Speeduino – Rover SD1, Paint It BLAAACK

I’m waiting on some more wire from my supplier, again. So in the meantime, I did some tidying up.

I changed my wiring plan again, so I’m waiting on more wire. I decided instead of reusing the 30 year old main power feed in the standard loom to power everything, I’m going to run a fused wire direct from the battery, in the new loom, and use that for everything. This required me to order some higher amperage wire to handle the current draw. This will arrive tomorrow, so I’ll be able to get back into the loom tomorrow night.

I took this chance to take off everything I had just done, and give all my mounts a quick coat of low gloss black paint. I chose to tidy a couple of the pieces up a bit more too.

The little bracket that holds the crank sensor cable got twisted, so now the cable will run along the flat face and not the edge, in the hopes that it won’t eat the cable insulation.

I also took a file to the crank sensor mount itself, just to tidy the edges up and give the sensor a little more space for adjustment.

The coil bracket got the side shaved off it to make it a bit more slim, and the whole thing cleaned up with a file to make it look less “home-made”.

This is what I shaved off the mount

I also fit the belts back on, as I needed to adjust the alternator belt tension before fitting the coil bracket. The old alternator belt was fine, so that was reused, but the old power steering belt was badly cracked, so out that went. I also chose to go with a slightly longer belt to give me more room for the crank sensor. I used a 13A0875 belt vs the 13A0865 that was on there. This leaves me with some room on the adjustment to tweak the belt up, any longer and it runs out of adjustment.

All the parts I painted where given a few coats of high temp engine enamel. It’s fairly durable, oil resistant, and handles high temps.

The last part to paint was the intake pipe. This was highly polished alloy, and since I didn’t prep it at all, the paint probably wont last, but I’m not bothered for now.

Next to do is to make the ignition leads, and finish the work on the loom. Once I have those in the car I can do a test fire on the Speeduino and see what happens. Hoping to do that this weekend.