S4s rolling restoration project

[tomcattom]

That pretty much covers the process I'd already read about @fjmuurling, but that is the clearest video of it I've seen so far 👍

Sadly I don't have a laster cutter, so I'll be cutting my dial faces using a good old pair of scissors, but I have raided my wife's leatherwork tool box for some hollow puches to knock out the needle and mouting holes in the face neatly 🤐

[cweeden]

My wife works at a local secondary school and they have a well equipped DT department including a lightweight laser cutter. It makes me suspect these are common in schools and you may find one local to you that wouldn't mind helping out perhaps if the scissors don't do the job well enough?

cheers

-Chris

[tomcattom]

You shouldn't be able to see the edge of the face once installed, so hopefully you won't see any wonky cutting on the perimeter, but I'll bare that thought in mind if that isn't the case Chris!

Sorted the speedo out for a second time today. Turns out the wheel speed sensor sub-harness has been cut into and repaired at some point. So either that join is the cause of the fault or the fact that as a result of that prior repair there is about 4" of loom that isn't properly twisted, which given it's a differential signal probably isn't helping either.

Not sure what the actual cause is, but the new loom appears to have fixed it.

 

I also updated my ram air mod to use silicone hoses too

 

If Amazon deliver the spray adhesive tomorrow I'm hoping to have a stab at putting a complete oil temperature gauge face together 🤞

[tomcattom]

Adhesive for the gauge face assembly eventually arrived this evening, so I've done my first mock up.

Putting the face together was a doddle. It's not bad for a first try but a few subtle tweaks are required to the artwork to get them to match even better. The red band looks a bit thin, the font needs to be a touch bolder and the scale lines are a bit short.

[tomcattom]

Final assembly of the gauge completed today.

Here is the final artwork all printed ready to construct the new face. The dial is printed reverse onto some inkjet compatible OHP transparency sheets, it's printed the correct way round on some 110gsm matte photo paper and then I have a sheet of 0.5mm clear plastic to mount it all on to give the dial some rigidity.

Everything taped down to align it ready for gluing.

This was where I left it last night so the adhesive could properly set before trimming.

 

Next job was to cut the face out and using a 2mm and 8mm hollow punch I borrowed from my wife's leatherwork toolkit I cut the mounting screw and needle holes. The punches didn't really do a great job but thankfully the screw heads and needle boss cover the edges so you can't see that they're not as crisp as OE. A laser cutter is definitely the way to go here if you have access to one! All the parts laid out ready for assembly. I gave the face a quick wipe down with IPA before fitting to remove all my greasy fingerprints.

 

Face installed into the gauge. Note the marking on the edge of the case at the 10 o'clock position. Because there is no needle stop and I didn't know if the needle was in any way keyed onto the shaft, I thought it prudent to mark the resting position in case I needed it later - good job I did! It's not quite lined up properly in this shot and it took several more attempts to fit the needle after I took this photo before I was fully happy with the resting position.

Inner shroud fitted. It covers up my poor cutting around the perimeter of the face!

 

The reason I tool the gauge apart in the first place was because the glass was fogging up. It looks like the glass is some sort of laminate affair from what I can make out so I decided to try and source a new bit of glass. I could find people selling replacement glass but in most cases it would cost more than the glass itself to post it 🙄 In the end I bought a new random 52mm VDO gauge for a tenner on ebay to strip it for the glass because that was cheaper. When it turned up it transpires that not all VDO gauge glass is created equal and the new glass was of a smaller diamater than what I already had To use this new glass I was going to have to use the bezel from the donor gauge too. The new bezel is of a different design and by a stroke of luck that bezel is actually a perfect match for the CAI gauge, so win win The fully assembled gauage is resting on the old VDO gauge bezel arrangement here for comparison.

 

Gauge all fitted. Pretty good match if I do say so myself.

And illumination tested.

 

Just need to run the car out of the garage and get it up to temperature to check the gauge still functions correctly now 🤞

[Chillidoggy]

Excellent work, Tom. And it looks perfect.

 

Suddenly the £200 quoted by Caerbont doesn’t seem as bad! 

[tomcattom]

Thanks @Chillidoggy.

You're right about the Caerbont quote. Materials wise it didn't cost me more than £25 to make the new dial, that was to buy the transparencies and donor gauge and I already had all the other materials here. It's the time spent on the vector artwork where the cost to a company like Caerbont doing it goes. It took me three iterations to get the artwork to a standard I was happy with and probably somewhere not far off a full working day of effort to refine it over the past week or so I would say; I'm no vector artwork pro by the way!

Happy to share my vector artwork with anyone else that fancies having a go at this themselves.

[Giniw]

On 12/02/2021 at 20:26, tomcattom said:

Here is a good illustration of how much further forward the turbo is sited when using the Alunox manifold. I'll have to adjust the exhaust tomorrow to get that to line up properly again.

How can it be that off?! Have they never been near an Esprit engine? Oo

[MrDangerUS]

Giniw,

What year is your car and which generation of Alunox did you buy? First Group Buy parts had some fitting problems, so I heard!

[tomcattom]

A little project I've been working on in the margins for a whlie has taken shape today following an important delivery. The headunit I fitted to the Esprit came with a backup camera that I've never fitted to this car or my previous car that I used it in. Ideally I wanted to place the camera above the rear numberplate between the numberplate lights, but the body slopes upwards there such that the camera would be at completely the wrong angle.

To overcome this I created a CAD model of a little plinth to mount the camera on which I had 3D printed for a tenner each; they arrived with posty this morning

 

I used my crossline laser to mark the centre line of the car to ensure I drilled the holes for the camera cable and plinth screws in the right place.

 

I then fitted a little piece of closed cell foam to the back of the plinth to stop water getting in behind it.

 

And here it is discretely fitted to the car, along with a pair of nice new numberplate lights after the old ones came off in pieces while trying to replace the bulbs 🙄

 

The cable for the camera is routed through the same hole at the rear of the boot that the numberplate light harness passes through. Once everything is tested I'll zip tie it to the existing harness there to keep it up out of the way.

 

Next job will be to sort a source of power for the camera and connect it up to the RCA cable I fed through the sills when I replaced the handbrake cables last year.

[Barrykearley]

36 minutes ago, tomcattom said:

Next job will be to sort a source of power for the camera

Straight off the reverse light 👍

[tomcattom]

Took the car out for a run today and when I got back near home I heard a few car horns sound but assumed it was just a byproduct of the generally poor driving standards of the majority round here.

Seems I may have been the intended recipient 🙄 😂

Not sure if I just forgot to tighten the bolt onto the hangar or it's just worked loose over the past year. Easily fixed tomorrow though. Won't need it for long, car is booked in for a new custom exhaust after Easter 🙂

[Barrykearley]

Make the exhaust chap - super easy - and mega cheap.

[Clarky5150]

Surely you have run out of work to do on her now. Why don’t we do a swap and you can start the fun all over again. Always fancies the S4S 👍😂

Failing that I wouldn’t mind one of those camera mounts as compensation for messing me about on the car swap deal 😂😂

[tomcattom]

Oh I still have plenty left on the list to do @Clarky5150, I'm definitely not looking to start all over again 😆 I've got a whole suspension refresh still to do, DM deletion kit to fit, wheel refurb to name a couple of jobs to do. And that's just the jobs I already have the parts sat here ready and waiting to do - but all of that is for after the summer. I'm looking forward to a year putting some proper miles on it for the first time since I've owned it.

On the subject of which I decided to go out for a run during my lunch break today since the weather here was glorious. One of the many benfits to working from home.

 

While I was out the other day I noticed that the boost gauge on the dash was never indicating more than 0.75bar, even at full throttle. So while I was out today I had Espritmon running to capture the run to see if it's a gauge issue or something else.

I'm getting 100% TPS which at least means I set that up correctly after all the faff I had replacing the throttle cable. What caught my interest while browsing the logs is the MAP reading. At full throttle I can see the second injector springing to life, but at the same time the MAP is reporting what I presume is 1.78bar of boost I'm assuming here that the units are in bar, and I'm reading the Espritmon graphs correctly because the manual isn't very clear what the units/scale of that particular windows are. If anyone can enlighten me I'd be interested to hear from them.

Assuming that really is 1.78bar, that's getting close to double the 1bar boost I'm supposed to see. If I am geniunely seeing too much boost my best guess for the culprit is that either my boost solenoid isn't working correctly or I've managed to cockup the setup of my new wastegate actuator when fitting it last year. Otherwise everything appears to be performing as expected - I think!

[fjmuurling]

MAP = Manifold Absolute Pressure

So it it not the boost.

MAP - Baro = Boost

If the car is not running MAP = Baro (or almost the same)

[tomcattom]

Ah okay, that makes sense now you say that 🤦‍♂️, thanks for clarifying @fjmuurling.

So for crude maths, if I assuming barometric air pressure during the run was 1bar say, that would mean at that moment on the graph I was seeing 0.78bar of boost, which would tally up with the gauge on the dashboard. I'll try and dig into the raw data later to see what the actual recorded barometric air pressure was at that point in the run to be more accurate.

At least I'm not over-boosting and causing any damage. Just need to work out why I'm not reaching the full 1bar now, assuming the barometric pressure wasn't down to 0.78bar, which I doubt given the weather today 🤔

[tomcattom]

Oh wait, Espritmon gives the baro reading over on the left hand side bar 🙄 so at that moment it was 0.97bar, so my 1bar guess was almost spot on.

So 1.78-0.97=0.81bar of boost. That was the peak value I saw throughout the capture I believe.

[Barrykearley]

Try linking the solenoid out - on the vac side. You’ll see what the wastegate capsule is doing then. The solenoid is only for “overboost” anyway - mine is running more so it’s rather pointless.

[Chillidoggy]

My Freescan logs show a maximum 2.23 MAP at full throttle. I don't have an Espritmon log, though.

[sailorbob]

The wastegate solenoid is not used just for overboost, see this thread

Freescan incorrectly reports the MAP value too high.

 

[Chillidoggy]

4 hours ago, sailorbob said:

The wastegate solenoid is not used just for overboost, see this thread

Freescan incorrectly reports the MAP value too high.

 

Yes, but it’ll be for a comparison.

[sailorbob]

Not when you are comparing the value to that in Espritmon.

[tomcattom]

My plan is to remove the wastegate solenoid from the equation (as you suggest @Barrykearley) to test that I've got the actuator set up properly; I did have issues getting a reliable measurement when I was reinstalling the turbo back last year so its possible I've got it set wrong. I can also hook the solenoid directly up to the battery to prove that is at least functioning and then hopefully with the results of those tests I'll be able to narrow down the problem.

That's interesting about Freescan inacurately measuring the MAP value @sailorbob. Not that it will affect me because I've never been able to get Freescan to work reliable for me anyway, so I default to Espritmon for most of my needs.

At least I know I should be expecting around 2bar reading from the MAP sensor at full throttle, assuming all is well (which appears to be backed up by @Chillidoggy's S4s). With the solenoid out of the equation I should be expecting to see around 1.65bar max, according to the actuator maximum value in section EF of the manual.

[tomcattom]

Despite our best efforts to shield the family, and my wife in particular, from Covid over the past 2+ years we finally caught it so not really been in a position to do much on the Esprit.

Anyway, I felt well enough to want to go out an tinker with the car today. I removed the wastegate actuator from the equation and ran the turbo on actuator pressure alone and the peak MAP reading dropped to 1.44bar. That's someway short of the 1.65 (approx) that I was expecting to see during this test. So it would seem that despite my best efforts with the DTI when I set up the actuator in the first place, I got it wrong. Going for the trial and error approach now; I will add a turn at a time on the actuator arm and re-run the test until I reach the expected value. One positive is that at least I know the wastegate solenoid it working correctly because it's giving the extra ~0.35bar I need to get to the magic 1bar of boost when everything is working as it should.

 

I also quickly fitted the new stainless jacking point brackets that I bought some time ago. I used the supplied pop rivets along with a bead of CT1 adhesive on each one after cleaning the mating face on the body shell thoroughly. The back right bracket took a bit more work because of the damage repair done in that area from a former life excursion off the road.