Been a bit quiet on here posting wise.....
But have had a few problems and was a little embarrassed as I thought I had bought a Lemon last year.
Also I guess I was determined with my new hobby to persevere and win through without assistance to see if I could get some man points. Remember I have never worked on cars much at all since my first car over 25 yrs ago.
So about Sept last year after importing I decided to get the Cambelt changed by a local independent garage who seemed to look after some weird cars on there website a De Lorean for one and I thought they wouldn't be too scared by the quad cam setup on ours.
Got the belt from Mitsubishi and the rest as a kit of parts from a well known to Club VR4 supplier.
Within a few days the Idler pulley half failed. The circular sleeve on the bearing came loose and starting scraping against the engine block. This happened while at Nevs to get an opinion on something. Laid the car up ( thanks for your assistance Nev! ) and trailered it back to garage where everything was sorted with a new part with the week old part being reimbursed by the supplier with added compensation for labour etc which was nice of them. I then did all my Fluids.
And that's when the tapping started. Not going to go down this story too much as the Hydraulic Tappets have been talked about a lot all over the net. I changed to different oils etc. Removed my oil cooler and eventually replaced all my tappets. The source of the noise was the left rear cylinder. I moved the tappets back to front - front to back no change.
Now the cause of the noise was the Tensioner. From about 200 miles after fitting it went bad and I had about 1mm of easy movement in it from the strength of my hand. Fitted the original and noise is all gone 6A13TT now sounds as it should! What a baptism of mechanics I have had as to keep costs down I have done all the work.... phew!
Will be sending the tensioner back to the supplier so he and therefore you guys can stay safe in not buying one of these so if your considering doing a cambelt try waiting just a week or 3 till I can get that sent back.
Then I had a no starting problem!. Again a garage struggled with in a reasonable amount of labour cost to fix it. I found with a little knowledge from them that I had an Ignition booster box on here which was fitted before the Ignition Failure Sensor and weakened that device. with coil packs unplugged you had your 12v ( bit lower actually ) appear at the other side of the IFS but once loaded with the Coil packs that 12v supply just got dragged down to gnd as the IFS broke down. Replaced IFS, removed booster into bin!. Still ran weird. But at least started.
Next found a really badly corroded starter solenoid connector which was robbing a few volts away from my 12v. Cleaned up and I'm back to being mobile, Less grumpy and just generally more positive ( lol )
Just thought I'd share the story for Newbies and Veterans alike for the Tensioner issue heads up.
Bye for now