Keltik's cast iron squirty thing

[keltik]

23 hours ago, Muncie said:

I do romp on it quite often too.

You can't beat a jet unit for soaking up horsepower.

Could've been running straight magic 50w snake oil with extra children's tears and the old engine was still going to die.

I'll be running Total 10w40 semi synthetic again because it's the cheapest oil on tap at work.  Might add an oil temp gauge too for some extra eye candy on the dashboard.

[keltik]

So after the last outing, I whipped off the RH exhaust and realised there was no amount of sealant that was going to fix this.

Took it to the local engine shop and had them mill it flat.  The bow was to severe for them to sort out so I got it back with the recommendation to have someone else fix it.  So I did.

Build up the problem side with a skim of high temp JB weld.

Make a ghetto surface plate out of some sandpaper glued to an old floor tile.

Refitted everything and headed out to the lake with a bunch of spares and tools and a safety tow boat.

[keltik]

Fixed the misfire in the first 2 minutes with no tools or spares required - one injector plug wasn't clicked in properly.

Had a good test run and got through half a tank of fuel.  It's got a lot more power than before and is a fair bit smoother!

One problem is that it seems to be pulling timing and losing power the longer you hold it at full throttle.  Coming back to quarter throttle for a few seconds feeds the timing back in then you can get on it again.  I think I can hear the knock, oil temps are cold and water temp never gets warm so it must either be a hot spot in one of the cylinders or a fuelling issue.

I think I can hear the rattle coming from both banks so the current plan is to change the fuel filter and go out for another run with a pressure gauge on it and the scan tool looking at live timing data.

[keltik]

Turns out I'm a moron and those fuel injectors were hoopajooped.

Changed the filter and cleaned the bowl, everything was covered in this fine silt crap. I figured of its on the inside of the filter bowl - it's on the inside of the injectors.  Then it hit me. What causes detonation, crappy power and chunks to break off a piston - shit fuelling!  There was also one time I started the engine and it locked on one cylinder.  I'll bet number 4 injector was leaky and that's what screwed the old motor.

Anyways, the internet was half divided on whether you could/should run VT-VY injectors on a VS ECU.  Everyone agreed they would fit and had the same capacity and impedance....But a solid 90% of posts said you would need a map to suit.

One guy posted on the justcommodores forum that he did it and drove around for a few weeks and nothing bad happened.  That's the sort of scientific evidence I needed!  So on went the VY injectors with fuel rail, pressure reg and a new filter.

Drove to the boat ramp, fired it up and boy did it sound quite different.  So went for a quick lap and holy shit, it seems so obvious now that things weren't running right before.  Have a listen to the engine note and max rpm compared to earlier videos.

What an unbelievable difference.

[johnnyfive]

The cows appear to have an increased vigour. I am confident I will be slowest now. A+ well done

[Vintage Grumble]

From MoOOooOo to MOOOOOOOO.

I'll have to get that last 10-15% of throttle working now.

[keltik]

Well bugger.  Have been taking on more water than I'd like lately.  Today's trip ripped off some more bathroom sealant and bog to reveal....

Gonna need to remove the fuel tank to fix it properly.  Could this be the time to strip the whole hull and patch everything up nicely?  Or do I bodge it up for a few more trips?  

[keltik]

Well it's been 2 months of ignoring this thing in the shed and what do you know....it still isn't fixed.

3 trips as passenger in other people's boats has motivated me a little tho.

So it's time to flip the hull.  I pushed it off the trailer and naively thought I could just roll it over using muscle power with the misses holding my hernia in.  Turns out steel is heavy.  That's no way my shed could support a chainfall so I got out the trolley jack and a series of wooden props.

[keltik]

A few minutes with the strip disc and flap wheel turned this...

Into this:

Amusingly that's not even the side that was leaking.  This one is.  You can see the peeled off 'patch' and the offending hole that let all of the river go for a spin through the bilge pump.

Today's mission is to head down to the metal recyclers and obtain some replacement metal to hot glue in there.

[kyteler]

Fuckin wow. 

Those patches. 

Hole 

E

Shit. 

[rusty360]

Welded from 38000 feet by a bird?

[keltik]

Stripped off the gobs of bathroom sealant and carried out a thorough inspection of the hull.  There were multiple pinholes and paper thin steel.

Ended up cutting a modest amount of crap from the starboard side but took a massive amount of crusty garbage out of the port side.  Mr Greer sent me some lovely 2.5mm plate to craft my patches from.  I dont have a brake or anything like the right kind of tools for bending - so the patches were formed using a hammer, a vice and vast amounts of aggression.

 

[keltik]

Welded on the new bits using the small amount of welding skills I possess.  Grinder n paint.

Found a couple more surprise pinholes that got welded up.

Then I decided to paint the hull again using a proper primer this time.

None of this work is stuff I'm supremely proud of, but it's good enough.

[keltik]

Next weekend once the paint has hardened, I'll flip the hull over, make some small modifications and paint the inside.

Hoping to put a proper firewall in and add a frame around the engine cover opening so it can bear weight, be walked on and get sealed better to keep the waves out.

[keltik]

Put the hull right side up, got it back on the trailer, painted the inside and put the engine back in.

First job was to move the fuel pump.  It was previously a few inches above the highest part of the fuel tank so I can't imagine it self primed very well.  So I mounted it down near the bottom of the tank, moved the filter and tidied up the fuel lines a lot.

Installed a new bilge pump in the port side, put new wiring and hose to the existing pump on the other side and shortened the discharge hoses a lot.

Started figuring out the slightly bananas wiring for the engine.  It's become a much bigger job than I was expecting.  I'd strip some wiring back then find a bunch of bullet crimps with a wire falling out.

[keltik]

A couple of the dash gauges fell to bits from my hammering on the hull.  So put a set of save barns finest in there.  Added a USB and cigarette lighter outlet I'd had lying around the shed for a while. 

The carpet is just there for my comfort while I'm contorted up under that dash trying to wire all this stuff in.

Kept the old coolant temp gauge to use for exhaust temp.  Ditched the ignition key switch and will just be using a rocker switch.

[keltik]

Holy-o fuck this took a lot longer than it was supposed to.  Mostly from me looking at what I'd done, hating it then, then trying something different. But the wiring is finally complete! 

ECU engine harness is able to be removed with the motor by unplugging a few plugs stolen off the VS donor wiring harness.

Started from scratch on the hull side of the wiring.  I'd like to remind everyone I'm not an electrician so most of this is guess work.

All 'mission-critical' wires have been crimped, soldered then heat shrinked. The bilge pumps and 12v outlets on the dash are on a separate circuit to everything else so can be powered with the engine ignition off.  I added a couple dummy lights to the dash, got check engine light and an exhaust overheat warning light.

The black coolant temp gauge will soon be replaced by a tachometer, I've already run the tacho signal up to it but haven't found a gauge I like yet.

One bilge pump can run in manual or auto mode on a float switch, the second is just on a toggle.

The ECU and fuse panel are now housed inside this ip56 waterproof box thingy.  It took many many many attempts doing it the cheap way using cereal click clack boxes and other stupid ideas before I caved and bought something more appropriate.

Next up, modify the floor and seat mounts. After that, cooling system. 

Getting closer.

[keltik]

Got the floor sorted and the seat mounts are nearly done.  To make the new ECU enclosure fit nicely, I decided to move the firewall forward by a couple of inches.  This also gives me room to get a drive belt on the engine in place.  

To accommodate the larger engine bay, I was trying to think of a good way to make the engine cover 2 inches longer.  I tried showing it photos of the queen but when that didn't work, the only solution was to make a new cover.  I measured the width at 1200mm which was super convenient being the width of a standard sheet of ply. So I popped down to Bunnings and got them to cut a sheet in half so it would fit in the car easier.

Later at home, I popped the new sheet of ply into place and discovered the engine cover isn't square and is only 1200 at one end.  The other being closer to 1240. So now I had 2 completely useless 1200 square sheets of ply.  Back to Bunnings for another and this time cut it a bit bigger.

[keltik]

Got the local exhaust shop to bend some pipe for me so I could replace the crusty exhaust.  Couldn't find a ball & socket joint to match the manifolds so decided to just weld the new pipes directly to the manifolds.  One less flange to leak is a good thing.

Pulled the manifolds off to weld everything up after tacking it in place and discovered one spark plug was mega loose.  I unscrewed it and saw this....

Now those plugs were new.... maybe 10 hours of running.  I'm not 100% sure if I blew it to bits by running mega lean with those crappy injectors or if there's other things going on here. 

Had a look at the piston which seemed to be ok.

Did a compression test to make sure there were no bits missing and all the other cylinders were around 190-200psi.  This one was down to 100.

Put the leak-down tester onto it and sure enough, the valves weren't sealing very well at all.  

So I think I've either burned up a valve seat or since the back side of the exhaust valve is pretty crusty, perhaps this one has been sat open the last few months and got some crap on it.

After careful consideration, the plan is to reassemble everything and carry out another compression check once it's been run for a while.  Then I can decide if it's worth fitting my spare head.

[keltik]

Put some new exhaust studs in, a new set of plugs, gave the manifolds a lick of paint and reassembled everything.

Got the front firewall brace tig welded up so now I can finish the engine cover.

My new cooling loop involves running a line on a tap to bleed hot water off from the heater pipes.  The rest of the hot water recirculates into the water pump as normal where it mixes with the cold water introduced from the jet pump via the lower radiator hose.

I also ran a hose from the thermostat housing down to the lower radiator hose hoping this would temper the cold water coming in.

This doesn't seem to be working great as the hose doesn't warm up.  The hot side works fine and running full flow through the engine would have me in a similar situation to where it was before.

Perhaps it's time to buy a mixer and do it properly.

On the bright side, my wiring must have been right.  Engine runs nicely but won't idle with the flywheel off once it warms up.