Cantanko

I’ve finally got round to flushing out the cooling system on the ‘cruiser before changing the radiator (it’s on the list of to-do’s before my trip next year) so seeing as the weather was particularly nice, I decided to give it a go.

Various bits were purchased:

• New radiator
• 10 litres of red Toyota “For Life” coolant
• Holts RadFlush 2-part cooling system cleaner

First things first – get the crap that claims to be coolant out of the system. I had to remove the bash plate immediately behind the front chassis crossmember to get to the radiator’s drain plug. You can just about reach it from the top, but it’s easier to sheer off the bolts on the plate than it is to squeeze your arm down between the radiator cowel, block and battery holder.

I drained the muddy red coolant, then refilled with fresh water, ran the truck until it was warm, then drained it again.

I wasn’t in any particular hurry to get this done as I had other things to get on with, hence allowing it to back-drain through the thermostat was quick enough. If 20 minutes per drain is too tedious, just remove the thermostat housing (it’s in the lower hose, reasonably easy to get to from underneath) and it’ll drain in seconds!

On the refill, I stuck in the first bottle of radflush, then refilled with hot water (the engine was hot at this point, so it’s a bad plan to fill with cold water – I guess it could concievably crack the head due to differential contraction).

The radflush is a two-part deal – part one supposedly dissolves limescale and crud in the waterways, part two neutralises part one and “adds a protective layer to the cooling system to prevent further corrosion”. Uh, OK…

Following the directions, the truck was run at fast-idle for a half-hour. I got bored here, so I shot a bit of video on my phone as I didn’t want to leave it running unattended. It’s boring, but it gives you an idea of what was going on. The engine’s running at approx. 1800RPM.

After this, the gunge that was drained out was quite impressive:

After this the system was flushed with plain water a couple of times, then part two added, then flushed a couple of times again, then left to drain. That’s where I’ve got to so far – part two will include the radiator change itself

After much gnashing of teeth, I have a working OpenRD box!

It is, of course, running Gentoo and a rather bastardised kernel mashup as currently there’s very little official support for the “ultimate” version of the OpenRD platform.

Just to prove that it’s alive:

# dmesg                                                                                                                                                                                   
Linux version 2.6.33-rc8-00099-g31a2de0-dirty (hcs@cantanko) (gcc version 4.4.3 (Gentoo 4.4.3-r2 p1.2) ) #8 Thu Jun 3 01:53:33 BST 2010                                                                 
CPU: Feroceon 88FR131 [56251311] revision 1 (ARMv5TE), cr=00053177                                                                                                                                      
CPU: VIVT data cache, VIVT instruction cache                                                                                                                                                            
Machine: Marvell OpenRD Client Board                                                                                                                                                                    
Memory policy: ECC disabled, Data cache writeback                                                                                                                                                       
On node 0 totalpages: 131072                                                                                                                                                                            
free_area_init_node: node 0, pgdat c0686c78, node_mem_map c0743000                                                                                                                                      
 Normal zone: 1024 pages used for memmap                                                                                                                                                               
 Normal zone: 0 pages reserved                                                                                                                                                                         
 Normal zone: 130048 pages, LIFO batch:31                                                                                                                                                              
Built 1 zonelists in Zone order, mobility grouping on.  Total pages: 130048                                                                                                                             
Kernel command line: console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda3                                                                                                                                                
PID hash table entries: 2048 (order: 1, 8192 bytes)                                                                                                                                                     
Dentry cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes)                                                                                                                                         
Inode-cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)                                                                                                                                          
Memory: 256MB 256MB = 512MB total                                                                                                                                                                       
Memory: 512128KB available (6092K code, 977K data, 164K init, 0K highmem)                                                                                                                               
SLUB: Genslabs=11, HWalign=32, Order=0-3, MinObjects=0, CPUs=1, Nodes=1                                                                                                                                 
Hierarchical RCU implementation.                                                                                                                                                                        
NR_IRQS:114                                                                                                                                                                                             
Console: colour dummy device 80x30                                                                                                                                                                      
Calibrating delay loop... 1199.30 BogoMIPS (lpj=5996544)                                                                                                                                                
Mount-cache hash table entries: 512                                                                                                                                                                     
CPU: Testing write buffer coherency: ok                                                                                                                                                                 
xor: measuring software checksum speed                                                                                                                                                                  
 arm4regs  :  1090.000 MB/sec                                                                                                                                                                         
 8regs     :   787.200 MB/sec                                                                                                                                                                         
 32regs    :   996.400 MB/sec                                                                                                                                                                         
xor: using function: arm4regs (1090.000 MB/sec)                                                                                                                                                         
NET: Registered protocol family 16                                                                                                                                                                      
Kirkwood: MV88F6281-A0, TCLK=200000000.                                                                                                                                                                 
Feroceon L2: Enabling L2                                                                                                                                                                                
Feroceon L2: Cache support initialised.

And CPU info:

# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 1199.30
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
CPU implementer : 0x56
CPU architecture: 5TE
CPU variant     : 0x2
CPU part        : 0x131
CPU revision    : 1

Hardware        : Marvell OpenRD Client Board
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000

The primary resources were a kernel build post on the OpenRD Google Group, help from a really obliging chap on the PlugComputer forums that helped me fix my uBoot ethernet issues and the Gentoo SheevaPlug install guide (it’s near enough to a SheevaPlug to be very useful).

There’s also a bit more about ethernet gubbins in an OpenRD-Ultimate post on the Google Group, and general musings from me on the Gentoo Forums.

I took delivery of a new toy today: it’s an ARM-5 powered development platform known as OpenRD that gives you a 1.2GHz ARM-5 CPU, 512MB RAM, 512MB flash, a MicroSD card slot, internal SATA drive mounting point, eSATA, dual gigabit ethernet, 7 USB ports etc…

I currently have a couple of machines that are on 24/7, doing things such as monitoring UPSs, CCTV, backups and various other menial-yet-essential tasks. I figure that given a little patience, most (if not all) of these functions can be migrated on to this ARM box. Why? Well, it draws approximately one 30th of the power my current always-on machine does. I’ve thought about building a low power machine before, but all reduced power consumption to perhaps 40 or 50 watts. To get it down into single figures makes the savings appreciable, and hence I figured it was worth a pop.

I bought mine from NewIT for just under £200 inc. VAT and delivery. While this is steep compared to a vanilla PC, at least some of this should be offset by the reduced power consumption, plus the smug factor of knowing I’ve reduced my power usage by a deal.

A few photos follow – once I’ve got a stable build mechanism for installing the OS, I’ll post my findings here as well.

I had to stick this somewhere as it is so visually impressive – kinda puts my experiments with Tesla coils into perspective!

There’s a site that has the high res stills here. The site can be seen on Go0gle Maps here.

The Celica came up with an interestingly malady recently: for a couple of weeks I noticed that it had developed a quiet little ticking noise from the top end somewhere. Initially I thought it was just cam and / or valve wear, but towards the end of last week the noise became more pronounced and hence I stopped driving it until I had some time to take a look.

In the mean time I had a quick rummage around on the GT4OC web site to see if anyone else had experienced a similar thing, and interestingly they had.

It would appear the 3S-GTE engine has a habit of unscrewing its spark plugs over a period of a few thousand miles and, if you don’t catch it in time, can result in it blowing the plug clean out of the head! The ticking noise I was hearing was the number-three plug jiggling around under each power stroke. I’d torqued the plugs to Toyota specs when they were last changed, but it would appear that they need retourquing every 20,000 miles or so…

While I had the charge cooler off I decided to torque the other plugs down again as well, and bugger me if they all weren’t just finger-tight!

I’ve never heard of an engine trying to unscrew its own spark plugs before now: you learn something every day

My auto box has a problem unlike any auto I’ve worked with before. When warm and in D, 2 or L, if you mash the throttle the box can’t hold on to first and jumps  into second. I noticed this problem when I test drove the car and to be honest it doesn’t tend to cause a problem given my rather relaxed driving style in the ‘Cruiser, but it can be annoying.

If you’re gentle, it’ll hold first and progress through all four ranges as you’d expect. Stamp on it and first becomes anathema to it – it’s almost like an anti-kickdown

So, simple things first: check the throttle / TV cable. If it’s disconnected or loose not only would it be slipping (the cable regulates box line pressure, dictating how much force is applied to the clutch packs) but it would also be very premature in its shift points.

Once out of first the box behaves impeccably and hence I couldn’t believe that was the problem. It wasn’t – the cable was correctly adjusted. Winding the adjuster on some more to pull the cable further just firmed up the shifts and if anything caused the first gear issue to get worse. Hmm…

In perusing around the interpipe I found that Julian from Overland Cruisers is a dealer for Wholesale Automatic Transmissions who do various uprated solutions for the A442F, most notably their A442F extreme rebuild. Whilst I feel the entire package is a bit overkill, the extreme valve body on its own adds various benefits such as allowing lock-up in the top three gears as well as providing firmer shifts and applying greater pressure to the clutch packs. If it turns out to be a real valve body issue, I reckon the extreme valve body could be a neat way of both fixing the problem and providing a stronger box. Julian’s prices are good for these, so if you’re interested I’d get in touch with him

Anyway, back to diagnosing what’s going on with my box. The factory service manual is quite verbose here in how to narrow down the myriad possibilities, but it doesn’t directly cover my symptoms in any of the various flow charts. Following are the various check I’ve undertaken and the order in which I performed them:

1 – Fluid change

My past experience with auto boxes has proven two things, firstly that correct fluid level is critical, and secondly that more often than not they tend to be forgotten when servicing the rest of the vehicle, usually because they tend to be very reliable.

My car was no exception with respect to the second point: although the fluid had been topped up, when I took ownership of the car the fluid wasn’t quite as cherry red as it should have been. So, first thing – change the fluid.

Doing a fluid change on an auto is easy but not a one-step operation: the hydraulic system holds approximately 15 litres of ATF, but only six litres of that will drain out in one go. As a consequence (and without resorting to various levels of disassembly!) the best you can do is perform a couple of changes and hence dilute the old fluid with new. The procedure I undertook was as follows:

• Take the car for a bit of a drive round to get the fluid warm: ensure the temperature gauge is in the middle of the range. Conveniently I have quite a few steep hills within a couple of minutes of my front door, so a couple of trips up and down those soon get the vehicle up to temperature.
• Apply the hand brake, stick the transmission in park and kill the engine.
• Shove a bowl under the transmission oil pan and remove the drain plug.
• Leave it for a few minutes to drain down. It might be worth moving the shift lever through all of the ranges to see if it drains any more fluid out of the various pistons and clutch packs, however I’m unable to confirm if this has any effect or not as I was on my own when doing this operation. I figured it couldn’t hurt
• After the majority of the fluid has drained out, replace the sump plug. Take your bowl of used ATF and roughly measure how much fluid you collected.
• Refill the transmission with as much new ATF fluid as you drained out. A small funnel stuffed into the transmission dipstick tube appears to be the accepted way to replace the fluid.
• Start the engine and firmly apply the footbrake. Move the gearshift through each of the ranges, pausing for a few seconds in each to allow all of the fluid passages in the valve body to refill. Finally, move the shifter back to neutral and leave the engine running.
• Check the transmission fluid level with the dipstick. As the transmission is at an indeterminate temperature, you can’t really rely on either the ‘hot’ or ‘cold’ marks – you just have to trust your measurements were vaguely accurate
• Go for another drive again to get the tranny back up to operating temperature, but pay attention to how it feels. It might be worth taking some fluid with you in case you feel it slipping (which is usually caused by a low fluid level).
• Once warmed up again, repeat the above procedure.
• After two changes, do another drive round, but this time perform another level check. As the fluid is now warmed up, you should be able to trust the ‘hot’ mark. Make sure you top it up to the top of the ‘hot’ range.

Once all that was done, I went for another drive round and tried mashing the throttle from a standstill. Unfortunately, there was no difference whatsoever in the box’s behaviour and it jumped straight into second again. Not something very simple, then…

2 – Gear shift link check

Apparently one of the things that can cause first gear not to be held (at least in position ‘L’) is a badly adjusted shift linkage. There’s a neat little procedure on LCOOL explaining how to check and adjust this – it’s essentially lifted from the service manual, however it has been annotated in places.

After checking this again there was no change. Worth a try though…

3 – Line pressure (TV) cable adjustment

Easy enough to check: with the TV cable connected to the throttle linkage and the throttle at idle, make sure the following adjustment is as pictured below:

At idle, check the cable adjustment

4 – Throttle position sensor

The TPS check is a nice easy test, requiring just a multimeter.

Locate the ECT diagnostics port – it’s attached to the bulkhead to the right of the engine. Flip open the cap and attach the multimeter as follows:

Attach a multimeter to Tt and E1 to test the TPS

Switch on the ignition (but don’t start the engine!), then grab the throttle linkage and slowly move it from idle to flat out. The reading on the multimeter should increase in a series of steps:

As the throttle is opened, the voltage should increase in steps

If the voltage leaps around as the throttle is opened, it’s probably either a dirty or defective TPS. If not enough steps are read, consider that the TPS may be misadjusted.

Again, unfortunately, mine was behaving fine and was correctly adjusted, so on to the next test…

5 – Mechanical shifting test

This one is quite entertaining as it involves putting the box under full manual control, and is again quite easy to do. The idea here is that you remove all electrical inputs to the box and rely instead on the shift lever to change ranges. Without the ECU providing drive to the solenoids, only first, second and fourth are available and no automatic shifting will take place. If, however, all of the ranges engage correctly, this to a large extent rules out malfunction of the gearbox mechanics.

So – the procedure:

• Engine off, handbrake on, gearbox in Park
• Under the passenger side of the vehicle, locate the solenoid harness connector (approximately half-way up and half-way along the gearbox). Push in the locktab and remove the connector.
• Go for a drive Reverse should work correctly, however forward ranges are now completely under driver control:
  • ‘L’ gives you first
  • ’2′ gives you third
  • ‘D’ gives you fourth (overdrive)
• Check that each range works correctly, but remember that there will be no torque converter lock-up over 40MPH and as a consequence be mindful that you don’t overheat the transmission by maintaining high speeds (> 50MPH) for any period of time.

Success! The transmission behaved correctly, and it was incredibly pleasant to experience full-throttle first gear from a standing start The box held first quite happily without any fuss whatsoever. Based on this, I’ve either got an electrical issue with the ECU or a malfunctioning shift solenoid. This is good as, on the scale from “expensive” to “f***ing expensive”, it would appear we are on the lower end

Conclusions so far

Well – it would appear that it is not a core gearbox problem but something on the periphery, namely the electronic control system or the valves directly connected to it.

My next step is to test the solenoids. I’m sure they’re working otherwise two of the four gears would be completely absent, but it feels as if one of them either isn’t opening or closing completely allowing fluid to pass, especially at higher line pressures – i.e. when the throttle is pressed harder. In the FSM there is a convenient table:

Solenoid malfunction table

Based on this, if solenoid 2 leaks in any range when 1 should be on and 2 off, this will result in second gear. This looks like a good suspect

So – next job is to create a bit of a test harness to see how the box behaves under manual control. As it stands it’s late and I’m knackered – I think I’ll have a play with this at the weekend…

Wound up parking next to a 100-series today in Derby – the 100 is certainly a more modern look, but I still quite like the 80′s brickishness… Has to be said I quite like the 100′s alloys, but I’m not convinced they’d put up with the magnitude of the potholes round where I live

My 80 parked next to a 100

Got the calipers serviced today – of the eight pistons, only one was seized and even then not badly. A bit of pounding with a hammer and an aluminium drift had it freed up in ten minutes or so, with most of the time spent cleaning out the calipers themselves, all of the oilways, seal seats and piston faces.

There was a bit of tarnishing on the pistons but not enough to cause either seal damage or concern, however I will probably change the pistons out next year – it’s been put into the maintenance schedule so I don’t forget

I’ve done about sixty miles on the new discs and they appear to be bedding in very well. There are no fluid leaks that I can find and it stops straight and true, rather unlike the way it did before the service!

All in all, quite a successful outcome

I picked up the caliper service parts from Inchcape Derby today – not bad considering the parts were only ordered Wednesday. So far, they’ve always managed to get me bits and pieces for the truck within 48 hours, which does make the sometimes scary prices a little easier to swallow!

The parts I received are as follows:

• Seal kit (04479-60020), comprising of
  • 8 piston O-rings
  • 8 piston boots
  • 8 boot securing circlips
  • 4 copper washers for hydraulic union
  • 2 bleed nipple dust caps
  • sachet of piston grease
• 2 bleed nipples (47547-20030)
• 2 copper hydraulic union bolts (90401-10015)

I figured that as I had the whole thing to bits it would be sensible to swap out all the bits that will invariably have got chewed up over time like the union bolts and bleed nipples, not to mention the fact that I can almost guarantee I’ll sheer something whilst pulling it to bits.

I also picked up five liters of DOT4 brake fluid and some of that brake cleaner spray stuff from Halfords – I’ll flush the brake hydraulics while I’m at it as previously I’ve found seized pistons are as often as not caused by water in the fluid as well as water on the outside of the caliper assembly, and for whatever reason people always seem to not bother flushing brake lines. It’s always quite nice working on a vehicle with ABS as the pump will happily shove the fluid through the lines for you.

Considering that one piston is rather well seized I’m not yet convinced I’ll be able to rescue one of the calipers. If it’s too far gone it’ll go in the bin and have a new one fitted, but if it’s reasonable I tend to find little service jobs like this quite therapeutic

Photos of the service parts:

Well – it’s that time of year again: my Celica’s air con is starting to smell a bit like a wet dog. If you can’t be bothered to clean your air con “properly” (i.e. depressurising the A/C system, removing ungodly amounts of dashboard and trim etc) this approach might be of some use to you. I was certainly pleasantly surprised with how good the results were!

You will need:

• An old vegetable steamer, kettle or similar
• Dettol
• 1 Can of air-con cleaner

Time required: approx. 40 minutes.

Method

1. Take your old vegetable steamer and discard all of the silly cooking stuff that normally lives on top of it.
2. Fill it up to its maximum level with boiling water and add half a cap of Dettol.
3. Place the steamer in whichever footwell your car’s recirculating air intake resides. Mine was in the passenger footwell.
4. Start the engine, switch on the air con, turn the temperature to its coldest setting, switch the fans to top speed, set the ventilation to windscreen demist and set the air to the recirculate position.
   

   Settings for air con when running steamer

5. Switch on the steamer. You should see all of the steam being sucked quickly under the dashboard.
   

   Steamer doing its thing - steam sucked up under dash

6. Let the system run like this for about 15 to 20 minutes. I had to refill the steamer about half way through. The steamer managed to boil nearly two litres of water during this time!
7. While this is going on, check that no steam is making it to the windscreen: If your air con is working properly the screen should stay perfectly clear. All of the water should be collected in the air con system’s condenser and end up as a puddle of water under the car. If steam does make it to the windscreen, turn down the steamer a bit and consider having your air con system checked
   

   All of the steam should condense and end up under the car

8. After 20 minutes has elapsed, switch off the steamer and remove it from the footwell.
9. Set the system to take in fresh air rather than recirculate. Turn the temperature up to maximum and switch off the air con. Open the windows and let the moisture evaporate from the air con condenser (approx 5 mins).
10. Close the windows and set the system back into the state it was in step 4.
11. Follow the instructions that come with the can of air con cleaner – usually place the can behind the front passenger seat and activate. Close the doors (and stay OUT of the car – the air con cleaner is toxic!) and let the system run for another 10 minutes, allowing the air con cleaner to circulate within the car.
    

    Air con "bug bomb"-style aerosol

12. When done, open the doors and windows to ventilate the vehicle, again being careful not to inhale the gas.
13. Try your new air con! You’ll probably find its now colder and fresher smelling than it has been for a while