Sometimes determination and perseverance is the only way to achive your goal.
43 days have elapsed since my last post, I had thought that during that time I would have been driving and debugging The Yellow Bit*h (A term of endearment that I have named RF80.), unfortunately this has not been the case. Back on 9-12-07 with the motor running and only an hour or so of housekeeping items to take care of, TYB was going home, she never made it.
TYB was put on the lift to change the oil and adjust the shift linkage. While on the lift it was noticed that the main feed tank fitting on the swirl tank could be turned by hand. No leak was observed but this needed to be corrected. With a full tank you can imagine that this turned out to be a messy job, (I can assure you that gasoline will burn armpits.) a check of the other tank fitting also showed seepage which was also corrected.
While adjusting the shift linkage the transmission stuck in gear. After a couple of hours trying to diagnose the problem it was decided that the only thing was to return the car to the guy who had installed the 3.22 gear set and rebuilt the transmission. Two weeks later I go to pick up the car at his shop, when I started the car I heard a noise in the Bell housing. Once again the transmission was removed and this guy tells me that there was no locating pin installed to line up the transmission. I was proud of myself that I didn’t beat this guy with a tire iron. I just showed him the pictures taken when I joined the engine and transmission which clearly showed the locating pins. It was obvious that the pins were lost when the transmission was pulled. New pins were machined and the transmission remounted.
With the car back in my hands the following was noted. The shift linkage was completely messed up; only 3rd , 4th and reverse gear was available in the box. The connector for the Lambda had been torn off the main harness, these connectors and pins cost $22.00 each from Motec. The car had been driven in the rain without a rear clip, so was a complete mess from the crap thrown up by the tires.
After correcting the problems I took the car for its first drive followed by popping and spitting like I had 5 cats in a gunny sack. I try checking the fuel map and adding some fuel because the motor seemed lean under load. This only partially corrected the problem, I pulled the plugs and found them all fouled from being to rich. Last night my tuner came back and using the logging and interrupter feature of the Motec software he was able to get the motor back in spec.
The car is now drivable, the linkage still needs to be adjusted so that the gears are easier to find and I have a check list of several items to be corrected but now my efforts will be toward refining the car as I put some miles on it.
Peter and TYB