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20XE retarded timing issue.


Skragmor
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Hi all,

My dad and I have just finished fitting a 20XE into our Manta but we have ran into a problem and so far we have not been able to fix it.

When we check the timing with the timing light it all seems to be working the opposite of how it is suppose to.
Instead of getting advanced timing we are getting retarted timing and the more you accelerate the more it retards it, all to an unhealthy level.
The car starts and runs it just overheats under load because of the combustion happening way too late.
We have checked the crank and the knocking sensor and they both seem to work fine, we even swapped them for spare ones we had.
There are no error codes coming up when checking the diagnostic ports.

It is the early dizzy type XE with Motronic 2.5. We checked the wiring with the multimeter to make sure that sensors are all connected and there are no severed wires but nothing abnormal here.

If anyone has any ideas it would be great as we have completly ran out of them haha.

Here is a picture of our bay for attention.

Many thanks,

Tel

 

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It looks very nice but that dizzy looks wrong for some reason. That may be giving the retarded ignition if the dizzy has been reversed for some reason?

is that a carb dizzy? Standard 1800?

can you bang a standard dizzy on it and see if it fixes it to check if it's a dizzy problem?

Edited by Kevin Abbott
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23 hours ago, Kevin Abbott said:

It looks very nice but that dizzy looks wrong for some reason. That may be giving the retarded ignition if the dizzy has been reversed for some reason?

is that a carb dizzy? Standard 1800?

can you bang a standard dizzy on it and see if it fixes it to check if it's a dizzy problem?

You are right to think that the dizzy is wrong as it is the 1.8 Manta dizzy housing but with the insides of the 20XE dizzy. As the standard 20XE dizzy goes on the back it doesn't have the small pulley on the front so we had to take the hall sensor and the trigger wheel out of the 20XE dizzy and mount it onto the Manta dizzy shaft and place it inside the housing while still using the Manta dizzy bearing.

On 18/08/2017 at 19:43, mantadoc said:

Set it using the maximum advance figure at appropriate rpm and see how that works out

When I try and move the dizzy with the engine running to give it advance or retard, it starts running badly, it only runs right in the normal position.
Or did I completely misunderstood you haha?

 

Thanks for the reply chaps, it has been a massive let down after working for a month solid to get to this point, it has to be something stupid and simple that we missed or did wrong!
Keep the ideas coming! Here's a few pictures of the build.

 

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Edited by Skragmor
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15 hours ago, Mickfrad said:

Great looking build. Would be nice to see some pics of the rest of the car.

mick

Thanks mate, yeah with pleasure.

My dad has owns the car since 1994, it started life as a 1.8 Guy Frequelin model. In 1999 it got a full respray and he fitted a 20SEH 8V engine and it was used regularly since.
Began the XE conversion in June this year except this time I was able to help and be a part of it too.   

This is it at Billing 2013:

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Previous conversion 20SEH:

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Edited by Skragmor
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12 hours ago, Kevin Abbott said:

Nice that. 

Why don't you join the club?

I was a member for a few years in the past and I will be again. My dad still owns the car at the moment but he is handing it down to me soon once the swap is complete, I will rejoin then permanently. 

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1 hour ago, Snowy said:

Have you actually run this engine before you did the conversion. In other words has it ever run properly for you?

No we didn't. We never hear it running but what I do know is that it's from a low mileage car and the engine itself is in great condition, you can see by looking at the cylinder walls and the condition of the head. Really is a cracking engine. 

We changed most things during the rebuild, including piston rings, water pump all belts, gaskets and core plugs.

After rebuilding it, it started on the button. Had absolutely no trouble getting it running. 

We are currently looking at the dizzy again as my dad transferred its insides into the Manta dizzy so there is room for error there obviously.

Can the ECU be faulty? Is that something that happens often? Not something I have encountered in the past. 

Thanks,

Tel

 

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Edited by Skragmor
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I am not sure if the light is a normal static light or not, I will have to ask me dad. The reason I say it's retarding is because when you have the light to the crank pulley and you accelerate the mark moves clockwise the more you accelerate and as far as I understand it it should be moving anticlockwise.

Cheers,

Tel

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41 minutes ago, mantadoc said:

That sounds correct.  Have you checked for internal assembly errors?

Shouldn't the ignition move counter to the direction of the engine to get advanced ignition? And move towards to direction of the engine to gate late ignition?
So if it move to the right it means timing is retarded  when under load and it should advance?

As far as we know we done everything fine during assembly. Everything was torqued right and the direction of parts going in was well looked at.
It is mostly standard inside apart from forged conrods and a lightened flywheel.

Yeah we are 

2 minutes ago, Snowy said:

Sounds like the dissy is the issue. But without knowing it was good to start with makes life that little bit harder.

If you have a standard 1800 manta dissy try that first.

Yeah we are looking at the dizzy again in the next few days. Standard Manta dizzy wouldn't work as the trigger wheel inside has 4 windows and XE one only has 1 which is why we had to put the XE insides into the Manta housing. As the trigger windows and hall sensor from the XE was placed onto the original Manta dizzy shaft you can lock it down where you want so we are going to check to make sure we did that right.

The strange thing is if you unplug the hall sensor cable the car still starts, which isn't a problem because it should go into limp mode but even then the timing is retarted the same way which makes me think that there is something else wrong. We have checked the timing several time, when piston 1 is at its highest everything is on the markings.

Thanks everyone for the ideas, hopefully in the next few days I will have some good news!

Tel

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Remember you are looking at the bottom of the dizzy when looking from the front of the engine.

It's a mechanical advance mechanism, so we have only two options, your measuring is in error, or the dizzy was assembled incorrectly.

Because I can't see what you see I would say go back to basics.

A static timing light is one that does not have a knob on to vary degrees.

 

 

My guess would be you dropped the top half of the dizzy shaft in the wrong side of the stops (statement may not be accurate)

Edited by mantadoc
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2 minutes ago, mantadoc said:

Remember you are looking at the bottom of the dizzy when looking from the front of the engine.

It's a mechanical advance mechanism, so we have only two options, your measuring is in error, or the dizzy was assembled incorrectly.

Because I can't see what you see I would say go back to basics.

A static timing light is one that does not have a knob on to vary degrees.

 

 

My guess would be you dropped the top half of the dizzy shaft in the wrong side of the stops (statement may not be accurate)

Ok then it isn't a static one as there is a knob on it. 

Yeah that is exactly what we gonna look at, whether we have put it to the right side of the stops or not!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ok well in the end everything is sorted! A chap let us come round and look at his XE engine to see where the trigger wheel is sitting in comparison to the hall sensor when the rotor arm is on cylinder one. Logically we thought that the window on the trigger wheel should be at the hall sensor when cylinder one is firing but how wrong we were! It actually sits way before the window but the main thing is that is is sorted now and runs like a dream with no overheating.

Thanks for all the replies and the help,

Tel

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7 hours ago, mantadoc said:

The mark on the Dizzy body you point the rotor arm to for static timing should have been the first clue.

But if you timed it with a timing light still should not have been an isse.

 

Still all fixed now

Remember that the dizzy body/housing is from a Manta 1.8 and the hall sensor and trigger wheel from an XE so we had to machine a special bit to be able  to mount the sensor and wheel onto the Manta dizzy shaft so it fits inside the housing so there was no marks to follow as it is custom. The timing is electronically done by the ECU and sensors so we couldn't really adjust timing but the starting point had to be right otherwise the ECU would make the timing go all over the place.

Yeah glad it's all sorted now!

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Sorry, just trying to understand, but the systems where the ECU does the timing don't (AFAIK) use mechanical advance, they often have a bigger rotor arm, and fixed shaft and the dizzy just distributes the spark and does not time.  There is no logical reason for an ECU that controls timing to take a signal from a mechanically advancing distributor. That was the jump in things like motronic 1.5, soon after people realised they could ditch the dizzy and go wasted spark.  Even with the dizzy rotor offset you said you timed it with a timing light so that negates that offset so I suspect something else w s done to fix rather than just timing, like making it static or reassembly causing the top half to be the other side of the stop.

It appears we are on crossed purposes and I just wanted to understand the issue and fix.

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Haha yeah I started to realise too that our wires were crossed! I will try and explain a little better!

The engine we fitted is a 20XE with Motronic 2.5 dizzy type. We didn't go carb and wanted to keep the original injection but because we didn't want to get rid of the heating in the Manta we decided to bring the distributor to the side of the engine using the 1.8 Manta dizzy bracket.
To do this we couldn't just use the XE distributor as the shaft on it doesn't have a pulley and the bearing in the XE dizzy is lubricated from holes in the camshaft as far as I know so we decided to gut the Manta dizzy and take the insides of the XE dizzy and mount them onto the Manta dizzy shaft and put it all inside the Manta dizzy body using the Manta shaft bearing.

I know the XE dizzy is supposed to be fixed so we wanted to set the rotor arm and the hall sensor the way it was originally and set it in stone.
The error on our part was that we didn't check how it was all sitting originally, just assuming that the hall sensor will be sitting at one of the sides of the stop when firing cylinder one but that is where we were wrong, it actually sits way before the stop and thanks to looking at an engine with the original dizzy we set the engine on the marks and checked where the hall sensor was sitting.

Because the sensor was sitting wrong and is electronically controlled it was confusing it and delaying the timing up to 35 degrees making it overheat a lot and not giving any error codes.

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I get you now, so fixed dizzy with no mechanical advance yes?

Looking at the chopper for the sensor they have 1 hole not 4 like on a Manta.  That essentially means, in my head, they are using it like a crank position sensor almost but only fires every other revolution?  If there is a crank sensor as well I would have no idea why they would do it that way, except to track camshaft position to indicate which cylinder is on firing stroke, but of course if using a dizzy cap the management has no need to know about which cylinder is on firing stroke.

Thanks for the explanation as I always like to understand the solution to a puzzle :)

 

Re the firing well before, when trigger wheels are used on cranks, the missing index tooth is well before TDC to give time to process the info and fire

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