Westfield SVA - 22nd July 2003- Westfield SEi 2.0l on twin 45's
by Glen Elliott
I have had sleepless nights before, for example, the night before my daughter was born. However I was less nervous that night than the night before the dreaded SVA.
The evening before I checked over the car but I was convinced that I had missed something. I checked all the fluid including diff oil! I checked the cockpit again for edges. I checked that all of the suspension nuts and bolts were tight and covers were secure. And all of the instruments were functioning. What else could go wrong on a car that had done 3 miles, so off to bed.Somehow, I managed to catch four hours sleep and I was out of bed and on the road by 5 am and heading east for Llantrisant test station. Ten minutes into my journey and things started to go wrong.
The rev counter got stuck at 5000 rpm and the coolant temperature was intermittently swinging from 90 oC to zero and back again. I pulled over and sat still listening to the engine which sounded fine. Well, bonnet off and time for a quick check. The thermister appeared to still be well earthed. Incidentally, the thermostat housing on the Zetec is not made of a conductive material so you need to earth the thermister on to the block. Very strange. Still the fan was controlled from a switch on the rad and the engine management had a separate probe which goes in to the top of the housing. The probe for the rev counter was still intact with no sign of heat damage from the exhaust pipe and was connected to the engine management.Well I thought I would head up the road and see if the engine continued to operate ok. Three miles down the road and I realised that I had accidentally pressed the max rpm button. This is a 'feature' with the Dunnell black box. Suddenly I had sensible engine revs again. Phew!
The journey was quite enjoyable from then. So early in the morning with the road empty, it was difficult to not have a dirty great big grin on my face. Of course that soon got wiped off my face as I passed the headquarters of the DVLA and the heavens opened. Oh the joy of open top motoring.Still I had good water proofs on so no bother. Incidentally as the rain came down, the temperature gauge intermittently came alive to show that the engine was still at 90oC.
Finally I arrived at the centre at 7 am for my 8am appointment. A couple of the inspectors were going 'on safari' to catch naughty lorry drivers and so I was let in to the test centre early. I still couldn't find the problem with the temperature gauge but did have time to check that the car self centred properly which must have looked like I was trying to do donuts around the yard!At 7:50, the rain I had driven through caught up with me and a friendly inspector opened up the doors to the test lane and waved me in.After allowing me to clear the car of tools and waterproofs, the test began. The first test was the emissions test. The inspector asked what engine I had and how old it was. I duly opened my brief case and produced a letter from Mr Ford informing him that my engine was made in April 1997. I deliberately left my copy of the yellow SVA manual in full view of the inspector. Perhaps mind games work and perhaps they don't, but it doesn't hurt to let the inspector know that he has to prove every fail point.
Two and a half hours in to the test and the inspector had still not found anything that couldn't be fixed on the spot. With glee, he looked up from the pedal inspection panel and found one nut a bit loose. The engine had been running for a long time but I wasn't overly concerned as the fan seemed to the kicking in and out ok. Then we were ready for the final three tests - the dynamic brake test, the self centring steering test and the noise test.
The dynamic brake test is completed after each brake has been separately tested. The test involves the inspector driving down a short track and throwing out the anchor while another inspector watches to ensure that the front brake locks up before the rear brakes. The fronts locked up first....just. The self steering test is a check to ensure that the steering will centre if left untouched. To complete the test the steering wheel is turned first full left and the car is driven forward without touching the steering wheel. Then it is repeated for the right hand side. If you go in circles, you fail and if the inspector judges that it hasn't centred fast enough, you fail. An easy pass this time. The noise check is quite simple. A noise meter is placed about half metre from the exhaust at a 45o angle. If more that 101 dBa is recorded when the engine revs are at ¾ max power rpm then you fail. For the Zetec, the max power is at about 6000 rpm so I had to try to hold the revs constant at 4500 rpm. The problem was that the engine seemed to be excessively popping at the exhaust. The pops at the exhaust were sending the noise levels sky high. Clearly the car wasn't at its happiest. Then boiling hot coolant jetted forward over 6 feet from the nose cone and a cloud of steam drifted past us! Fortunately no one was in the way of the boiling hot geyser and my heart was pounding as I turned off the engine. I suspected that the high heat of the engine ( it had been running for a bit over an hour without barely any movement) had caused the inlet hose to slip and coolant to be pumped on the road. But unfortunately when the block had sufficiently cooled to allow some water to be put in to the system, it turned out that the radiator had burst. The rad is from a mark II Golf and it has an alloy core with plastic side tanks. The gasket had failed between the matrix and the inlet tank. So after 4 and a half hours of testing that was the end of the first attempt at SVA with a fall at the final post. To top it all the RAC wouldn't recover the car as it had broken down in the test centre and not on the road. However the inspectors were great and let me store the car in the unused motor bike SVA test building.
The following week I returned and fitted a new rad courtesy of Tony Kirk. Second time around, she passed the noise test with a low of 96.5 dBa. Luckily he didn't query the louder induction noise. Incidentally, the fault temperature reading was due to a connection having come loose on the back of the gauge. How come electrical problems seem obvious when you find them?At 10am on 1st August 2003, a yellow and blue Westfield was born registered to a proud father builder. The whole project took from May 2002 to the 1st August 2003 to becoming a road legal car. Perhaps not the quickest build in history but certainly an interesting journey.