| Sunday, August 16, 2009 |
13:44 - Old and improved
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Due to one thing and another, I've had nearly zero opportunities to drive the Esprit lately, or indeed at all in the past year.
It's not all schedule-related, either. The fact is—as should not have come as a surprise to anyone, and indeed as it did not to me—it has suffered from a litany of mechanical gremlins since the day I drove it home. Long-time readers will remember what it took to get the damn thing smogged in California. And that was when it was running properly.
Since then, the first thing that has bedeviled me was the electrical system, where fuses would blow at random as I cruised down the highway; lacking any mechanical expertise at the time, or indeed any idea of what to look for, I pawed cluelessly through the engine bay, thumbing the little plastic fuel cutoff switch that's supposed to pop in a collision and keep the car from exploding in a fireball, and which could just as easily have popped of its own accord on my way back from a casual venture into the East Bay hills. Turns out I could have solved my problems with a 20-cent fuse, instead of flatbed truck fees and service labor charges at a dealership garage where the car shared bay space with Ferraris and Mercedes SLRs, but hey, at least they felt bad for me and detailed the thing before I picked it up.
Next on the hit parade was the O2 sensors, which kept going bad over and over despite my every attempt to isolate their neuroses. I went through three complete sets of the things—which, at $60 each, do not amount to chump change. And since the sensors would have cost a lot more if I didn't just create new ones by splicing generic Denso sensors onto the existing Lotus wiring harnesses, my soldering skills (or lack thereof) amounted to yet another obstacle. I had to ship sets of the damn things across country and back so that they could be soldered properly by someone who knew what he was doing. And even then, no long-term joy was to be had; inevitably the engine codes would come back, and I knew that my ability to keep the car registered in California—never mind running smoothly—was in dire jeopardy.
But none of that was problematic at all in comparison to the real slap in the face, which was the cooling system. Late in the summer of 2007, my first year of owning the car, I discovered that the car would overheat at the slightest provocation; going up the Highway 9 hill out of Saratoga one day after an exotic-car meet with a bunch of San Jose Ferrari/Lambo/Lotus/Porsche/etc. enthusiasts, I had to drop out in humiliation and rest on the shoulder while my coolant boiled away at 120°C.
 
Treating the coolant with Water Wetter didn't seem to help. Neither did replacing the thermostat (though it turns out that even if the thermostat were faulty, I wouldn't have noticed any change afterwards anyway, because the garage that did the work didn't, um, actually do the work, as we'll see later). And finally, attempting to flush the coolant to rid it of all impurities and eliminate all air bubbles through the use of an air lift vacuum system seemed to do no good either—largely because what happened as a result was that the decidedly fragile stock radiator couldn't take the vacuum pressure and exploded.
So that was pretty much that for the Esprit, at least until I was in New York and had ready access to the necessary expertise (what with being in the business and all) to give the poor car some much-needed attention.
So now it has a new radiator, a much bigger, fully welded aluminum unit instead of the flimsy stock one with plastic end tanks. And now there's nothing I can do to make that car overheat: I can drive it straight up hills all day long in the August heat and it won't climb over 80°C. It's the damnedest thing.
Much though it goes against all my prior-held predilections, I'm seeing the benefits of upgrading a car's parts when it seems prudent to do so. The Esprit is a prime candidate for such upgrades, because though it's a high-end car, it's also a low-volume one produced by a tiny factory, and so it doesn't exactly shy away from using third-party equipment.
And some of this equipment is... shall we say... less than top-drawer, in the interest of keeping costs under control. The Renault-sourced gearbox, for example, is perhaps the best known example, or so I'm led to believe; anyone trying to coax more power out of their Esprit finds himself running up against the torque-handling limitations of this gearbox in fairly quick order and has to replace it with something that won't explode. The radiator is another example. And yet another... is the ignition wire set.
Check out the way those coil packs are placed right in the middle of the engine block, right between the valve covers. The ignition wires lead from the coil packs out under the intake manifold and into the heads, attaching to the spark plugs at the end of those long pencil things. Being right in the middle of everything hot, they tend to get brittle and crack. And then you find that your cylinders start to miss.
(Oh, and in that second picture, notice the metal housing at right. That's where the thermostat is. That bit has never been opened. Those lying bastiches at the garage.)
So it's been pretty impossible to drive the car over the past few months; initially because the car was buried under ice:
...But later because the missing cylinder persisted into warmer weather. It would run fine for a few minutes, but then inevitably as it warmed up it would start going POP-POP-POP-POP-POP in rhythm with the crank as unburned fuel ejected from the (also newly re-engineered) exhaust, and it was clear that somewhere in there was a connection not being made. Pulling the engine apart, as we've done in the last couple of weeks, has confirmed the diagnosis.
It's no mystery what's going on when you try to unplug the wires from the coil packs and the wires fall apart in your hands.
Anyway, we've now finished converting the Esprit's ignition over to a coil-on-plug system, using wasted spark ignition and a 4-channel CDI ignition box driving the eight individual coil packs. The box is mounted in the luggage compartment, well away from the heat of the engine, and the spark plug leads (made of $3.25/foot hi-temp wire) are routed through nice cool parts of the body and into the coil packs, which fit quite well into the holes in the heads:
 
And it now runs very nicely.
Oh, and we've also torn the bumper off it:
That's to repair a compression fracture that's been there since I got the car. Finally we'll get this thing looking the way it deserves to.
And then maybe I'll be able to do something fun with it...
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Brian Tiemann
