Fire’s up, runs very rough then won’t restart.

[Paul V]

Just fitted a new radiator and fans to my Griffith 500, went to fire the car up but the (new) battery was quite flat, I jumped started the car from a battery pack I have, the car fired up and then ran very rough, sounded not too bad if I kept the revs around 2500-3000 but as soon as I let them drop it stalled, and wouldn’t restart, I left it while going to get petrol, also put the battery on charge. When I got back there still wasn’t enough to start the car so I put the battery pack on it again and started it. Again running very rough, when I let the revs drop it stalled and again won’t restart. The engine has only done about 20 miles since it was rebuilt by TVR power.

Any tips?

[Green Meanie]

I had the same problem when a fitted a rebuilt 4.0 litre to one of my hot rods the new engine was soooo tight it did not want to start,even when my battery was fully charged I had to jump start it from a diesel 4x4.I had the dizzy out so many times to check the timing that I lost the script and had to get one of my friends round to check everything,timing was spot on and when his 4x4 was connected with jump leads everything was fine the engine started and ran, after that I recharged my battery and no other probs.All I can say is are you sure that you new battery is OK,have known a similar prob with a V8S and it turned out to be a bad cell in the battery so it was giving a reduced voltage output when the engine was running,so try that.

[Paul V]

Was running when it came back from power, they said they had had problems with the fans, I found they were rough so replaced them and decided to go for a alloy rad as well just for good measure, my old rad was fine though.

Well I checked at the connections to the dizzy and coil, it started straight away, only this time it was in the red on the temperature gauge within a minute, I’m guessing it still had air in the system from fitting the new rad but I bled it from the manifold and rad, topping up just as it says in the SH book, hoping to 2 aren’t connected, it’s on it’s third rebuild in as many years already!!!

[dnb]

Does sound a bit like air in the cooling system. Mine was always a bit funny when this happened - the coolant temperature sensor reports rubbish to the ECU, and makes the fuelling goes silly.

[Paul V]

Looks like I’ll be giving it another bleed tomorrow, decided to call it a night now, the neighbours aren’t to pleased if I fired it up to late lol

[Paul V]

When you say take it off the header tank, do you mean fill it where the thermostat is? Does that mean I’ll need to take the thermostat out first?

[Paul V]

I will do, I undid the bleed hose on the manifold and waited till the water came out of it but will try back filling this time, another trip to Halfrauds for some more very over priced antifreeze lol

[Paul V]

Well the system was more or less full already so I took the bleed plug out the manifold and started the car with it out, letting it pump out a fair bit of fluid making sure to keep filling the system as I went then I put the plug back in. I let car run for a bit, it took a while to get up to temperature but did, I saw about 100 on the gauge before the thermostat opened, then the fans cut in and it sat at about 90 on the gauge. One thing if I turn the engine off and just have the ignition on the gauge reads about 10 degrees lower, guess it might be time to clean the earths again?

It was rough again this morning but after bleeding the system I let it cool right down and started again from cold, seems to be running ok now.