S1 Exige Conversion

[jamesjeffery]

Unfortunately in the last week I have contracted covid, so I have been isolating and will be spending Christmas on my own. In the meantime it has given me time to sort one of the things I had been putting off for a while.

I bought some gas struts right at the very beginning of the build before I really knew the length and spec I needed. The plan was for them to mean I wouldn’t have to carry a pole around everywhere if I wanted to keep the boot open.

First step was to find something the correct length to prop the engine cover open. Luckily I had this thin metal pole that was sturdy enough to hold the cover open.

The pole wedged between the boot floor and driveshaft so was nice and stable to work on.

I placed bits of tape to mark a few rough positions. One by the window where the strut would fix to the car, one on the engine cover where the strut at max length was located and finally one at 300mm from the first bit of tape. This one at 300mm indicated the minimum length the strut would go when fully compressed (500mm total expanded length). As long as the engine cover tape indicator was positioned further towards the back of the car than this indicator when the bootlid was shut the struts should work.

I removed both the side finisher panels to give access for the first mounting point.

I drilled a 6mm hole and used a penny washer and pushed the strut through. I then used another penny washer to spread the load and nut in the inside to fix this first position.

Both sides with the first position sorted. I wanted this position as close to the top of the finisher panel as possible to best hide them when the lid was closed. Also the struts would be facing downwards when the lid was closed, meaning less force wanting to push the sides up and ruining how the lid currently sits.

With the first position finalized I was able to mark the second position more accurately.

To test if the struts would hold, I taped the second thread into place and took the brace pole away. Thankfully so far so good.

Confident with the second position I drilled more holes and pushed the thread through. I then noticed a problem, I had no way of accessing the thread to put the nut on. Because I bought the struts so long ago I guessed the length I needed, turns out I should have gone for a shorter one to be able to have access using one of the pre-existing cooling slots in the frame. I would have to make another access hole.

Currently the struts were at full capacity, 400nm which was obviously way too strong so I needed to let some air out. I fully removed them from the car and using bathroom scales I released enough gas to get each strut to 10kg/100nm. I was happy this was close enough to put them back on the car and then take tiny amounts out from there should I need it.

I took a 10mm drill bit and made a hole directly under where the thread was in the frame. I then opened this up using my dremel and sandwheel which was the same diameter as the cooling slots. I would then finish the holes with some black paint to neaten them up. The next problem was how to get the nut onto the thread as I didn’t want the access hole to be any bigger than it needed to be. I tried many methods like spanners and tape, tweezers etc but in the end I put my finger in the hole with the nut pressed against the inner surface over the hole. I then removed the end ball joint from the strut to be able to spin it onto the nut.

With both ball joints now fitted and finalised I had to screw it all back together. I decided to use a rubber washer to allow for some gentle adjustment if needed to get the strut tight and the ball joints in the correct positions.

The finished strut in situ. The threads on each ball joint were the same direction meaning when I tightened one it loosened the other, so I decided to tighten the engine cover ball joint first, then twist just the housing to tighten the other end but not loosen the first ball joint.
I think I took a tiny bit of air out both sides after the 10kg scale adjustment and it was ready to test.

Here is the finished result. The struts keep the engine cover up and it feels pretty sturdy. Will have to be a bit careful in high winds it doesn’t rip off, but I’m really happy with how it works.
The fact the struts are longer than I first would have liked probably helps the stability in a way.

All I wanted was for the struts to have just enough gas to hold the cover open, rather than it flying up when the cord is pulled. With the right amount of gas, when the cord is pulled the cover just pops up out the latch as it did before, however still staying down. With 2 fingers I can lift up the cover to where ever I want and it holds that position, perfect!

Finally when closed the lid sits exactly as it did before, so the struts aren’t pushing anything out of shape.

I recommend doing this if you wants to get rid of the pesky pole! It is also nice to think the cover won’t fall on my head if I ever knocked the pole over, so a well worth little mod.

[andybond]

A positive outcome in a negative situation!

[The_Cable_Guy]

Definitely going to be doing this to mine.

[stratosboy]

Fantastic progress and build thread James, I’ve just scanned it all the way through. What did you end up with weight wise in the end? Great colour. Mine still isn’t finished!! but house move has become my priority. I know you have had a fair bit of fettling, but I still think the quality and fit of Dom’s panels are really good. Mine were miles off. Cool Reg too, mine is J9 EXG.
You must be feeling very proud of this. Well done buddy.

[Sub_Boy]

Hi James,
Its looking fantastic! Mine is still a while away from also being finished as my clams involved lots of repairing (they are not from Dom….wish they were )
Can you tell me where and what brand are the gas struts?

[jamesjeffery]

Thanks, it’s been fun! I haven’t actually weighed it since, in hoping similar weight as before at around 712kg (ish). Yeah Dom’s panels are great, really recommend them. Good reg as well! I would have loved J8 EXG but M9 is just as good. It makes me smile each time I see it and drive it, hopefully you can get yours done soon and enjoy it as much as I am mine.

Cheers! I bought then from WDS Components.

End Fittings, Fork Ends, Gas Strut Mounting Brackets

One thing I will say is when the lid is shut the struts are pushing the lid back, so it is now very tight against the back of the weather channel, so much so it has chipped the paint a bit as shown below.
The engine cover is fixed as far forwards as it can be. I have thought about filing the fixings so it can be mounted further forwards (there is space for it to be moved forwards and still hinge fine) but I think the struts will just push it back to the same position.

[jamesjeffery]

So a little update on a problem I came across. Driving on the M25 to get home I noticed my coolant temp begin to climb. Thankfully I was near a junction, so I pulled off and popped the engine cover to find an empty coolant bottle. Not great in the pouring rain so I called my dad to rescue me. We found that the coolant return pipe had been resting against my EP clutch slave cylinder bracket and had eventually worn through.

We filled the bottle and I limped home.

Unfortunately I was up against a little bit of a timescale problem with a trackday, so I decided to ‘bodge’ the problem with a silicone sleeve. I measured the circumference of the pipe to work out the diameter and ordered a 80mm long section and a couple of jubilee clips.

I thought it was going to be an easy fix, just one pipe off, slide the sleeve over and tighten in place, connect the pipe back and top up coolant. However this wasn’t quite the case.

This area of the coolant system is pretty busy and I wasn’t able to get any good clearance, so I had to remove more pipes than I originally planned. The only positive was that hardly any coolant leaked out as the system had already been pretty drained

Here’s a closer look at the hole. When resting against the slave cylinder bracket it actually plugged the hole pretty well, but really leaked away from it.

In hindsight I should have added some washing up liquid to the pipe to help the sleeve slide over, as getting it around the bend want the easiest but once it straightened out I measured 40mm down from the hole and marked the pipe so I knew when the sleeve would be equal distance over it.

Sleeve in place and clamped tight. I also put some edge trim on the bracket to take the edge off.

I connected everything back up and was about to top the level up when I decided it would be better if the pipe was clear of the bracket. So I connected a few cable ties together and with no obvious place to tie around I decided on the bottle itself to pull the pipe just clear of the bracket.

Only needing a slight gap between the bracket and pipe also helped keep unnecessary tension off the connection into the sill.

In theory this should last years and possibly will stay this way for a while as it seems to work perfectly fine.

[andybond]

That’s a lucky escape and a good fix!

[jamesjeffery]

I managed about 15 laps on track before the car now won’t start, getting no spark at all. Tried as much as we could while there, checked the plugs for a spark, checked grounding, managed to source a new coil pack and tried that, changed the rotor arm and dizzy cap, all no good.
Few things to try like the crank position sensor, MFRU, seeing if voltage is getting to the coil pack etc but pretty stumped.
The car was really sputtering going around RH bends (a bit of a problem at snetterton with Riches and Coram) so I’m assuming this is linked to now why it won’t fire.

[jamesjeffery]

Me and dad were finally able to sort the non-start issue today. At the track we tried as much as we could to get a spark and today we had a much better look. At the track we looked at the spark plugs, checked for a spark from the king lead, replaced distributor cap and rotor arm with new items, checked fuses and pulled the fuel line off to check whether the fuel pump was working. Finally I managed to find and source 2 coil packs (firstly an S2 coil which dads now kept for his car and a grubby coil pack from a breaker MG local to Snetterton). As none of this worked my car went onto dad’s trailer and I drove his back to Essex.

Thankfully my brother and dad share an S1 so I was able to test and swap over lots of components to test them and see if they made any difference and would save my buying lots of things I wouldn’t necessarily need. I tested both the original and breaker coil packs on their S1 and found both were good, so I bolted the original back onto my car and checked for voltage, which it was getting so ruled it out as being the issue.
Next was swapping the crank position sensor over and again mine worked in their car and so ruled this out also.
Next thing to trace back to was the MRFU located by the ECU. I plugged mine into theirs and it worked fine too. I also noticed the inertia switch location when I was removing mine so I plugged it back in and pressed the inertia to see (unlikely so) whether it had been cut off for any reason, nothing changed.

We were running out of things to change now and were at the point to remove and swap my EFi unit with their standard Rover ECU to see if we could get a spark. It might not have ran well or fired up due to the tuned nature of my car, but if we got a spark then the ECU would be the problem. When pulling my ECU out I noticed this…

One of the wires from the loom to the plug had become disconnected. I have no idea why this single wire had a different separate connector compared to all other wires, maybe it broke before and was now a weak link. Dad then shoved it into the connector and held it there while I turned the key and the spark was back!
He soldered on a new connector plug thing and we plugged the ECU back in, connected the king lead back and the car fired first time. All this hassle and a another trackday cut way too short down to one tiny wire!

I have no idea what that wire does or where it goes and I honestly don’t care, I’m just glad the car now works as it should (except the map is still way off and runs too lean above 6000 but I’m either going to remap the EFi or bite the bullet for an Emerald).

I haven’t really been able to drive any RH bends with any real gusto to test if the spluttering had been cured but I’m confident the 2 problems were linked, with forces in RH bends pulling the broken wire out the connector and causing the issues, so it should no longer splutter.

I hate electrical faults are they’re never straight forward to find (to me anyway) whereas something like my gear cable snapping was nice and easy to locate and then move forward with. I’m just very glad we were able to sort this at home and not book it into an Indy that would have charged me god knows how much to sort something so tiny.

Long story short check your looms and ECUs!

[jamesjeffery]

Driving home after fixing the ECU I noticed that there was a slight petrol-y smell. Upon further inspection I noticed that there was petrol dripping at quite an alarming rate from the fuel line into what I believe is the fuel rail. I was quite lucky as the engine block was covered in petrol and smoking pretty badly close to catching.

When we were at the track after testing the fuel pump was working it was really difficult to get the O-ring and pipe into its housing. In the end we got it as close as possible and used the bolts to pull it in. This must have been slightly misaligned and pinched the O-ring, causing this split.

I didn’t have any spare so measured the split one (8mm inner diameter and 4mm cross section) but decided to order some new ones with 1mm smaller cross section to avoid the super tight fit.
There was no snagging with this new smaller size and so far no leaks. Perhaps the old O-ring was too big to start with but I’ll definitely keep an eye on it for a while to see if I need to go to the larger size.

[Dunc]

Wow that was super lucky, could of been really bad. Glad you’ve sorted it.

[jamesjeffery]

Small update but I noticed that the bonnet hinge bolts had broken through the paint and had caused some cracking. Not the best pictures below as I had to pump the exposure up but they show the damage caused over the past year or so.

I decided to avoid making this any worse by using larger washers to spread the load a bit better. The original fittings did have washers on them, but I used a small size to keep them hidden from sight as best I could in the drainage channel.

Bit of a fiddly job as I didn’t want to take the whole bonnet off as they aren’t the easiest things to put back together on your own with the packer plates/bolts/holding the bonnet piece etc.
Got there eventually doing one side at a time and now there are much larger washers on there. I might have tightened them up a bit tight as there are a few new cracks, but hopefully these are just surface cracks in the paint.

After the new fittings I decided to adjust the actual bonnet as well as I was never overly happy with the placement, being too far back and creating a large gap at the front. I slackened off the 3 securing bolts just enough to push the bonnet further down and nipped them back up.
Trial and error eventually got the shut lines looking good, but I never pressed the bonnet fully down as last time I did that when first assembling everything the release got stuck and it was a right pain to get open again.
I then adjusted the release spring and went for a test and the bonnet popped open perfectly.

Much better spacing and it also hides the fixings in the drainage channel much better than before.
Next small job is also on the bonnet.

[thommo]

Steady progress

[jamesjeffery]

Little weekend job I’d been meaning to do for a while and adjusting the bonnet gave me the push to finally do it.

Hard to show on pictures and looks worse in person but the bonnet grilles aren’t in the best condition, with areas of blue over-spray, chips showing the silver underneath and just generally looking a bit tired.
I had masked up the grilles pretty well before it went to the body shop, but after being left around the shop etc I think a few areas of tape might have torn and let the blue through in strange places like the middle of the grilles.

I had some delicate surface frogtape and decided to mask up the edge, folding the tape under as best as I could to allow me to spray right up around the edge to get all the blue over-spray tucked up. I used a manky old towel to cover the radiator and other components, which would save me from taking the newly adjusted bonnet off the car. The towel also highlights the numerous silver marks much clearer in this photo.

There were also a few blobs of the adhesive that had been sprayed, so I would hide these with new black paint too.

I added a bit more tape to expand the area of protection as I found I was getting a bit close to the paintwork when I had the can really turned to spray up in the edges. I used the same matte black spray paint I had used for many other areas on the car (spoiler supports, discs etc).

2 coats and I’m happy with the finish, much more uniform finish and no more over-spray and chips.

I was a little concerned that the finish was matte because all the other grilles are gloss, but I think matte works better against the radiator shroud thing as that’s a fairly dull finish. I might spray this piece the same black at some point… we’ll see.

The blobs of adhesive are almost invisible now whereas they really stood out before. In all a good hours worth of effort.

[andybond]

Looks like a tidy job that!

[thommo]

Good effort!

[jamesjeffery]

This isn’t going to be a full post but the first stage of oil cooling is complete. I wanted to incorporate a bit of safe-guarding for the oil temperature and initially wanted to use an air to oil cooler in the right hand intake. However, many people pointed out that without decent airflow (mounted in the nose is best) they’re not actually very efficient. Also mounting in the nose means super long hoses and potentially lots of oil left in them during changes, so I went for a different route.

I picked this laminova up from eBay pretty cheaply. It is a Rover part from the KV6 that uses the coolant to cool the circulating oil, so unlike the air systems this would provide constant cooling whether the airflow is good or not. Other parts I’ll need is a sandwich plate between the oil filter and housing for the braided hoses (with built in thermostat to ensure the oil isn’t overly cooled), an oil temp sensor and I’ve also bought a different vauxhall wiper that has the rear wiper function I will hook up to a relay to switch between coolant and oil temp displays on the Stack unit, perfect for trackdays as I can easily flick between the two without having to hold any buttons on. I didn’t want a separate gauge for the oil temp as I like how clean the dash is and I couldn’t use the spare Peugeot switch for the temp display as it is already being used for my manual fan.

The unit came pretty grubby and full of old crappy oil, so would need a good clean up.

Taking it apart was fairly easy, only tricky part was getting the gasket pieces off without bending/ruining them. I couldn’t pull or twist them off so in the end I got a flathead screwdriver and carefully prised them off. Ideally I wouldn’t reuse a gasket but I imagine it is unlikely I’ll find new ones.

Finally the central radiator piece was removed. This has lots of fins just like a radiator to dissipate the heat, but it was also full of crap. I was amazed how much oil actually washed out of this.

Tough to photograph but the unit was also full of crap and grit, probably never opened and cleaned out. Hopefully it never gets this bad when I have it installed.

I spent a good couple of hours with an old bucket and lots of hose water to clean out all the crap and old oil. I got as much as I could out the radiator part but it was just never ending so had to stop once it looked as clean as I was going to get it. Everything else cleaned up well.

The main unit cleaned up well but the outside had a fair bit of crap plastered on it that was too tough to remove with the brushes I was using, so I got my dremel and went over it with a wire brush. I think the unit is under the engine in Rovers so is in the firing line for all kinds of dirt and crap. Left side is where I’d cleaned, right is still dirty.

All taped up and ready for paint.

I usually like painting things black to hide them, however I thought it would be better to go with silver so I could spot any oil leaks easier, hopefully there won’t be any to spot. I was initially going to spray the pipe outlets to match but the can ran out (only just managed one coat for the main unit) and also keeping them bare metal would guarantee no paint chipping off and going into the coolant.

I initially didn’t want to use the original o-rings and bought some new ones. I bought some that had the same cross section at 3mm but testing them I wasn’t confident they would properly seal. So I bought some 4mm ones that I hoped would also help with sealing the unit with the old gaskets as these slightly protruded above the clamping surface.

However, when putting everything back together I couldn’t get the coolant outlets to seat. I saw the originals were almost square cross sectional as opposed to circular, so I had to reuse them. Not the end of the world but using new would have been better.

The unit is now all back together and ready to be fit in place. I really cranked down on the bolts as tight as I could to compress the old gaskets as much as possible.

I plan to put the unit along the engine bulkhead just before the coolant pipe goes into the RH sill off to the radiator. This position also means I only need very short braided hoses to connect the unit to the sandwich plate. Hopefully less old oil remains in the system during changes too. I did think to place the unit after the radiator as this would make the system more efficient at cooling the oil, but then the oil would heat the coolant before it entered the engine, which I think could cause problems and also would need much longer braided hoses and I don’t fancy relocating the thermostat.
I’ll eventually get around to putting it on the car but I think it wont be a straight forward thing to sort as it requires both coolant and oil to be drained, the coolant pipe to be cut to make room for the unit, cutting and building the braided hoses at the correct length, probably a shorter oil filter (Renault 5 turbo I think), then all the work to get the temp sensor sorted and the stack reading etc. I think this might wait until after the season’s trackdays are done so I can tie it in with the normal fluid changes. I would reuse the coolant but reusing oil I’m not so keen, which is a shame as it is pretty fresh so hesitant to do the work now and miss the nice weather.

[thommo]

Scrubbed up well!

[jamesjeffery]

After spraying my front grilles I thought it would be best to sort the radiator shroud to match.

The fixings I used after the conversion were rubbish and cheap plastic fasteners that went in fine, but then wouldn’t unscrew, so in the end I had to use my dremel to but them out. This caused lots of small indents by the fixing holes which I wanted to sort before spraying. Also over the years the shroud must have had things dropped on it or rubbed in certain areas as it had some reasonably deep grooves and dents in it which I also wanted to fill.

During my build the best thing I used to fill these kind of indents was upol dolphin filler and as my old one had very much gone off, I ordered a new pack and filled in the imperfections.

I used some 240 grit glass paper to sand the filler smooth and applied some more where necessary. I also went over the whole shroud with the 240 to create a surface the paint could bite to.

I didn’t have any primer so laid a thick layer of the Matt black paint to act as a kind of primer, sanding it back with some 240 and then some 400 grit ready for the final coat.

The shroud has come up well and I think was well worth doing. I let it cure over night before fixing it back to the car.

Unfortunately I only had the same box of cheap rubbish fixings to secure the shroud in place, so rather than using the screw type fixings that would cause me the same problems again if I ever wanted to remove them, I went for a slightly different ‘push in’ pin type.
However I could only seem to get the two side fixings in fully (maybe the filler closed up the middle holes a little) so the middle just have the main base of the fixing. They still hold strong and it isn’t going anywhere so they’ll do for now.
The bonnet has just caught the edge of the shroud but when it is shut the places you can actually see look much better.

Another job done and now the shroud and grilles colour match and look nice and fresh.

I also noticed that my tailgate hinge had got some weird kind of osmosis going on, strange as it has only been on the car less than a year.

As I had the spray can handy I decided to remove the tailgate and give the hinge a quick sand and blast of paint. Hopefully this paint will protect against the white staining coming back but time will tell. For now though it looks how it is supposed to.