I have decided to sell my lovely FTO

I’ve decided that the time has come to sell my lovely FTO, so if you’re looking for a beautiful sports car for peanuts then carry on reading!

I’ve decided to sell because I feel I’m in a different phase of my life now, and while I’d be happy to have a weekend car, unfortunately this isn’t possible for me. I’ve had the car for just over three years, and in that time have driven it a fair bit, but relentlessly looked after it too, with little concern for cost.

Like any fifteen year old car, it has its supermarket dings, chips and spots of rust, but it still turns heads and pulls like a train. Mechanically it’s very sound, thanks to it being my hobby and me being a bit obsessive about looking after it.

So here are its details:

• 2001 Facelift Ralliart Mitsubishi FTO GPX in Passion Red
• Manual gearbox
• 17″ Wolfrace alloys
• mongoose stainless cat-back exhaust
• 197 BHP MIVEC Engine (193 on rolling road)
• Multipoint Stag LPG conversion
• 232,000 miles

I’ve done a million things to it to keep it running and have a rather thick pile of invoices for parts and services. I guess the highlights are:

• Major service (60K) done at Eurospec at 173K including cambelt
• Gearbox and clutch replaced two years ago.
• New inner and outer CV joints and covers fitted
• replaced downpipes
• Mongoose stainless cat-back exhaust with 4″ pipe
• LPG conversion done by Profess
• Front seats replaced with new leather/Racaro cloth versions
• MOT until September 2015
• Ferodo DS2500 front brake pads with refurbed calipers, braided hoses and discs fitted
• Mintex rear pads with new discs and braided hoses
• three brand new tyres with about 1k on them
• Tappets adjusted regularly
• New main and air con radiator
• all new strut top mounts
• obsessive servicing using best quality oil and filters
• throttle body refurbed
• inner and outer steering tie rods replaced including gators
• Full Hunter suspension alignment done regularly

I guess that’s the best of it all, now the bad points:

• 232,000 miles on the clock
• Lots of stone chips on paintwork at front
• Rear light cluster has moisture in it sometimes
• a couple of very small areas of rust on the rear chassis legs which i have treated
• some minor bubbling on the rear arches
• LPG runs a little rough when cold
• wheels need a refurb
• slight rattle from the rear passenger shock (could be something in the boot though!)

Other note worthy things for me to cover are that the LPG tank sits in the boot where the spare tyre was, I still have the spare tyre and jack, but don’t keep it in the boot, so carry a can of tyre weld. I will provide the USB cable for the LPG controller so you can make adjustments, or let Profess do their remote service. On LPG the 54l tank will give you about 310 miles and right now cost about £35 to fill up. You can always switch to petrol if you like, but for the most part performance is very similar.

Finally this is a beautiful car that will make you feel alive when you drive it, people will stop to watch you pass, and it’ll make you feel unique and show you the meaning of passion. It’s something special that’s for sure, and it’ll make you feel the same.

I’m asking just £1600 ono! Contact me using the form below if you’re interested.

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Here’s a load of pics!

The Dreaded MOT

New driveshafts with new outer CV joints and bellows all round

I thought I might regale my MOT experiences this year, as I think it shows how overconfidence and impatience can make your life go for the worse! On Monday 25th with a week left on the existing MOT, I took the old lady to Eurospec for a gearbox and drive shaft swap with an MOT.

They got the gearbox installed that day, but said the MOT will have to wait until tomorrow now, and they’d really like to drive it a bit more to test the gearbox, but me being rather eager said to them, don’t worry about the MOT, I’ll get it done at a place near me in Camberley on Wednesday and drove off happy as Larry

Replacement manual gearbox

This is where I went wrong, I was impatient to get it back because mine is cheaper to run than the courtesy car and I assumed the car would not need any major work and would pass its MOT!

So on Wednesday it failed on two counts, NS brake hose rubbing and rear OS outer bush having excessive movement, or “one of your rear bushes is knackered” as the tester put it. I asked which one, but the car was off the ramp so he described it to me, and I understood it to be the lower control arm outer bush.

The wrong lower arm! but it was very loose

When I got home, I found that it was in fact quite loose so thought, no problem I can replace that with some FTOOC help. 🙂 I also discovered that worriedly Eurospec has not fitted a clip holding the OS front brake hose in place, or a cotter pin on the same hub nut!

I went to Camskill’s site to order a whole new lower control arm, but found they were having a stock take and were closed! I rang Camskill to confirm delivery was possible, but it was engaged constantly, so ordered the part anyway and asked for express delivery for Friday. Finally after calling their Tyres department for clarification, I left a note explaining how irritating it was just taking the parts department’s phone off the hook to screen calls.

First thing the next day (Thursday) Camskill call me to tell me they don’t have the part in stock, they can get it by next Thursday after my MOT expires grrrr! So after it was suggested on the FTOOC, I contacted a local Mitsi dealer in Chertsey who says, yep no problem they’ll be here tomorrow morning including bolts and washers. I’m thinking why so long Camskill??

Nice new rear OS lower control arm

So on Friday I swing by the dealer and pick up the bits and then that evening in the rain, me and my daughter fit the part, which incidentally you really can only cut out using a junior hacksaw; an angle grinder is just too vicious! I adjust the brake hose and go to bed with a smile on my face.

The next day is Saturday and I have a pre booked appointment to have the OS front tyre replaced which has a flat spot.

At Total Tyres in Binfield, a great garage

Total Tyres do their usual sterling job while I sip a Latte in a café across the road, appropriately named “George’s” . I leave Total Tyres to get the MOT retest done and when I arrive I’m quickly and efficiently dealt with.

Moments later I’m shown the actual bush I was meant to have replaced, it’s the outer bush on the lower arm, and is very obviously knackered – how did I miss this?? So another fail!! I drive home not sure what to do, the MOT expires tomorrow and I need it for Monday to drive to work. The tester also pointed out a nail in my nice brand new tyre.

 

The OS rear lower arm outer bush, this was the one they meant!

Thing is though I can’t replace that bush, it needs pressing in, so rather sheepishly I ring Eurospec in desperation and ask if I can drop it in this afternoon and have a courtesy car :-). No courtesy car, but no problem taking a look at it on Monday if I want to drop it off today, so a friend drives there with me, and at the same time picks up the old gearbox and drive shafts from the earlier work. I’m taken back home, car less and confused about how I get to work.

Thankfully my girlfriend suggests I stay with her on Monday as she lives very near to a train station and very near to Eurospec, so on Monday I take the train in to work, bleh. I call Eurospec who explain they’ve ordered the bushes and will be fitted tomorrow. Yay!

Little Audi A1 1.6 Desiel, pretty pokey and very grateful to borrow it!

On Tuesday my girlfriend very kindly lends me her car, so my plan is to drive to work and after dropping it back at hers, get a lift to Eurospec to pick up my car, and if possible drive it to Camberley to have a retest. On my way back I get a call to say its ready, but traffic is bad so I revert to plan B which is to pick it up, drive it to hers, stay the night and then drive it directly to the test centre for the re-test first thing in the morning.

So I pick it up and first check that they’ve tidied up the couple of things they forgot to do after the gearbox swap, and then notice they’ve replaced all the bushes on both rear lower arms, including camber bolts, not something I asked them to do actually, I just wanted one bush done. But to be honest it’s not something I mind as such, so I settled up and drive away, just grateful they booked me in quickly and the work was done well.

Having a Hunter alignment at Hounslow Tyres, what a great place!

The following morning I drive to the test Centre and behold!! A pass is issued!! But the fun isn’t over quite yet, the suspension’s geometry is all to cock and I still have that puncture. I search for a garage in west London that does a hunter alignment and find Hounslow Tyres not too far away, so I turn up at 5pm, and am pleasantly surprised at what a nice garage it is, friendly people, good work and not too pricey. After some plane spotting I drive home with a smile and a car that is smooth and doesn’t pull to the left!

Now after reading all that, don’t you think it would have just been better if I had not been so impatient, and just left the car at Eurospec for the extra day? Sure they would have to had to order the parts, but I would have been all sorted by the end of the week, and I would have had their courtesy car too! Oh well you live and learn.

 

Simply Japanese at Beaulieu

Today was a great day out to the Simply Japanese event at the Beaulieu Motor Museum, I’d had my eye on going for a while, but as with any outdoor based event, I wasn’t sure if it would work out. As it happens, the day was a glorious sunny day, so after the usual homage to Autoglym products, we set off on the one hour drive.

We got there, and much to my surprise there was quite a good turn out, my last encounter with this kind of event at Beaulieu, was for Ford cars and while good, I got the impression that people where just taking advantage of the cheaper entry fee! I guess the Jap car scene is a bit more vibrant, my favourite car was the Supra!

Anyway, the old girl is looking good, and still turning heads, although it still feels a bit weird when people take pictures of your car, but here’s some I took:

 

 

I looked really hard but only found one other FTO, this tidy looking GPX that was hiding under a tree, if it’s yours then drop me a line!

Finally a special award should go to this handsome man and his toupee, well I suspect it was?

Blimey how much money??

I was just looking out for the paperwork for the LPG conversion I had done last year, so I could get the diameter of the tank they put in the boot. I want to accurately cut a hole in the boot floor, for it to poke up through. Well I looked at the miles logged at the time of conversion, which was at 201,000 and realised, wow I’ve driven over 20,000 miles in the last year!!

Quick as a flash I fired up a program I wrote called Petrol Planner that tells me how much money I’ve saved running on LPG, as well as other useful stuff like how much a journey will cost, or lets me work out how much fuel I’ll use for a month. Feverishly I checked the values for current LPG and petrol price, set to 69p a litre for LPG and 135p a litre for Tesco 99 ron petrol.

Look at the results!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So I’ve saved £1755.83 based on today’s prices, which is great! This doesn’t include the 15-20 litres of petrol I have to buy every month, which adds up to about £250 over a year. But all in I’ve saved £1500 roughly 🙂 The conversion cost £1200 so it’s definitely paid for itself now.

Mirror Mirror on the wall…

You know how sometimes you wake up in the morning, and then laboriously clean manicure and prune yourself using copious amounts of moisturiser, numerous hair products and eternal patience, until you feel like you’re somehow presentable to the outside world?

After all that, if you’ve ever walked past a shop window and seen yourself in the reflection and thought.. ooh looking good, then you’ll probably understand why I had to take this picture.

MIVEC and hydraulic tappets

A while ago I produced a walk-through on how to adjust the valve clearance on the FTO’s V6 MIVEC engine. While I was generally happy with what was covered, one thing was missing, which was servicing the twelve hydraulic tappets found in this engine that are part of Mitsubishi’s MIVEC .

To some it might be surprising to hear this engine has hydraulic tappets, people generally focus on the 24 fixed tappets as they’re the ones that often need adjusting, but it’s possible that that tap-tap-tap is a stuck MIVEC tappet, or the oil ways to it are being blocked, and I’d like to show you how easy it is to clean them.

To start you need to get the rocker covers off, and you can follow the valve clearance guide to do this. Once you’ve got them off, it should look something like this:

Firstly you can see the top of the hydraulic tappets to the left of the red arrows, they’re the little round things with a hole in the top, I’m sure there’s a more technical name like input shaft flange coupling for them, but there they are. If you want to, you can carefully screw a wood screw into the little hole and pull it up, which is a good way of seeing if it’s jammed up or not. You should be able to gently pull it up a little and then let it pull itself back down.

In the above picture we can see the bottom of the tappet, which rests against a tab coming off what’s called the MIVEC follower. I’m not going to pretend I know exactly how MIVEC works, although I probably should, but my brain is fried from spending the last three days researching how Hyper Threading works.

What I can tell you is that cleaning these is a good idea, and to do this you have to remove the cam caps holding them. If you look at the previous picture, you’ll see blue arrows pointing to the bolts holding the cam caps in place. Remove one cam cap at a time, and put it somewhere clean to work on:

 

In the above picture you can see the bottom of the hydraulic tappets, and also the oil ways inlaid in to the underside of the cam cap that feeds the tappets with oil. Removing the tappets is very easy, they just slide out.

In this picture you can see the tappets removed. First we’ll take a look at the oil ways and give them a clean, and then move on to the tappets.

You can see one of the holes feeding a tappet with oil is blocked, in fact this one had a small piece of what I assume is some kind of sealant lodged in it. A quick clean and all is good, just make sure you don’t damage the flat mating surfaces. Now we’ll tackle the tappets.

If you hold a tappet between your thumb and forefinger, you should be able to squeeze it a bit, how much depends on how strong you are, and how sludged up the tappet is. Watch out when you do this, as oil will squirt out of the little hole in the side. What we want to do is flush the inside of the tappet repeatedly with carb or brake cleaner, until it can be squeezed with less force or all the gunk has come out.

This is how I squeezed my tappets using a pair of pliers, I squirted cleaner in to the little hole, and then pumped the tappet until all the gunk came out. Rinse and repeat until squeaky clean. I have to say at this point, I think i should have inserted something soft between the pliers and tappets. There was no scoring or marks on the tappet from doing this, but you may feel more comfortable using some card or similar to protect the tappet.

 

Once you’re happy with how clean everything is, flush the tappet through with clean fresh oil by pumping it, and then prime the tappet by ensuring it’s filled with oil before fitting it back in to the cam cap. When you fit the cam cap back on, I thought it was a good idea to put a little oil on the areas that mate with the camshaft, so it’s not running without some lubrication.

A word of warning about replacing the cam caps, the cam cap on the far right is smaller than the other two. When I was refitting this one, and nipping up the bolt before being torqued correctly, I accidentally snapped one of its bolts.

 

Thankfully because it wasn’t driven fully home, it was fairly easy to remove using mole grips, but it was a scary half hour while I agonised over the best way to safely remove it.

After this I realised that because of the position of the engine in it’s cycle, when I went to refit this smaller cap and tighten the bolts up, I was having to compress the tappets too. This confused my ability to feel when I had fully tightened the bolt, to the point where after a while I was just stretching the bolt. The solution was to turn the engine over so that the cams were in a position where these particular tappets, were not under compression. I then torqued the bolts to the correct setting.

 

 

Where am I going to put the shopping?

I had the FTO converted to run on LPG about a year ago now and have reaped the benefits in running costs to point where I could probably no longer bring myself to buy petrol, and even the 20 litres a month i have to purchase are done begrudgingly. The other trade offs are power and boot space.

Quite a big boot really

The power loss is because LPG has a lower calorific value than petrol, which means it has less energy in it. Consequently when you go all hell-bent for leather, racing that Astra GTE off the lights, there’s just less grunt to make the engine go. The solution of course is to switch over to petrol for these moments, which is what i do. Not that I race other cars at the lights….much 😉

The side trays are missing

 

The other thing is that massive tank in the boot,to get it in there I had to dispense with the spare wheel, i will probably regret that one rainy day on the M3 but life is full of trade-off and compromises. Coupled with the boy-racer style sub woofer in there, my monthly trip to Tesco can be problematic.

 

 

When I had it converted, I raised the side trays and rear supporting bar for the floor so that it sat higher above the LPG tank. But doing this meant I could no longer stand up the seemingly vast collection of Bag for Life carrier bags I have, and had to precariusly lie them down on their side.

To address this I have put the side trays back in as they should be, so all that remains now is to cut the boot floor panel so the LPG tank pokes up through it, then cover it suitably and that should give me more space for all those big carrier bags!

 

Where the Magic Happens

Some of you reading this (or maybe there’s only you) might be wondering, where does this guy do all the work on his FTO? I might be revealing too much here, it’s an usual situation but it works, and proves you don’t need some fancy set up to do some major work on your car. All you need are the right tools for the job, nice neighbours and a place to put your cup of tea.

For me that place is a good friend’s garage, it helps that I partly own the house, and my kids live there too, but all the work I do is on the concrete driveway in front of the house. Sometimes I drive the nose of the car in to the garage when it’s cold and wet, which I like to do when adjusting the valve clearance, but really it’s just about finding the space and a piece of solid ground to work off.

So this is my corner of the garage, here are the tools and bits and bobs that I’ve gathered over time. My philosophy is that the money I save from doing the work myself, should easily cover the cost of buying the right tools I might need, and as time passes I find I need to buy fewer and fewer.

So it’s not much, but when you walk in there’s that old oily smell, and a sense of character from the strange collection of worn out relics dotted around, that you get in old garages and automotive museums like Beaulieu. These tell you there’s some history here, that’s lost to time. Except of course I know why I keep that snapped bolt, the odd shaped spanner, or the old number plates on the wall.

They’re priceless mementos of the things I did that were hard, incredibly rewarding but usually both, that form the soul of any enthusiast’s garage.

 

Running on Empty

You know there are some songs that are just great driving songs but at the same time seem so poignant? Well Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty is one that’s resonates with me right now. So when i hear that intro and hear the line Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels, I’m reminded of the countless hours spent feeling the road rolling under those wheels, and the moments in my life that I was driving to, or sometimes away from –  come to my mind like breaks on a grand tour.

Then it makes sense when along comes Gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive, yeah twenty thousand miles on that road is what it took, and I treasure everyone of them, crazy I know, but those were the times when I was driving to her and nothing else mattered.

But now, I don’t know when that road turned into the road I’m on, it seems like the right road, but there’s no one sitting across from me anymore, all that’s there are the memories of the happy times, that fade behind me as I speed away from the setting sun in to the night.

So now I’m driving on in to the night, and you know I don’t even know what I’m hoping to find, but maybe you can show me, and if it takes all night, that’ll be all right, just don’t hold back coz,  I’m running on empty

Apologies for ripping up this classic song

Bloody vandals!

I guess I’ve been lucky up to now with the FTO considering the places I’ve left it parked, so imagine my surprise when I returned to it at the end of the day to find it had been vandalised in the staff car park at work!

Shit happens as they say but this is a gated car park with CCTV and regular security patrols in Kew so i was surprised to find the door window trim on the passenger door had been partly ripped off.

Bleh so that’s another £20 I need to spend 😦 It could be worse though i guess.