kws

VR. Sensor is pretty close. I could maybe move it a little closer. The trigger logs look all good from what i have seen, but i havent logged when cranking for a while. I was going to do this tonight but its pissing down. How close should the sensor be? I dont want to risk contact. Heres my setup. In the photo there is a pin on the crank pulley, you can see it just below the sensor. This misses the side of the sensor, but only by a couple of mm. Could this be an issue?

Don't have proper control over cranking pulsewidth yet, apparently that will be fixed next update. I can only really control priming pulse and cranking enrichment as a percentage. This issue never happened with standard ecu. Would a small leak around the throttle body shaft cause an issue like this? The tps isn't sealed against the intake, so I suspect there may be a small it leak there. Will spray some carb cleaner with the engine running and see if it's leaking.

TO the peeps that know what they are doing, why would my engine backfire through the intake every time i am cranking to start it? Usually pops at least once when cranking. If i open the throttle WOT (into flood mode, cutting fuel), it makes an almighty bang when it backfires in the intake (nothing stopping it). Its a Rover V8, running Speeduino EFI, crank 36-1 trigger wheel, wasted spark coils (two four post coil packs), and batch injection. Base timing has been set by disabling the injectors, setting cranking timing to 0 degrees, and then checking the TDC mark lines up with a timing light when cranking. I have also verified No1 is at the top of its stroke with a bore scope when the TDC mark is at 0. Cranking timing is normally something like 10 degrees BTDC. When it backfires in the intake the engine struggles, the lights dim. The engine will start fine, although takes some churning over when warm, and runs and drives great. Lots of grunt, so hesitation, uses a bit of fuel but what RV8 doesnt? This is an example of it cranking and you can hear it when its cranking in this one

Another six months down, so last weekend it was time for another Warrant of Fitness on the Rover. No matter what car it is, but especially old cars, Warrant time is a bit of a pain. After doing lots of pre-emptive work for the last warrant, and having only covered about 1200km since, I was hoping for another easy pass. Here she is ready for the inspection After a thorough poking and prodding, she came away with another clean sheet. One of the rear seat belts had to be untwisted, and the front wheel bearings might need tightening or replacing before next WOF, but otherwise she is a solid old beast. So that’s another six months of motoring to do, and coming into summer, I’m intending to put far more than 1200km on it by the next WOF. In saying that though, the car was off the road for a couple of months recently due to various reasons (Speeduino install, waterpump failure, my wedding….). To celebrate its new warrant, the car decided to surprise me when I got home, buy snapping the hand brake cable as I parked up. *sigh* Off to Rimmers to buy a replacement. Thankfully the parking pawl on the trans works, so the car wont roll away. Since the Rover has been uncovered the past couple of days I finally took the chance to grab the camera and grab a quick video of the exhaust. It’s a good sound. I like it, but I do wish it was a smidgen louder, and more grumbly. At some point I’ll unbolt the rear section (which has a muffler in it) and see what it sounds like without it (so then it will only be a single muffler, and a resonator in the system). If I like it, I’ll get a pipe made up to replace the muffler. The next job is to change the auto trans oil and filter. It’s a messy job, and a pain to do, but it should be done.

Guy at my old job had one. Auto grenaded its self, so he was converting to manual. Not sure if he ever finished that project before i left. His opinion was that the autos were rubbish; probably fine for around town but dont abuse it.

Oh wow, didnt realise the ATC had solid forks. Is the rear axle sprung, or is that solid mounted too?

That is such a fantastic collection of death machines, how do you even come across a load like that?

Except for the hand brake cable which decided to snap when i parked up at home. British cars know how to celebrate getting a warrant.

Rover passed its warrant, excellent. Heres to another 6 months of motoring.

The Zeal has been slowly trucking along. I have been finding it hard to get motivated to do much, as it’s so cold and dark after work these days. Since the last update, the Zeal has taken over the garage, kicking the daily outside (and into the rain). It turns out, as I suspected, that the rust has more bark than bite, and looks worse than it is. The salty air of where it was sitting for the past few years has found its way up under the paint and has been creating this ugly flaky surface rust. Once you get through the flaky paint and rust, the metal beneath is solid, albeit a little pitted. Remember, this is what I was working with Obviously I cant leave it like that, it’s ugly and will only keep getting worse. The original plan was to strip the whole bike down and redo the whole frame, but once I got the rest of the plastics off, it was pretty easy to access the rusty parts, and let’s face it, stripping the whole thing was a huge job. I sold Scooty the other day, and with the money from that I went and picked up a Ryobi One+ angle grinder, a flap disk and a twisted wire brush for it. I had heard that the flap disks were really good for stripping rust and paint, but I also knew the brushes were good too, so I thought I would put them to the test. I found very quickly that although the flap disk is SUPER effective for stripping everything and leaves a nice smooth finish, it’s a little too aggressive. The wire brush on the other hand only really attacks the rust and any flaky/bubbling paint. It’s no where near as aggressive, so I stuck with that for the rest of it. To give me more room to work, I removed the complete exhaust system. Very easy to do, 8 nuts in the head, and two bolts along the pipe to hold it to the bike. The system is in average shape with lots of surface rust. The only issues I can see is that both mufflers have a hole in the underside of them. Whether this is by design, or age/rust, I’m not sure. Will need to investigate further in the future. In the meantime, they will do. I also removed the brake master and res for the rear as this takes up a lot of space. I hung this out of the way with a bungee cord. I have spent the past couple of days attacking every bit of rust I can get my hands on, both with the grinder and with a normal hand powered wire brush. The main focus was to remove all the loose bits of paint and rust, and give the rust converter something to work with. Of course where I could, I got it down to bare metal, but some areas just weren’t that accessible (like the mount above). I used CRC rust converter, and so far im impressed. It sprays on well, sticks well, and seems to do a good job of killing the rust. It turns it into a black “primer” that can be painted over. It’s a tad messy but will do the job. Unlike the other rust converter I tried last time, it doesn’t eat/melt the paint around it either, which makes everything a bit nicer. Its pretty ugly now. Very blotchy The next step will fix that. The whole frame with get a rub down to key it, and then I’ll prime the whole thing. Once the primer is dry, it will get a couple of coats of paint. I’m not 100% on which shade, but I’ll be trying to match the original paint as close as possible. Thankfully once the tank and plastics are on you can’t see much of the frame, so it doesn’t need to be show bike quality. Until next time….

Anyone got anything, good, or bad, to say about Hutt Automatics or Motortech Transmissions?

Hi all, I need the auto (GM180) on my Rover serviced, and some leaks fixed. Who is the recommended go to for a proper job? Need someone that knows what they are doing, and will do the job well. Someone that can drill and weld a drain plug into the trans sump would be good too. In Lower Hutt, but can travel anywhere in the region.

Another day, some more progress. In my last post I commented that whenever I put the Zeal into gear the engine would cut. Some awesome members (thanks!) of a couple of forums I post this on mentioned that it was probably the side stand switch. The switch is designed to do just that; cut the engine if you put it into gear with the stand down… only problem, since my bike is on a paddock stand, the side stand is up. Time to investigate. The switch lives here, down by the stand (sans a bolt I already removed) It was a tad dirty down there. Here it is removed I gave it a real thorough hose down with WD40 and Contact Cleaner whilst actuating it. I cant find any way to disassemble it, so that will have to do. I suspect the bike was on its stand for most of the last 5 years (going from the pooling of fuel in carb No1), so the contacts have probably corroded. I checked the connector in the under seat area, and it looked all good. I also mentioned that I had some issues with my clutch, way back in my first post and I made a post last night about it on the 250cc forum. The helpful guys over there pointed out that it was probably the cable needing adjustment at the engine side. Sure enough, when I looked at it today, it was hard up against the stop at its longest position (hard against the lock nut in the photo). I wound the adjuster out a few times and managed to arrange it so that the adjuster on the bar lever is in the middle of its adjustment, and with only minimal free play (as required) This shows how it was adjusted, in the bottom LH corner This allowed me to do this I ran it through all the gears, and it does everything it should. The clutch comes on and off, and all the gears go in and out without issue. 6th has a little rumble, but that’s probably because it’s running on a stand. No nasty rattles or anything though. As seen in the video too, I also had a play with the idle and got it to idle with zero choke when warmed up. Obviously I was playing too much, as I ran out of gas at the end of the video >_< Since I was in the garage and I had to wait for the smoke to clear again, I decided to have another look at the gauges. I had previously had a go at fixing them in a previous post, using super glue. Unfortunately the moment I tried to fit the tacho cup the screw broke the glue and the mount came free again. When I was in Repco the other day I noticed this on the shelf. Selleys Plastic Fix glue. It’s a two-part system, where you paint on the primer with the pen, and then apply glue. Smoosh the two bits of plastic together and hold it for 30 seconds till it “grabs”. I’ll be damned if it didn’t “grab” and set solid almost instantly. It worked VERY well. Whilst it was drying I had a crack at mounting the Speedo cup. Looks good. So good that I had to jam on the Tacho and cup again. Excellent. I have a new headlight on its way to replace the rusty and dented POS there, so that will be sorted at some point. Next up I think its time to strip the bike down and get the frame sorted.

The clutch is a bit sticky, but i can spin the wheel with the clutch pulled in when in gear. When i put it in gear it might run for a second, or it might just die instantly.

It does have a side stand switch i think, will certainly have a nosy. Thanks!

I have been a tad lazy with the updates on this, but rest assured, progress is happening. Slowly but surely, most days after work I have been plugging away at the Zeal. Coming off the last post where I had started to reassemble the carbs, I got stuck in and cleaned the rest of the carbs, replaced the seals and reassembled them. I finally got my replacement brass screws, so took great care not to smash these ones to bits. Made in Japan, sent via USA to NZ. I also received my cool little set of carb brushes from Aliexpress. They were pretty good at cleaning out passages and jets. Most of them were clean, but I did manage to clear out a bit more baked on crud from the No1 main jet with them. All the carbs mounted together And with the choke rail mounted back on The de-rusted idle adjuster looked much better The only other thing left to do with the carbs was to bench sync them. Bench syncing the carbs is to make sure all the throttle plates open the same amount. The throttle cable acts directly on carb No3, with the other carbs all being triggered off that carb with a series of tabs and springs. There are adjustment screws on each carb linkage so that you can fine tune the interaction between the carbs. There are many ways on the interwebs to bench sync a carb. I chose one of the easier ones, which is to use the idle screw to open the No3 carb slightly, and adjust the idle screw so there is a slight drag on whatever you use as a feeler gauge. In my case I used one of the carb cleaning wires. Slightly open And then use the same feeler gauge to slowly fine tune how far the throttle plate is open on the other carbs, working out from carb 3. This should get the carbs all in the ballpark of being fairly similar. Once I had finished that, I moved back onto the tank. Because the damn tank was now leaking, thanks to rust, I had to line it. I purchased a KBS tank repair kit off trademe. They seem to have good ratings and it was a good price. I used the kit to degrease, and remove any rust the other rust remover missed. It seemed to do a good job. Then the tank sealer went in. I rolled the tank around a lot, to try to get a nice even coating. Unfortunately due to the design of the Zeal tank it was hard to drain the excess, so there is a little pooling and some runs in the tank, but it’s pretty well covered, which matters. Once cured for a few days, I filled the tank with water and left it overnight to make sure it wasn’t leaking. Sure enough it was still dry on the outside the next morning, so the sealer has done its job. Yus. In preparation for refitting the carbs to the bike, I wanted to attend to the nasty looking carb manifolds. They are a metal base with rubber top, and it was all cracking and flaking off. Not a good look. I removed any flaking rubber, wire brushed the metal parts, and then used Sikaflex to seal them. This is what I used. Sikaflex 227. It comes highly recommended for this job. Strong, fast curing, but stays flexible. I smothered it all over, and filled the cracks The old vacuum hoses were brittle and broke when removed, so I needed to make new ones. And the refreshed manifolds were fitted to the engine The carbs were great fun to refit… not. A lot of wiggling and jiggling got them in place, and then lots of fiddling got the damn throttle cables back into place. Looks a little nicer than when I got the bike I couldn’t help myself. I rigged up my trusty fuel tank syringe, used it to gravity feed the fuel bowls, poured some gas down the carbs, connected the battery and hit the starter. (yes, this video wasn’t the first first start, but it didn’t take much to fire up anyway) It was a tad smokey, blowing plumes of smoke and even wisping smoke out when the engine was off. Filled my garage with smoke, even with both doors open. It sounds great though, so much noise from the carbs. It wont idle without choke at the moment, and isn’t running prefect, but the carbs do need some tweaking and tuning, and maybe a tweak of the idle screw. My latest purchase arrived the other day which will help with this, a Carbtune Pro The smoke was starting to clear up when I decided enough was enough, so that’s a good sign. The coolant was also warming up and circulating, and everything seemed to be going well… except one thing. The gearbox/clutch. I’m suspecting this is an electrical issue, as there are a couple of them (like the engine run switch allowing the engine to start no matter which position it’s in, and not cutting the engine when set to STOP). When the engine is running in Neutral, it will idle and run happily, but the moment you put it into gear the engine will cut. I don’t think its related to the clutch, but feels like when it’s shifted from Neutral it cuts off. With the clutch lever out, in gear, it won’t try to crank. With the clutch lever pulled in, the engine will crank over in gear but wont try to start (yet as soon as you shift to neutral it will start straight away). I’m guessing something weird going on with the neutral switch? Will need to investigate. Now that I know the engine runs OK, hopefully I can sort the gearbox issue and make sure that works OK and then I will strip the bike down and deal with the frame. Fun Fun.

Long page is long.

It’s been a bit of a rough weekend, so what better cure than to take the Rover out for a spin and an Italian Tune-up. The sun was out, so off came the car cover, and out came the Rover. I had been meaning to check out the new Kapiti Expressway that has just been built, but hadn’t had a chance to make it up that way, and every time I wanted to drive the Rover recently the weather has turned to mud, and what fun is it cruising in the pouring down rain? Not to mention not being able to button her back up again after the drive due to the car being wet, and then getting covered in pine needles. So yeah, this was an adventurous trip. In my whole time with the Rover, I have never driven it this far from home. The furthest is usually to either Upper Hutt or the CBD, roughly 20-30km away. The Rover has been running well recently, and after the water pump failure it’s been holding its fluids and been mechanically sound. A pleasure to drive. Firing the car up for the first time in a couple of weeks, it didn’t start quite as sweetly as usual, and was running a bit lumpy and spluttering when given gas. Obviously not happy with the tweaks I did last time (in an effort to make warm starting easier), so I tapped a few keys on the laptop and reverted back to a previous tune. Started and idled much better this time. The first test was the new Haywards Interchange, which is an utter clusterfark, no matter which way you try to go through there the road markings are a mess and everything is guided by some messy cones. It will be good once it’s done, but blegh. Once the temporary 50kph zone changes to 100kph though, it was time to unleash all 190hp, and the sound of my people. Pedal to the floor, trans kicks down and off we go in a roar of V8 anger. She may not be fast, but it hardly matters with a sound like that. It was a fairly slow drive around SH58 thanks to a typical Prius driver which couldn’t hold more speed than a 30 year old Rover through the corners. Oh well, more time to enjoy the cruise and the scenery. The rest of the drive was pretty uneventful, other than seeing a sweet steam train choo chooing its way to Pram. Lots of railfans hanging around taking photos of it. Probably got some with a Rover photobombing them, lol. The Kapiti Expressway is a new 18km long grade separated four lane expressway built to bypass a rubbish bit of roading that used to go through a couple of towns and slow everything down. This is only one section in a bigger project, which will include the Transmission Gully Expressway that will take traffic off the two lane coastal route between Porirua and Paraparaumu (Kapiti), but the Kapiti Expressway is the first section to be completed and drivable. Gives an idea of what the rest of the project will be like. Four lanes good. Heading to Paraparaumu for lunch, we took the exit that said “Paraparaumu”, as expected, and strangely got shunted straight off the new expressway and back onto the old State Highway. Not the glamorous expressway I expected! Stopped at BurgerFuel for lunch, snapped a sneaky bum shot After lunch we found a proper on ramp to the expressway and decided to head North. Not knowing how far the expressway went, we just cruised along until the new road ran out, and we were on the old one again. Turning around and heading South again allowed us to sample the whole 18km expressway. Impressions? Its nice. Very smooth, very flowing and very fast. That said there are already some surface repairs in places, and something about the road surface and my high-end SuperCat tires meant that I had an annoying rattle whilst driving on the new road. A strange resonance or something. I do hope to see the speed limit increased on the expressway at some point; its very easy to speed as its so open and wide, and its a prime candidate for a trial of 110kph. It’s nice to see the work they put into the area surrounding the expressway too. Lots of green; new plantings and what will eventually be mounds of grass and bush. You can catch glimpses of the wetlands they build in various spots as well; just little ponds of water here and there. Anyway, back to what is important here. The Rover ran faultlessly the whole time, and was great to drive. It’s equally at home puttering around town, as it is at passing cars up hills and cruising the motorways. We made a quick stop for a rest, and take a couple of photos. Shes filthy, but in a well-loved kind of way. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t run on hopes and dreams, so a stop at the local Dino station was on the cards. What a surprise that was though! Yup, a drop of 2.2l/100km down to 15.9l/100km. Not bad for an old beast tuned by me. I have clocked just under 1200km since getting her, most of those done with the Speeduino setup. It’s good to see the economy finally working out, and becoming somewhat reasonable. I love driving this car, so will be using it as much as possible, as long as the weather holds out. Oh what I would do to have a carport or garage, instead of a car cover. More to come. Might FINALLY get around to doing the front speakers at some point, and it’ll need another warrant next month, so there is that to look forward to. Yay.

It's good info this. Thanks guys. Shame there seems to be no way to up the pw when cranking on speeduino. Im reluctant to change too much as the cold start is good, as is almost everything else, just not the damn warm start lol.

Keen to know what you do RE painting the frame. My frame needs to be blasted, but still deciding what to do after that. Very cool looking bike, shame about the off but im glad the gear did what it was meant to. Sucks it was something as stupid as some oil on the road that did it, i hate variables like that.

Such a cool car, wish i was in a position to buy it. Would totes do another Speeduino project.

I cant use my WBO2 on start anyway as it takes a few seconds to initialise (only powered when fuel pump runs), so its all been feel and smell. Cold start and normal running is all good, its just the darn warm start. Adding more timing and more fuel has actually made it easier to start when warm, but its still not perfect. The reason i added more fuel, was that when i was watching the logs i could see that when i gave it some throttle when cranking, it would increase the injector pulsewidth and then start. Pulling fuel from cranking made the car worse. Its all just a guessing game really.

Played around some more. Bumped the cranking advance to 25 degrees, and messed with the dwell and cranking enrichment. I also added some fuel in the IAT correction, as it was leaning out when the IAT was high. Its not 100%, but now it starts in about half as many turns of the engine as long as i give it a jab of throttle. Think ill leave it at that for now.

Can conclude it didnt help, if anything it made it worse because my car hate idling lean and the intake temps didnt drop quick enough when running. Starting the car in flood mode (injector cut) helps a lot, as does half throttle.

@yoeddynz based on your post on the previous page, this is my updated IAT table. Will try it out and see if leaning it out a bit helps I also need to remember to log and see what my IAT reads after a period of sitting when warm. The sensor is very close to the LH exhaust manifold, so i wouldnt be surprised if it gets toasty.