First drive

Lots of progress on various things this weekend. Saturday was mostly electrical: sorting out the reverse light wiring, and extending the wires on the lambda sensors. Unfortunately it turns out that they use solder-defying wire, so I had to use two sets of bullet connectors to insert an extra section of wire, which was a bit tedious, but should work fine.

While I was at it, I got annoyed with the ECU reporting an error for the missing fuel vapour valve (on a proper car, it takes fuel vapour from the tank and feeds it into the air intake when getting a perfect air/fuel mix isn't critical [i.e., part throttle with a warm engine]). I don't have this facility on my car, so I removed the valve. Since the ECU complained, I measured the resistance of the valve, which was about 42 ohms, and stuck in the closest resistor I could find instead (200 ohms), which seemed to keep the ECU happy.

Today was mainly spent working on the bonnet. Emily helped me fine tune the shape, after which we attached the bonnet clips. I'm not completely happy with the fit, but I think it's about as good as we're going to get without cutting a new bonnet from scratch from a fresh aluminium panel.

The plan was then to drive out onto the drive and set up the geometry, but it was a bit dark, so in the end we just tidied the garage and drove back in again. Still, first drive: it went well, although there was a fair bit of smoke from the engine. Will suggests that it may be too rich, caused by faulty air or coolant temperature senors, or maybe just the lambda sensors not being warmed up. Need to try and figure out what's going on here or it will likely fail MOT. Fingers crossed it's not burning oil because of fatal engine issues...

I let Emily drive the car back into the garage. Happily, she didn't crash.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srfQgUFF-ps

Emily, not crashing or speeding. Phew.