Milestone achieved: It runs!

 This Saturday has been so successful I could actually get away with doing non-car related work on Sunday and still consider it a good weekend. As you can probably guess, I got the car started. Or more specifically, me and my brother in law did. 

The first step was to figure out why I had no spark and no injector. Friday night I spent Googling issues, and absolutely none of the posts pointed the finger at spark plugs, HT leads, coils or ECU. As expected with an engine from the 90's, there is very little tech involved in actually burning the fuel. Same with the injectors, all it needs is a timing signal... And that's where the story begins.

Turns out the cam/crank angle sensor at the back of the engine is quite a critical piece of engineering, without it the ECU has no idea when to put fuel in or when to burn it. So my attentions started there. Thankfully with just a bit of cleaning of the contacts the engine started firing. Well, sort of. All the HT leads were generating sparks, but only header 4 was getting warm. That meant I had three cylinders that didn't have any fuel. Swapping the injector leads between 3 and 4 kept the same problem, cylinder 4 was getting fuel but 3 wasn't.

My brother in law popped over and suggested testing the injectors with a healthy dose of 12 volts from the battery. A few clicks later and it sounded like all the injectors were working, but not providing fuel. So we went for injector 4 on the wiring loom, and injector 3 being manually triggered off the battery. That improved things, to a point where injector 3 could be plugged into the loom and start running. At this point optimism was high. As far as we could tell, the action of sticking 12 volts through it repeatedly had loosened it off.

So we carried on, next was injector 2 which sprang into life, and then injector 1. So the engine was finally running on all 4, albeit a bit rough and 'tappity'. Bearing in mind that it had had an oil change but the engine hadn't been run, I suspect the first few seconds of running had simply filled the filter and the overall oil level was a bit low. So job number 1, top up the oil.

The engine started to get warm, so bearing in mind the water circuit was still empty at that point, it was turned off and the water filled up. Several burps later and a bit more engine running, we had a warm radiator and a temperature gauge registering mid point. And no leaks!

Ah, on the subject of gauges, they all work! Rev counter was the first to spring into life, swiftly followed by oil pressure. Oil pressure started high but then dropped down to midpoint. I have no idea whether that's good or not but it sort of makes sense.

Water temperature took a bit longer to wake up but that soon got up to mid point and held itself there. The last one was the speedo, and putting it in gear while the engine was running showed that was ok. It also proved the prop shaft and diff worked, which is another good sign.

The last thing on the dash was the battery light, I forgot it the first time round but went back to it later and could see it went out when the engine was running. That means the engine is charging, and more importantly my wiring was good! So now I can confidently secure the wiring in place and know there's no more work to be done. I'll also secure the battery in place as that's all good as well. Oh, apart from the terminal covers, I still need to design and print those.

That just leaves the brake fluid indicator light to be checked after the fluid is filled.

As with all my weekend work though, this one raised a few more jobs to be done;

1. Fix the earths on the front. It looks like two of the earths were wired a bit tight, and at some point they've caught on the hinge and pulled themselves apart. I need to cut them back, splice in a longer earth, and get things back together again.
2. Sort out the fuel pump. As I found last week, the fuel pump runs opposite to the chinglish instructions that came with it. So now the pump is the right way round, the wiring needs to be sorted.
3. Injector seals. I'm tempted to replace the injector seals, they're £20 for a set and would make things a bit better for not much money. 
4. Along with injector seals, I need to get the injector wiring back in place after the fault-finding.  Not difficult but still another job to deal with.
5. Steering cowl/shroud. That's in progress and probably today's job I think.

And that leaves the wheel arches. Even with fibreglass, filler, all manner of adhesives, they're still not as strong as I'd like. Opening the bonnet I managed to ping another one so it's slightly detached. So once again I'm back to 3D printing some L shaped brackets that will be bonded in place. That will be a much sturdier fixing. Four per corner, I just need to measure the angles for the prints. Then I'll cut back the sections where they'll go, and get them put in. 

So today is going to be lots of drawing and printing. But I don't mind, I have a running car! Woohoo!

(And as a footnote, the exhaust growl is spot on, although I am paranoid it's possibly a bit loud. Without a DB meter I won't be able to find out, and since it's raining at the moment, I can't try one of those Android apps to give me an indication of where it is).