XM 2.1 Rebuild

[steelcityuk]

Well the car made it to Wetherby and back on Saturday.

I'd spent the previous couple of days going over the engine again. I timed in the injection pump, it was 0.01mm out which although I adjusted to the recommended 0.88mm it's possible that tolerances could be more than this.

The cam bolt and injection pump bolt were thread locked for peace of mind. The increasingly bad leak was traced to the bleed hose that goes from the thermostat housing to the cam carrier cover bolt. The molded end had become cracked and split. Fortunately I had one on the spare engine.

The car does have some niggles which need attention. The amount of hissing from the FDV seems excessive when stopped and in general driving around town can be heard in regular short bursts. On acceleration the front rises up and the rear squats excessively which is then followed by the front dropping very low. At times it feels as if there isn't much in the way of suspension travel but when parked the ride height seems OK. The strange thing is that when parked the suspension doesn't seem to have much movement in it whilst in soft mode. I know that the rear end needs some attention, hopefully soon I'll get time to remove, strip and clean the HC and the Hydractive valve. I could do with getting the parts together to build a pressure gauge, has anyone else done this?

I've found that putting the suspension into sport mode does indeed switch the suspension setting, this surprised me because I thought that at this RP it would be using a later version of the Hydractive system.

Steve.

[steelcityuk]

After the work on the rear of the underside of the XM and the usual strip and clean of the height corrector, I played around with the height control lever (I haven't touched the ride height setting at this stage), sitting on the slam panel, etc. My conclusion is that there's something wrong with the front height corrector, I've either rebuilt it wrong, there's a major amount of gunk in there now or the shaft's gone rusty and is now sticking. The linkage is very well lubed but the car seems happy to sit high or low until something, either pressure or vibration causes it to correct itself.

If the pipes were connected up back to front would it cause the HC to work backwards?

Any comments?

So that's another job for the weekend.

Steve.