October 24

Yeowch - nearly 2 months since my last update, but the news is good...

I took the car to get an emissions test last month at a local garage (thanks to Dan Bromilow for the car, and Tim for the trailer) and it seemed like it would get through so long as could get the engine good and hot - about 20mins at idle. It was hard to be sure, as we didn't approach taking the readings in a very controlled manner, and there was a bit of an issue in that after about 30 minutes of testing, and tweaking fuelling, the readings suddenly went very lean, as if air was leaking into the exhaust.

So later in the month, I took the exhaust apart and put lots of sealing paste at all the joints.

In mid October, I had a bit of a panic and realised that my 6 months grace period since the original test was up, and I had to get the car tested again soon! I bought a towbar kit for a friend's car on which I'm insured, fitted it, got hold of Tim's trailer again, and went for another MOT emissions test. We took a more methodical approach to the testing, and the numbers were good. But once again, the readings went lean towards the end. I got the tester to turn off the equpiment, let it cool down, recalibrated it, and we tried again. We got perfect readings. My enthusiam bolstered, I arranged the SVA retest.

And the car passed! There was the inevitable further tweaking of fuelling, but I ended up with CO % Vol of 0.20 against 0.30 for a pass, and HC ppm vol of 21 against 200 at a lambda of 0.99. Not bad!

This page last updated on: Sunday, Jul 16 2006