Sprung

As you can see the new springs are now in place on the car.

Here’s the difference between the old and new springs from the front of the car.

The older spring is on the left in the above picture.

I can also attest to the fact that ride is much better. The car doesn’t ‘crash’ into bumps anymore, it takes them in its stride. However, it does now appear that the suspension warning light likes to come on regularly. Let’s see what time bring on that one.

I’m looking forward to taking the car out for a spin on the weekend through a few ‘twisties’ to see what the handling is like. The ride height has also been raised a bit, hopefully to overcome it smacking it’s nose.

I am also pleased to say that the heat shield over the exhaust was also cosmetically repaired as seen above. It was always an annoying eye sore when I looked at the engine. Now, no more! Yeah.

Also, one of my cooling fans had a blown fuse, which sort of explained why the car almost overheated in traffic on the way to get serviced. The fix is just to install upgraded fuses. Glad, that was checked and resolved. Would not have been nice to overheat in traffic again thanks to a blown fuse.

There still remain some outstanding items to address:

– the A/C mixing flap still doesn’t work, even though I sourced a replacement COG for it. Possibly a main controller unit issue but we’ll need a spare one of those to test before we can be sure.

– the suspension warning light seems to want to come on during start up and at random on a drive. Let’s give that one some time and see if there is pattern to why it’s doing that.

– even though the EVAP system has been thoroughly checked and a new charcoal cannister installed the car still smells a little ‘fuely’ after a drive. It has always been like that but I would have thought that a new charcoal cannister would have rectified that issue. I’ll need to do some more research to see what is normal when it comes to fuel smells after a drive.

– after the interior refurbished I can feel an airflow just below the handle of the drivers door. Seems to be coming from outside the car. Not a huge issue and I’ll need to have a closer look when a get a chance.

– as mentioned before the valve guides are going to need doing. The aim will be to take car of that around mid year.

However, all the belts and fluids have been done as well as the hydraulic tensioners, spark plugs, etc. as part of the engine out service. The ride feels much better now, so I just need to wait for the weekend to see what the handling is truly like.

The engine is out

The F355 is in for it’s annual service and this one will require an engine out and belt change amongst many other things. As you can see above, indeed the engine is now out.

Interestingly, there is some major corrosion present on the outside parts of the plugs as you can see above for cylinders 1 – 4

and cylinders 5 – 8, above. This is strange given that the corrosion is on the part of the plugs that is outside the cylinder! It is also interesting that two plugs on either side are largely unaffected while two others are quite corroded. The part that goes inside the cylinder is fine. This kind of suggests that somehow water has been trapped in and around the plugs for some reason.

Next was a leak down test on all the cylinders.

Most of cylinder are good, like above, except:

Cylinder 4 at 30% and

and Cylinder 3 also at 30%.

This is a loss of power in those cylinders and is typically caused by wear on the valve guides. Getting that fixed is a major job for the future but it good to have these readings as a benchmark.

No signs of issues with the evap system but got a replacement charcoal cannister just in case.

Still more work to be done but the corrosion on the spark plugs is a bit of a mystery and the valve guides will need replacing down the track as well.

Let’s wait and see what else is found.

Service time

It’s that time of the year again when the F355 goes in for it’s annual service. Apart from the normal rego check and fluids, this one will also be an engine out and belt change.

To further add to this I’m also getting the suspension ‘renewed’ as well as hopefully the evap issues sorted amongst a host of other ‘smaller’ items that need attention.

While taking the car to Racing Red I got caught up in some heavy Monday morning traffic, which didn’t help my stress levels at all! At one point the water temperature got to 120 degrees (130 being the max) and the oil temperature almost reached 100 degrees. I was worried that I’d need to pull over. Seems like the cooling fans weren’t working for some reason?? Luckily, I managed to get the car to its destination but cooling fan operation maybe something else that needs checking as well it seems.

I’ll report back on the progress but this one is going to be a big one, but it is all necessary and hopefully will sort out all the recent issues with the car, especially the ‘chuggs’.

More soon.