Aidan Peterson had used my Subaru for recce for the Rally of Canberra, and he was staying with us for a few days to enjoy the local sights, but more importantly for me, to help with some jobs in the shed.
He was somewhat as excited as I had become, and as soon as we got stuck in, things began happening fast.
The rough engine idle was quickly discovered to be a vacuum leak. An oversight of mine had been the brake booster vacuum line, and as we had removed the line, it caused the rough idle. A cap was bought and installed, and the first major issue was complete.
The second issue was an unresponsive throttle pedal, and that took a little more time.
Testing electrical circuits, throttle body condition, and replacing pedals were all part of the diagnosis process, but we were still scratching our heads.
Despite this, it’s amazing what some knowledge and experience can do when trying to solve issues.
Aidan has engineered plenty of his own cars in the past, and watching his processes when looking for fixes was something to marvel at.
I was hardly able to comprehend much of it, but with experience comes skills.
As we were also playing with other projects that weren’t Fiesta, namely Escort, Legacy RS Turbo, and Mazda Familia GTX, we took off for the night and would try again the following morning.
It’s amazing what a night’s sleep can do.
We got back to the shed, re-assessed what we’d tried and what we’d found, and had another look around.
Embarrassingly, we found a lone earth eyelet in the passenger’s footwell, wrapped around an ECU plug.
‘Surely not', we both thought, but with the engine running, touching the metal caused a slight engine note change, and we looked further.
The paint was scraped off, the eyelet bolted down, and we had a working accelerator pedal.
It was an incredibly frustrating, yet relieving feeling. How could so many hours of thought have gone into it, to be fixed by something so simple? But also, how lucky we were that it was not some greater problem.
It was here that a valuable lesson was learned – check your earths over and over.
More often than not, in electrics, it is an issue with the earths, rather than the power.
The excitement was evident, and we were quick to bleed the brakes, put some wheels on, and take it up the road.
Only brave to take it 500m to the dead end and back, there were huge smiles on my part.
Another job had been ticked off the list and it was now a driveable rally car, albeit on semi-flat tyres and on borrowed bent wheels.
The fire bomb and some minor suspension dramas were sorted in Part 6...
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