More About The History Of The Stupid Car I tinker. I can’t help it, it’s almost a compulsion. I didn’t tinker with the Elise as it was too expensive to cock up. A kit car on the otherhand was ripe for meddling with. Having bought it second hand, I kew it already worked (for some value of working) so there was a degree of ‘compare and contrast’ with each thing I did.
I’d always fancied owning a Jaaaag. I was getting older, I was now a manager, my Mazda6 daily was about to expire expensively and so I wandered over to Autotrader…. There I found a 6 year old black XF with a 5 litre V8 going for £20k. It called to me. With the Stupid Car and my wife’s Kia Picanto it would bring the average number of cyliners per car in the family to 6.
In chasing down the issues with my car, I want to plumb in a fuel pressure sensor. The easy way to do this is to add a 10mm brass tee piece in the hose that goes to the engine from the fuel pump, so off to Amazon I go and buy a couple for less than £6. I get it all plumbed in and boot the car so that the system pressurises.
As so many of my posts will be about my car, I thought I’d better write something about it. It is a Fisher Fury kit car, with a 4.3L V8 engine. Background I used to have a Lotus Elise which was a lot of fun (even though I crashed it due to running out of talent). However I found it frustrating to own. Although I’m a software engineer, I find software unsatisfying as it’s ephemeral.
Many moons ago I fitted a set of Dallas DS18B20 temperature sensors in the engine bay as I didn’t trust the radiator. I put one in the water hose from the engine to the radiator, another in the hose from the radiator back to the engine. For air temps I put one in the air flow either side of the raditor. To measure this all, I buried a Raspberry Pi behind the dash and came up with a funky set of three relays so the Pi could shut itself down safely when I killed the power.
My car now takes about 48 litres of fuel. I noticed though that the gauge was not going down. Given it is not a car that sips petrol I found this hard to believe. Fuel level sensing is done by the fuel tank sender. It has a float on an arm that moves up and down with the fuel level and that in turn moves a variable resistor. First Hypothesis - Gauge is wrong I fitted a spiyda Gauge Wizard when I fitted the tank as the sender and the gauge were definitely not a matched pair.
I’ve now made all my brackets, detoured via tidying up the wiring and I’m now on getting it in. This car was designed to take a 6 gallon MG Midget tank. I’m trying to get a 10 gallon tank in. It is not going well. The tank is catching on the diff cover of the axle. I may be able to get away with taking the rear cover off, or I may have to drop the axle from the car.
(Update 04/02/24 Combing everything into one post as it wsa getting tedious) Fitting the new fuel tank to the Fury is the gift that keeps on giving. The original tank had both mounting holes and a pipe on the top to connect the fuel hose to. The new larger tank has no mounting holes. I made some brackets to the profile of the new tank and drilled mounting holes using the top pipe centre as a reference point.
Some notes as I go along. We have A Renault Zoe A Growatt hybrid solar/battery system An OpenEVSE charger HomeAssistant instance An MQTT broker The challenge is to get all of those talking together so that when the growatt battery is full and the sun is shining, any excess solar goes into the car rather than the grid. It’s a little confusing as OpenEVSE seems to push OpenEnergyMonitor as the way to do all of this.