The king is dead, long live the king !

Yep, I didn't hang around, the old one is gone, and a new one is already filling its space.  Another bargain GTO appeared on Gumtree.  This time its a MK2, so no flippy head lights, and it has a few other issues that need resolving (needs a service, 4 wheel steer is faulty, some paint issues, and a few other things) but it was acquired for the pitiful sum of £500.. cash.  Its crazy you can get a beast like this for such little money.

Note: There is a distinct lack of tree shaped dent in the back :)

This car wasn't bought with the intention of using it for the ScumRun this time, although the price is right, so we can use it as a fall back if necessary.

I will be taking it down to our friends at MitsiArt for them to give it the once over and if it all checks out I will throw some coin at it to get her back up to par.

Gone to the great garage in the sky...

Well, that's it.  The GTO is no more.  MitsiArt (or a man with a trailer on their behalf) came to collect her to strip her for parts today, and so the driveway is now clear.

The fix-er-upper...

Once again, Paul and co at MitsiArt did a stellar job getting the GTO back to working condition.  I took a few snaps of her while she was in the shop...

While we were messing around with pulleys and engine bits, I decided to have a quick look at the cam belt.  It had been changed just before we got the car, but it seems that due to a known design flaw with the way one of the pulleys works (I'm noticing a trend here), the belt had started to rub on a washer that was close to the belts route.  This left a nice deep groove in the belt.  Not ideal for a cam belt, especially in a car that is an "interference" engine (the valves open into the path of the pistons). 

Cam belt failure is an instant engine death and rebuild time, so its out with the old and in with the new.   More expense but thankfully half the work of getting to it had to be done to sort out the other pulleys.

Here you can see how the double-overhead camshaft actually works in practice.  Lining up those pulleys is a bit of an art form apparently.

And now she's back up and running :)

Pull-ey the other one...

Gregg and I had taken the car out for the evening, and on our way home I gave her the beans around a fairly tight corner leading on to the M27.  At this point I thought I had hit the rev-limiter as there were some odd sounds coming from the engine so we slowed down a bit.  It was then that I noted things were not quite right.

The air-con wasn't "con"-ing any-more... the battery light was on, and the power steering was incredibly heavy.  Something had broken.  Crap.  The good news was that the engine was still running so we decided to get the car home (about a 15 minute drive) and then try and figure out what had happened.

On first inspection it looked like the power steering and alternator (including aircon) pulleys had jumped off the main crankshaft pulley, but after a closer look the actual pulley itself had broke in two.

GTOs have an interesting feature in their crank pulley, basically it is a two-part construction.  The inner solid pulley, a rubber spacer, and then the outer pulley.  The spacer is a vibration suppression mechanism, but unfortunately after 22 years the rubber tends to perish meaning that the outer pulley comes loose.  

By all accounts, this usually ends in disaster when the loose part penetrates the cam belt cover, breaks the cam belt and the engine destroys itself.  Not only were we were lucky this didn't fail like this on this run, but also spectacularly lucky it didn't fail in Europe as we would have had zero chance of fixing it while we were there.

So the problem now lies with what to do.  Due to its complex design, a replacement pulley can cost upwards of £400, plus fitting.  This is crazy for a simple pulley. BUT...  after some research, it seems that there are alternatives on the market.  Specifically the 3SX lightweight crankshaft pulley: found here Not only is it almost a 3rd of the price of the official Mitsubishi one, but being milled from aluminium billet, rather than steel, it is significantly lighter.  Removing this weight from the crankshaft apparently can net up to 10hp. Bargin.  So that gets ordered, along with the two belts.  But the problem was fitting it.  Research suggests that the crank shaft pulley bolt is the single tightest bolt on the car, and if you don't have an air-gun your are "gonna have a bad time".  Well we didn't have access to one, so this meant we needed to get the car to Mitsiart to fix-er-up.  While the car was drivable, we ran the risk of the outer pulley still destroying the cam-belt, and this would be bad so we needed to get that off and out of the way asap.  Easier said than done.

Because of the way that the rubber had failed, there was no way to pull the outer pulley over the top of it, and the rubber was still bonded to the inner pulley.  The only option was to cut away the old rubber to make space for the outer pulley to move.

My other half, Emma, gladly offered to do the destructive work.  So I set her loose with a few tools and sharp implements.

Below is what the inner pulley looks like without the outer part attached.

The car can now be driven to MitsiArt, ready for installation of the new belts.

The hunt for red oct..... er... the memory card.

So its been a while since the run, I figured that anyone who is still following the blog might appreciate an update... so I thought it was time to post up what has happened since the run, and where we were going with the car.

With that in mind, the first port of call was to try and locate the missing memory card.

Those of you paying attention will recall that on Day 1 of the scum run, Gregg managed to launch my 16gb SD card into the dashboard, never to be seen again.  Despite a lot of rummaging it didn't appear, so I decided it was time to get down and dirty with the car, and strip it to its nuts and bolts.  To be fair, this task wasn't purely for this reason.  We also needed to give the fairly ropey carpet a clean, and generally organise the cables and the seats a bit better, so we were killing several birds with one stone.

With the carpet removed you can see what an epic mess of cables lie underneath the dashboard and centre console.  To be fair, a lot of it is stock cabling, or at least cabling that was there when we got the car, but our additions for the scumrun were, shall we say, expedient.  So getting back in there with cable ties and wire loom was the order of the day.

The passenger side carpet looks like someone spilled coke, or similar, and let it pool and dry.  Nice.  We attacked it with a hoover, soap, and carpet cleaner.  Then let it all dry out, but it will still need more work in the future.  Its good enough for now tho.

Back to the hunt for the SD card..  Well after ripping out the carpet and scooping up all the crap that had accumulated underneath I actually located the thing.  It had somehow managed to get from the passenger side glove box, all the way through the dashboard, down and under the carpet and finally nestled its way into a nook in the floor by the drivers seat.  No way we would have found that while waiting for the ferry at Dover.  Still that's 70 quid saved..  all in all a good day on the car.

Final fettling, what could possebly go wrong......

.....crap.

Finishing touches are applied to the sled, like locking wheel nuts.
I like those alloys, I suspect some continental scallywags would too!

Nothing like close to the wire, passenger seat gets its extension brackets.

That's where I left the crimps! We also found 20p under the seat too. Get in!

Busy day at MitsiArt, glad Paul could fit us in.

I dearly want that Starion, it's a minter. 

Say hello to our little friend, Seymore! Team Skunkworks 3rd member.

Seymore approves of the Starion also :)

All stuck up

With the car almost complete, its time to finish the look by adding a few final stickers.  See below for pics:

Technically this is supposed to go on the window, but it would foul on the wipers, so this will have to do.

Test fitting the stickers

Some on the rear

The URL for the website and the blog.

The final look of the spoiler

Commemorating the trip to north Wales :)

... Not yet anyway ...

Rear quarter...

And the final livery

Now she just needs a clean and we are ready to roll...

An illuminating experience

Being 22 years old, the GTOs headlights leave something to be desired.  Having owned a Japanese sports car in the past (an MR2) I had a spare set of H4 ultra bright headlight bulbs just kicking around in the shed going to waste.  So we figured it was a good idea to up-rate the lights.  Simple enough job.  On the MR2 it was just a few screws and a plastic cover, and you were job done...  not so with Mitsubishi....

A quick Google revealed that the process is somewhat more involved due to the way they designed the headlight system.  First you remove the bonnet plate (the bit you see when the lamps are retracted) then you remove all the plastic covering, then undo a few bolts, then reach around the back to unplug the power, THEN you pull the bulb out.

Still a fairly simple process.  Or it would be if ALL the bolts weren't rusted shut. I spent the better part of an hour wrangling the bolts on the left lamp before they started to budge, and even then it was hard going.

I got the cover off and got to the point of pulling the glass part out to get to the actual bulb.  The little brass screws are seized.  They WILL NOT budge.  At all.  In an effort to "circumvent the system" I even tried removing the whole light cluster.... no dice.

So I reassembled everything.  Maybe we will stick with the stock bulbs after all... lol

This does present the obvious issue that if a bulb goes while we are away we are pretty stuffed.  There is very little we can do about that now though.  And if I hadn't tried to change the bulb pre-emptively we would have been stuck struggling with it on the side of an autobahn.  Now we know to not even bother.

Some pics below of the nightmare.

The offending article (although the rig one wasn't any better)

Some of the many rusted bolts.  These were the ones i managed to free without sheering off.

The hole from whence it came.  Managed to get it all back in and aligned close enough.

More loud was required

So those of you who have been near the car while its running may appreciate the irony of this post, but we decided the car required more noise :)

A trip to Sextons in Portsmouth saw Gregg impulse purchasing a full set of Hertz co-axial speakers.  6" x 9" for the rears (with a decent bass response) and 6.5" for the fronts.

This was a significant improvement on the current setup of "none".  The car came with no door, or dashboard speakers, and the rears were terribly fitted so a full replacement has resulted in much rejoicing of our ears.   Rejoicing or bleeding... not sure.  But there is sound, and there is a lot of it :)

See below for some pics of the installation.

Getting the door cards off and on was a challenge unto itself, but once off
access to all the gubbins was simple enough

The speaker mounts

When ISN'T a power driver a good idea ?

Do not adjust your set.  The Gregg is just wonky.,.. (no change there)

Cruise on down the highway

One of the issues with the GTO from day one was the fact that the cruise control appeared to be faulty.  I managed to get it working once, but that was it.

Paul over at MitsiArt thought it might be the air pump.  It works on suction to hold the speed (no idea how... lol)  and if the pump isn't pumping then no suction.  The problem with this was that a replacement new unit, if we could find one, would likely run us a significant cost.  Not something we really wanted to do for a non-critical system.  So that was that.

Then, the other day, after a bit of surfing, I came across a "genuine working cruise control pump, cables, and actuator" for just over £20.  Bam !  Buy it now, shipped and delivered...

The unit arrived today and was a pretty crazy mess of components, tubes, and bowden cables, so I set about installing it on to the car...  pics below

The box, direct from ebay

The compressor removed from the rest of the system

Before: note the proximity to the aircon pipes at the box :(

The actual unit comprises of several parts.  The pump (the broken bit), the actuator, and the pulleys (the bits in the box with the 3 pipes going into it), and the hoses and cables that link it all together..  The pump is mounted to the bottom of the pulley box so to get at it you have to basically pull it all out.

This is easier said than done as it is mounted in such a way that its butted up against the solid aircon pipes which are mounted in place.  Still, a bit of fiddling and swearing got it loose without affecting the A/C and it was a 2 minute job to swap the pump over.   

When returning the unit to its mounting place, I decided that it would be better to route the cables the other side this time so that its easier to get everything in / out if required.

After.... nothing spectacular has change really...

Except the cable mounts for the pump and the power steering reservoir sensor 

 Total job time, less than 30 minutes (including prep and clean up), and about 20 quid in parts.   Job done !  :)