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chasinthemirages '88 VL Royale


chasinthemirage

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Bought a set of wheels for this a couple of weeks ago, the absolute legend that is @Threeonthetree collected them for me and dropped them off at Mainfreight.

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They are 15x7" E34 alloys, they have centre caps as well but they don't fit over the nuts I have/are BMW caps anyway. I personally really like the look of these wheels on the car but my earlier suspicions were correct about these wheels. They certainly aren't going to fit under the stock guards with the wider LSD diff so they can stay on my daily for a while longer. I've considered staying with the open diff and doing a disc brake conversion as well as going to something like a Ford 9" which can be narrowed so that I can have the wheels I like as well as an LSD but in all honestly I don't think it's going to happen. My mental health/personal life isn't that great currently and for the last couple of months I've just felt like I'm pissing my money away on this thing, I have no interest in finishing or driving it anymore. Things may change but at this stage I'm just aiming to get it running and rolling again so that I can move it on.

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Everyone goes through a shit period and loses interest in stuff. Once you get it running again you may change your mind and those wheels do suit it actually. Sometimes things seen like a mountain and it's just all too hard to climb so I hope you feel better soon about things.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Did a wee bit of work on this today. Still not 100% on what I'm doing with it but regardless of what I decide it needs to at least be rolling as it'll be pretty hard to sell if it's stuck in the garage! 

The whole reason I took the parts car when I bought the second VL was for the disc brake LSD rear end. Today I decided to make a start on getting it ready to go into the Royale. I removed the control arms, panhard rod and brake calipers as they were surplus/in need of a rebuild. Once I'd removed the seized calipers I noticed the axles were turning in different directions...

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I then popped the cover off to make sure the teeth weren't showing any damage or abnormal wear.

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Now I could be wrong but that looks to me like a 28 spline, four spider, open differential. There's no second ring of bolts on the crown wheel and upon closer inspection the ID tag is the same as the open VP diff I bought off dr.wylde. Bummer. 

After a bit of googling and becoming fairly certain that the diff isn't a limited slip unit I decided to remove the hubs so I can swap them onto the VL housing. I tried to use the old discs as a hori slide hammer and when that didn't work I bolted them up and gave them a belt with a hammer.

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It was at about this point that I decided to call it quits before anything else went wrong. 

I've already got new cylinders and shoes for the drums but I think discs are the logical thing to do for now and then cross my fingers and hope to find a limited slip diff down the track.

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  • 5 months later...

So this thing has been languishing at my folks place for far too long. I took all the nasty old hoses off the engine eight months, (yes you read that correctly) ago and finally finished assembling everything a few nights back. 

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Overall the cooling system was pretty rough,  all the hoses appeared to be OEM and were pretty cooched. When I first got this thing home it was loosing coolant about as fast as I could top it up so I rang around and managed to track down the last Gates cooling hose set in NZ at the time. Long story short I've removed and cleaned the inlet manifold, replaced the injector hoses, fitted a recored radiator, a new thermostat and radiator cap and replaced every coolant hose in the engine bay with the exception of the overflow bottle hoses (foamers may be able to spot the incorrect hose?)

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Last week sometime I gave the thing a wash, filled it with coolant, disconnected the HT lead and cranked it until I had oil pressure and then kicked it in the guts. It started on the third try which I was quite surprised about. I'm not really that happy with the engine bay and there's still a few things to sort, namely the rough running and the noisy clutch release bearing but at least it's running again and one step closer to being a road legal car or someone else's problem.

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  • 1 month later...

Hello again. Been an interesting couple of weeks for this thing recently. As I mentioned in my last post I got the car running after sorting the cooling system and it was running on 5. Long story short I ended up swapping the CAS, AFM, coil, distributor cap and leads with my Berlina in an attempt to isolate the fault. None of that fixed the rough running so I borrowed a compression tester off the OSGC that is @h4nd. As it turns out the compression is fine, within 10psi across all six cylinders but it runs like shite until you fit a battery that isn't cooched. Oops. 

I also finally did something with the diff, I've retained the OE 25 spline single spinner because as average as it is for traction at least it doesn't limit the already small choice of 5x120 wheels any further. I changed the oil, fitted new shoes and wheel cylinders and made some new brake hardlines. I had a few issues with the hardlines leaking but last night I finally got them to seal up and after bleeding the brakes I took it for it's first drive in my almost year long ownership.

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Here's a potato spec photo to prove it actually left the garage. I need to bleed the brakes again as they are absolutely awful and I didn't manage any doses as it wouldn't rev past about 3500rpm (battery related I think) but I guess slow progress is still progress. Gotta admit though, as much as I want a lush street car this thing has got me pretty beat. 

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Gosh i kinda want. My bloody deeply rooted CHCH bogan showing through :badgrin:

Should also try swapping distributor rotor as they can do weird shit when failing. You sure its not just running out of fuel? Filter/tank sock blockage?

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@kws I pined these things for years before finally buying one. I was always put off buy the unique mixture of Holden bogans and RB flatpeakers but they've been great cars. 

I swapped the rotor too but the fault didn't go away until I started it using the new battery from my other VL. I've got a new one in the back of the car currently so I'll fit that tonight and see how it goes before I worry about anything else.

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My old Flattie had one of these...(although in wagoon form)...We put a real basic surge tank into it and it solved many an issue. it revved out far smoother and had way less issues with starvation.

It was super basic. Just the stock VL pump feeding a surge tank which was just a large diameter bit of pipe with my old GTiR fuel pump inside it. 

 

He also had issues with finding an LSD for his too.

But my god it was a lush car...and the disco red interior was grand!

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@DodgySam I think the issues that I'm having are due to over fueling rather than starvation. I checked over a few more things over the weekend, it has compression and spark but the number 4 spark plug is constantly saturated with fuel. I don't think it can really be anything else so I'll pull the rail off again and get the injectors flow tested and cleaned and hopefully that will solve the rough running issue I've been having. 

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Righto, so to follow on from the above post I'd like to get the opinion of someone with some more EFI experience than myself. The whole time I've owned this car its run rough (it wasn't running rough when I test drove it before purchase).

It starts and idles but blows quite a lot of blue/black smoke upon startup and has a constant lump in the idle. The one time that I drove it it wouldn't accelerate past about 3500rpm. I have borrowed parts from my other VL in an effort to isolate the fault. One part at a time I have substituted the following: AFM, CAS, distributor rotor, distributor cap, ignition leads. I have also swapped the spark plugs between cylinders without any change. Removing the ignition leads one by one with the car idling showed that the miss is in cylinder number 4 as the engine note doesn't change with this plug disconnected. The miss has remained constant in number 4 cylinder despite swapping the parts. I have also compression tested the engine and found that all six cylinders were within 10psi of each other so I don't think it's a valve issue. 

One thing I noticed when swapping plugs around was that the number 4 plug was very wet while the other 5 were black and sooty (it hasn't had a good run up to temperature in god knows how long so I'm not worried about the soot). With the car idling I removed the injector plug from number 4 without any change in the idling engine note. I then removed number 1 as its easiest to get to and there was a definite change in the engine note. (Both the removal of the ignition lead and injector plug were done very briefly as I didn't want to risk causing any further issues).

This has got me thinking that the number 4 injector is stuck open or leaking and constantly delivering fuel which is causing the miss. What do you fellas reckon? Is there anything else that I should be checking or trying before I commit to removing the inlet manifold so that I can once again take the rail and injectors out? I'm not entirely sure I've gone about this diagnosis in the most straight forward way but hopefully I've explained it well enough. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I'd quite like to drive the thing without worrying about stuffing it!

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You could try giving the injector a love tap with something to try free it up. Failing that swap number 4 injector to another cylinder and see if the miss moves. Does the whole intake have to be removed or can you just take the fuel rail off yo get at the injectors. 

 

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