Stripping it down.. AGAIN!

Back from the IVA, that evening I stripped the car, seats out, tunnel off, scuttle off.

Think the tester was a little heavy handed on the handbrake lever as its now bent..

Ok really heavy handed, he had bent the supports also.

Next up was trying to work out why the car is not charging. Jumped on youtube to check out some videos to try and test the rectifier and generator.

Stock motorcycle regulator/rectifier check out

Motorcycle stator checkout

The generator was giving a good 25-35 volts per phase so this wasn't the problem. The rectifier also checked out fine but when plugged into the generator the output was not showing any volts out. 

 

Time to order another one.. 

The battery was charging well so not sure its anything to do with that.. It took a killing on the IVA day but think its still strong and to keep it going for 4 hours with no charge it must be man enough.

New rectifier ordered. 

New Handbrake lever ordered

Some handbrake pillars arranged by another owner (Thanks Jamie!) 

Some steel bar to strengthen the handbrake chassis mounts. 

IVA Retest

The weather has turned.. Its bloody freezing!  Was under the impression retests were done in the afternoon.. WRONG! Had to be there for 8am again.

Left the house at 6:15am.. There was a heavy frost and it was freezing.  A jumper and two coats to keep warm.  I set off on the 30 mile trip to the test centre in the dark.

Straight away I was cold.. on a motorbike you get warmth from the engine, sat in the car I wasn't getting any warmth at all. The water temperature has been running about 60-70 degrees most of the time as a normal running temperature. The car was struggling to get the water temperature over 35 degree so I wasn't feeling any warmth from the engine.

I was only 5-6 miles into the trip and the battery light started to flash on the digidash. Checking the volts on the dash and I was already down to low 12 volts and it appeared the car was not charging at all.  At that point it was either turn round or crack on and get through the test and worry about it later, I decided to crack on. Drive all the way down without any high beam to save on power.

I arrived about half an hour early, the centre was locked up so it was standing in the cold for me some more. I was freezing!!!

Lucky for me I packed some hot tea!

Amazing sky..

We started the test at 8am, I explained to the tester than I was having issues with the battery and thought it was the cold. He allowed me to keep the engine running throughout the test.

Two hours later I had a fail..   GRRR...

It was a great result in my book, emissions and noise went through and I thought I was going to get a fail here.

It failed on the blood handbrake, very annoying as I had been to an MOT centre to have this tested. Was told I was getting 18-19% efficiency. I was only seeing about 65 kgs worth of braking pressure with the hand brake, that needed to be a minimum of 81 kgs with the car weighing 475kgs to satisfy the limit of 18%.

I also wasn't allowed both sets of side indicators working at the same time so it was a fail here. Didn't bother fixing these as it was such a simple fix.

All the way through the test I was loosing battery power. I was below 11.5 volts by the end of the test.

Now it was time to get home.. It was dry so I was looking forward to the trip home. If I could keep the rev's high I was hoping to put some charge back in the battery and I would not need to run any lights. 

WRONG!  5 miles down the road the engine started to cut out and I lost the top injectors. I pulled over and the engine died. The digidash was reporting 8 volts! 

Straight onto the phone to the RAC to see if they could recover me. It was clear at this point I was not getting any charge and the battery was completely dead.

20-30 minutes later a very nice RAC man turned up. Think he was pleased to see something different from a normal production car.

He had a good look at the car and tried to get it going, ran the booster on it and checked earths etc. I did say I thought I needed to be recovered as it was something more serious that could not be resolved at the side of the road.

Was really impressed with the chap, he gave some really good ideas on how to avoid these problems in the future and giving easier access to the battery terminals etc.

A recovery truck was call, again about 20 minutes and they were with me. Annoyingly they said because I didn't have tax and wasn't registered I had to pay for recovery... £151!!!!!  Ouch! 

 I was just so pleased to be in the warm...

A long morning...  but a successful day in my book!!!  It would have been alot worse if I had failed on noise and emissions. 

DIY Wheel Alignment

A few people kept telling how easy it was to do my own wheel alignment. What the garage had set the car up as was not self centering and my IVA was tomorrow so I had to try and least get some sort of centering.

I measured the threads on each track rods so I could go back to what it was just incase I messed things up.

Then jumped on youtube and watched a few videos on how people perform the home alignment. 

The theory is to run two guide lines down the sides of the car. You then make sure these are equal distances from the hub of each axle. You then measure the distance between the edge of the wheel to the line and this will well you if the wheel is toe in or two out. 

So I had a little bit of toe in at the rears and a bit more at the fronts. 

It had been recommended just for the IVA test to pump the tyres up to an extreme level, this reduces the contact patch with the road and makes the car easier to self center. The other area to help was to run extreme toe out.. Some forum posts suggest 3-4 degrees. 

I had a good play around messing around with extreme toe out and the car did show signs of self centering. I was a little concerned about how the car would drive on the road as I had a 30 mile trip each way to the test centre. The first time I drive the car it was so scary driving it with extreme toe in. 

I stumbled across the below website and its brilliant. Will be using it again for sure.  You must run two parallel draw lines down the side of the car. These MUST be parallel to each other. They do not have to be parallel  to the car as the calculations work this out. 

DIY Alignment Calculator

Here are my final results.. This is as close as I could get the front wheels to being aligned in the time I had available. 

For reference Cell K needs to be 2350mm and Cell I and J need to be 360mm if you are running 13" wheels. Never knew but if you measure the outer edge of a wheel rim this is bigger than the side its sold in, so mine are 13" wheels but the outer edge is large. For this calculator you need to use the outer edge. 

At just over 2 degrees toe out on each side, I was a getting a little self centering. With more room and space I think we should see a good amount of self centering.

Marc sent me the below below degree to MM conversion table, this was a great help.

Still no self centering..

Well driving the car home from the garage with them setting up the alignment up at 1 degree toe in the car is still not self centering.  Gave the car a good push around the garage but its not making any attempt at self centering at all. The IVA says it should show an effort of going back to center.

A post on the owners club suggested I might have the lower wish bones on the wrong side. They are offset to bring the lower side of the uprights forward to give positive caster. Positive caster helps with self centering.

I ended up measuring the arms on the wishbones and mine were the correct way round. 

The below book had some helpful info.. 

Here you can see the positive caster, the lower wishbone is infront of the top wishbone. Not masses but its still positive..