S2 #378 (Steve) - hopefully only light fixes

[dapinky]

I'm betting that at the end of the day...it doesn't matter much, and whatever oil you use will be fine if you change it often enough. Glad to hear your engine is still healthy at over 100k miles. Mine has 57k and I'm nervous about it all the time!

One of the things that gives me hesitation with high oil pressures are our weak oil cooler lines. I'm aware that the defect is typically the crimps, but for some reason, I get nightmares of high pressure blowing the lines off. But then again, I'm irrational and nervous when it comes to everything breaking

That's actually a valid thought, but I changed my lines and oil cooler a fair few years ago to a system which doesn't rely on 30+ year-old crimps.

[378S2]

Well... no changes other than the date and my oil pressure is reading 5bar today. It does this from time to time, sometimes it reads a consistent 7 under load and sometimes a consistent 5. The pressure transducer isn't standard, so maybe I just need to get round to swapping that over but it's a pig of a job I'm not excited to start.

[378S2]

A little work on the Elan this Christmas - I've done an oil change to the 10W50 which has brought the oil pressure down as expected. The oil filter is in a terrible spot - each time I do it I manage to fumble and drop it (open side down) on the exhaust. Bloody stupid place to put an oil filter.

I have also replaced my injectors, and I am very pleased with the improvement. With thanks to Matt for the recommendation, I picked up a set of well priced replacements from the US.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/191637275013

For the installation I followed the WikiLEC instructions which were excellent, thank you for those; it was fiddly but not hard. I put the front up on ramps to make it a bit easier to reach everything. The fuel rail bolts would not budge with a ratchet but the impact driver whipped them out in a moment. I really only had three problems:

1. The electrical connectors were very brittle. I managed to break off the little locking tab on each and one connector was already chipped quite badly. I've ordered a new set of connectors and will replace them all.
2. I could not get the new injectors in to the top rail first per the instructions. I found it much easier to put them in to the head, and then push the fuel rail down on to it. I put the bolts back in the rail, and then levered them up to the correct height which I found quite easy to do.
3. On first start it sounded awful, I am fairly sure it was not firing on more than 2 or 3 cylinders - bad enough that my wife came out to let me know I shouldn't have messed with it! I gave each connector a spray with WD40 and jiggled them in to position which cured it (new connectors will solve that).

Just a quick test drive tonight with a fire extinguisher on the passenger seat and a beautiful full moon above (roof down to make rapid escape from a burning Elan easier!). Subject to a proper test tomorrow, I think that it was noticeably more powerful and was boosting to 0.6bar in all gears.

New on the left and old on the right

The replacements are 3mm shorter than the originals, however the seals are spaced correctly with only ~0.5mm difference.

The advert for the new injectors say that the new hole pattern is an upgrade. 5 holes, not 1. Well I can't vouch for any improvement coming from that, but there are definitely more holes.

#1 was quite shabby.

[TorqueHorse]

Awesome, glad they are working for you so far! Hope the real test goes well too.
I'm chasing down a 'hard start' issue at the moment and need to pull mine to make sure they aren't leaking overnight. I'll use your tips to put it back together easier

[378S2]

Shame to hear of your hard start problem Matt.

Test drive completed - all working nicely. I don't have any means for an empirical comparison of the before and after but I do think that it now gets to 0.6bar boost in all gears whereas before I could only get it to 0.6bar in 4th gear. The coils and leads improved things but now it seems very predicable and I would say has a wee bit more pace. Possibly.

So probably a few placebo points again to be awarded in lieu of any actual measurable performance gain!