same with the final 3. As I got round to the 4th bolt (I think) there was a loud twang as some tension was released and one of the bolts that was loosely in had a snapped washer that had splayed open. I've got no idea if this is expected behaviour undoing the pressure plate like this, it clearly had some pent up tension in there.... but that's the point isn't it?
There are some slight burn marks on the friction disc, pressure plate and flywheel - I imagine effect rather than cause of me trying to start the car in fifth and other such shenanigans. Is this detrimental? Obviously it's not ideal, but I'm hoping the product can stand up to it and it not make an appreciable dent in the lifespan of it.
I've taken some reference measurements from my OE clutch and everything seems to be within 1mm of each other, certainly within thresholds of wear. Wondering if I've ended up with a 1ZZ flywheel (for example) that might be just subtly different enough in its offset from the crank to cause issues, but really CLUTCH'ing at straws at this point.
I've got new pressure plate bolts coming on Saturday, so have at least 24 hours to investigate and try to find a smoking gun. I think the pressure plate bolt washer and the 'twang' I heard is about as close at I've got at the minute, but I'm not overly confident. As ever I appreciate input.
On first glance all was looking well, no bits of clutch hanging in the bottom of the bellhousing and no missing pressure plate bolts etc. There was a small scuff on the face of the splined hub where it looks like it maybe took a glancing blow by the input shaft on the way in, but it pretty much wiped off with my finger, no damage to speak of.
I took the pressure plate off, I decided (not sure why) to undo the bolts sequentially, sort of "following the clock", I loosened 3 off, then removed three, then did the same with the final 3. As I got round to the 4th bolt (I think) there was a loud twang as some tension was released and one of the bolts that was loosely in had a snapped washer that had splayed open. I've got no idea if this is expected behaviour undoing the pressure plate like this, it clearly had some pent up tension in there.... but that's the point isn't it?
There are some slight burn marks on the friction disc, pressure plate and flywheel - I imagine effect rather than cause of me trying to start the car in fifth and other such shenanigans. Is this detrimental? Obviously it's not ideal, but I'm hoping the product can stand up to it and it not make an appreciable dent in the lifespan of it.
I've taken some reference measurements from my OE clutch and everything seems to be within 1mm of each other, certainly within thresholds of wear. Wondering if I've ended up with a 1ZZ flywheel (for example) that might be just subtly different enough in its offset from the crank to cause issues, but really CLUTCH'ing at straws at this point.
I've got new pressure plate bolts coming on Saturday, so have at least 24 hours to investigate and try to find a smoking gun. I think the pressure plate bolt washer and the 'twang' I heard is about as close at I've got at the minute, but I'm not overly confident. As ever I appreciate input.
jeremyc said:
Is the pressure plate true? Does it lie flat on a flat surface (so the outer side of the plate is upwards)?
As far as I can tell yes, if anything there might be a very slight taper from the outside of the pressure plate to the inside. If I put a flat edge across it and shine a light behind it, I can see a sliver of light coming through on the inside of it... but this may be normal in the 'relaxed' state of the pressure plate, as the stock one I have appears to be the same.What a pain for you! I'd take the fly wheel off too and lay it side by side with the oem one to check that is correct (or not) too. It sounds to me like that may be the culprit. Is there an offset on the friction disc too, as if that could go in the wrong way round? (looks fine how you've had it in the pics though!)
With the marks on your clutch i'd be happy to scotchbrite those off and use it without worry. It does only seem to be picking up on the outside, however there's obviously been no bedding in period. I couldnt say whether that was normal or not!
With the marks on your clutch i'd be happy to scotchbrite those off and use it without worry. It does only seem to be picking up on the outside, however there's obviously been no bedding in period. I couldnt say whether that was normal or not!
scottos said:
What a pain for you! I'd take the fly wheel off too and lay it side by side with the oem one to check that is correct (or not) too. It sounds to me like that may be the culprit. Is there an offset on the friction disc too, as if that could go in the wrong way round?
With the marks on your clutch i'd be happy to scotchbrite those off and use it without worry. It does only seem to be picking up on the outside, however there's obviously been no bedding in period. I couldnt say whether that was normal or not!
Yep very frustrating now! I was really hoping to find a smoking gun, even if it meant I made myself look like a berk doing something stupid.With the marks on your clutch i'd be happy to scotchbrite those off and use it without worry. It does only seem to be picking up on the outside, however there's obviously been no bedding in period. I couldnt say whether that was normal or not!
Friction disc can only go in one way, otherwise it sits on the flywheel bolt heads and won't sit flush so I need to rule that out.
I've had the flywheel off this morning, it looks to be dimensionally identical to the OEM one.
I'm pretty happy that the burn marks are not detrimental long term, maybe I've scrubbed a few miles of life off of it but with a car like this I'm unlikely to put the full life of a clutch into it anyway... Despite that I'm still considering buying a new clutch (same manufacturer) today just to compare them side by side, see if there's a chance I was shipped the wrong one initially but the fact that it all fits together makes me feel that's a massive long shot.
tommobot said:
Have you checked the thickness of the central element of the friction plate..
I've recently had one which was the same thickness on the friction element, but the inner (where the springs are) was slightly thicker... Couldn't select gears whilst running...
I have not but I'll add that to the list of things to check next time I go down to the garage.I've recently had one which was the same thickness on the friction element, but the inner (where the springs are) was slightly thicker... Couldn't select gears whilst running...
Going to give the manufacturer a call today, see if they can confirm I've got all the right parts. Part No's on the order check out, but I need to rule everything out at this point.
Thanks for the suggestions, I'm happy to say that (I Think) the mystery is now solved, but it'll be a few days before I can test.
I Got a very generous offer from local Lotus specialist (Seriously Lotus) to compare my clutch with an identical part number he had on the shelf. We did this on Friday afternoon and my heart sank when I saw the units were clearly identical, so it ruled out a miss-boxed clutch as being the source of my issues.
We did however go on to bench test the clutch under a hydraulic press, and lo and behold when pushing down on the diaphragm fingers the pressure plate did not lift up, at least not completely. It seemed to constantly pinch one third of the clutch whilst the other two thirds lifted up fine. This pinch point coincided with the burn marks on the pressure plate, obviously.
We then did the same test on a brand new clutch and the pressure plate lifted fine, as you'd expect. That new clutch is now in my garage waiting to go in the car as soon as my pressure plate bolts arrive. Hoping for a warranty refund on the original, but we'll see how that goes.
Since I couldn't put the clutch back in yet, I did a bit of housekeeping on the gearbox. Changed throwout/release bearing for a CC supplied one (rather than the Toyota OE one I used previously... just to be sure) and repaired a thread for the slave cylinder.
The thread was functional, but was a bit chewed up. I didn't want to get the box back in and find I couldn't bolt the slave up properly so I drilled it out to M10, tapped and helicoiled back down to M8 - and fitted studs to make reinstallation of the slave cylinder much easier (you have to line it up to blind holes whilst pushing against the pressure of the spring/clutch fluid and also lining it up with a supercharger bracket, so there's no wonder the threads were a little chewed).
Fingers crossed box will be back in tomorrow night, then a few more nights to add all the various bits and pieces before a fire up and clutch test later in the week.
I Got a very generous offer from local Lotus specialist (Seriously Lotus) to compare my clutch with an identical part number he had on the shelf. We did this on Friday afternoon and my heart sank when I saw the units were clearly identical, so it ruled out a miss-boxed clutch as being the source of my issues.
We did however go on to bench test the clutch under a hydraulic press, and lo and behold when pushing down on the diaphragm fingers the pressure plate did not lift up, at least not completely. It seemed to constantly pinch one third of the clutch whilst the other two thirds lifted up fine. This pinch point coincided with the burn marks on the pressure plate, obviously.
We then did the same test on a brand new clutch and the pressure plate lifted fine, as you'd expect. That new clutch is now in my garage waiting to go in the car as soon as my pressure plate bolts arrive. Hoping for a warranty refund on the original, but we'll see how that goes.
Since I couldn't put the clutch back in yet, I did a bit of housekeeping on the gearbox. Changed throwout/release bearing for a CC supplied one (rather than the Toyota OE one I used previously... just to be sure) and repaired a thread for the slave cylinder.
The thread was functional, but was a bit chewed up. I didn't want to get the box back in and find I couldn't bolt the slave up properly so I drilled it out to M10, tapped and helicoiled back down to M8 - and fitted studs to make reinstallation of the slave cylinder much easier (you have to line it up to blind holes whilst pushing against the pressure of the spring/clutch fluid and also lining it up with a supercharger bracket, so there's no wonder the threads were a little chewed).
Fingers crossed box will be back in tomorrow night, then a few more nights to add all the various bits and pieces before a fire up and clutch test later in the week.
My clutch pressure plate bolts got delayed and as a result the clutch wasn't back on the car till mid week. Such was my apprehension to get it back on, I even calibrated my torque wrench to rule out the chance of me massively over/under torquing the pressure plate...
When refitting, I did much the same as last time - looking out for any possibility that I could have screwed things up but it really is a simple process. Clutch back on, centred up and now just needed to organise a helping hand to get the box back in.
I got the box in on Wednesday, it's always around this time where I think "this is impossible, even for a computer" and consider getting the subframe off!
But with a little jiggling it went in, and I got the nod of approval
I took my time over a couple of nights getting the rest bolted back up, I strained the oil and put it back in (the strainer picked up a fair bit of RTV 'offcuts' so probably not a bad exercise anyway!) and by the end of last night the car was in theory ready to fire... but I left it till today out of fear :lol:
I got some other finishing touches done this week too:
- New studs/bolts for the exhaust manifold
- New Bosch 4.9 LSU lambda sensor, this now my third since the ECU went on... I really need to get to the bottom of why I'm killing them, but for now I have EGO feedback again.
- New Air Filter setup
For the filter, I didn't want to put the TRD airbox back on, it's a massive faff to change filters and I'm really not convinced that it added much noise to the SC car (in contrast to my NA car which it transformed). I got an ITG Stab99 airbox (76mm inlet) and managed to get hold of their Elise/Exige specific bracket for the rollover bar support, added to a length of 76mm silicone hose and I had a relatively inexpensive induction kit setup. As I no longer run a MAF, I could do away with various restrictions and complications for a nice clean setup.
Oh, last finishing touch - I added my SeriouslyLotus stud conversion kit. Makes fitting the wheels (particularly at chest height on the ramp) sooooo much easier, and they look cool too.
With all that done, I really had run out of excuses so I got on with the test. Car fired up on the button, and....... Clutch worked fine!
Celebrated with a few laps of the cul-de-sac, and called it a day.
I can only conclude that the original clutch was dead on arrival, after going through the process twice I really can't think of anything I could have cocked up.
When refitting, I did much the same as last time - looking out for any possibility that I could have screwed things up but it really is a simple process. Clutch back on, centred up and now just needed to organise a helping hand to get the box back in.
I got the box in on Wednesday, it's always around this time where I think "this is impossible, even for a computer" and consider getting the subframe off!
But with a little jiggling it went in, and I got the nod of approval
I took my time over a couple of nights getting the rest bolted back up, I strained the oil and put it back in (the strainer picked up a fair bit of RTV 'offcuts' so probably not a bad exercise anyway!) and by the end of last night the car was in theory ready to fire... but I left it till today out of fear :lol:
I got some other finishing touches done this week too:
- New studs/bolts for the exhaust manifold
- New Bosch 4.9 LSU lambda sensor, this now my third since the ECU went on... I really need to get to the bottom of why I'm killing them, but for now I have EGO feedback again.
- New Air Filter setup
For the filter, I didn't want to put the TRD airbox back on, it's a massive faff to change filters and I'm really not convinced that it added much noise to the SC car (in contrast to my NA car which it transformed). I got an ITG Stab99 airbox (76mm inlet) and managed to get hold of their Elise/Exige specific bracket for the rollover bar support, added to a length of 76mm silicone hose and I had a relatively inexpensive induction kit setup. As I no longer run a MAF, I could do away with various restrictions and complications for a nice clean setup.
Oh, last finishing touch - I added my SeriouslyLotus stud conversion kit. Makes fitting the wheels (particularly at chest height on the ramp) sooooo much easier, and they look cool too.
With all that done, I really had run out of excuses so I got on with the test. Car fired up on the button, and....... Clutch worked fine!
Celebrated with a few laps of the cul-de-sac, and called it a day.
I can only conclude that the original clutch was dead on arrival, after going through the process twice I really can't think of anything I could have cocked up.
Great news that it’s all working fine now.
Very frustrating that a faulty component has a) led to hassle and delays, and b) made you spend a lot of time questioning what you could have done wrong.
Unfortunately these things happen at some point in many engineering type projects. All you can do is analyse it calmly and methodically, which you’re clearly very good at. Bad luck, but a good final result.
Very frustrating that a faulty component has a) led to hassle and delays, and b) made you spend a lot of time questioning what you could have done wrong.
Unfortunately these things happen at some point in many engineering type projects. All you can do is analyse it calmly and methodically, which you’re clearly very good at. Bad luck, but a good final result.
Paul_M3 said:
Great news that it’s all working fine now.
Very frustrating that a faulty component has a) led to hassle and delays, and b) made you spend a lot of time questioning what you could have done wrong.
Unfortunately these things happen at some point in many engineering type projects. All you can do is analyse it calmly and methodically, which you’re clearly very good at. Bad luck, but a good final result.
Yep frustrating and a bit confidence rattling but all good now. Hopefully I can recoup some costs from the original clutch but that's a battle for next week.Very frustrating that a faulty component has a) led to hassle and delays, and b) made you spend a lot of time questioning what you could have done wrong.
Unfortunately these things happen at some point in many engineering type projects. All you can do is analyse it calmly and methodically, which you’re clearly very good at. Bad luck, but a good final result.
Having a weekend off the car and enjoying the weather a bit, catching up on house/garden jobs etc but my lawn mower is buried under the rear clam so I need to get a move on!
Been a weekend of finishing touches, crazy how much time you can spend into the final few bits once the big jobs are done.
Wheel arch liners all cleaned up, replaced/refreshed my Bostick repair patches in a few places and got them fitted up.
I had a damaged splitter that required some attention. This is actually one of two OEM style splitters I've got, in addition to the Reverie carbon one that I still need to figure out a plan for. I damaged it a while ago, was barely noticeable and then I made it a (lot) worse by throwing it up into the loft without supporting the damaged bit very well... then it cracked properly.
I needed to paint/refresh a splitter up to use whilst waiting for me to figure out the Reverie one, so figured I'd fix this at the same time.
Don't expect bodywork mastercraft, but I glassed it all in to bring some strength back.
Followed by a bit of sanding
Then some filling, then a lot of sanding
In all honesty I probably needed 2 or 3 more passes with the filler to form the shape back up properly but it's solidly in the "it'll do" category now, so got it primed up ready for paint along with the back clam panel.
Forgot to take some 'done' pictures, so will snap some of them fitted the car.
In the middle of all this, between paint coats etc the rear clam went back on. Garage suddenly feels massive again!
It was a little bit awkward to get it lined up properly, I actually fitted it with the rear grille still attached before it came off for paint, removing that first would have made things much easier. Bolted up in no time though, nothing really difficult there - and it allowed me to get the interior back in and cleaned up a bit as it had turned into a bit of a component dumping ground.
With the car largely back together on Sunday morning, I rolled it outside for a quick test and a wash. The test was just going up and down the road, just about got it into 3rd gear and so far no crunches, whining or clacking from the gearbox... which is a relief. Hopefully gears 4, 5 and 6 will be equally fine! The test did reveal though that my brakes are STILL not bled very well. I really dislike these 2pot calipers at the front, even despite all the tricks of inverting them and banging them with a mallet they always take me 2 or 3 goes at bleeding through. Very annoying, but I'll not attempt it again until I can trigger ABS a couple of times - just to purge out any air I might have gathered in the ABS system somewhere.
Looking a bit odd without a splitter or spoiler, but still looking much better than it has for the last few months.
Spoiler, grille and splitter have since been refitted so today I just need to do a quick lights check for the MOT, and get the laptop out to try and tidy the idle tuning up a little bit. The big ITG filter has certainly had an impact, even though I'm running MAFless the duty cycle I have configured for the TB needs a tweak to allow for what I assume is a shed load more air flow.
Wheel arch liners all cleaned up, replaced/refreshed my Bostick repair patches in a few places and got them fitted up.
I had a damaged splitter that required some attention. This is actually one of two OEM style splitters I've got, in addition to the Reverie carbon one that I still need to figure out a plan for. I damaged it a while ago, was barely noticeable and then I made it a (lot) worse by throwing it up into the loft without supporting the damaged bit very well... then it cracked properly.
I needed to paint/refresh a splitter up to use whilst waiting for me to figure out the Reverie one, so figured I'd fix this at the same time.
Don't expect bodywork mastercraft, but I glassed it all in to bring some strength back.
Followed by a bit of sanding
Then some filling, then a lot of sanding
In all honesty I probably needed 2 or 3 more passes with the filler to form the shape back up properly but it's solidly in the "it'll do" category now, so got it primed up ready for paint along with the back clam panel.
Forgot to take some 'done' pictures, so will snap some of them fitted the car.
In the middle of all this, between paint coats etc the rear clam went back on. Garage suddenly feels massive again!
It was a little bit awkward to get it lined up properly, I actually fitted it with the rear grille still attached before it came off for paint, removing that first would have made things much easier. Bolted up in no time though, nothing really difficult there - and it allowed me to get the interior back in and cleaned up a bit as it had turned into a bit of a component dumping ground.
With the car largely back together on Sunday morning, I rolled it outside for a quick test and a wash. The test was just going up and down the road, just about got it into 3rd gear and so far no crunches, whining or clacking from the gearbox... which is a relief. Hopefully gears 4, 5 and 6 will be equally fine! The test did reveal though that my brakes are STILL not bled very well. I really dislike these 2pot calipers at the front, even despite all the tricks of inverting them and banging them with a mallet they always take me 2 or 3 goes at bleeding through. Very annoying, but I'll not attempt it again until I can trigger ABS a couple of times - just to purge out any air I might have gathered in the ABS system somewhere.
Looking a bit odd without a splitter or spoiler, but still looking much better than it has for the last few months.
Spoiler, grille and splitter have since been refitted so today I just need to do a quick lights check for the MOT, and get the laptop out to try and tidy the idle tuning up a little bit. The big ITG filter has certainly had an impact, even though I'm running MAFless the duty cycle I have configured for the TB needs a tweak to allow for what I assume is a shed load more air flow.
MOT day! Spoiler alert, it failed.
I had the car booked in for 9am, there's a tyre shop which I use a lot just over the road who also have some laser tracking gear so I'd arranged to get my front toe corrected there before the MOT.
It was really good to get the car out on the road, but it drove terribly with my eyeballed front toe. Lovely day to be crabbing around the road though
For the record my eyeball toe was 2deg in on one side and 1.5deg in on the other... I expected worse! They trued it up for me and the car felt so, so much nicer. Onto the MOT bay and I soon got a failure for fast idle emissions.
It wasn't even close either, limit for CO was 0.2% and I scored 1.53% on the first attempt and 1.14% on the second... yikes. (lambda read 0.96 and minimal acceptable is 0.97).
This is the first MOT I've had done with the 2bular sports cat fitted, it's supposed to be MOT-safe but who knows. The other factor is the ecu/map, specifically the parts of the map that I've been playing with (butchering) to smooth my idle out a bit. I was datalogging whilst the car was being tested and I could see them holding ~2.6k RPM for the fast idle test with 7% throttle.
What I can see from the logs is that my lambda reading matches that of the MOT readout, and it was hitting 0.96 lambda. Ideally it should be close to 1.0 here, and lower numbers = richer, so that would explain things a bit.
I've not really touched fuelling as part of my idle tuning, but I did mess around with ignition advance a bit, specifically I was backing it off loads just 'above' the RPM range for acceptable idle. This had the desired effect of letting my idle drop nice and smoothly, as originally it hung a little bit just outside of the range where idle speed control would kick in. Luckily I have all the tools at my disposal to replicate the test in my garage, and gauge results - so I'm fairly confident I can get it close to target before going for a retest.
The drive home was OK, few observations from the gearbox/clutch setup:
- Usability is just like OEM, pedal bite point a little higher than before but I'm already used to it.
- When applying throttle there's no notable extra noise from the 3rd/4th gears. SSC warn you that they're a bit louder than OEM but you can't hear it whilst accelerating, on the overrun there's a slight "wooo" noise, not quite a whine - but easily liveable for a road car, I think they sound cool.
- The gearbox has a slight rattle on the overrun regardless of gears. I'm not overly concerned about this because my Elise used to do it a lot too. Rattle is probably the wrong word, but I tweaked a lot of it out with my Elise by rearranging gear cables and stuff like that -so maybe something I've just not put back exactly right on the rebuild. Bit of sponge here and there and I'm fairly confident it'll be fine. Either that or the Diff I bought is a duff and will fail spectacularly any day now....
- When giving it some gas, the shorter ratio of the FD is certainly noticeable compared to before but still very road biased. I think if you'd never driven one before, you'd never know - it feels great, but there's certainly an added punch in the midrange... at least until...
- I'm getting some WOT misfires. Checked the logs and can't see anything obvious, no EML code etc. Might just be fouled up plugs particularly if my idle is running rich, and I had no working lambda sensor at all for the weeks leading up to SORN which meant the ECU was over correcting and throwing fuel at it anyway... I'll give the plugs a clean out and try again, or at very least will go log some proper "pulls" so I can make sure things are happy, perhaps adding the mahoosive filter needs a bit of a map tweak too.
- Brakes still need another bleed, but they're road worthy at least (and an MOT pass!). I'll get round to it.
I had the car booked in for 9am, there's a tyre shop which I use a lot just over the road who also have some laser tracking gear so I'd arranged to get my front toe corrected there before the MOT.
It was really good to get the car out on the road, but it drove terribly with my eyeballed front toe. Lovely day to be crabbing around the road though
For the record my eyeball toe was 2deg in on one side and 1.5deg in on the other... I expected worse! They trued it up for me and the car felt so, so much nicer. Onto the MOT bay and I soon got a failure for fast idle emissions.
It wasn't even close either, limit for CO was 0.2% and I scored 1.53% on the first attempt and 1.14% on the second... yikes. (lambda read 0.96 and minimal acceptable is 0.97).
This is the first MOT I've had done with the 2bular sports cat fitted, it's supposed to be MOT-safe but who knows. The other factor is the ecu/map, specifically the parts of the map that I've been playing with (butchering) to smooth my idle out a bit. I was datalogging whilst the car was being tested and I could see them holding ~2.6k RPM for the fast idle test with 7% throttle.
What I can see from the logs is that my lambda reading matches that of the MOT readout, and it was hitting 0.96 lambda. Ideally it should be close to 1.0 here, and lower numbers = richer, so that would explain things a bit.
I've not really touched fuelling as part of my idle tuning, but I did mess around with ignition advance a bit, specifically I was backing it off loads just 'above' the RPM range for acceptable idle. This had the desired effect of letting my idle drop nice and smoothly, as originally it hung a little bit just outside of the range where idle speed control would kick in. Luckily I have all the tools at my disposal to replicate the test in my garage, and gauge results - so I'm fairly confident I can get it close to target before going for a retest.
The drive home was OK, few observations from the gearbox/clutch setup:
- Usability is just like OEM, pedal bite point a little higher than before but I'm already used to it.
- When applying throttle there's no notable extra noise from the 3rd/4th gears. SSC warn you that they're a bit louder than OEM but you can't hear it whilst accelerating, on the overrun there's a slight "wooo" noise, not quite a whine - but easily liveable for a road car, I think they sound cool.
- The gearbox has a slight rattle on the overrun regardless of gears. I'm not overly concerned about this because my Elise used to do it a lot too. Rattle is probably the wrong word, but I tweaked a lot of it out with my Elise by rearranging gear cables and stuff like that -so maybe something I've just not put back exactly right on the rebuild. Bit of sponge here and there and I'm fairly confident it'll be fine. Either that or the Diff I bought is a duff and will fail spectacularly any day now....
- When giving it some gas, the shorter ratio of the FD is certainly noticeable compared to before but still very road biased. I think if you'd never driven one before, you'd never know - it feels great, but there's certainly an added punch in the midrange... at least until...
- I'm getting some WOT misfires. Checked the logs and can't see anything obvious, no EML code etc. Might just be fouled up plugs particularly if my idle is running rich, and I had no working lambda sensor at all for the weeks leading up to SORN which meant the ECU was over correcting and throwing fuel at it anyway... I'll give the plugs a clean out and try again, or at very least will go log some proper "pulls" so I can make sure things are happy, perhaps adding the mahoosive filter needs a bit of a map tweak too.
- Brakes still need another bleed, but they're road worthy at least (and an MOT pass!). I'll get round to it.
I spotted my issue with the misfire... quite embarrassing!
I was focussing in on the lean spikes (circled in red) and beginning to suspect something mechanical, maybe dodgy injector or something. What was also confusing me was why the EGO feedback wasn't freaking out and throwing fuel at it to remedy - it wasn't even activating, so that turned me to something software related.... then I widened my scope a little bit, and found the issue... traction control is inexplicably kicking in. (blue circle)
As I've said a few times in this thread, my TC setup is very basic - as I'm currently not receiving a usable wheel speed signal from the front axle I can't use a proper setup which detects a differential between driven and passive wheels, I'm left relying on ECUMasters "RPM Gain" strategy which looks for spikes in RPM. I was almost certainly not getting any wheel slip today, so I can only assume that my different gear ratios are maybe fooling the system a bit. I know how to adjust the ratios in the software, so I'll fix that next time out.
As for the idle, I was able to replicate the high idle test conditions in my garage and found a few cells where I'd retarded ignition too much to help with my idle hanging issues. I've tweaked that, taken a tiny bit of fuel out and the lambdas are right around stoich now during idle - so expecting/hoping for an easy pass for the retest.
I was focussing in on the lean spikes (circled in red) and beginning to suspect something mechanical, maybe dodgy injector or something. What was also confusing me was why the EGO feedback wasn't freaking out and throwing fuel at it to remedy - it wasn't even activating, so that turned me to something software related.... then I widened my scope a little bit, and found the issue... traction control is inexplicably kicking in. (blue circle)
As I've said a few times in this thread, my TC setup is very basic - as I'm currently not receiving a usable wheel speed signal from the front axle I can't use a proper setup which detects a differential between driven and passive wheels, I'm left relying on ECUMasters "RPM Gain" strategy which looks for spikes in RPM. I was almost certainly not getting any wheel slip today, so I can only assume that my different gear ratios are maybe fooling the system a bit. I know how to adjust the ratios in the software, so I'll fix that next time out.
As for the idle, I was able to replicate the high idle test conditions in my garage and found a few cells where I'd retarded ignition too much to help with my idle hanging issues. I've tweaked that, taken a tiny bit of fuel out and the lambdas are right around stoich now during idle - so expecting/hoping for an easy pass for the retest.
MOT retest passed today, by a long way!
I originally failed with 1.14% CO (1.53% on the first test!) and the threshold for a pass is 0.2%. Today I passed with 0.08% 8-)
Pretty happy, partly because I now have a taxable car but also it's always reassuring when you make changes to the map and you get out the results you expected
Oh, and misfire was indeed fixed by switching the TC off... car feels rather rapid
I originally failed with 1.14% CO (1.53% on the first test!) and the threshold for a pass is 0.2%. Today I passed with 0.08% 8-)
Pretty happy, partly because I now have a taxable car but also it's always reassuring when you make changes to the map and you get out the results you expected
Oh, and misfire was indeed fixed by switching the TC off... car feels rather rapid
Fonzey said:
MOT retest passed today, by a long way!
I originally failed with 1.14% CO (1.53% on the first test!) and the threshold for a pass is 0.2%. Today I passed with 0.08% 8-)
Pretty happy, partly because I now have a taxable car but also it's always reassuring when you make changes to the map and you get out the results you expected
Oh, and misfire was indeed fixed by switching the TC off... car feels rather rapid
Nice one! Any trackdays booked? I originally failed with 1.14% CO (1.53% on the first test!) and the threshold for a pass is 0.2%. Today I passed with 0.08% 8-)
Pretty happy, partly because I now have a taxable car but also it's always reassuring when you make changes to the map and you get out the results you expected
Oh, and misfire was indeed fixed by switching the TC off... car feels rather rapid
Couple of wee updates, one pretty dull and one slightly less dull.
Before the winter work I fitted a Mishimoto sandwich plate to allow me to generate a bit more oil temp in the car. This has definitely worked, or at least moved things in the right direction (could probably still be hotter in all fairness, but I'll judge it properly after some track sessions) but I wasn't 100% happy with the adaptors I'd had made up for the oil cooler lines. The Mishi plate has M20 female threads and the Lotus oil cooler lines are 5/8bsp... it seems no adaptor exists for that.
The ones I had made up were based on two conversions, M20 to something else (M10? I Can't remember) and then M10 to 5/8 BSP so the adaptors were fairly long and caused very low clearance to the bulkhead/plumbing which made me nervous. It also introduced one extra failure point. A fellow community member got in touch and said he'd been speaking with a fabrication firm about putting together a small order of custom adaptors so I bought into that, and they arrived this week:
I got these fitted up, they're much closer to the dimensions of the OEM sandwich plate adaptors so much happier.
Next update, I'd bought a new spoiler for the car towards the end of last year. I wasn't 100% sure whether I'd fit it or not, but after trying it out - I don't want to go back!
It's made by LEA Composites, full carbon fibre and has an adjustable angle on it. Neither of those attributes are what attracted me to it, it was more the fact it's ~30% wide than the original wing and (imo) fits the body lines much better.
Compared to the stumpy one the car came with:
I think it looks much better, and is 2kg lighter too. There are a few 'clam mounted' options available, which all look great but I personally love the Pre-08 rear wing and the bootlid mounts on aesthetics alone (if you want an actually functional wing, clam mounted is the way to go). The bootlid mount just looks more cohesive with the design of the car IMO.
I now have a problem where I've got a random piece of token carbon on the car... :?
Before the winter work I fitted a Mishimoto sandwich plate to allow me to generate a bit more oil temp in the car. This has definitely worked, or at least moved things in the right direction (could probably still be hotter in all fairness, but I'll judge it properly after some track sessions) but I wasn't 100% happy with the adaptors I'd had made up for the oil cooler lines. The Mishi plate has M20 female threads and the Lotus oil cooler lines are 5/8bsp... it seems no adaptor exists for that.
The ones I had made up were based on two conversions, M20 to something else (M10? I Can't remember) and then M10 to 5/8 BSP so the adaptors were fairly long and caused very low clearance to the bulkhead/plumbing which made me nervous. It also introduced one extra failure point. A fellow community member got in touch and said he'd been speaking with a fabrication firm about putting together a small order of custom adaptors so I bought into that, and they arrived this week:
I got these fitted up, they're much closer to the dimensions of the OEM sandwich plate adaptors so much happier.
Next update, I'd bought a new spoiler for the car towards the end of last year. I wasn't 100% sure whether I'd fit it or not, but after trying it out - I don't want to go back!
It's made by LEA Composites, full carbon fibre and has an adjustable angle on it. Neither of those attributes are what attracted me to it, it was more the fact it's ~30% wide than the original wing and (imo) fits the body lines much better.
Compared to the stumpy one the car came with:
I think it looks much better, and is 2kg lighter too. There are a few 'clam mounted' options available, which all look great but I personally love the Pre-08 rear wing and the bootlid mounts on aesthetics alone (if you want an actually functional wing, clam mounted is the way to go). The bootlid mount just looks more cohesive with the design of the car IMO.
I now have a problem where I've got a random piece of token carbon on the car... :?
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