I took the car to Calgary's "Driven to Perform" show today. A show for tuner cars. There were about 200 cars there and mine won "Best Euro". Very happy.

Trophy

Very well done John. Pure dedication.

well done mate - a very well deserved reward for all your hard work!

<Happy Gilmore quote> What a tremendous looking trophy!

Excellent work John, must be a great feeling to win! What sort of euro-competition did you have?

hadto be a winner with all that work,realy well done you deserved it.

There was a quite a selection of European cars there. Lots of BMW, Audi (including R8), VW and Porsche. Several M3s with superchargers, a Lotus Elise with a supercharger, a MK2 golf with a VR6 and turbo, Ferrari 360, Aston Martin DBS, oh and a Merc SLR!

Lots of pictures here here from other people at the show, only a couple of my car but it'll give you an idea of the cars and models there.

Well done John

Have you any pictures of your car at the show, I could only find 2 in all those photo's

Yes I'll upload a few tonight for you.

Same but it was not exactly a chore to look through...

Here are a few pictures of the car at the show. No models this time.

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Looking

Did you get good feedback from the locals?

Your car is so absolutly stunningly beautiful! lol Amazing work - I want it ^_^

People would walk around it and eventually spot FIAT written on the engine and go "It's a FIAT" as if in disbelief

All positive responses. Several people commented on a stunning paint colour. I got a big clap and cheer when my throphy was announced

very cool mate, must have been great.

Rich

Well done mate. All your work has made this easily the best all round coop.....if Carlsberg made coop's........this would be it!

Thanks, that was in it's glory days, last weekend. This weekend the engine's coming out!!

It hasn't been happy since the tune and yesterday I lost pretty much all oil pressure at idle when hot. There is plenty of pressure when cold. Even revving it to 4k when hot only showed 1 bar. The guys who tuned it are going to strip the engine down if I can get it to them. It bent another spark plug (#3) electrode as well. I checked the plugs and 2, 3, 4 and 5 were in perfect condition but #1 was wet and oily. Once we pull her apart we'll know if the electrode bending is due to bits of pistons or temperatures. The engine needs a strip down regardless to investigate the oil pressure problem. Hopefully we can turn this around so I can get some driving out of her this summer. On the two days I did drive her it was so nice to sit low, change gear and have responsive steering. So very different from the Jeep.

John

Does look fantastic in those show pictures.

Maybe I should have specified Nuvola for mine after all!

Last weekend the car was in a show, this weekend it's in pieces all over the garage floor!!!

Bits

There's something Missing

Missing bit

Crane

I removed the engine out the Coupe today. Far easier the second time, took me 10.5 hours. I'm taking it to Lightspeed on Monday for them to take it apart and see what the damage is. Number 1 cylinder doesn't look very well, the exhaust port is black and oily. The others look okay. When I removed the magnetic rpm sensor it had a bunch of iron filings on the end of it.

I'm hoping I can get away with just new pistons. However if the cylinders are scored then I'm not sure what I can do as I think this is the biggest bore I can take the engine to. I can't easily get hold of another block!

John

Bah sorry to hear its in pieces again! Was wondering though, what front and back bumpers are on the car, because they look amazing and i would love them on mine!

Geez John. I wish I had your patience! Sorry to hear of your car's woes.

I took the head off today to inspect the destruction! All the pistons had big chunks of metal missing from the inlet side. Some had the whole section between the two valve cut outs missing down to the top ring. Pretty impressive actually.

I took the engine and head to Cam at Lightspeed to rebuild for me. The head needs cleaning up and at least one of the valves is bent slightly as it's not sitting properly.

Cam's going to look at the bores to see if they can be honed or whether they need a rebore.

What the pistons used to look like.

What they look like now! The numbers are just identifiers not the cylinders:

1
2
3
4
5

John,

am I missing something?
why/how did you end up with all this mess? Car has been properly mapped, no?
What brand were these pistons?

Good luck with the rebuilt!

V.

Sorry to hear this, your coop has always impressed me

How did it happen?

Wow, that is some serious detonation John?! I can't see how that could happen from the mapping unless the timing was totally wrong in the first place. Could be that you timed it up wrong in the first instance or perhaps when the Autronics was fitted??

Hope you get some better luck this time.

Actually looking at those pictures again it could be that you have had very slight valve piston contact. Was it the inlet valve that was bent? Either way, it looks a timing issue.

Oh dea JL, det'd to F**k. I'd hazard the thickness of material between deepest part of the inlet valve cut out and the inner edge of the first ring groove was too little making that the weakest part (although just looking at the original picture there looks to be plenty of material there). seriously I would get guy Croft to design the next set of pistons as he'll only do it on cad and then you can tell what the thickness will be prior to manufacture - but the culprit is detonation, lower compression could be advisable for the fuel out there. Do Chambers show impact damage, pitting, are the valve seats coming away from the head at all? What temp did the car run at in the rolling road?

Rich

shit, that looks bloody bad John !

I hope my coop is never going to end up like that, or I'll just crush it, soz to hear about your problems.

But it also looks like the actual pistons have been hammered to death, then hit with some detonation & run bloody hot, as there are blow by holes at the cutouts....

something pretty bad has happened here

Bloomin eck..... they look bad

Yes the cost per hour driving is horrendous! I'm sure a Porsche/Ferrari/Lamborghini would be cheaper to run! However unless I fix the engine the whole car is useless.