OK so having miraculously got my car booked in for rolling road with Wayne Schofield this Thursday I knew I wanted to get the Lambda sensor fitted before it went up to him. Plan was to get it sorted Saturday.
Everything was fine apart from:-
- didn't know where exactly it would fit
- wasn't sure how easy it would be to drill 2mm stainless
- wasn't sure how easily it would weld - never welded with stainless wire before
- didn't know if the unit would actually work
- whether or not it worked, didn't know if it would bigger up the maps I'm already running
So apart from all that I was quietly confident.
Saturday Morning, it quickly became clear where it was going to go - on one input branch of the muffler but pointing away from the muffler - whilst it's next to the engine it's avoiding the heat of the muffler itself.
Having marked the location, then took the muffler off and set about drilling a 23mm hole. My standard monkey-metal drills wouldn't touch the stainless
Time for a trip to machine mart. Bought a handy dandy set of cobalt drills, along with a 20mm hole cutter to supplement the (unknown quality) 22mm hole cutter I'd bought from Wickes the night before.
Lo and behold the drills went through the stainless like the proverbial; even the Wickes hole cutter worked beautifully, just leaving a 22mm hole. A bit of die grinding later and I was left with this
Then came the welding. Now I know it ain't real purdy, but to my surprise as I was tacking it in place I blew a big hole. I therefore had to build that up again. I was also aware that pinprick holes in the welds would affect the sensor's functionality so I went round twice to make sure there would be no gaps
All connected back up
I looked at the manual. Before first use you have to calibrate the sensor in open air. I tried to do that but it didn't seem to be coming to life at all. After thinking it through I revised this sensor has been in use on another car so decided to just fit it, and connect everything up
With all the wires connected up I went for a test drive. I also reconfigured the engine map to tell it that there was a lambda connected now.
The good news is that the car ran fine - no different really though. Bad new is that the oxygen readout on the laptop didn't seem to change. Well that was part of the bad news - the other part was the burning smell as I drove around the block. When I pulled over to check it there was liquid seeping out of a suppressor that had been wired into it.
There was a letter in with the kit I bought stating the previous owner had had problems with interference from HT leads - so they had wired in a radio interference suppressor box - that was now leaking some sweet tasting stuff that burned my fingers and was sticky.
I decided the suppressor was toast so I removed it and re-joined the relevant leads.
Since then nothing has changed so I'm going to let Wayne sort it out on Thursday. If the sensor is toast I'll need to get another one but if so at least the fitting is all in place.
Currently:-
- Idles around 1200 rpm for the first 40 minutes of use then drops to 1000
- rev limiter kicks in at 5800 rpm even though it's set to 6800 in the software
- takes 2 goes to start it from cold
- pulls like a frickin train!
Excited about Thursday.........