Cosworth 2.9litre in my Crewwy

[Aidan]

so what's the latest Andrew, has it given up the fags ?

[dickspanner]

Sadly, all things have changed.

Due to me losing my job, we have decided to have a last minute holiday so I have not had chance to even take the dust sheets off the crewcab.

At this moment in time, she runs fine, fires up first time, and drives without loss of power or any signs of problems except the heavy smoking from the right bank of cyliners. The smoke starts as a slight blue wisp when fired up which very quickly clears then as time progresses she starts smoking.

After speaking to the 'experts' there are two senarios.

1. Electrical, basically from my understanging of it all (which may be a misunderstanding) if the Hego sensor on the exhaust is faulty as the engine warms up it will run leaner and the brain will start to over fuel the engine through the right hand bank of injectors. This will increase untill it heats up the right side more than the left, the excess fuel which will be dumped into the exhaust as will heat it up even further and start burniong off. The cat is probably goosed on the RH side as well and the white fluff that was coming out of the exhaust was the baffle in the side blower beginning to break down due to excess heat and smoke etc. The way to test this is buy monitoring the Hego information sent back to the brain. One of the guys said that a multimeter would not be able to do this successfully and I would need a osiliscope. The next step after that would be to get the injectors all checked out to make sure they are working correctly.

2. Mechanical, the Cosworth engine is fitted with bronze valve seals and they are prone to cracking if left for a long time. A hair line crack could of appeared in one of the guides and when the engine heats up the crack opens and allows oil into the chamber and then burn off or dump into the exhaust and again the same senario would occur with the exhaust system.

I am betting (hoping) it is an electrical fault as I had a corolla GTI which dumped three times as much smoke as the cosworth did when it was driven and it was all down to a sensor on the engine, once it was rolling roaded, they diagnosed the problem, replaced the sensor and it was fine afterwards.

The biggest problem is that nobody will rolling road the crewcab and it has not got a OBD chip on therefore can not be remapped to remove the sensors out of the mapping to get a true reading of what is happening.

I am going to have to decide what is needed next but I am going to leave it untill I come back from my holidays.

The first step I think is to take out all the cosworth wiring, cheak it for any faults and re fit it. This will illiminate any electrical wirng issue and that is just a time cost senario. If nothing is found then the Hegos need to be tested. If no fault there then brain will be tested. Again if no fault there then the engine has to be split to examine the heads.

If I do go down the route of splitting the engine then I will install all the gas LPG kit at the same time so when it is back on the raod it will be fully LPG'd.

I have not spoken to my engine builder yet as he is still in Cyprus on holiday, however I believe he is back from his holidays some time this week. I will arrange a meeting with him at the lockup so we can talk at length about the mechanical failure if it is present.

I have done compression checks on the engine under no load and under load and there was no surprises there. There is no water in the oil or oil in the water, possibly ruling the head gasket failure out. (not definate yet though.

Just getting losing the job over with and holiday over with before I return to the crewcab to try and sort it out. I know Vanfest is mid September sometime and I would like to take it there as I feel it would sell without a problem.

Was even talking about taking the cosworth assembly out and sticking a 1.9TDI unit in and selling it as that, which would be a mint crewcab with TDI and selling the cosworth motor seperatly to someone else who wanted to put it in their VW as it would be soted before I sold it.

Dickspanner

[Aidan]

have a good holiday, hope you got the spring swap sorted


just googled Hego sensor http://fordfuelinjection.com/?p=1

so it's a lambda probe as we know it - can't see why a multimeter wouldn't work, works fine with a lambda, you just have to be able to probe into the signal wire with it connected - I've just done this this week on the scooby - was throwing engine check light and fault code 32 lambda.
I drilled a small hole into the multipin connector to allow me to access the ecu side of the plug (ie eliminating any dry connection in the plug) and then multimeter probe on that and other probe to manifold(earth) and lo and behold you can see the voltage which was .259V not changing which is indicative of a foobarred sensor.
You could probe the plug if you have thin probes, but the scooby plugs have little neoprene seals on the wires which prevent dirt and corrosion and my test probes won't get in there.
so just a 2mm hole, bung of rtv once used can be removed in future if any further testing required - new lambda may be short term as I got a new universal cheapo one off ebay for £15; had a bit of a job fitting it, as the old one dragged most of the threads out of the boss, but my engineering shop lent me their M18x1.5mm tap so I could repair the seat and it fitted ok, now I have 0.3-0.8V varying happily and the ECU is happy and fault codes cleared and cel off

[dickspanner]

Good website Aiden, downloaded quite a bit of info and I am going to take it on hols for a bit of reading.

Hopefully upon my return I should be able to get to the bottom of the problem, I have atlast found a rolling road who is willing to dyno the crewcab, however it is not a cheap expence and he also stated he may not find out what the issue is, so I am going to explore all the elctrical senarios first before taking it to him.

Dickspanner

[Aidan]

re rolling road, did you try awesome in Irlam ? They were happy to do the SA syncro velle when I fitted the new engine before I sold it, didn't actually happen because someone bought it pretty much straight away and I didn't get to keep the appointment - they would have been £70 plus vat, 4 years ago

[dickspanner]

The biggest issue is that a lot of rolling roads only like doing cars which are stock and they can just plug in their diagnostic machine and carry out the tasks it tells them to do. There are very few left who are ran by people who can think outside the box, or should I say do stuff off there own understanding of how performance engines should run.

When I spoke to the guy he is giving me a two hour envelope of his time and use of the dyno during that time. He has capped the time due to the work he needs to do is not 'plug in a to part b' type tasks.

He has mentioned several tasks he is going to do to try and get to the bottom of the James Bond Smoke. After speaking to him it left me feeling very confident in his ability to sort the crewcab out.

Now I have returned from France I am going to carry out some diagnostics myself, to see if I can find out if a sensor has gone down or something.

After I have finished these tasks if I have not sorted it out then it will go to him. If I sort the problem out I will reduce the scope of his remit and just get him to dyno it out of curiousity and the print outs of bhp and torque etc will go in the for sale folder, as I am still trying to get it to Vanfest.

WIll keep you posted.

Dickspanner

[Cableguy]

Good luck with sorting it out.
Out of interest, where abouts is the rolling road?
Would be good to know of one that'll have a butchers at mine should anything go awry.

[dickspanner]

I will give feed back and details of the rolling road once it has been there.

Dickspanner

[dickspanner]

Well going to workshop tomorrow to start the fault diagnosis on the meercat experiance.

Electrics first, the bloke is coming down later in the week to plug the laptop in to try and determine what the problem is (not holding my breathe as it is a old type brain but you never know).

Sarting with simple stuff first.

Got to get it sorted so she can go to vanfest (even though I have not even enquired about a ticket or anything, and not even sure what day it is).

Should sort it though.

Now I am officially unemployable, should have a few hours to spare working on it to get it sorted.

One of lads suggested ripping the whole thing out, sticking a diesel turbo back in it and selling it as a stock crewcab. Now what could the cosworth set up go in next I wonder, would love to put it in a spitfire. Anyhow, lets just get it sorted first eh. LOL

Dickspanner


Scooby doo type scene change, opening a spitfire up with cosworth motor in, stroky beard time. Hmmmmmm. Stop it.

[Aidan]

have you fixed it ?, is it going to malvern ?

[dickspanner]

Oh mate I am absolutly gutted, I have been very ill for last 4 days, just a jelly in bed and have not had the ability to do anything except be sick, and that was not good.

The crewcab is parked in my lockup, I am walking and talking again 'just', but I just have not got the energy to go there myself and diagnose the electrical fault (which is what I think it is) so I am going to have to miss Malvern and realistically the last chance of selling it for a while.

Still out of work and the longer that goes on the more the pressure of finding a job takes over the time doing things I want.

Are you going down?

Dickspanner

[Aidan]

been and come back - just a load of camper vans really and some tat stalls, lots of handbags and t shirts

[dickspanner]

Well that would of been a nice treat for you then, you buy anything nice for yourself pal. LOL.

Felling a heck of a lot better today. Looks like work will begin on the crewcab next week to try and find out the problem.

Dickspanner

[Jim Hunter]

Hello Dickspanner,

Today I was remove an BOA engine from a 1993 Scorpio.Engine come out real well.I also take the fuel pump and the front parts of the exaust.BUT in the wiring I am lost I really don't know what I have to remove and where the ecus are ???
Could you please shed me any light on this ?

Thank you so much,
Jim

[dickspanner]

Jim,

Welcome to hell.

Another member started this conversion and gave up when it came to the wiring. It took 3 days for us to get our heads round the wiring and make the new harness, good luck.

When I stripped my scorpio I removed the entire wiring harness from front to back, the wiring in its total was too heavy for one person to lift, it fitted in a box circa 900mm wide by 900mm long by 450mm high and took two of us to lift, you will find 9 brains which control the various components through the car.

I then laid the harness out in the relative plan to where it was roughly routed in the car. Most ECUs have indicators on them like ABS or Cruise control etc. You will find that these delatch from the main harness with little effort and can be put to the side as we salvaged wires out of these harnesses when we needed to extend wires etc.

When you remove the main brain from the body tub, ensure you get all the mounting assemble so you can reuse it to mount the brain in you setup.

You will need to purchase the wiring diagrams for the Cosworth, I purchased mine from 'Granada and scorpio online' as you will find a lot of very helpfull information on there but nothing is free, if I remember correctly it cost me around £35 for the diagrams and you get a big book of A3 diagrams.

I removed some of the sensors which I felt I did not need anymore, this has been to my detriment when I have tried to get the crewcab rolling roaded, so it is up to you if you remove them or not.

Another thing I removed from the donor vehicle was the fuel pump from the tank and the top section of the tank and I welded it onto my fuel tank and shortened the pick ups on the fuel pump to keep the cosworth pump.

Ensure you get the inertia switch as well.

Basically I bareboned the complete shell. Kept everything then when I had finished my conversion scrapped what I had left over.

Oh the alloys fit as well.

Good luck and I will try and give you as much advice as I can pal, to make your conversion a little easier as I did my conversion with nobody else having done one before or the knowledge not readily available. However I did have the help of a very few people on here which was priceless.

What conversion kit are you going to use?

Dickspanner