2006 Fpv Tornado F6 Ute - Cleanup & Resurrection

[arronm]

Phil you need my special spanner for turbo nuts

[Ralph Wiggum]

Yeh boi

SnapOn wobbly bits for lyf

*comp housing removed for clarity purposes

[turboknapp]

Whats the part number on those Luke?

[discostig]

I’ve washed the engine bay several times this year.

There's your problem. I've never washed the engine bay for this reason and it all still works

Wipe down with a damp cloth is the best it gets from me!

Good work getting to the bottom of it though, what a head fark.

Also lack the special tools needed to get to that bolt. It's rounded a bit anyway so I think I'm going to leave it until I am not building a house, then get it all replaced with stuff that hopefully stays F#*%ING put.

Edited 16/10/15 05:18 AM by -Stever-

[PTR_NITRO_FG]

I've never washed the engine bay for this reason....

Wipe down with a damp cloth is the best it gets from me!

+1 for this ....

An old detailer friend back in the day tried giving my engine bay the usual degrease/high pressure hose treatment....hour or so later went for a drive and car was spitting and misfiring and sh*t.

Found out that water had gotten into the spark plugs area....never again

[Bizkets is Drunk?]

I just use the spot free rinse at the car wash on the engine bay. Only a light spray

[PhilMeUp]

Yeh boi

SnapOn wobbly bits for lyf

*comp housing removed for clarity purposes

I'll have another look at the turbo-to-manifold nuts next week, but we need another maintenance day where we can all watch (and learn) how Luke does this.

There's your problem. I've never washed the engine bay for this reason and it all still works

An old detailer friend back in the day tried giving my engine bay the usual degrease/high pressure hose treatment....hour or so later went for a drive and car was spitting and misfiring and sh*t.

Found out that water had gotten into the spark plugs area....never again

Yep, I used to do that. Water gets past the front coil cover bolts, and then drops down into the spark plug holes. Been there, done that, many times.

Hence removing the fibre washers and putting heat-proof o-rings on the bolts instead. The o-rings don't last forever, but they're cheap and easy to replace.

One of these days I'll find some good, extra-thick fibre washers that will water-seal the holes permanently.

When washing Falcon engine bays, I do a quick spray of water onto the coil cover, but then I aim the hose away, lean over and blow the water out of the coil cover bolt recesses in the coil cover.

I like keeping my engine bays clean. I used to stuff up a lot and get water into the spark plug holes, but I've got that figured out these days.

I use a garden hose (ie low pressure). The only time I've used high pressure is for specific gunk build-ups (eg near the engine mounts, behind the power steering pump).

Apart from spark plugs, this is the first time that I've had water-related trouble. Now I know to check for that plastic cap on all Falcons.

Even without washing the engine bay, if that cap is missing then dirt and grime will still get into the cog area.

My taxi has done 532,000km. The engine bay looks almost new. Makes it much easier (and less frustrating) to work on, and if I need to do something out on the road then I don't get myself covered in mess.

I need to get some current photos of the interior. Looking at the photos of this car now, and comparing them to the photos that I took when I originally bought the car, is rather interesting.

[PhilMeUp]

Thursday, 22nd October, 2015

Tonight it was time to finish replacing the radiator that I damaged a few weeks ago when the car slipped off the trolley jack. I had already replaced the easy stuff - the support beam underneath the radiator and the thermofan.

In the back of the Tornado is the original engine from my taxi. The engine developed a major knocking noise shortly before reaching 500,000km. I’m pretty miffed about that - in the taxi world we go through transmissions and diffs, but never motors. The Barra motor almost never fails. Taxi workshops have rows of engines in the back of workshops. When wrecking the Falcon, the one part that doesn’t sell is the engine.

I drive my taxi hard, but I also maintain it very well. It always gets regular oil changes - I used to use the very highly regarded Penrite Gas 10 but recently switched to Gulf Western Syn-X 3000. Both of these oils are semi-synthetic, but I’m now buying the Gulf Western oil in 20L drums at a much cheaper cost per litre than I was previously paying for Penrite in 5 litre bottles.

Although I’ve learned how to do almost all the mechanical maintenance on my taxi over the last few years, I’m not an expert on engine internals. When a replacement engine was fitted, I had the workshop put the old one in the back of the Tornado so that I could pull it apart and conduct a post-mortem to determine the cause of death. It’s been there for a few months now - I really need to get out and find someone who can supervise me pulling it apart and help me find the cause of the knocking noise.

Tip: If you’re ever carrying an engine in the back of the ute then be thorough with tying it down. Taking a hard corner and suddenly having about 250kg of engine slide from one side of the tray to the other is just a tad nerve-wracking.

One particular attempt to see how fast I could take the Mill Point Road (ie curved) freeway entrance became most interesting. Bloody terrifying, actually.

Let the games begin.

There’s a story regarding the shovel in the background. Some time ago, I had a taxi booking very late at night at a train station in a dodgy area. Here in Perth, the taxi world has a lot of trouble with indigenous people (I’m trying to keep this polite as possible, but if you ever meet me in person then you’ll get a much more… honest… assessment). We have loads of fun with non-reflective-skin locals.

So, these teenage individuals have gotten into my taxi. Knowing that it was highly unlikely that I was going to get paid for this, I managed to get about half the estimated fare from them, along with a promise that someone at the destination house would have the rest.

Sure enough, once we arrived at the house, the kids vanished.

Although not unexpected, I was still unimpressed.

The house was the worst that I’ve ever seen. There was no front door. There were people asleep on the floor all over the place. Naturally, I made a nuisance of myself by shining a torch in everyone’s face in the hope that someone would pay the money just to get rid of me. There were cockroaches everywhere, and the outside of the house was like a rubbish tip. True squalor. Not the most constructive people around.

I saw a shovel on the ground, figured that was worth the $10 still owing to me and put it in the back of my taxi. If anyone in Perth wants to buy a shovel for ten bucks then let me know.

Or, maybe I should just keep the shovel and a bag of lime in the back of the ute. Might come in useful if someone ever crashes into it.

From now on I’m going to jack up the car at the larger k-frame crossmember instead of the smaller one at the front of the engine. However, getting the trolley jack that car under the car wasn’t easy.

When I fitted the new radiator back in January, I removed the intercooler to get access to the four bolts that hold the radiator in. This took me all night. I wanted to find a quicker and easier way of doing it this time, and realised that if I removed the support bracket underneath the radiator then the radiator would be able to move around a bit. This would give me better access to the four bolts.

I removed the front bumper.

I drained the coolant. I have a battery-powered Ryobi blower, so used that to blow air through the upper radiator hose. This actually worked, and a bunch more coolant was pushed out of the lower radiator hose, on the other side of the engine bay.

Feeding a ratchet through to one of the radiator bolts.

I didn’t want to drop any bolts and spend ages looking for them, so held a magnet over each bolt as it was removed.

The radiator came out, in much, much less time than it took me back in January.

I had a secondhand radiator lined up, so sprayed the core with CT18 and rinsed it with the garden hose on low pressure.

Flushing water through the core.

Once I finished rinsing out the core, I shook the radiator back and forth to shake the water out of the core. Then it was time to start on installing the replacement radiator.

The turbo boost gauge on top of the dashboard has never worked for me. I had done some research, and learned that there’s a VDO pressure sender on the intercooler. To get to the sender required removing one of the intercooler pipes.

Once the upper intercooler pipe was removed I could see the sender unit.

I disconnected the two wires.

A close-up of the VDO pressure sender.

Although I could see the sender, I couldn’t actually reach it with my hands. I removed the headlight to give me some access.

The battle scene, 11:56pm.

The replacement radiator slotted into place easily enough.

I wasn’t able to get access to the VDO pressure sender to remove it, so had to remove the intercooler.

[PhilMeUp]

The sender unit bolts into a hole on the driver’s side of the intercooler.

I removed the sender unit from the intercooler by unscrewing it with a 17mm spanner.

The sender unit bolts into a brass collar, which then bolts into the intercooler. I used a 17mm spanner and 14mm spanner to separate them.

As mentioned, the sender unit is made by VDO in Germany.

Although the connections on both the sender unit and the wires were dirty, I couldn’t see any reason why they weren’t making a connection. However, I went inside with my cordless Dremel and cleaned the connection tabs on the sender unit with a small wire brush.

On the nut end of the sender unit were the specifications. It’s pressure rated at 0-2 bar (ie 30psi).

32/25 on one of the other sides.

And 1.06 on another side. I couldn’t see any of these details until I went over the sides with the Dremel and wire brush.

A photo showing the connection tabs on the VDO sender unit.

It took me ages, but I finally figured out the VDO part number, which is 360 043.

VDO Specifications:

VDO Part No: 360 043

30 PSI

10-180 Ohm

Floating Ground

Thread Size: 1/8-27 NPTF

They’re not cheap, even in the US. Of course, I’m not even 100% sure that the fault is the sender unit. I haven’t even tracked down the obvious thing that I should have checked first - a fuse.

The current price from JEGS in the US is $US47.33 - http://www.jegs.com/I/VDO/918/360-043/10002/-1?parentProductId=887192

I found an Australian place called The Guage Shop, but they don’t have a listing for it on their web site. I’ll email them. http://www.gauge-shop.com.aus

The other side of the connection tabs.

The sender unit screws into a larger diameter collar, and then the whole lot screws into a threaded hole on the side of the intercooler.

I used some CRC non-flammable Contact Cleaner to clean out the wire connectors. This stuff is good, but expensive - around $25-30 for a can.

Apart from cleaning the connection points, there wasn’t anything else that I could do to test or maintain the sender unit. Thus, it was time to start putting everything back together. I screwed the sender unit in quite tight to ensure that there would be no air leaks later on.

I’ve got large hands, which makes it difficult to put back in the nuts that hold the intercooler in place. Getting the lower one on the driver’s side back in took a few attempts, and some patience. That one’s a job for Luke Skywalker.

After various attempts and lots of self-control (ie frustration), I finally got the intercooler bolted back into place.

I put the upper hose back on the intercooler and filled up the cooling system with coolant. Time to start the engine, and see if the dashboard turbo gauge was now working. Negative, no life in it. Bugger. I’m guessing that I’ll have to replace the sender unit, which means taking all this stuff apart again.

Getting everything back into one piece. 3:14am.

I had jacked up the front of the car at the start so that I could turn the front wheels from side to side to access the screws in the wheelarches that help to hold the front bumper on. However, the handle for the trolley jack kept getting in the way of getting the front bumper into place.

I finally got the car back into one piece. Several hours of late night work, and I had achieved pretty much nothing. Replaced a radiator that I shouldn’t have damaged in the first place, and unsuccessfully tried to fix the turbo boost gauge.

It was also obvious why I’ve always jacked the car up at the crossmember in front of the engine, instead of the larger and much more sturdy k-frame crossmember at the rear of the engine. Even getting the low-profile Arcan trolley jack far enough back required jamming it through, as the top of the trolley jack doesn’t clear the bottom of the bumper. And, once in place, the handle only moves up and down a centimetre or two at a time.

[PhilMeUp]

The no-longer-new radiator, that I paid a bunch of money for at the start of the year.

The bottom of it had also curved outward.

I took the car for a test drive. I’m always getting the floor dirty, so the first stop was a car wash to vacuum the floor for the second time in a few days.

Then I was off to the usual 24 hour supermarket to get something to eat.

The interior these days is looking a whole lot better than when I first got the car.

But, after all that, the turbo boost gauge still doesn’t work. Bugger. Not my most productive night. Time to call it a night and go home. 4:22am.