Tidying up the dash a bit

While browsing Ebay recently, I managed to score a cheap oil pressure gauge. This is something I've felt I should fit for a while, as it would be nice to have early warning of low oil pressure, should something go wrong. Unfortunately, there was no space on my dash for it. I wasn't particularly happy with the way the traction control just sort of hung awkwardly off the bottom of the scuttle so figured I'd make a little centre console bit.

Traction control hanging a bit shoddily off the bottom of the scuttle.

After a lot of fiddling around, I ended up with this. It's not perfect (slightly too wide at the bottom) but it's a big improvement.

Oil pressure gauge mounted.

When the sender adapter arrives I'll plumb it into the engine.

Meanwhile, I've also been dismantling the VANOS. The idle is a little bit rough, and I can't find any intake or exhaust leaks to explain this. So I tried unplugging the VANOS while it was idling, and noticed no change in the engine note at all (the VANOS should be adjusting the timing at idle, so normally unplugging it would make the idle get quite a bit rougher), which suggests that it's not doing anything.

Vanos solenoid.

The VANOS seals look OK-ish, and the solenoids all have about the right resistance, and click when I apply 12v to them, so it's not totally clear if they're working or not. I've ordered a replacement set of seals anyway and will see if that makes a difference.

MOT... passed?

After the MOT failure I took the car to a garage and asked them to take a look at the emissions, on the grounds that they have tools for analysing the exhaust gas so they'll be better able to tell what affects emissions. This sort of worked. They found that by unplugging the MAF, the car will run on a more basic fuelling map that's good enough to get through MOT. So I now have an MOT but still don't really know what's wrong with the car (although it does at least rule out things like excess fuel pressure, or poorly seating valves, etc, and point towards a problem with running closed loop). Given that they haven't actually done anything to the car or identified the issue, this feels very close to a bribe, but an MOT pass is a pass, so I'm not complaining.

More fiddling about on the intake side this time revealed a perished hose leading to the EGR valve (which I'm not using), so I removed this and blocked it off properly in case it was causing an intake leak. I'm not sure this has helped, though I may go back and get them to check the emissions again.

They also pointed out that the wheel alignment was very poor, no big surprise as I haven't done the front end since replacing the wishbones. Perhaps a job for this afternoon.