| 1st September 2008 |
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By some stroke of fluke, I found that Steve has the same tacho on one of his cars, which is fortunately
lurking in his garage at home (rather than in storage). So this evening I whizzed over there and extracted
it from his car to try on mine. His gauge works fine, which is something I suppose. However, while I was
there Steve put both gauges on his signal generator, and both behaved in exactly the same (normal) way. So it still sort of suggests there may be something up with the wiring on my car, but then Steves gauge works fine. No more time for further investigation this evening. |
| 2nd September 2008 |
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Having done some reading of the Haynes manual, it suggested that there are some simple checks you can do
to the regulator, to ensure its connections are correct (rather than that it is working properly, but it's
a reasonable hint). So this evening I got the car back up into the air to do these checks, since the
connectors for the regulator are inconveniently located under the bulkhead/tunnel. Fortunately, it appears to check out ok, so I'm fairly convinced that this isn't a problem with the regulator, and it does appear to be a problem with the gauge. If it were a problem with the signal to the tacho, which is taken from the low tension side of one of the coil packs, I am sure there would be a noticable misfire on the engine, and it appears to be running fairly happily. Out of time again. |
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| 3rd September 2008 | |
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Having failed to crack the problem so far, and not being very ready, I managed to blag an extra last minute day
off work, to try to fix things up and get packed up ready to be off tomorrow. To cut the long story short again, I spent the whole morning trying things out on the tacho to get to a working state. Each time I tried something, I went for a quick blast down the bypass to check it out. Eventually I settled on something which Steve had told me to try, by fitting a pull-down resistor to the signal wire to earth. This seems to have resolved the flickering problem, though has made it a fraction sluggish in comparison, but that could be that it has always been a bit hyper-sensitive. However, this was not before I had to fit both tachos to the car as I convinced myself it was under-reading... it wasn't. |
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The rest of the day was used up doing the things that I had hoped to get done before I started the tacho panic.
I got the car packed up with tools and spares, and ready for the drive up to Glasgow tomorrow. Fingers crossed
everything holds together, including the weather! Back in a week... |
| 10th September 2008 | |
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Well, I'm back now. Firstly, once again, I had luck on my side (?), and the car behaved totally impeccably, never missed a beat, just kept filling it up with petrol and driving it! 1500 miles over 6 days, in all sorts of weather, fortunately mostly dry, but we had a good soaking on the way home for good measure. The tour itself was excellent, some amazing roads in some of the most beautiful parts of the country, and some good company to boot - what more could you want? Well maybe something a little more comfortable for the boring/wet/bumpy bits, but get onto the quiet/open/twisty/hilly roads and all that is soon forgotten and immense fun can be had. I'll see if I have any decent pictures, but I didn't get much chance to take many - too busy driving! |
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| 28th September 2008 | ||
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Not alot been going on since the tour, though I did manage to spend a couple of hours cleaning the worst of the
filth off the car. It was quite sticky dirty when I washed, which I thought may have been the rainy drive back, but
later concluded it was because I spent half a day behind a Caterham 21 which was running rather rich, and must have
been gently covering me in a nice petrol/oil mixture. Anyway, since I have been using the car a little bit, as we have had a couple of nice weekends of weather recently. However this has revealed a couple of problems. Firstly, I (foolishly) trundled into town last weekend on an errand, and things got quite warm, which caused a recurrence of my sticky steering column problem (see 30th May 2003) - so that needs to come out and be re-lubricated. Secondly, the front anti-roll bar has now failed in the same way as the rear one did last year (see August 2008), although it hasn't actually broken clean apart like the rear did. I have been half expecting this to happen, and extra suspicious since I noticed a strange squeak in the front suspension on the way back from Scotland. So, even though there are only a couple of days left on the tax, I might still get a sneaky drive in, and figured a quick removal of the anti-roll bar was on the cards today. Didn't take too long, though I made it a bit longer by doing some bolt swapping to allow the clamps for the bar to come off too. I also disconnected the rear one, by removing one of the droplinks, as driving with a rear but no front bar may have been interesting. |
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| ©2002-2009 David Hackett |
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