update:

Ford still cant get it going. They tell me its now firing injectors twice, and they dont know why.

I dropped off the old s2 autp loom, and my capa sct flash1 unit to them for the guy to play around with.

Seems my traditionaly brutal luck is holding out on this one.

hi guys, I got the car back from ford today.

$1100 bucks, they had to relplace the crank sensor, they seem to think the auto elec it went to before ford might have damaged it. Cant prove it though.

Its running a lot better, but they tried to foist a set of platinum plugs on me. they reckoned that the autolites were causing resitance and messing with my tacho lol. I rang brendan mock and asked if this was possible, and he said no way. So they had to take the platinums out...

Only problem is 15k's outa town i lost 2nd and 4th, again. Cannot select them period. Im letting it cool down, and ill try it again later, Im hoping its the penrite gear oil being too thick for the blocking rings. Praying like a mad C**t that it hasnt damaged anything.

will have to drive to melton on the morrow and see if i can round up some tranzmax z.... thats if the gearbox hasnt decided that now the cars running that it will s**t itself.

Looks like I have a car again!

I found the problem of not having 2 and 4 was that the stopper bolt on back of the short shift had worked its way inwards. easy fix. Filling the box with transmax z definately improved the shift, and reduced maybe 50% of the gearbox noise. Out on the highway, overtaking in 4th or 5th theres still a whizzing noise under load, it sounds like Im supercharged

Went driving through the city, and right hand front brake decided to revert to its old habbit of sticking on. I thought I had fixed this 6 months ago (had some air in the line), but it was back with a vengeance. Dropped it in to the local racv here in bacchus and they identified the problem as the calliper being dud. Replaced with a second hand unit with flush and test for $250. And Im back on the road! again! I get the feeling my car has developed a liking for garages...

So the plan now is to grab a set of xr control arms to fix up the diff angle, and hopefully remove some of the whine and carry on. After the trailing arm Ill need to put a new set of bearings through the diff, since the incorrect angle has munted the pinion bearing. Not sure if Ill get a new set of gears, still not sure about the ratio Ive got in there.

By christmas or before (depending if I can find some decent work) I hope to have a new clutch and pressure plate go in, with a new thrust bearing as well. Last but not least, ill finally get around to putting in the 1671au cam in and have it tuned.

For now Im happy to have a working car again, and can get stuck into getting some paying work.

quick update, Ive rang Bullet performance in geelong and they tell me there are some fairly large differences in the programing in the au1-au2 ecu's, hence why mine is running uber rich, and very dog like at low rpm! Not even ford could tell me this and they built the f**k thing. No ford dealership around me could say they knew anything about how the ecu works, and they dont have anything like scantool or sct flash to check them out. Ive learnt my ford dealership lesson, and it cost me $1200... They are useless to the point of being irrelevant.

Now that Ive found BPR I should be right. The fella that runs it by day also works for ford in the evenings.

Going to take in the auto ecu, he says he presses one solitary button on his comp and its a manual. All the fuel tables, and spark tables will be right for my car and hey presto. Problemo solvered.

He also has good prices on flash tunes. Starts at $295 for hook up and first hrs tune (then hourly rate after that). To put that in comparison, JMM charge $500 for dyno and first hr. Considering a stock engine with just extractors should only take maybe 2 hrs tops, $300 ish for an extra 15 kws is bargain!

Got to ring him tommorow and organise to get it in

been pretty busy with job hunting since the ford saga broke my credit card.

PS: seems the box I was sold is a complete dog. thrashed s**t. Pinion bearing is stuffed, and the synchros are shagged also. Ill be suprised if it lasts a few months.

Such a shame mate after ALL the work you have had done, I am sorry for you that you have had such a bad time with Ford and other bums.. I hope you get it all going soon.

Something I don't understand, why did they need to do all this stuffing around? The dash wiring harness is the same auto/manual, the major difference between series 1 and 2 is the Smart lock.
The Control sensor wiring (EEC) is the same for SII/III manual or Auto? The BEM is no different between man and Auto. Weird....

thanks paps, I guess if Im in a philosophical mood its all a learning experience. If I could go back a few months and tell myself the things I know now, then all would be peachy, but isnt that the story for just about everything? Hindsight is a wonderfull thing.

Ill just be happy to get it working 100%. Money, while being nice enough to have, comes and goes like the tide, and I can make more. If I were the type to be insanely positive (which im normally not, the worlds fooked) then I would say the good thing is, when my sons have their first cars, they are likely to be the AU/ B series, and Ill have a bit of x-pert-ise up the sleeve

Tommorow either will bring a fix to the running or it wont. either way IM one step closer to sorting it out. If its NOT the tune and the ECU, then I can look at the loom. and then wonder why I paid westpoint ford $1200.... the thing there is they charge by the hour, wether they bring about a solution or not. Because they knew snot f**k all about their own make is irrelevant to them. They spent 16 hours of labour (or tossing around going "derrrrrrrr... I dunno") but charged me for 10 hrs, because their "expert" "genius" resident elec C**k up and missed a set of wires to be plugged in. Put it this way- one week into the car being at westpoint, they rang me and said this: " we have fixed the wiring in the loom, but now your car wont start or run at all. This comes to $800 would you like to pick it up?"

I s**t you f**k not.

all they did was tidy up my wiring, insulate it with shrink wrap, and put on a new Crank Angle Sensor. It turns out it wasnt starting because their Uber auto elec had forgotten to plug in some wires. They then tried to say it was the spark plugs, and that I needed a $160 set of ford plugs. I have it on higher authority that this is ultimate horsecrap, and when I rang them to tell them this, and pull the platinums out, they sounded sullen like a child who has been caught in the jam jar.

Moral to the story- westpoint ford in hoppers crossing = fail. I got taken by them. I hope no one else here does.

Do not deal with. period.

to deal with this section specifically:

There is more difference than the security. Some au1's came with smartshield for instance. The au1 used ef coil pack, tps and MAP sensor. These were changed for series two. Internally the programing of the ECU's are different to reflect the different hardware used. series 1 fuel and spark tables will run a series 2 engine but it will not run well by any stretch of the imagination without further reprograming. The strategies are worlds apart, and the signal being sent by a series 2 MAP sensor is worlds apart form what the series 1 ecu would expect. I would wager that its easier to make B series gear run off series 2 or 3 stuff than it is to run series 1 au gear on series 2 au gear. Theres just nothing in comon inside the electronics. series 1 au is old world. series 2 is the start of the new breed. Chalk and cheese even though they were built a few months apart.

Sadly I learned this the hard way.

Some great news! thanks to the brilliant services of Bullet Performance, the car is running as it should.

They took the origional auto ecu, and flashed it to manual settings. They removed the speed limiter for me (as I have the alloy xr shaft) raised rev limit to 5700 rpm, and uploaded the tickford POLICE spec maps. The engine runs so much better now, its spot on. It actually wants to rev again, and is also using a lot less fuel.

It turns out the internals of the s1 and s2/3 ecus are different, with the series 1 ecus operating of a base timing of 2 clock cycles per second, whereas the s2/3 use 3 clock cycles per second. so all the scaling tables are out of sorts if you try and run a s1 ecu in a s2 car.

Radical. I cant thank Matthew at BPR enough. He couldnt do enough for me, and went out of his way to make sure everything was perfect.

So the next project is to get the input shaft and bearing replaced, as I dont think they have a lot of life left in them, especially after some "exhuberance" on the trip home after getting the ecu reprogramed.

Excellent news there mate.

Now it is time to start enjoying it.

BenJ

yeah I got a bit eager on the way home, and the input shaft on the t5 is begging to be put down. Its hard not to though, even though I know I need to baby it.

how much would a new input shaft and bearing cost to replace at RRP?

5th on the highway is awesome, cruises at 2500 rpm at 100k's, dont even need to drop down to pass. just feed on the power, and your doing 130 by the time you pull back in. Its a great budget tune. After having it run like s**t for so long it feels amazing.

So.

Years have passed, not much has changed. Car still doesn't want to give in despite developing leaks and shudders here and there. Got a stone through the radiator last year and boiled it dry on the way to a uni exam. Thought I had killed it, but one new radiator and away she goes. Has been running a rich tune for so long now that the rings are stuffed (fuel thinning the oil), and compression is suffering. When cold, planting the foot results in a nice smokescreen for getaways from bank jobs.

Still.... finally got around to videoing the exhaust about 4 years after putting the Pacemakers on. So here it is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H1JZ8SJ5AU