Just a bit of an update from me:
I've had a bit of motivation to work on the car recently as i'm getting married next year and plan to use the car as my wedding car. The car isn't handling as well as i'd like it to so have decided to refurbish the front suspension as I suspect(ed) that a ball joint is stiff and I know some of the bushes are fairly old too.
I also wanted to crack on with the next stage of the ECU conversion so decided to tackle the hall sensor mounting and wiring. A while ago I bought an a-series bracket which had been CNC'd in the wrong orientation for this as I thought it may be easier than trying to make my own. After some thought and inspiration from a megajolt'ed spitfire I came up with this:
which seems to work really well! I haven't taken the car out yet for a proper spin, but idling it for a bit while logging showed there wasn't any sync loss at all ie. each tooth on the trigger wheel had been picked up by the hall sensor and in turn processed by the ECU. This means for the first time ever this car now has an RPM gauge! See video here for my dad demonstrating a quick rev:
https://youtube.com/shorts/PBklH0V4BrA?feature=share
I plan on using an old android phone as a gauge cluster, I've tested this and it works fairly well.
As for suspension, I have started pulling apart the front. I have tested the ball joints and the conclusions are as follows:
Uppers are new ish, both fairly free with the hub+disks attached, hopefully this is a good enough test
track rod ends OK, also fairly recently changed
lower ball joints are both completely rogered. Here they are off the car:
Will be replacing these I think. Have also bought a set of superflex bushes for the wishbones, ARB, tie bars and TCAs (I'm a bit confused with these TCAs, I bought Toledo bushes but I think dolomite style ones may already be fitted?)
Have done the ARB bushes, i used a cable tie to keep the ARB brackets assembled when putting them on the car, this means they are a bit less fiddly and you can just cut the ties once you've got one bolt in:
and end links:
Also done engine mounts, I think these are in the correct orientation as they are lifting the engine slightly? The old metalastic ones were in OK nick, but had warped a bit I think as the engine was sitting fairly low compared.
Also replaced the heater hoses, these were starting to split a little and were really the only ones I hadn't replaced, so for peace of mind I did the two heater matrix ones and the little bypass hose underneath which was in fairly poor shape.
I also made up the wires for the coil, so once i've made a bracket for it to mount it on the turret and made some spark plug leads we should be good to go for spark! I'm holding off on this so I can log the trigger sync and make sure it's reliable before I switch over from the dizzy. May leave this in for a bit as well until the new system has proved itself.