Car appreciation... the aesthetics, the engineering, etc

I hope you're all joking about doing anything so beastly to that lovely Peugeot!

My dad had a brace of 505s, first the GR, then the GTi, both estates. Learnt to drive in the former, happy memories. Not much rigidity though, you could wobble the wheel when driving and watch the shiver travel down the side of the car.

Four into one exhaust manifold and ITB’s, evil cams, high compression>turbo

Got my Mini Sidewalk up and running again. Caved and went to a garage, turns out a wire had corroded between the alternator and the Battery in the boot. would never have found that.

Also had some welding done on it... Welding is expensive... must learn to weld!

got a fair bit more to do on it now

new window seals
new door seals
new grill (fuck the person that drove into it and drove away)
rewire the rear heated windscreen
fit a wooden dashboard
fix the fuel guage

Hard working on a car on London streets though... the camber on my road is crazy!

camber on my road is crazy

I know what you mean. Is there a big car park you can go to? Or a quiet back street / avenue where you can get away with parking your car horizontal?

Obviously it requires more planning and only really viable on Sundays. If you don't have one get a mini rechargeable builders lamp.

Millington Diamond would suit nicely

https://www.facebook.com/alfajuniorbyretropower/videos/1900424593621387/

You are going to need to turn up your sound:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKbVQEBuemQ

That sort of doesn't make sense. If there is enough in the battery to start it, the clocks should not reset.

There maybe an underlying issue.

Many Fiat Panda owners would disagree with you and have resolved the problem by replacing the battery. If I drive it on consecutive days, then it does not reset. If I leave it for more than a day or so, it resets. As it is a proven course of action, cheap and can only be a benefit anyway, I am inclined to do that rather than chase any other sort of issue.

If it persists, I will investigate further.

I suppose it can't hurt to replace the battery in a car of that age anyway

As I said, seems odd.

Makes sense if the voltage drops enough to upset digital stuff but there’s still enough current to turn the starter.

Have we had this in here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWhN5Kywgxg

On fuel injected car, the fuel injection needs to be powered before the car will start. That is before the starter motor is engaged. Seems counter intuitive.

My panda experience has been replacing the rear suspension beam with one from a Ford KA. Also looking at the power steering motor replacement and how to get it to work.

There is some free FiatOBD software out there.

Well, it turns out it would've been £8k if I'd gone for the leaky seal replacement option, but Mr. Audi said that didn't need to be done yet so I've put it off again. Without that work, it was a mere £3k. Bargain. After I picked it up it started meepling on the way home about an oil level sensor error, but it appears to have stopped, and so I'm hoping that it was just a temporary glitch. #hopelessoptimist

The current hypothesis is that doing all of that drops the available/remaining voltage low enough to reset the computer. New/higher capacity battery stops this from happening.

If that doesn't fix it, then there a number of other things that it could be which increase in difficulty/expense to repair. At which point I'm going back and hoofing the dealer in the clackers.

I’m not an expert but I know that different digital systems in the same equipment will drop out at different times, depending on how fussy they are and the power supply design. Makes sense that the ecu would be more resilient than the dash.

I used to drive an electric vehicle at work that would happily (not happily) carry on driving whilst the dash flickered on and off in time to the turn signals.

Those engines don’t really need oil in them anyway.

That's just as well, as they only charged me for 4 litres of oil, and the engine's supposed to take 11.

I had a call earlier today from the Porsche Indy who looks after the car - the X51 intake manifold, which I had ordered months ago and then cancelled when told the delivery date "cannot be confirmed sir" is now back in stock.

Or, rather, they were 85% sure that it could be ordered - so they've done so (after our call) and we'll see if it turns up on Mondays delivery.

Fingers crossed!

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Having reviewed the valve-train and so forth we'll be setting the limit at 7,500 - the engine won't survive above that for long.

The next question is capacity - 3.7 or 3.9 litres.

The 3.7 is over-square, and was my preferred route before we knew where to put a sensible rev limit, but now that we're going to spin it to 7.5k max I'm wondering whether it wouldn't be better to increase the stroke as well as the bore diameter and come in at just under four litres.

Input welcome!

Cams continue to be a pain in the arse- no source of blanks can be found.

We could use billet, but whilst that's fine for race engines we're deeply uncertain about suitability for a road engine in terms of wear.

Spendy, also.

In terms of management I think we'll go with either the stock system or Syvecs - the latter would mean we can tune on the engine dyno, which is obviously preferable, but again - £!

Spendy, also.
...but again - £!

Yep, you close that stable door, quick!

Is 3.9L a stroker or overbored or both? Sorry haven't been keeping up.

Stock bore (on the 3.4 and 3.6) is 96mm, new liners take that out to 100mm, adding 0.3 of a litre to the engine capacity in both cases.

If you fit the 3.6 crank to the 3.4 then you get an increase in both bore and stroke (on that engine, but obviously not on the 3.6).

Or, if you lose all sense of proportion, and want a solid crank to your own design, you get one from (for e.g. Arrow) that would get you that final 0.1 on top, and take you to 4.0 (which means you can then sing your own version of a popular Vanilla Ice track).

The next question is capacity - 3.7 or 3.9 litres.

With a rev limit of 7.5k, go for the 3.9. No point in being oversquare with such a low rev limit.

Four into one exhaust manifold and ITB’s, evil cams, high compression>turbo

I have essentially this, minus the itb's on my gti6. It's great fun but hard work on the road keeping it at 4000 rpm and above, even with a close ratio 6 speed. I do often want more torque down low. Might be worth thinking about when you make the choice on the Porsche engine ie what specs and mapping you choose.

Speaking of mapping, I'm surprised your debating stock ecu versus a full replacement. The amount of nerdiness and tweaking you could do with a new ecu is appealing no?