Week commencing 3rd July – tour to the west of England.
Day 1 – Weaverham & Birkenhead…
On a very very wet Monday morning it was nonetheless good to meet Layton for work on his ‘02 MG TF 135 in paint code JFV.
Head gasket replacement, cambelt service, underfloor coolant pipes replaced, plus a couple of other bits. On running the car up to temperature we found no return to the expansion tank, so we flushed through a lot of solidified gunk in the return hoses from over the gearbox. Happily the car is now back up and running as it should be.
Thankfully, the gazebo sheltered us from the majority of the torrential and continuous downpour, but still a bit soggy and cold, and guess what, the sun came out just as we were packing up! Big thanks to Layton for lots of cuppas.
From there we went over to Birkenhead for investigation on a problem Mark had been experiencing with his MGF 1.8 120 mpi for about a year, he had gone through all of the usual suspects, replacing parts, some on a couple or more times, only to have the same problem reoccur.
Hooked up the diagnostics, only a single error code coming up, which is known to be false anyway, set about checking all the ignition system, coil pack, the distributor, HT leads and plugs, found the distributor cap had a loose central core, replaced that, replaced one of the plugs as the porcelain was cracked, but still the same result.
Checked the wiring for the throttle body, tried various different throttle bodies, still no joy. The only thing left was that the diagnostic had shown on live data that zero volts were coming back on the Lambda sensor, even though Mark had replaced with a Bosch sensor.
We temporarily fitted another one to make sure it wasn’t just the cabling, this showed .44 volts on live data, so the sensor that was fitted was faulty.
We also noticed that the throttle body was permanently showing open-loop, which it should be closed-loop on tick-over. Finally the manifold air-pressure was static all the time at 99 Kpa.
It would come down to possibly being the ECU and a faulty Lambda. Mark will source a replacement ECU and then go from there.
Bit of a head scratcher, shame not to be able to fix it on one visit, but we will keep in touch and see what progress he makes with this other information. It was although, great to meet Mark and have some interesting chats.
Bit of a late finish and a long day, but we’re now in our digs near Chester, I’m on the admin and Jon’s going to order his delectable delights from Just-Eat. – https://ift.tt/2RALEnb
