Dom's Car Blog

[Deanxm]

Activa's are simple beasts really, mechanicaly operated, there is no mystery to how it all works when your under it, The soarers are supposed to be solid but the pumps and struts not so much now on a car that should have been scrapped 10 years ago, they were not built in Xantia numbers either and i was told the parts are all Soarer active specific and so tricky to come by, just wanted to know if its all bs like the Activa stories are???????

D

[robert_e_smart]

i hear they are rather unreliable at this age though and expensive to operate on, any truth in this?

[Citroening]

[Citroenmad]

Excellent that Dommo, a very interesting car! Im surprised they are worth so much A car more expensive to maintain and run than an Activa but with similar design 'benefits' with the handling.

So are there buttons inside the car to manually raise and lower the cars ride height? Or can the ride only be adjusted by tricking it to do a dance.

[XantiaDaveEire]

Excellent that Dommo, a very interesting car! Im surprised they are worth so much A car more expensive to maintain and run than an Activa but with similar design 'benefits' with the handling.

So are there buttons inside the car to manually raise and lower the cars ride height? Or can the ride only be adjusted by tricking it to do a dance.

My thinkin exactly

I've never heard of them at all tbh

Are you planning on keeping it ?

[Dommo]

I think leaky suspension is just something that comes with active suspension, even the Japs couldn't sus it!!

They are very clever cars, the dashboard has been blurbing some japanese stuff at me and it only occured to me today that it was error messages saves the need for a code reader anyway!

There's a video on youtube that shows an active 4 wheel steer Soarer (like this one) versus a normal coil sprung one, the active one is a lot heavier than the coil one as it's got a v8 as apposed to the coiled straight 6, and generally less toys inside the coiled car, but you wouldn't think it going off that video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHK_2eoBaFU

Oh Dommo, an Active soarer!!!! i would love one of them, just a brilliant shed, i hear they are rather unreliable at this age though and expensive to operate on, any truth in this?
I wish you the best of luck with it and keep us posted, its a brilliant project.

D

Dean, they can be expensive if EVERYTHING is wrong with them. There's a bloke in Wisbech (near Peterborough) who works on these things day in day out and he has quoted me around £170 fitted for one resealed strut (best case scenario... It's £300 worst case scenario but apparantly rarely needed). This is only to keep the hydraulic fluid in, nothing to do with the nitrogen gas which is essentially the sphere side of things. You can get valves fitted into the struts to allow easy re-gassing of the strut, which is something I might consider in the coming future if this thing ever gets into a useable state!

As far as I can tell, everything to do with the suspension IS active specific. One of the parts in the £300 rebuild used to be £240 when it was available, and now isn't available any more. It's a sleeve that one of the seals seals against which can get scored, if it is scored then just a new seal kit won't be enough.

Chris - once it's up and running it shouldn't cost much more than an Activa to run, 25mpg up to 30 on a run apparently (hah!), which means 20mpg max with my driving! It should outhandle an activa in theory, I'd certainly hope it does anyway.. It's got MASSIVE tyres on it for a start!

There is a switch inside that lets you change from 'normal' to 'high', but only while you're moving, they don't alter when they're not moving for some reason.

Dave - I will be keeping it if it doesn't turn out to be a complete and utter s**t-box (which it seems to be at the minute )


Todays job was to try and stop it running like a sack of crap, I started by finding the battery was flat, so I tried jumping it off my brothers car and it kept starting then dying, I tried putting some throttle on when it started which made it die even quicker than if I'd just left it. Eventually it started running, but not exactly well. So I tried removing every plug and lead, measured the gaps/resistance they were all within tolerance so they don't appear to be faulty, although they were all very black tipped so my bro cleaned them up with a soft copper brush, and one of them had wet threads which stunk of petrol so that couldn't have helped. Once I put it back together it sounded better but still sounded dreadful at midrange, and I didn't dare rev it up beyond the dreadful noise. One of the dash lights was saying there's an engine electrical fault, which I've not yet managed to read the code for, so I've no idea what it's saying is wrong at the moment.

Here's one for you, after less than 5 minutes of running (albeit very badly) both exhaust manifolds were glowing red, surely they shouldn't??

Dom.

[Deanxm]

Here's one for you, after less than 5 minutes of running (albeit very badly) both exhaust manifolds were glowing red, surely they shouldn't??

No, not sitting there at idle with no load they shouldnt, there is something funny going on, is the timing right, have you done a compression check?
Does sound like a lovely bit of kit though, good luck with it.


D

[Dommo]

I was revving it to see if it could run properly, I had the intake piping removed to check the spark plugs and leads, but didn't tighten it back down so I was messing with the pipes while revving it, so it probably had 5 minutes of idling and/or revving, so it wasn't massively under load but it wasn't totally unloaded either.

[Chris570]

sounds like an activa to me

[Deanxm]

I was revving it to see if it could run properly, I had the intake piping removed to check the spark plugs and leads, but didn't tighten it back down so I was messing with the pipes while revving it, so it probably had 5 minutes of idling and/or revving, so it wasn't massively under load but it wasn't totally unloaded either.

Reving it wont place any load on it, there is still hardly any fuel going in, i just find it hard to beleive the manifolds would get hot enough to glow red on any car whilst running under normal driving conditions let alone sat on the drive, she is definatly going to keep you busy for a while

D

[CitroJim]

Red hot manifolds is a sign of very retarded ignition...

[Chris570]

Red hot manifolds is a sign of very special ignition...

Fixed that for you Jim

[Dommo]

I did an error code check last night, which came up with nothing on the EFI side of things apart from N/G (No Good), it didn't then tell me what errors there were, no error codes, just - - two dashes.

I called the chap I bought it off who suggested I test the two coil packs. They have one lead leaving them which heads to a distributor/rotor arm setup which have 5 leads going to them, the one from the coil and 4 to 4 cylinders. I'm not sure how I test the coil pack but if anyone knows how I'll give it a go.

I asked where the engine ECU is and I know now, so I'll try removing that at some point and my dad will see if anything looks amiss inside. I ought to do that before I leave for work, but that time is now!

Will update later, and appreciate any replies about the coil pack. Cheers.

[Deanxm]

So i take it there are two coil packs, 4 cylinders for each? do the packs do a bank each or what? at a guess i would say its not the coil packs if there is only two of them, you need to be looking for something that would alter the ignition timing without throwing a fault code..................... a turned distributer (not that it has them) but you know what i mean. Are the leads connected to the plugs in the right order?

D

[Dommo]

There are two coils yes, but they both do two cylinders on each bank, presumably so it can limp home more easily with a broken coil but I'm not sure on that, or if it would even make any difference?

It does have a distributor and rotor arm, one for each bank, but two leads go to one bank two to the other, same for both sides, as per the coil setup.

Both coils have one lead leaving them (kingpin or something) going to the relevant dizzy, they then have four wires leaving them to the cylinders. I'm not sure the leads are in the correct order, but they were put back in the same order they were removed, and the car ran OK for the test drive (make sense of that!!)


Tonights job after getting back from work at 9pm was to remove the engine ECU so my dad can give it a check over if he gets chance. Unfortunately the connector pins look good so I don't think it'll be anything simple like that

Dom