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RR's stupid diesel gamble, I give you... the Signum!


Rusty_Rocket

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I looked this car up on honest John as I know fuck all about modern things and thought I should at least try to keep up.

It said this:

"Rumoured small 300bhp 4.3-litre V8 with 280lb ft torque never arrived in UK."

What sort of shit is that, did it ever arrive anywhere? I'm sure you scallywags will straighten things out for me...

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Injector seals, won’t start when facing up hill, stinks of diesel

 

Coked up inlet fanimold

 

Oil pump failure, the retaining nuts keeps running loose which then knackers the bottom end

 

Oil consumption through glazed bores

 

A lot of them are sheds now through either excessive mileage or just plain bad maintenance over the years.

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Mechanically tough as old boots - noisy tho .

Injection pumps can sign off with no warning .

There is no intank pump so the injector pump sucks from the tank - they are very reliant on perfect fuel lines esp the leak off pipes . Leaky hoses or failed injector seals will make them a twat to start esp when low on fuel or parked up hill .

If the fuel filter is black then the seals have failed. About 70-80 quids worth of bits and officially a camshaft our job to fix but I’ve done several by just lifting the cam as far as I dare .

When you change the fuel filter please suck out the diesel / shit from the housing . Many people just lift the old element out and plonk a new one in . What you have done there is allowed all the shit from the dirty side of the filter into the clean side .

I rate them as an engine but some of the bits around them ( mostly Bosch) can be a little flakey

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Fiat connection is because Epsilon platform, some engines, boxes and other sharing. Because Fiat Croma was (one of a few) sister models when Fiat and GM were in bed

 

Revision Signums got CDTi, a JTD multijet joint effort

 

https://www.fiatforum.com/croma-ii/167791-what-really-gm-croma.html

 

11593.jpg

That photo deserves posting again. My eye was drawn...and not by the (admittedly curious) Fiat. ????

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I quite like the Signum - although not strictly a Vauxhall apologist, I could see they were trying something a bit different and it was a pity it didn't quite come off.

 

Weirdly, although the official line is that the Signum stemmed from a concept car shown at the 2001 Frankfurt Motor Show, I turned this up in a July 1997 issue of Vauxhall Magazine.

 

post-17915-0-64897900-1513226510_thumb.jpg

 

Still, I could live with the styling of one of these before I'd go for a Vel Satis... long may yours run.

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I like the way they mention 'automatic gearbox with manual change facility on the dash' -that was obviously the early beginnings of the horrendous Easytronic automated manuals, which every manufacturer would eventually adopt.  You'd think they'd had seen the wonderful reliability* and smoothness* of the Fiat Selespeed system and ditched it pronto! 

 

True that - I'm fairly sure the owner of our nearest Peugeot dealership retired to the Bahamas off the back of the semi-auto 'box in my dad's 407 wagon... nice in theory, dreadful in practice!

 

These Signums really are grade-A shite though, despite relative newness - overpowered, overlooked and probably quite wonderful until something major blows. And yes, I have been idly browsing the classifieds to see if there's any for sale nearby...

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Yeah the tail lights operating as brake lights probably caught people out because both were blown, because when only one is blown it’s obvious because although both lights still light up when the brake pedal is pressed regardless of blown bulb or not, it obviously lights up a different section of the cluster making you think ‘wait a minute why the fuck are this cars brake lights lighting up 2 different sections of the cluster on either side’

 

Must be a high spec Signum because dads old Vectra C didn’t do it despite it apparently being a feature of all Vec Cs and Signums, but his was a base special edition, we didn’t have the bulb failure warning messages on the computer screen either, mainly because his car had the computer from being ex lease because it was never even available as an option on that trim, so we got all the average mpg, distance to empty fuel, warnings about slippery road surfaces but no warnings about blown bulbs, low coolant etc.

 

The half canbus cars actually had a nicer screen than the full canbus cars from 2005 onwards (both prefacelift and facelift) where you got a nicer layout, icons and so on for warning messages rather than just a line of text like “Range: Refuel!” Or “Check Coolant Level!”

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