Right, I was supposed to do an end of year post to get things upto date but I'll do it now.
Boring post really as I've mentioned most things on various threads but I'll put it here to keep things right.
So anyway I continued using the car until the end of last summer and all was well pretty much.
There were one or two minor things bugging me which I made a note of for when it went for its service in October.
Service time.
So given all the work that had been done by either me and Craig or Jamie at Nelson's I figured it would be a nice easy £150 minor service for once.
Of course the car had other ideas as usual. :wink:
Anyway the list of jobs was initially just -
Carry out minor service.
Check oil pressure with mechanical gauge.
Do an oil analysis for the first time ever.
So the service was straightforward with the only parts being a new oil filter and fresh Millers 10/50 oil.
My oil analysis results came back a week later and confirmed that all was good in the engine. Phew!
I was slightly alarmed by the Aluminium content though, so I emailed Millers and this was the reply.
It maybe of interest to other Millers users.
"The reason for the reading of 25ppm of Aluminium is because of the high levels of Molybdenum in the oil. The Nano range of oils have a high Moly low friction additive in them. When the wear metal analysis is run, the Al wavelength slightly overlaps the Mo one so the machine thinks it's reading Al. The actual value of Al will be much closer to zero than 25. See attached analysis of a fresh oil analysed.
The limit of Al for a petrol engine is 75ppm so nothing to worry about"
So all good in the hood.
I must add Millers are great to deal with, with quick response times and polite, thorough explanations to questions from imbeciles like me.
Onto the oil pressure checks then.
My car would sometimes drop to about one bar of pressure when really hot. Never under one bar but I still wasn't that happy.
So Jamie got the car up to temp and compared the dash gauge with his proper gauge, at various revs.
Sure enough it proved what I'd hoped, that my dash gauge read a touch low.
2000rpm when hot and my dash gauge reads 2.8 bar, maybe a smidge more.
Jamie's gauge reads pretty much 3 bar.
So dash gauge reads maybe 0.15 to 0.2 bar under.
Same story at idle. I can't find the dash gauge pic but it was 1 bar.
Jamie's gauge read 1.3bar -
So that coupled with the oil analysis pretty much put my mind at ease.
It was short-lived though but more on that later. :grin:
Now the next issue was a one I'd looked into once or twice already during the 3 years I'd owned the car. An intermittent rough hot idle.
The car had done this during the whole time I'd owned it but it wasn't too bad. It was mainly after a hard drive in summer or if left idling for ages e.g. during an MOT, but despite plugging the computer in at each of its visits to Jamie's, no fault codes ever came up. :chin:
Anyway whilst having the car running for a good amount of time to carry out the above oil pressure checks, Jamie experienced the rough idle and wanted to get to the bottom of it.
Plugging the laptop in showed that for some reason, this time it had flagged up an error code and it was for the MAF.
Jamie rang me to say I'd probably need a new one.
While I was looking around online for one he rang back and said "Scrub that, it was in the wrong way round!".
So basically whoever had fitted the K&N (we think) must have transferred the MAF over to the new induction hose and fitted it 180 degrees out.
That meant that instead of air being channeled into the small hole in the MAF, the small hole was actually round the back with the air flowing past it.
Jamie swapped it around and the car ran smooth as silk.
So a nice cheap fix for once and a good reminder to always start with the simple things first. :grin:
The new improved hot idle also raised the oil pressure a bit due to the revs being a touch higher and a lot smoother.
Hot pressure was now at least 1.2 bar which given what we now know about my gauge equates to probably 1.5bar which is great.
So we had fixed the long-running rough idle issue and as I said earlier we'd banished my oil pressure paranoia and had received a clean bill of health from the oil analysis.
So it was all good? Not quite.
The only thing left was to check my oil filter for debris. Jamie had bagged it up for me to take home so later on I cut both ends off and unravelled the corrugated paper filter material.
It initially looked fine but when I scraped the pleats with a steel rule I found this.
Brown toffee coloured small fragments which we all know is cam chain guide material.
Basically the small pads in the heads wear from an early age and pieces often break off and end up in the filter.
They can go on for years like this and Jamie has never had a failed engine in due to a snapped guide, however there are stories of it happening, on the internet.
So I had two choices. Either use the car and check if the debris was getting worse after I'd covered some more miles, or have the top end stripped to replace the guides.
Not being a one for leaving things to chance I chose the latter.
So it was back to Jamie's a few weeks later for the work.
The new Millers oil was dropped and binned as if I reused it and found more debris I wouldn't know if it was old stuff in the oil or if I still had a problem.
We could have filtered it I suppose but nevermind.
So £100 worth of oil that had done 70 miles home, then 70 miles back to Jamie's went in the bin. :frustrated:
First it was off with the sump -
...to find this -
Bigger pieces in the sump than in the filter so definitely glad we'd decided to do the work.
Then it was cam covers off and cams out to access the guides.
There's a bit more to it than that involving the removal of an exhaust bracket, manifold and other stuff but anyway.
Once stripped you can do a visual check of the larger guides that live further down in the engine.
You can't swap these out through the heads but you can swap them out without a full strip if needed.
Mine were fine though so no problem.
There's another guide for the IMS in the bowels of the engine. This can't be seen or swapped without stripping the engine completely though but apparently it's only ever the small guides in the heads that wear due to their small size and their profile.
Old guides -
New parts ordered -
I posted a thread at the time discussing perhaps changing the Vario-cam solenoids as these are accessed from inside the rocker covers and we hope not to be in there again for a long time.
They are mega bucks now though so as mine were functioning perfectly we left them alone.
Some other parts renewed but not pictured were the two "seps" (separators in the sump) as these can suck up debris and you can't see into them to check. Not worth risking for the price of them so as I say, they were replaced.
So it was all then reassembled and good to go.
We've just used Jamie's Porsche approved 5/40 oil for now. I'll run it until the summer and probably bring this years service forward a month or two to move back to Millers 10/50 in time for my Euro trip in August.
My last update was after picking the car up from this work. 200 miles thrashing and all is well.
The car feels fighting fit now. It's smoother than ever, mainly due to sorting the idle and it's running like a Swiss watch.
While these issues are a bit annoying and they hoover out the wallet regularly, with every job done or niggle fixed, the car just gets better and better.
Bar a couple of tiny interior rattles I'm busy chasing down there really isn't much left to do.
Next job is sort some minor snags like door seal clips that were broken during the bodywork and then it's get some camber off in time for spring.
As ever, thanks for reading. :thumb: