The tunnel is fast approaching!

Hi! Nice you could drop in again. The Swedish autumn has arrived, happened last Tuesday I think it was.Nothing happens slowly, pang the temperature drops 10 degrees over night. I managed to take a test drive down to my favourite café Rosenhill today. The gloves were on as well as ski goggles and woolly hat. Not resorted to the soft top just yet, hopefully I won't need it for a month or so.

Thursday the new belt tensioner arrived, not new exactly but one from E-bay. I also bought a shorter belt 1775mm (6PK1775) instead of 1795mm. Before bolting it in place I had to remove the edge around where the pulley bolts on.

The old and the new. I removed  some of the edge from the old one while in situ but it wasn't successful. Much easier using an angle grinder with it on the bench.

 Difficult to explain but as the pulley has been changed from the larger plastic original to a 36mm diameter metal one it sits in front of the metal edge instead of covering it - that's why the edge has to be removed!

Another workaround required drilling out the bolt hole that keeps the new pulley in place because I needed a longer left hand threaded bolt. Drilled it out to M10.  The problem is it's a right hand threaded bolt with a nyloc behind, but hopefully it will hold.

All pulley's in place. The belt hangs slightly off the back of the metal pulley so I'll keep an eye on it.

The shorter belt in place which has pulled the tensioner over a centimetre or so which keeps it nicely away from the part of  the belt coming down from the alternator. 

The small metal pulley Peter provided in the SC kit but I bought another on e-bay which is a 1.9D DW8 BELT TENSIONER IDLER PULLEY 575167 and they look exactly the same.

Once the belt was in place I left the bonnet off and pulled the pipe off the air filter so as much air as possible to get to the intake. Took it for a nice long warm up and then foot to the floor to see if the lag problem had gone....

.... Unfortunately it's still there, not all the time but enough not to be able to count on the acceleration when I need it. I can pull out to overtake and suddenly it holds back, I can hear the sound of the SC screaming but nothing happens for a few seconds. It's like it's starved of fuel. Then after a while it slowly picks up until suddenly if fly's off like the bat out of hell it should be. 

When it doesn't lag it's fantastic! The acceleration is awesome. 

A very frustrating situation. I've spent so much time and effort this year, the rev limiter problem prevented a good trip to Brands and Nüburgring also a dyno or two that didn't get the results I wanted. I feel I need to do the whole UK trip again as no one in Sweden has the knowledge that Peter at GKD has.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm at a loss!
  

A Beautiful Summer

... and it's actually still going! We'll be talking about this summer for years to come, just like the summer of 79 in the UK! If the universe can send us a summer like this every year I'll be very, very happy, in fact I'm sure we all will be.

I'v been really putting on the miles, all topless too! Soft top has been on just a couple of times all summer. I improved a problem I was having with lag while accelerating. It's not totally gone yet but Peter and I have some ideas how to fix it. The first issues were loose hoses, a couple of loose nuts and a cable to the throttle position sensor had become loose. Fuel consumption was down dramatically but improved just as dramatically and more once the fixes had been done. 270 miles on one fill up and still more in the tank. That's not taking it easy either! One last fix is to change the belt tensioner as the old one is loose which makes the pulley wobble. It seems when accelerating the wobble makes the pulley on the tensioner move enough so the belt hits itself (If that makes sense!). Here's a picture and film to explain it:

Hopefully a new tensioner will stop the pulley wobble and perhaps a slightly shorter belt will drag the tensioner over a little bit more.

I'll write again soon once the tensioner is in place. In the mean time have a great rest of the summer.