Friday, 19 April 2019

Headlights trouble, waterhose leakage fixed and last 6 spark plugs replacement

Finally some progress again. Today is a bank holiday at my work, so a day off which I spend on various things. First I went to the car parts shop and bought the new bulbs. To my surprise the new bulb did not work. Sigh! Checking and checking but I couldn't find the culprit. I suspect some kind of broken cable somewhere but the wiring harness has not been touched when doing all the other work on the engine. So I placed a new wire to the other side and presto it's working. Hard to believe there is a wire broken though. When doing further light checking I now noticed the normal light is no longer functioning? What is going on? And even more strange, the high beam is working but failing on the other side. Weird. I need to furhter look into this.




And last week I spotted as well a new coolant failure! GRRRR!!


 I was fearing this and mostly fearing it was leaking around the new waterpump. But when checking I found it was a the lower waterhose.


 At the time I had to buy a new larger clamp and I placed it such that I could reach the mounting screw. I suspect I did not screw it tight enough. So I fixed that and it looks like it's running leak free now:


One more thing I had to sort out is to replace the other 6 spark plugs. So I had checked the internet for advice. I have been reading about crafty people making specific tooling to reach the plugs. I wonder how they managed to do that. Knowing the other plugs were severely stuck I did not want to cause any damage with a adjusted homemade tool. Others dismantled the fuel rail which seems the best way to do it - a lot of work though. On closer inspection I figured I have only to remove the coil and the "gas mechanics" and leave the fuel rail in place. It was going to be a fiddle job but I checked if I could reach the screws on the bottom that holds the housing for the "gas mixture mechanics". Looks like this was possible. So here goes:



First have the coil removed. Disconnected the wires and unbolt the 2 scews, easy. 




 With the coil removed you can now easily access the 2 screws at the bottom that holds the housing


And the other side of the housing, these screws are slightly more difficult to reach:


For this I used the small wrench with 2 extenders and 1 cardan holder to make the corner to reach both screws:


And there you go, the housing came off pretty easy. Of course both gas rods had to be taken off as well, easy. Everything else can stay intact.


With the housing off all 6 spark plugs can be easily accessed.


With the large wrench and a plug socket they could be properly removed using appropriate force


These came out much easier then the other ones.


I did soak them a little with WD40 and afterwards I cleaned it with a blower pistol which I bought new at the shop as well.


And here you have the little buggers:


No wonder the maintenance costs is so expensive for silly jobs like this. Glad I managed to do this myself.

And when starting up the engine it ran very smooth again. Happy with this. Now only the headlights to be sorted.



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