When Miah and I did mine, the three nuts and two bolts came out easily. The nuts needed a deep socket, but they're stuffed right up out of the way where they don't get soaked with salty water and they're well covered in underseal.

The tank was easy to drop out once the metal plate came away, and then the pipes just unscrewed from the pump. I needed to cut the old pipes on the pump and buy some new pipe olives but I just reused the pipe nuts. To remove the plastic lock ring I just tapped it round with a screwdriver and a rubber mallet, once I'd cleaned all the mud off the top.

Dead easy.

Merry Christmas all!

Sadly not. I bought it with about 167k showing and a ticky engine, which turned out to be a (very) dropped liner. I bought an engine off eBay (cn4x4sss) for 500 quid and David Hallworth and I fitted it. It's done not too bad, considering! Not sure what the real mileage for it was but Charles said it was out of a vehicle that had done 80k. It was certainly pretty clean inside, and "dirty enough" outside.

Given that "conventional wisdom has it" that cams and cam chains last about 80k, is it fair enough to think that mine is well and truly due?

Rolled over to 250k yesterday afternoon :-)

Sounds like the XYZ switch might be failing, or just need its connections cleaned up a bit. IIRC the inhibitor switch is part of the gear selector itself, and the XYZ switch just tells the ECU what you're trying to do. If the gearbox gets really unhappy with this state of affairs it'll go into limp-home mode and only give you 3rd and reverse.

Mine made hell of a black smoke on startup when the failed fuel pressure regulator was dumping petrol into the plenum.

I don't recall seeing any activity from the rev counter during cranking on my GEMS, and I know it's how I used to check for electrical issues on my old CX with the ignition pack - you'd see the needle kick on every compression. So I feel like I'd have noticed. I'll actually check later on though.

Fuel tank is full - with what, is the fuel any good?

If the crank position sensor has water in the plug or is on the way out it'll give all sorts of weird "crank, no start", "crank, start, won't rev" kind of faults, often intermittently.

If it's an early Clarion stereo and it's intermittent but comes on when you tap the bottom of the case, it's a dry joint on a big surface-mount resistor under the heatsink beside the tape deck. Easy to fix and a common fault.

I think I'll grab one of the Anritsus from work and have a sniff around.

Miah's was doing that, not sure if it ever entirely stopped. It seems a fair enough bet that it's the diode pack in the alternator.

Conclusion: Well that's weird.

I got round to the flat, put the jump leads on, let it charge up a wee bit - door open, key in pocket! - put the key in, turned the ignition on and the alarm went off. Key out, lock, unlock, key in, turn on, chorus of Assorted FAULT BEEP BEEP BEEPs, ALARM TRIGGERED, ALARM TAMPER, IGNITION TAMPER, turned it to start and it fired on the first flick! Like, it's never started that readily before.

Well hell.

That's an interesting wee deelie, I wonder what's under the heatshrink and where it gets fitted? I guess it just sends "immobiliser learn" and then anything at all to the GEMS ECU?

Also interesting that just jagging across the starter relay ought to make it start - mine has no spark. So that answers that question, it ought to be possible to bump start the engine if it's in a manual.

davew wrote:

Principle 8: Build strong communities that respect civil discourse and human dignity

You've been told repeatedly to stop your nonsense. You're not exactly going out of your way to "respect civil discourse", are you?

You are of course entirely free to discuss the topics you want, but if you are asked not to discuss them here, you ought to respect that.

I really, really don't want to see locked, edited or deleted threads or banned users here.

Now let's be clear about something - locking, editing or deleting a post, or banning users, is not censorship. You have a right to free speech, but you do not have a right to force anyone else to publish it for you.

Or, if you'd prefer the TL;DR version, wind your neck in, like you were told to weeks ago.

I really don't want to start seeing banned users (apart from spammers) and locked or deleted threads.

Yup, I'm planning on taking the BECM round to Miah's so we can pull the contents of the EEPROM. I don't think I ever got a note of the EKA from the previous owner! I checked to see if it had been scribbled in the manual, too. The radio code is there but not the EKA :-/

I'm hoping I can get a shot of Miah's Nano. There's an app called "GEMS ECU Utility" for Android that reckons it can clear the adaptives and resync the immobiliser but while I could get it to connect and do stuff it didn't improve matters any.

The battery was okay but with spending an hour or so dicking about trying to diagnose what's gone wrong it is now flat. It was charging well when I drove the car yesterday, with the little LED meter thing in the 5V charger adaptor saying 13.7V.

It's not asking for the EKA, and I don't have a note of that here anyway.

I'm not seeing the engine management light come on, although I can hear the fuel pump start up and run. It seems to have switched and unswitched 12V available at the right pins.

I also notice it doesn't have its alternator light coming on. I did change the alternator recently, although it's worked since then.

The compressor won't run unless the ECU turns it on, which needs the engine running and no "hard faults" stored. Making up the EAS Unlock Suite cable and getting the software installed would be a good thing right now.

Once the compressor is running it'll just fill the tank until the pressure switch tells it to stop. It won't attempt to level the vehicle until all the doors are shut, and if it's been sitting with the doors open for a while it'll go to sleep and need you to poke the height selector switch to set it going again.

oilmagnet477 wrote:

She is beginning to 'lose' coolant more markedly so think that at some point I'm going to need to invest some ££££ with Turner Engineering - as my long time 'retirement car' I will happily spend £5-7k when time and funds allow but that is some way off!

If it's anything like mine, it's pouring out of the front of one or other of the heads where the gasket is about as wide as it is thick ;-)

Mine's a daily and it does an unholy amount of miles for a 21-year-old vehicle. Not nearly as much as Gilbertd's though ;-)