by adamjosey » Sun Mar 23, 2014 10:55 pm
So guys been a while since I have been active on the forum, so apologise there! Had a absolutely mental 6 months since JAE and not really had a huge amount of time to spend on the Sol's.
As some of you maybe aware I bought johnrnugent B20 off him as he could no longer carry on with it sadly due to his health.
So I have had the B20 now since last April and sadly have not been able to do very many miles in her! To date I have so far only managed to do 343 miles in her!
The list of unforeseen issues with the car is quite long sadly and I have been battling on trying to sort her rather than give up and break the car.
To date I have come across the following problems with the car...
1. Leak on brake system on Master Cylinder and back left caliper - resolved replaced brake lines with braided hoses and redid pipe work to master cylinder.
2. One wheel stud bolt fractured on back right wheel due to wheel nuts being over tighten to the extreme, replaced studs with new one.
3. Gearbox held on by two bolts, all other bolt holes on gearbox and engine block stripped due to over tightening of bolts. To resolve this issue I removed the engine from the car, once the engine was out of the car I soon discovered a oil breather line had been trapped between the gearbox bell housing and engine block. The car had been into DNR for a clutch change when it was in John's hands, its clear they trapped the oil line and over tighten all the bolt holes trying to close the gap between the gearbox and engine block. I had to re heli coil the majority of the bolt holes in the engine block to fix the problem and increase the size of the bolts use to secure the gearbox to the block. In addition all of the lower brackets and bolts were missing from the underside of the engine, thankfully Luke (Solman) sorted me out with some new brackets and bolts.
4. Engine mount (gearbox) nylon bush pushed out and mount twisted. Due to the gearbox not being on quite straight due to the trapped lines the engine mount had come slightly twisted. Once gearbox was back on correctly I could not get the engine mount to fit back on. The mount had been heated up and bent to fit when gearbox was not fitted right... so ended up getting Warwick Uni engineering department to make a mount up for me to fit reusing the nylon bush.
5. Cooling issue, the radiator used in the B20 set up was the original VXI radiator (same as a ESi), this rad was far to small and ended up with the fan constantly running to keep the engine at the right temp. Ended up replacing radiator with a ITR rad from Tegiwa and added a double puller fan set up.
6. Breather Catch system, this was an extremely interesting set up which seemed to all but do not a lot... complete reworked system and added a filtered system running three lines, two from the rocker cover and one from the back of the block.
7. Clocks (speedo)... this sadly read 10mph faster than what you were actually doing, this was down to the needle being pushed on in slightly the wrong place. Ended up swapping the clocks for another set.
8. Earth on engine, I discovered the car was only earthed on the cylinder head and was missing the gearbox earth strap. I added a earth strap to the gearbox and ran a further 6 earth straps to various points all over the engine. This made the car run a hell a lot smoother at tick over and seemed to make it pull better under load (5th gear pull from 40 to 70mph).
Whilst going through and basically putting the engine right I discovered the parts John thought had been put in the car hadn't. The clutch was still a blueprint clutch, not a fancy carbon/Kevlar stage 2 clutch. John had thousands upon thousands of receipts for labour and parts which sadly just had not been either fitted to the car or done. The only parts that seemed to of been uprated were the ones that were actually visual with out taking the engine apart. The other thing I quickly found out was the person who did all the work did not own or had heard of a torque wrench... their idea of torqued up was tighten the bolts until the won't tighten anymore or the heads snap off.
So after sorting out the above I managed to get the car down to JAE without a hitch last September, the car drove well and had a good pull through all of the gears due to the increased amount of torque compared to a b16.
The car was not as quick as I was expecting compared to say a equivalent powered car of the same sort of weight, but it was still a lot faster than a SiR B16A.
About a week after JAE I took the car out for a spin into town and it drove fine, I did around 20 miles and drove home. I then picked my brother up and took him for a run up the road, now due to the amount of speed camera vans around were I live I went quite steady. I got about two miles away from home and whilst in 5th doing about 50-55mph when the car started to lose power. I then stopped and turned the car round and started heading back home. The power lost was extremely gradual with the car gently losing speed until I could not get the car to go any faster than 30 to 35 mph, at the same time a metallic ticking noise started from the front of the car. The ticking noise got louder and louder, the louder it got the less power the car had until the engine cut out. Whilst rolling on the road to my house I restarted the car, the car fired back up and run, but only when a the accelerator was slightly pressed, the car would not run on its own accord.
At this point the metallic ticking noise was quite loud. I got my brother to jump out and I popped the bonnet. While the car was running with the accelerator slightly pressed bringing the revs up to 1500 rpm. We both agreed the metallic noise seemed to be coming from the top of the engine. I then turned the car off.
I then spent time trying to work out what had gone wrong with the car and after a number of calls I then concluded until I took the head off I would not know if there had been any damage as I suspected that a valve had dropped. A point to note is that I compression tested each cylinder and the results came out at 190 to 200 per cylinder.
Since then the car has sat on the drive untouched until today.
I took the head off the car and found that there was no sign of any contact between the valves or pistons. The crank turned over freely leaving me completely confused to why there was a metallic metal on metal noise at the top of the engine. The next odd thing was upon removing the VTEC solenoid I found the filter was full of copper blocking the filter up. However I did not find any copper in any other part of the engine. I drained the engine oil out and it came out clean with out any bits or copper in it. So all in all I am very confused to what is wrong with the engine, I assume it must be bottom end? But I don't know why the crank and pistons move smoothly!
I'll put up some pictures, so you guys can see where I am at with it all.