April 2003: Emerald ECU Part 3

Slight Problem

10th April

This was the first real drive after installing the Emerald, although I hadn't planned on driving the car that day I had a phone call from my brother saying he'd missed the last bus home and could I go and pick him up.

I decided to take the Tiger and give it a quick test - the total distance was just over 5 miles and shouldn't have been a problem.

However I got the car out of the garage and drove down to pick him up, meeting him without any problem, I then turned round to go home and went back onto the main road, or at least that was the plan. The road I was driving on has a sharp dip in it and on coming out of the dip the engine just died leaving me on a slip road to a roundabout. I stopped put the hazard lights on and lifted the bonnet, the only obvious problem was the king lead from the distributor to the coil had come loose, so I refitted this and tried again - the engine was still dead. I then opened up the cover to the Emerald and tried again - on the back of the ECU is a light which tells you that the module is seeing engine rotation this was stubbonly remaining dark.

There now appeared to be a major fault on the ECU or the sensors, getting ready to call the RAC, I glanced over the roundabout and saw an RAC van on the other side. So I did what any sensible(!) person would I sent my brother with my card over to see if he could get some help. Luckily the patrol agreed to help and I managed to get a tow back home - only 3 hours after setting out on a 10 minute drive.

With the car back in the garage and a laptop plugged in the fault became apparant I had blown the sensor in the distributor presumably when the lead had come loose. I also solved the problem with the lead by rerouting it under the carbs instead of over them as this gives more slack on the cable.

Looking back at the to do list on the previous page (Emerald Part 2) I have so far managed the following:

Both the temperature sensors have been checked and calibrated
The bonnet hole has now been suitably reprofiled to clear the carb trumpets and avoid any vibration problems.
I still need to remake the air temperature sender bracket.
The Shift light has now been checked as working - by telling the ecu to switch it on at 2000rpm! and just needs securing.

However, I also need to look at fitting a throttle pedal stop and reworking the exhaust mounting to stop it trying to melt the rear wing!

Now at the time of writing the car has been for the rolling road with some very interesting results which you will find on the next page. However I thought I would detail a bit more on the above problems that were still to be rectified.

Throttle pedal stop

Well I can't really take the credit for this one as I copied the idea straight out of this month's Which Kit by using a spare M12 bolt and a couple of washers. Once you have worked out where to drill the holes then it is easy!

Exhaust mounting

Well this caused a bit of a problem due to the replacement of the standard Tiger can with the raw unit I had the unfortunate effect of the exhaust exiting directly onto the rear wing which was starting to look rather worn (it already has a few chips and stone cracks on it and this was making it worse).

The solution was to make up a bracket which bolted to the existing mounts, bent over at 45 degrees and then bolted to the exhaust. This had the effect of making the tailpipe point below the rear wing and will hopefully prevent melting!

Scuttle repanelling

Well I think this solution comes under the description "sledgehammer to crack a peanut" for the work involved. If you look on the picure below there is a small hole visible in the scuttle panel. Although the photograph is not at a very good angle, it turns out I don`t have a better one!

Anyway this hole seems fairly insignificant or at least it did until I was driving home from a computer fair in the rain and with a nice shiny new hard drive in the passenger footwell getting wet... Fortunately it was in a sturdy cardboard box.

Now there are various ways of sealing a hole :- blanking grommet, patch panel, masking tape etc. But in this case the hole and whatever I choose to patch it with are visible as soon as someone takes the bonnet off.

So with this in mind I went slightly over the top, out came the battery, emerald enclosure, and everything else on the shelf and a new panel was carefully made from a sheet of ali to cover the front of the scuttle from the outer edge up to the pedal box cover.

Once the panel had been shaped to fit, It was then drilled, riveted and sealed in place, and 4 hours after starting I had succeeded in blocking that little one inch diameter hole.