djaychela

My sidelight switch was always hot in all 3 Felicias I've had long term. If there was high resistance in there, they wouldn't work; the heat is probably from the internal lamp that lights them up, perhaps the wrong wattage lamp in there? Swapping them is easy enough (if a bit fiddly to get them out), you can get S/H ones cheaply enough. Same goes for the fuse box, although I'd be very surprised if that was the problem. The £300 you've been quoted is a "go away, we're not interested in the job" price.

AFAIK the fuel feed is purely mechanical, sucked up by the diesel pump. Certainly when working on my Mum's one there was no sign of any electrical pump, the fuel needed sucking up from the tank and into the new fuel filter via a hand pump temporarily attached. If the car plays up when the fuel is low.... don't let it get low!

Have you waterproofed everything with silicone grease?

It was one of these, James: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/290684988050 I don't have any photos, did it in a bit of a hurry and didn't realise I'd made such a bad job of the pictures that I did take - it was back on the car beforehand. Making it fit was easy enough, just chopped the ends off the joint, measured length and position of the stick relative to the sleeve that goes over the gearbox selector (put a parallel pin punch in there for a locator), took photos of it and then chopped it out, welded the new one in - one end was butt welded, the other end the lever tube went inside the fiesta joint to a degree, seam welded it, strong as in the end!

It's usually the joint which is centred on part 32. I replaced the one in the rally car with a steering joint from a fiesta (£9 delivered), welded it in, it's really nice and precise now, better than any standard one I've felt, and probably last longer too.

These engines will NOT start with dead glow plugs. Check that the glow plugs are getting power, and if they are then check that they are OK. As said above, they are cheap enough to replace, if a bit fiddly. You can do them without removing the injector pipes if you have a couple of (12mm?) spanners with the right cranking on them. If the glow plugs are OK then you will of course still need a decent battery and the starter to be OK to get it going...

Tom's not been around for a while, last I heard he was very busy with work, but you could get it made up using the diagram he put on here - shouldn't be expensive to get it cut and welded as it's a beautifully simple design.

Shimming is indeed mandatory. Tapered bearings, etc...

If it's the MPI then it will definitely have it - it's on top of the bellhousing, about in line with the clutch lever, and right by the engine block. If you try to remove the gearbox without removing it, then the teeth of the flywheel will damage it, usually beyond use (some are plastic, some are metal - the plastic ones die very easily).

The pinch bolt for the bottom ball joint is often rusted in place - careful application of heat and penetrating fluid should get it out, but you'll need a new bolt (nothing special, I think M10 from a local bolt shop will do the trick). You don't need to undo the track rod ends - there is enough "swing" to get the outer CVs off without doing so. One less thing to go wrong. I forgot to put the gearbox mounts in the list - undo the rear one first (engine will swing forwards), and then undo the gearbox end mounting (2 bolts that are vertical, one from below, one from above - one has a lock nut). Obviously you'll need to support the engine when you do this, I've done it with a jack and a thick bit of wood in the past, or an engine support bar as well. What engine is your car? Dunno about a flywheel sensor on the 1.6 and I'm near certain there's not one on the diesel. 1.3 MPI and SPI have them though, they are at the top of the bellhousing, right next to the engine. 3-connector plug goes into it, it's held in place with a single M6 bolt.

As above, you will need to remove the bottom ball joints - there's no way to get the driveshafts out without doing this. You can then remove the inner CVs from the gearbox (although I always remove the outer CVs from the hubs as well as it makes working on the car a lot easier and is a piece of cake to do - lessens the chance of damaging anything, particularly the inner CVs when removing/replacing the gearbox as they are fragile and can be broken if you bend them too far (yes, I have done this!). You can remove the box without removing the gear linkage, but again it's fairly straightforward to do, just a small drift to drive the roll pin out, and an M6 bolt for the steady bar. Although the Felicia box isn't heavy (it's the lightest one I've come across in an FWD car), it's still best to make it as easy as possible to do as getting the input shaft aligned to the new clutch plate can be awkward sometimes, so the less stuff that's in the way of you doing that the better, IMO. So, in short - Drain gearbox oil. Remove driveshaft hub nuts, bottom ball joints, shafts out of hub, shafts out of gearbox. Remove steady bar and linkage. Remove starter motor, wiring to reverse light and oil pressure switch. Remove speedo cable. Remove earth cable/s. Remove flywheel sensor (not just the wiring, you'll break it if you leave it in place and try to move the gearbox). Remove plate under box by flywheel. Remove bolts, done. I may have missed some stuff, that's just from memory. HTH.

Last thing you'd want to do - petrol can attack some seals etc., inside, much worse than a tiny percentage of old oil being present.

Not very much. I wouldn't worry about it - leave it draining for 10 minutes and there will be next to none left in there. Contamination really isn't an issue - any swarf from wear is stuck inside the gearbox on a large magnet which can only be accessed when dismantling the gearbox - and the oil will be fine with the tiny amount that's left in there.

Yeah, could well be - certainly either way you need to go through all the basics as often problems like this are things that simple service items will fix... and unless you know 100% that they're OK then you need to go through them - many has been the time when people (including myself) have said "well, it can't be that...I only changed it 3 months ago", when it has been the problem.

That's a good video explaining it, but you have the wrong end of the stick - that's a Supertracker device, the STR1LCTR24, which is for sale here: http://www.jbsequipment.co.uk/newsite/index.php?cat=&page=Wheel%20Alignment It's about £2400.

If you convert it to MPi, that will be 50kW (on a 136, not a 135 engine). If you removed the cat you may get a bit more, and give you the 53kW you are looking for. There is a thread on here about it, you need all the injection and head, wiring, ECU, fuel pump, immobiliser and the flywheel (as the ECU uses the pattern on it for timing). Yes, it is hard to believe. Guy Croft really knows his stuff in terms of engines and flow, etc., but there are other areas he is not good in - he still believes that carbs are superior to mapped injection, which is just crazy. No-one is perfect, and no-one is logical in every sphere!

No worries The device I was talking about is this: http://www.gunson.co.uk/item.aspx?item=1812 You drive over it and the slip angle the wheel has is marked by the plate. I think the thing you are talking about is a more advanced setup, more like a pro tracking shop would use, such as these: http://www.tooled-up.com/Product.asp?PID=27047&Referrer=googleproductlisting&gclid=CKf4_cSwj7ICFUQLfAodA0cAKw Quite a bit more - about 10 times the price. The string method works perfectly though - you can get really good results with it if you're careful and after you've done it a couple of times it doesn't take long to set up.

If any part of the front suspension has been changed, it's possible that the steering geometry will be out, and given what you say, it's likely yours will need checking/adjustment. While in theory replacing a ball joint at the end of the wishbone shouldn't alter things much, production tolerances mean they usually do. On the Felicia there is only one angle which is adjustable as standard, and that is the toe in/out, which is adjusted using the threaded ball joints on the end of the steering rack. For measurement you can purchase devices which will tell you the setting (they are around £50 for a pair of drive-over plates which tell you the angle), or you can do it manually using a couple of different methods, either using string (which is a bit fiddly but very accurate), or by making marks on the tyres and measuring the difference across the car between those marks when the marks are at the front of the wheels and at the back by rolling the car forwards and backwards, but this takes a bit more maths (unless you have a car where you can make both measurements when the marks are at the same height as the centreline of the wheel which isn't the case on any car I know of, certainly not a Felicia). I have used string to set up the rally car on many an occasion and it's worked well (particularly as you want non-standard alignment on a competition car and trying to explain this to most people in garages is a waste of time). You can measure camber and caster fairly easily with a camber gauge - this is a spirit-level type device which you attach to the wheel (or the brake disc) and you can measure camber instantly and caster with some basic maths and the instructions given with the camber gauge. Neither setting is adjustable by default on the Felicia, so if they are off then you would need to find out why - usually due to accident damage or possibly damage to the wishbone when the ball joint was fitted by the mechanic (unlikely, but possible).

No problem. There are (not great) scans of the workshop manual for the Favorit box (which is the same as the early Felicia one and very similar to the later Felicia one) here: http://darrenjones.is-a-geek.com/~darren/pics/gearbox/ It details the shimming procedure but as I said above, you can do without the special tools if you make careful measurements using a DTI. I've not heard of a gearbox failing in the manner you describe, providing everything is bolted up. Worst I ever managed was to kill 2nd gear on a rally completely (in my Favorit), and had to drive it home unable to select 2nd at all, going from 1st to 3rd; made the 100 miles home "interesting", but it didn't let us down...

OK, got the sheet, thought I would reply on here as it's then searchable by the world if someone else wonders what the answer is/was. It's actually much more complex than the sheet you sent me, which also ignores the outflow (i.e. going into the engine) - that is a considerable volume of air which would flow out of any ram system. Rather than work it out from first principles, I did a bit of searching, and found an interesting post on the subject, which I'll copy and paste here: Doing the math, assuming no losses: pressure increase = 1/2 density speed ^2 pressure of air at sea level at 70 F = 14.696 lb / in^2 density of air at sea level at 70 F = .074887 lbmass / ft ^3 1 slug = 32.174 lb sec^2 / ft 1 foot = 12 inches density of air at sea level at 70 F = .000001346969 slug / in ^3 if speed is feet / sec pressure increase = 1/2 .000001346969 (slug / in ^3) speed ^2 (ft^2/sec^2) 1 slug = 32.174 lb sec^2 / ft pressure increase = 1/2 .000001346969 (lb sec^2 / (ft in ^3)) speed ^2 (ft^2/sec^2) pressure increase = 1/2 .000001346969 (lb / in ^3) speed ^2 (ft) 1 foot = 12 inches pressure increase = 1/2 .000001346969 12 (lb / in ^2) speed ^2 pressure increase = .00000808181 (lb / in ^2) speed ^2 1 kph = 0.621371192 mph = .9113444 ft / sec at 100kph, pressure increase = 0.067123 lb / in^2, less than 1/2% increase To check the math, I compared with an article on ram air: 150mph = 220 ft / sec, and pressure increase = 0.391160 (2.66% increase) 1 psi = 68.948 mb (millibar) 150mph, pressure increase = 26.97 mb The article to which he's referring is this one (coincidentally which is from a sport bike website, where I know there was lots of "promise" for ram air inlets initially and then someone did the maths - I believe it was the excellent John Robinson in Performance Bikes magazine when I first read about it - and showed that the gains were nowhere what people had thought). http://www.sportrider.com/tech/146_9910_ram/index.html As can be seen in the second part of the article, there is a small boost there, but most of those gains don't happen until relatively high speed (over 80mph in most cases), and these are worth a few percent of power gains for a correctly-mapped engine; clearly worthwhile at high speed (and in some cases it took well over 100mph before any gains were seen), but it would take careful design to achieve. Not to say that it's not worth doing at all, but your original maths was miles out - you won't even get 1psi (0.069 bar), let alone the 20+bar (290psi+) you were talking of originally. For the record (and from your email!), you're not making me angry, i think i come across like that sometimes, but I'm just writing what I think, and don't want you to waste loads of time doing something which won't work - you'll get far more from decent head, inlet and exhaust than you ever would from a ram air system.

You can dismantle the gearbox with only standard workshop tools. You won't need a press to service the input shaft, you can remove the bearings and the races with a hammer and drift or a small puller for the bearings (I did mine without, several times). The input shaft bearing clearance needs to be very small (around 0.01mm) which is easily measured using a DTI with the box being dummy-built. I had to make a shim up for mine when I fitted the new gearset, easily made from shim steel using scissors. The diff bearings are similar - the Skoda workshop manual shows a tool set for spacing the gearbox cases apart and then allowing measurements to be made, but it's quite possible to do it without them and with careful measurement. The diff bearings are an odd size but any large bearing shop will have them. The input shaft bearings are common, off the shelf items. The intermediate shaft bearings are both bespoke, but I've never had any trouble with them on any of my boxes; the outer one is easily replaced, but the inner (engine end) one is less so, but not impossible. The most difficult part is assembling the cluster into the box, but once you've done it a couple of times it's easy. In response to your original question, there's no way to tell if there's immediate danger - it could be anything that's wrong, and without taking it apart, it's almost impossible to know.

Yes, as was said in the thread. Externally, physically the heads are identical - everything from each will fit the other. Fitting the MPi gear and management to your existing engine will be fine, and probably the way to go if you intend on tuning it at some point. Actually, one thing I'm not 100% on is the flywheel pattern - I'm not sure what the flywheel pickup (sensor) pattern is on the SPI models, so worth checking that before getting it all apart and then finding out it won't run!

I would definitely say it was input shaft-related; it has tapered bearings on there which have to be set precisely and if not the gearbox will be noisy (I've built a few, and also made some mistakes!). If it only does it when it's cold it does sound like that, and when it warms up the clearances are changing. The problem is that the only way to be sure is to remove and strip the gearbox. There is a magnet inside the gearbox case to collect debris; it is not accessible without stripping the gearbox (it is by the differential, seen oh the extreme left of the your picture).

Does it make this sound only when you are stationary, or also when on the move? Are there any other noises?

You can mail me the sheet to djaychela (at) hotmail (dot) com.