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[Stu.C]

As we all know, the engine wants fuel, so out came the 'orrible filthy dirty tank. The fuel lines have these quick connectors on them that need a special tool to undo, so I found the cheapest one possible on ebay and marvelled as it mangled those delicate connectors in about the same way a German Shepherd would have done.  





So I wouldn't lose track of things to do, whenever there was something on the car I wanted to keep, I'd tag it with a coloured ziptie; blue for chop it off, green for undo it carefully and keep all the bits. This foolproof plan was going quite well, until a well-meaning friend offered to cut away the bonnet release ... and I heard a bloody great thud as the accelerator pedal dropped to the bulkhead with no tension on the cable anymore  :'(  Ahh well, that's a throttle cable to add to the shopping list then.





For others, I took the NHS-approved approach of drawing on it with a Sharpie and really clear instructions    I know this bit doesn't actually make the engine work, but if I'm putting the box in something later and want to mount the gearstick and surrounding bits, it'll be a lot neater to just weld this whole section in place, right ...





Storage space was starting to get a bit tight, so I had to make a couple of teensy-weensy adjustments to the dash panel.   


I was never going to need the whole thing, but what's left is the bit the instrument cluster sits in, so I figured it could maybe be a template for making a dash cowling one day, or perhaps just get used for the frame the cluster fixes into. Either which way, some is better than none.








Truth be told, if I could've kept the whole car, I would have - it was bloody lovely, despite the grot I found as I took it apart. The leather seats would have made for some really comfy chairs, if nothing else. But you've gotta draw the line at some point. I'd got as much out of it as I could reasonably keep hold of, so on a frosty January morning Frank turned up to take it away for the Fire Brigade to do rescue training with. The jaws of life are hungry little buggers, so they probably get through quite a few bodyshells in a year's exercises ...

[henryd]

Cracking thread, keep it coming

[Stu.C]

With everything now out of the car - and indeed the car gone - there was a kind of mental switchover to wanting to get the engine running. If I'd tried to do it while the car was still there, I'd have just flipped from one thing to another and probably half-finished neither. What's gone is now gone. I had my chance if there was something I wanted, so it's my own fault if I didn't get it. That freezing cold January morning with the car disappearing away was quite cathartic really, I guess... 


Anyhows, first order of business was to take stock of what I'd got. I started with what I'll refer to as the main body loom - this runs from the headlights and the round engine bay connectors next to the battery, through the bulkhead to the passenger footwell, across behind the dash and to the driver's footwell. In fact, thinking about it, it may even then poke back out into the engine bay and go down to the lights on that side. One of you will know, but it's not integral to the plot    I laid out this loom section on the workbench and slowly worked along it to get a feel for what was what, annotating with marker zipties; yellow for "keep it", orange for "maybe" and red for "ditch it".


If you imagine you're looking at it from beside the front of the driver's door, following it round left to right you've got the footwell connectors, ignition & immobiliser, light switches, cabin fuses & relays, instruments, climate control, airbags, more relays, another footwell connector, then through the bulkhead to those brown & white connectors, the fans and the battery terminals.





Yes there's a hell of a lot there, but it turns out (after a lot of reading up on my notes from other's threads) that the only bits you're really interested in to get the engine going are the battery & brown/white connectors at one end, and the immobiliser and ignition at the other. I started out by using the multimeter to do some continuity checks on those various connectors to make sure I'd not lost something along the way. I also checked I had a convenient earth at the ignition end (bottom right in this pic), as I'd need that for my control panel.





For the immobiliser, the simplest answer is to tape the key to the immobiliser ring - the bit that goes round the ignition barrel. The chip in the keyfob gets picked up by the transponder, and an OK signal goes down the wire to the ECU. Without this signal, you can have everything else working but it's never gonna start !





For the ignition, we've got a big red permanent live coming in, a couple of blacks that are live depending where your key is turned, and the chunky black with a red stripe that goes back to the starter.





Rather than muck about with keys and ignition barrels and stuff, I knew I needed a way to have a master cutoff for all power, (eventually) an on/off for the fuel pump and a Go switch for the starter. Browsing the "Fast & Furious" section of eBay got me a genuine knock-off carbon-fibre-style racing ignition panel. It's crap & cheesy, but at 15 quid or so, it'll do the job.    The main power switch is (supposedly) good for 30 amps, and it comes with a relay - so you can trigger the starter from the big red push button, but not actually have that much oomph go through the switch itself  (because it'd probably melt).





Years ago my dad patiently explained signal-to-noise ratio, whilst I was trying to get some science homework done. Like all good dad lessons, it applies to much more than just that one piece of homework    If there's too much noise to hear the signal, get rid of the noise. So I put the "noise" inside a box for now and everything became much simpler ...




That then meant I could connect my control panel up to the battery, plug the instrument cluster in and confirm that when I flipped the relevant switches, power was going up and down the right wires 





It's basic wiring, yes, but it still a buzz when things switch on as expected after all that work ... ! 

[Nick W]

You can get the engine running without the body loom by connecting the immobiliser ring to the engine ECU along with a couple of other wires. That's true of a lot of 80/90s engines that weren't fully integrated into the car. Certain variants of Ford's EEC IV only need an ignition switched live and a battery connection to run, with everything else being contained in the engine loom

[Stu.C]

Indeed Nick, and that was pretty much the approach you suggested to me quite a while ago. That bottom-up approach of start with nothing and only add as much as you actually need is probably fine if you've been around the block with this stuff a few times. And I certainly didn't ignore it, but I'm a newbie despite my years ... 


I purposefully took the more cautious top-down approach of start with everything, and then when/if you have that working, strip away all the bits you don't need. A slower approach, undoubtedly, but it played to my sense of wanting to discover how everything hung together. All of this was way more involved than any previous stuff I'd done on cars, so my logic's that if I started out with a known good loom, any problems were more likely to be simply not having plugged something important back in.


Two paths to the same destination 

[Stu.C]

I've got an "engine stand" already, but that's more for mounting a block on while you strip it down & build it back up. The centre of gravity is quite high as it's sized for convenience while you're stood up, whereas a running engine would have a lot of wobble on it, I reckoned. Besides, I'm cheap, so I probably bought one that's not even rated for the weight of this engine anyways 


There's countless youtubes I've seen of (mostly American) folks running their big V8s on some pretty fancy looking "engine test stands". They've got custom fuel tanks and gauge panels and are infinitely adjustable for all the different engines in one's vast collection. Oooh, that'll do me, I thought. Then I looked at the price of some of them - and they were five times more than I paid for the whole damn car 





So reality set in, I cast my eye around the garage and started measuring up for some nice sturdy engine brackets. After a bit of rough & ready measuring with the engine dangling off the hoist, I came up with a layout that had just enough space for the engine to drop in and the sump to clear the supporting buttresses. Yes, it would have probably been easier/fancier/better/instagrammable to make it out of welded up box section, but the welder's buried at the back of the garage, I've no box section and quite frankly, I couldn't be arsed. No one was going to see it anyway, were they...?    There's nothing actually fixing the engine down - it's just the weight pushing the threads of the original mounts into some holes I drilled in the wood.





Without the counterweight of the gearbox on the back of it though, the engine's very front heavy relative to the mounts, so I bolted the back end down with some flat bar. I had no idea whether revving the nuts off it later on would be enough to get it to jump out of the brackets, so a bit of belt & braces insurance was probably in order.





With the engine secure, I connected up the fuel tank to the supply & return on the engine, connected my "loom in a box" to the engine & the battery and rigged up the fuel pump to a switch on the control panel. This meant that the first thing I could do was prime the fuel system and build up pressure.


Well, we'll call it that, eh. What it actually meant was that I could (slightly more safely) deal with the pressurised fuel spraying everywhere because I'd forgotten to check the lines were nipped up tight   


All systems ready for Go then. If I've got it right, the next sound you hear will be the sweet, gentle purr of an X30XE ...





With a fire extinguisher just out of shot, there was nothing left to do on a quiet Sunday afternoon but switch on the master cutoff, press the big red button and see what happens ...


Go on, click here. You're all intrigued now 


https://www.cuyahoga.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/20210124_160907_1280.mp4

[Migv6 le Frog Fan]

Brilliant ! 

[STEMO]

Thar she blows! 
Now, what are you going to do with it?

[Stu.C]

Thar she blows! 
Now, what are you going to do with it?

Spoiler alert : Keep tinkering with it off and on for at least another year, whilst life stuff gets in the way... 

[VXL V6]

Fantastic! Well done!

Reminds me of this:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKEMpREO-TY

[STEMO]

Thar she blows! 
Now, what are you going to do with it?

Spoiler alert : Keep tinkering with it off and on for at least another year, whilst life stuff gets in the way... 

I'd just keep starting it up occasionally, with a big, daft grin on my face. 

[Stu.C]

The keen-eyed amongst you who watched the video may have noticed it revving to about 9,000 RPM before I quickly shut it off    The keen-eyed amongst you may have also noticed the complete lack of a closed intake system. There was probably at least one of you sat there shouting "unmetered airflow!" at the screen. I hear ya folks, I just needed to know that it'd fire up and I'd not broken the bonds of the immobiliser, ECU and engine 

Now that I knew I could start the engine at will, it was time to bolt a few bits on so I could run it for longer than a few seconds. Time for a quick checklist;

• Radiator and expansion tank for the coolant
• Multirams for the air metering
• Vacuum lines from the plenum all needed to go somewhere
• AC compressor
• Power steering pump
• Maybe some kind of exhaust ?

Dealing with the cooling at the front was easy as it was just connecting up pipes and mounting the expansion tank in about the right place. But round the back there's the Heater Bypass Valve, which looks after the flow to the cabin. Except I didn't have a cabin any more. And it gets opened & closed by vacuum from the controls inside the cabin. So no control. So random coolant gushing everywhere. Which would have been bad. I ditched the HBV and used some coolant pipe to act as a bypass between the coolant transfer pipe (the big stainless pipe which comes round the side of the engine from the rad) to the coolant bridge - I figured on this being the same flow as when the cabin heating's switched off.



The multirams were simple - just bolt up what was sat in the storage boxes.

The vacuum lines needed a bit of thought, however. I started out with the guide from the maintenance section, but given I had no cabin heating or HBV, figured I wouldn't need the upper vacuum reservoir. This was lucky, because I discovered I'd thrown it away with the car   With no vac reservoir, I just tee'd the vac line back on itself at the main brake servo line. And yes, I'd taken the entire brake servo out of the car too, so I just mounted that up in place with some more wood and connected the vac line up to the plenum. The only remaining vac line not connected was the one that'd go to the carbon canister for the fuel vapour purge, so I just blocked it up for now.





Aircon is a big complicated mess of pipework, compressors, unhealthy gases and assorted gubbins I just didn't want to be dealing with - so I had decided long ago it'd get ditched. Luckily I'm not the first one to deal with that, and the simple answer is to fit a shorter aux belt and bypass the pulley. It's a 6PK1900 or equivalent you want in this scenario - which means a 6 rib belt of 1900mm length. When I took the old one off, it was ripe for replacement anyway.



Power steering was something I reckoned I might be keeping though, but I wasn't sure if the pump was lubricated by the power steering fluid itself and would burn out if I ran it dry. So I hooked up the hoses, and the fluid reservoir, and the steering box and filled it back up with fluid. Yep, I'd grabbed them all too 



The exhaust would definitely needed sorting too, as running this with open headers is loud. And when I say loud, that's proper loud with a capital OWWWWW    I bumped into a neighbour who said he'd heard me firing it up while he was walking his dog - he lives at least a mile away   

Ah well, that's a job for another day then, but maybe I'll just fire it up one more time before I put it away ...

[Stu.C]

I'd just keep starting it up occasionally, with a big, daft grin on my face. 

Well, it'd be rude not to ... 

[Stu.C]

Then things started breaking 


First up was the fuel pump, and in hindsight it wasn't much of a surprise. It had been sat in a tank of stale fuel for about five years whilst the car was sitting around; occasionally getting started, occasionally getting topped up with a splash of fresh dinosaur juice. Then I'd started to put it to work with lots of moving the tank about, lots of short runs, and probably worst of all - a pretty much empty tank. Checked the fuses, the relay, the continuity and even tried hooking it up to 12V out of the tank, but it was having none of it. Luckily new ones are readily available and replacement is even easier when you've got an invisible car 





There was all kinds of muck in the bottom of the swirl pot, including some bits of yellow tape. Sock filter had done its job though, and a new one came with the pump, so I swilled it all out and clipped it back together.





Not long after, I suffered a complete wheel failure    The label in the hardware shop had said they were good for 150kg, but maybe that figure was calculated for a zero gravity environment    Turns out the wheels were basically pressed baked bean tin lids and didn't take well to being dragged around the not so flat garage floor and driveway.





Couldn't get to the other wheels to unscrew them from the bottom of the collapsed trolley, and couldn't even move the trolley about much with all that weight ! Popped to Screwfix for some much bigger one-piece nylon ones, built a new subframe and eventually jacked the trolley up to get it fitted. 





These are the times when you pop out to do one simple little job in the half hour you've got available, and it escalates to something that takes you way longer to sort out - then you realise you never got that original little job done either ...  :'(

[Stu.C]

I seem to remember February that year as having been cold. Certainly too cold to be messing about in the garage with wiring, so I brought the whole lot inside to work on. The goal here is to drastically improve that signal-to-noise ratio, and strip out the vast amount of *stuff* that I'd just never need - even in my wildest dreams. Again, the project isn't about creating the perfect setup, or necessarily retaining originality - instead it's about trying things out, seeing how things work, maybe even occasionally breaking it and dealing with it. There's no target destination for the engine, no fixed set of requirements or must haves - just the general notion in my head that if I was going to put it into something later on down the line, the bits I'd want are either already there or I know roughly how/where to slot them in. 


First up was the engine bay loom, for which there's a bunch of relays and fuses for bits I won't have any more. I'd gathered together the engine bay relay diagrams from the Maintenance section, the wiring diagrams from the Haynes, a bunch of Sharpies, loads of cheap short zipties in different colours and - most importantly - a space where I could just leave things part way through without having to tidy up.





There's one wiring layout for the X25XE/X30XE with aircon (which was your only choice from Vauxhall in the UK, I think), and one for the poverty-spec edition without aircon that Opel made available elsewhere (up until about 1997, I read somewhere). This meant it was pretty straight forward to map out where every pin on each relay came and went, and from that which ones I didn't need any longer, and also which connections I needed to keep.


Testing as I went along was fairly easy. I dragged a 12V battery in with me, hooked the loom up to that, and then carefully plugged shoved the wires for some interior bulbs into the fan and pump connectors. By then grounding out the temp sensors in different combinations, I could make the bulbs light up without having to faff about with the actual hardware 


In all, I got rid of probably half a dozen relays and a couple of fuses for the fans, pump, washers & wipers and the Secondary Air Injection. The ECU doesn't get any feedback from the SAI, it just switches the pump on through a relay, but it will complain if there's no resistance on that circuit. The simple answer is to replace the lot with an inline 100 Ohm or so resistor, so the ECU effectively sees less coming back than it sent out. 





You'll also see in the top left of that pic one of the tools that I found indispensable for this project - a set of terminal removal widgets for about a fiver from Amazon. You grab your loom connector, squint at it until you reckon you can figure out where the prong is that locks each pin into the connector, then work your way round the widgets to find out which one is the right shape to press the prong in with a bit of wiggling. After a while, you get used to looking at a connector and having a good idea which widget you're going to need. There's videos on the youtubes that'll explain it in much more detail, but once you get the knack you're sorted.