Down to my last used Jonny. Only the Anglia 105E left.

[dollywobbler]

Not sure on Amis, but on a 2CV, it is a bit of a two-extension job. Main thing is not forgetting the insulator block, or you bend the pushrod and if you really mangle it, it can be a full engine strip-down to sort out...

[jonny69]

I think it's the lower hose clamp which is inaccessible. Can't remember how I got to it - maybe through the fan.

[jonny69]

Saturday's job maybe.

Or maybe not. More snow a'comin.

[jonny69]

Having had a massive rant in the ‘You DO like driving, don’t you?’ thread, I pulled this out the garage and drove it to work yesterday. Which cheered me up massively. I’m ashamed to say it hasn’t been out for probably 2 months.

 

[Image is long gone, unfortunately. Would have been a picture of the Anglia at Red Bull, I expect]

 

No Ami progress yet, unfortunately just been too busy and the weather a bit too poo.

[danthecapriman]

Angle box looks great!

Was there a particular reason for that number on the sides? Or am I just being immature!?

[jonny69]

being immature!

 

Mostly this reason

[jonny69]

Pretty sure I’ve fixed the Insight. I bought an ODBII reader, then downloaded and went through all 669 pages of the gearbox section of the manual. Thought I’d pretty much narrowed it down to the start clutch pressure control valve if there was a problem. It would either be the valve itself or a duff connector, which would trigger the system to bypass the valve and put the pressure to the clutch through an alternative route. Any of those should throw up a fault code, according to the manual. Full list of codes in the manual. Quite clever how it works - but there were a few things to check first:

1. Fluid level and condition. Known good, because I’ve done quite a few fluid changes.

2. Check for codes using the ODBII reader. No relevant fault codes except one which registered the aircon was reading high.

3. Do a clutch re-learn procedure. I found out how to do this by bridging pins 4 and 9 in the diagnostics port and doing a sequence of shifts within a certain time period. Did this and went for a quick test drive. This seems to have fixed it and it’s now engaging properly.

 

Credit to this little car. I haven’t driven it since before Christmas. I was expecting the hybrid battery to be completely flat and for it to default to the 12V system and crank start. Couple of bars of hybrid battery showing and it just wound up on the IMA motor like I’d last driven it yesterday. I’ve got a change of job coming up soon, so this is going back into duty and I’m going to move the AIDS-powered Merc on.

[jonny69]

Citroen update: We’re back in business!

 

 

Wind back to September and it conked out on the way to work and I had to get towed home. Fuelling issues again and I haven’t run it since. Today I [finally] got around to putting a new pump on it. Checked the fuel lines front to back and they’re all clear. Battery needs replacing but it fired straight up with hardly any cranking - so that’s a pretty good sign! Everything else also works, which is a surprise after sitting for 9+ months!

 

Next job is to give it a chuffing good wash and polish inside and out, then this badboy is up for sale.

[jonny69]

Jonnystatus:

• MercAIDSes is sold.
• Ami is on Car and Classic.
• Anglia bumbling on as normal.
• Honda is re-insured.

Questions?

[Asimo]

 

Jonnystatus:

[*]Honda is re-insured.

Questions?

 

 

Does your Insight engine rattle like the little-ends are worn?

 

Mine certainly does, but it is no worse than when I got it four years ago. After 35,000 miles or so I'm not worried about it, but I do find the noise annoying. No clues about engine noises on Insight Central forum: seems to me the opinion is split 50:50 between "they all do that" and "my car is silent so your engine is about to die"

[jonny69]

It’s a bit clattery-noisy when it first starts but it quietens down. I put that down to the fact that the oil is like WD40 and everything needs to pump back up on starting. It’s not the quietest engine in the world by any stretch of the imagination but I don’t think I could comment on yours without hearing it first. Can’t hear it at all with the windows up.

[jonny69]

On 10/24/2018 at 1:12 PM, jonny69 said:

Jonnystatus:

• MercAIDSes is sold.
• Ami is on Car and Classic.
• Anglia bumbling on as normal.
• Honda is re-insured.

Questions?

One year on seems like about right for an update.

-Merc is now long gone and good riddance. I don’t really miss it.

-Ami never sold on Car and Classic. It’s gone to strangeangel on here who is giving it the tlc it needed.

-Anglia actually hasn’t been out the lock up since I parked it up last winter and it probably won’t be out again for a while. Toddler and house renovations are taking up all my time. It’s insured and ready to go, though, it’ll just need some fuel in it and the battery putting back on.

-Insight is reinsured for another year and also running a new lease of life. More below:

The clutch relearn thing I did before clearly hadn’t worked. It went back out of kilter fairly quickly and was banging into drive quite roughly. Additionally, it had developed a weird bump in the transmission on deceleration. I could replicate it each time and both things together were making driving in traffic a nightmare. I was making plans to write it off as a dead clutch and box - before I had one last go. 

One more fluid change, because I already had the fluid. Plus I changed the two internal filters because they probably needed doing by 85k miles. This made no difference, which was upsetting. There was one thing else that had happened, which I hadn’t accounted for, which was that I’d changed the 12V battery. This forces a complete reset in the car and it ‘forgets’ all the settings including the clutch and gearing points. Argh, could this be it?!!

I did the clutch relearn procedure again - except this time it triggered into an actual procedure and I could feel it finding the biting point. Then I took it out and did the gearbox calibration, which is to drive up to 40mph, turn the lights on and let it coast down to zero. After that, the clutch was engaging perfectly and the bump in the gearing was gone. I can’t believe it was that simple and just a silly oversight on my part has caused me so much worry!

Have a thoroughly badly thought out last minute photo from this morning. Notice it’s not washed and I’ll probably need to do the headlights to pass the MOT.

[jonny69]

Two pics in two days. I KNOW, RIGHT!

MOT tomorrow so at lunchtime I put a fresh bit of red film over the fog light conversion and just in case I gave the headlights a quick scrub with some G3 and a rag. They’d gone a bit foggy and I needed to do it anyway. See the difference left and right. 

[jonny69]

Unsurprisingly, this passed its MOT again with no advisories. However, what I didn't expect was when the weather turned cold a few weeks back it threw up an EML and IMA light on the dash. Dying hybrid battery? Dread. ODB2 code P1449 confirmed that, blink code 78 = battery module deterioration. More dread.

I had already planned to build a grid charger (like @Asimo's one) and do a charge/discharge cycle over Christmas, to see if it improved performance, but now I had to hurry up and get on with it. I got really confused about what fixed current LED driver I had to use. I got one that said it would put out 180V in the spec but in reality it only showed 150V open circuit and that wasn't enough. With a toddler at home I literally have no time to spend loads of time on this of an evening and only really have my lunchtimes, so I ended up buying a 240V compatible charger from the States because it was less hassle. It came with a much better charging harness than the one that was already on the car, so one lunchtime last week I pulled the old one out and fitted the new one. Set it on a dumb saturation charge overnight, 14 hours in total, and logged the battery voltage hourly. Plotting the voltage against time, I could see when it was charging and when it was saturated, ie just topping up the more empty cells. It took a lot of charge, so it must have been right out of balance, but it's performing better now than it ever has since I've owned the car.

So here's what happens with these batteries: There are 120 cells in series which adds up to around 144V nominally, or about 160V-170V in operation. The car only cycles the battery between 20% and 80% charge, so it never fully charges it and never fully discharges it but the battery lasts longer as a result. Over time, the cells become unbalanced, which means some of them in the pack are more charged than others. When you use the battery, those more empty ones discharge sooner and the car sees this and backs off the assist. The 'stronger' cells which are sitting at a higher state of charge do not get discharged very deeply and start to suffer from memory effect as a result.

There are two things you can do:

1. A saturation charge with a grid charger effectively charges all the cells up until they're all as full as each other. This balances everything so that it all discharges at the same time. The more full cells fill up first, then the more empty ones catch up until they're all the same. Apparently with NiMH this doesn't overcharge the more full cells, they just kick the excess out as heat and the battery fan keeps them cool.
2. The memory effect can be reversed by deep discharging. Using the charging harness, the battery is completely discharged at a low current using a low-ish wattage bulb, then recharged and repeated a couple of times. The depth of discharge is a subject of debate, but below 1V per cell seems to be what's needed, then further for subsequent cycles. If the pack is badly degraded, there seems to be some evidence that an ultra deep discharge to 50V overall can revive it, but it degrades the all-out capacity of the cells at the same time. Great for bringing an already dying pack back to life, but it slightly hurts a good pack.

I've done number 1 above. The pack is now performing really well. Previously on full throttle, I'd get full assist for about 5 seconds, then the car would back it off to about 50%. Now it gives full assist for as long as I keep my foot down. Previously it would empty the pack in the couple of miles of stop-start traffic coming out of work and charge itself back up on the open road, but now it maintains its voltage and doesn't have to do so much parasitic charging.

I don't think my pack needs a very deep discharge, so I'm not going to worry about it just yet. I think it probably does have a bit of memory effect, so I'm going to do a charge/discharge/recharge cycle over Christmas but only down to 120V or so. It'll be more of a conditioning cycle but not deep enough to degrade the upper part of the cells.

If you were wondering what's under the carpet in the back of the Insight, there's a big aluminium battery cover and under that is the battery on the right hand side and all the control gear on the left. Edit: spare wheel is under the dimpled black cover down at the bottom. There's quite a lot of empty space underneath and down the sides. It's not the best use of the space IMO!

[jonny69]

Cross posting from Shiter’s Boots. What’s UP shite homies!!!

Whats going on here at Shateau 69? Not much. Stuck at home during lockdown due to medical shielding and haven’t moved much. Insight has done one journey since mid March. Anglia is still sat in the garage.

After the grid charging in November, the battery continued to give me problems. I did the charge/discharge cycle thing (see previous post) over Christmas and pretty much cured it. My current commute is quite hard on the battery and is all the things that these cars hate doing, so I figured I’d probably have to cycle it again at some point. Seemed like a good time to do it since it had sat for 3 months and looking ahead it’ll be sitting for some time further without use. May as well get the battery in good shape while it’s out of use and just top it up from time to time until I use the car regularly again.

Last time, the battery was actually in pretty bad shape and the discharge cycling corrected it. I logged the charges and discharges and the battery gained around 40% capacity in the process. That’s from reversing the memory effect by taking the cells to a low enough voltage and by reactivating the battery chemistry which has a habit of going dormant when it’s not used.

Here’s the kit in the back of the car. Black box is the grid charger, which is nothing more than a simple constant-current LED driver to do the charging and a voltmeter. The lightbulb thing is the discharger and is a couple of 60W mains bulbs screwed to a plank. I’ve lashed on a cheap eBay volt/current meter to log the discharge, with the intention at some point to integrate that stuff into the charger to make an all-in-one box. You can actually buy these pre-made but they’re expensive and not so much of a fire hazard very Autoshite.

[jonny69]

Smoll car pretending to be floor fitter’s van. Loads of space. 

[hairnet]

Feart?

[jonny69]

Reposting this picture because the new kitchen floor made the dining room floor look completely fucked and I went back and bought an identical amount of laminate flooring. 

SWMBO then went down to her folks and did 45+ miles on the fuel light. I know with her driving it’s probably got ~70-75 miles left in it with the light on, but I still did a sweat. 

[jonny69]

It's been a while. 3 years by the looks of it. Why's that? I don't fucking know.

Well actually it's probably because I've got two young kids which means not a lot of time for the cars. I pulled the Anglia out about 6 months ago and put an electric fuel pump on it when I changed the leaky fuel line. That meant this happened outside my house:

Needed a bit of a wash after sitting in the garage for best part of 5 years:

The Insight just kept going on and on and never missed a beat so nothing interesting to post about there. I went over all the 100,000 mile service items and most of them didn't even need doing. Then in June when the hot weather hit, the IMA battery decided to give up. It stopped responding to discharge cycling, which I was doing a couple of times a year, and I narrowed it down to one of the sticks in the pack with what looked like a dead cell or two. I tried to revive it in situ with various targeted charge-discharges but eventually I had to accept that it wasn't going to have it. This was all really annoying because I was about to put the car up for sale due to the upcoming ULEZ in London. This car is a Japanese import and because it's pre-2006 cannot be registered as exempt.

I looked into a new pack, which are available for about £2k from Peter Perkins in Hull and he fits it for you on the day, but I couldn't justify the cost because I am selling the car. The other option is to take a risk with a whole second-hand pack or take the bad sticks out and replace them with good ones. Insight packs are pretty rare, but I discovered the pack in mine had the yellow Civic Hybrid (HCH) sticks in it. This made things a lot easier because those packs are easy to come by. I found a huge vehicle dismantler in Oxford with 4 packs on the shelf (ASM Auto Recycling, £60 each) and they just brought them down on a pallet truck for me to check over. I picked one and took it home. Slowly charged and discharged it a couple of times to revive the cells and prepared to swap the sticks from the HCH pack into mine:

Everything looked fine. The discharge curves for the stick pairs and the pack as a whole looked pretty good so I simply switched the sticks and put it back in the car. Unfortunately the car wasn't happy with it and put the IMA light on fairly quickly, signalling a fault. Looking at the tap voltages, it was clear that one or two of the sticks were dropping too many volts during cranking. That meant that during hybrid assist they were doing the same and were too weak to supply the current for hybrid assist. I could have kicked myself at this point, because all I had to do was to put a big load on the pack to check this and I could have swapped the weak sticks for some better ones before I put it all back in the car. So we are where we are and I'm back to driving the car with the hybrid system switched off.

The Insight needs to be sold anyway, so I've got two options: sell it as is and hope someone wants to take it on without a working IMA battery and do it themselves, or replace the battery and sell it all working. What are people's opinions on this? I think the numbers are going to run something like this:

They don't come up for sale very often and that makes pricing difficult. There's been a couple of fresh imports on eBay for £8000 which is JOKES in my opinion. Way over the odds, deluded seller. I had a figure in my head it would be worth about £4500 with a working but original battery. There's a citrus one on eBay with a working battery for £5500 and a blue one on eBay with what sounds like a duff battery for £3500. I think that's a bit over the odds given it needs the battery sorting.

I think I'd be happy with £2750 or thereabouts for mine with the dead battery and that leaves the new owner a couple of options:

1. Take the pack back out and choose the 20 best sticks from the two packs by loading them up individually and checking the voltage on them. The car will be off the road for a few weeks while you do this. You'll need to cycle the pack a couple of times a year with my cycler to keep it healthy. This will be the cheapest option and you get a very cheap working Insight at the end, you just need to put the time into it.
2. Go and get another HCH pack (or all of them) from ASM and do the same. Best chance of getting 20 really good sticks if you've got multiple packs to choose them from and you'll be able to use the car at the same time with the hybrid system switched off.
3. Buy a new pack from Peter Perkins. Zero work required from yourself and you end up with a really good Insight at the going rate but with a brand new battery with a 3 year warranty that you won't have to cycle or anything. Just have it fitted and forget about it.

Any thoughts welcome, positive or negative.

[Dave_Q]

Well thought number 1 - thanks for the insight (lol) into futureshitin'. Quite reassuring that battery furtling is achievable for a DIYer, on the right kind of pack at least. 

On selling it, I reckon the general public and the common or garden car-flipper will still have the fear about battery-electro-business. 

Worth sticking a sale thread up here or on any 1 make forums, or perhaps an EV related youtuber would take it on as a project? As there must be a good series of videos available along the lines of "I tried fixing my own EV battery"

Otherwise to sell to the general public I think it needs a new battery, or the battery swapping work pre-done.

[Tickman]

If you can be arsed doing the new packs from the dismantles then sorting it that is your best outcome.

I believe if you get in touch with Honda they can give you a letter for the emissions which you submit to get ulez etc.

I need to do this for mine as it is an X reg so too early for the numbers to be there.

[jonny69]

15 minutes ago, Dave_Q said:

Well thought number 1 - thanks for the insight (lol) into futureshitin'. Quite reassuring that battery furtling is achievable for a DIYer, on the right kind of pack at least. 

On selling it, I reckon the general public and the common or garden car-flipper will still have the fear about battery-electro-business. 

Worth sticking a sale thread up here or on any 1 make forums, or perhaps an EV related youtuber would take it on as a project? As there must be a good series of videos available along the lines of "I tried fixing my own EV battery"

Otherwise to sell to the general public I think it needs a new battery, or the battery swapping work pre-done.

Thanks - all of that is exactly what I was thinking.

1 minute ago, Tickman said:

If you can be arsed doing the new packs from the dismantles then sorting it that is your best outcome.

I believe if you get in touch with Honda they can give you a letter for the emissions which you submit to get ulez etc.

I need to do this for mine as it is an X reg so too early for the numbers to be there.

I have completely run out of time to do it unfortunately. I need to transfer my insurance to another car but I'd want to at least put a few weeks of miles on the car to be able to comfortably tell the new owner the pack works fine.

You'll be able to get the letter from Honda for yours because it's a UK car - there's an example on Insightcentral that you can follow. I can't do it on mine because it's a pre-2006 Japanese import. Post-2006 imports are already exempted because the relevant information is on the V5. Pre-2006 are not automatically exempted and Honda couldn't access the relevant information like they can with the UK cars. It's annoying!

[Tickman]

That's very annoying for your car.

[LightBulbFun]

13 hours ago, jonny69 said:

You'll be able to get the letter from Honda for yours because it's a UK car - there's an example on Insightcentral that you can follow. I can't do it on mine because it's a pre-2006 Japanese import. Post-2006 imports are already exempted because the relevant information is on the V5. Pre-2006 are not automatically exempted and Honda couldn't access the relevant information like they can with the UK cars. It's annoying!

are you able to contact Honda in Japan about it? I wonder if they could cough up an emissions specifications letter?

 

[Asimo]

21 hours ago, jonny69 said:

Any thoughts welcome, positive or negative.

Does @Rust Collector still need a replacement for his Insight write-off ? 

[Rust Collector]

22 minutes ago, Asimo said:

Does @Rust Collector still need a replacement for his Insight write-off ? 

I do still need one, but this one is both over budget and also sounds like it's in too good a condition to pull apart to rebuild my one.

[Rust Collector]

@jonny69 I'd be really interested to know more about testing the sticks though as my pack needs rebuilding at some point!

[jonny69]

1 hour ago, Rust Collector said:

@jonny69 I'd be really interested to know more about testing the sticks though as my pack needs rebuilding at some point!

Do you have a grid charger fitted? If you have, have you discharge cycled the pack before?

[Rust Collector]

4 minutes ago, jonny69 said:

Do you have a grid charger fitted? If you have, have you discharge cycled the pack before?

Yes and yes 😅

[jonny69]

8 hours ago, LightBulbFun said:

are you able to contact Honda in Japan about it? I wonder if they could cough up an emissions specifications letter?

Honda UK gave me a phone number but I was put off by the language barrier. I tried to get in touch by other means but the Honda Japan site is in Japanese so I sort of gave up there. I guess it's technically possible, but TFL are pretty clear cut about the pre-2006 imports and I didn't want to bury too much more time into it. I haven't seen any examples yet where it's been done.