Injection!

One more thing I gathered during the winter of 1997/1998 was a camshaft - a Kent Cams RL22 is really a little bit too hot for a street engine, but what the heck... This camshaft needs a way to get more fuel - twin Weber 40's or 45's are the common way to go. The thing is, these are quite pricey in Sweden, even used, so the thought of fuel injection (FI) became stronger.

I got hold of a Sierra electronic fuel injection (EFI), that I thought would work, but according to the Haynes manual, I would need an EFI engine block to get it done properly (now I know Haynes was wrong...). Also, the Ford/Bosch EECIV is not very easy to tune - you really need a reprogrammed chip to make it work with a modified engine.

The local scrapper happened to have a K-jetronic mechanical FI off a Saab turbo laying around. Hmm....that sounded nice. It would also mean that turbocharging would be possible later on. I bought that setup.

The fitting of a K-jetronic to a carbed engine is possible, but not straightforward. I will describe my way here. The "heart" of the K-jetronic is the fuel metering head. A "flap" subjected to the airflow to the engine controls a piston that determines the fuel flow. The K-jet works with quite a high fuel pressure, and that means the fuel system needs to be changed.

Cars originally equipped with K-jet often has the high pressure (HP) pump mounted inside or near the fuel tank. I did not want to modify my fuel tank, mainly because welding fuel tanks is a bit scary...

A friend (Roland) and I came up with the idea to use a small "catch-tank", fed by a low pressure (LP) pump, which in turn would supply the HP pump with fuel. Later I have learned that the Capri RS2600 uses a similar setup.

I had a friend at work weld the catch-tank, and I used the old mechanical LP pump to supply fuel. The old carb return line to the big tank was rerouted to run from the catch-tank. The fuel is the taken from the catch-tank via the HP pump to the metering head, which has a return pipe to the catch-tank.

Since I had a Sierra EFI manifold, I decided to use that, since injector mounts and throttle body could be easily used. The K-jet uses different injectors that the Sierra EFI, but I machined/turned some adaptors in aluminium. I decided to use the Saab turbo throttle house, because it had all the fittings for the K-jet "idle control". It is also a few mm's bigger, and that can't hurt, right?

One thing I left off though was the Kent Cam - it would really need bigger valves and higher compression ratio as well - instead I went with the "Nisse Hedlund 206" cam that came with the car - the cam is specially designed for the Sierra EFI, so I thought it would work well with the K-jet. I also used some of David Wizards trusty advise to port the head a bit.

It was possible to reangle the brake booster, the washer bottle had to go and I could reposition the cold start injector. I also had to fabricate (cut and glue) the rubber "snoot" that goes from the metering head to the throttle body.

All things in place, time to crank!

Amazingly, the engine fired at the first try! And maybe even more amazing, the whole car didn't burst into flames either! The first short test-drive revealed a great deal of low-end response, and a leaking valve cover gasket.

Fixed that, and suddenly the car ran no more. The fuel pump seemed to have seized. Fitted another one (luckily I had a spare...), and that one worked for a couple of minutes. Bahh...

OK, rerouted some pipes, and got a "new" pump from the scrappers. Now it seemed to work again. Lucky there, cause the day aftre we were steering south for the Capri Club of Swedens annual meeting...a small trip of 1150 kilometres...

During the trip the car revealed a hesitation when accelerating, at 3000 rpm it started to splutter. That excepted, it seemed to work fine. Since the car at least ran, I didn't make any big efforts to fix this before the meeting. On the way to the meeting the car ran worse, and the last long uphill was a real thrill. As we pulled into the meeting area the car died completely.

With the hood/bonnet up a lot of Capri enthusiasts suffering from last night partying (right Wax?) offered their help. No spark was found. A quick change of condenser/capacitor helped. But still the car hesitated, as I quite embarrased found out in the 402cm dragrace. OK, Micke Woullet has a 2.9 24 valve Cossie engine, so I guess he would have beaten me anyway...

A couple of weeks later the Capri Club had arranged at track day att Gelleråsen, in Karlskoga. I really wanted the car to run OK by then, so Roland and I swung our heads together to find the problem. I tried to change two of the injectors that seemed faulty. No response. I fabricated an adjustable control pressure valve, same result. This was friday afternoon, saturday I was going to Rolands house (270km drive), and sunday was track day...

At Rolands house we tried again. A desperate search for injectors saturday handed me six Granada 2.8i items. We changed these under the rain shelter at a Shell Gas station. People stared at us, but we met a nice guy driving a Volvo P1800.

Those injectors did no good either, still the same problem. We resigned to the last option. I had a spare metering head, and we decided to try that. Now we used Rolands garage, which meant his beauty had to stand the pouring rain for a while.

At 1.30am sunday, we were finished. Test drive, and yahoo, no hesitation!

The track day was next! Despite almost a week of rain, that special sunday showed us the sun! Roland and I packed ourselves in my car and drove the 60kms from his house to Gelleråsen. As we arrived the folks who came to the track saturday evening had just woken up.

Raimo Kokko and Bengt Dure was changing the jets on their 3-litre racecar "Projektet" for brakfast, and found the reason it ran as bucket of crap the day before. One of the jets was quite stuffed with goooo....

Some really nice cars attended, Micke Woullet with the 2.9 24v, a MkI V8, a RS 2600, some Cortinas and Escorts and the odd MG too.

Suddenly a blue MkIII arrived, fitted with the "Zakspeed" kit. The engine note was "strange", and an unfamiliar "hump" was visibile under the car. Hmmm....turned out that one had a Volvo B23ET turbo engine.

My car did OK at the track, but a quite annoying understeer was present. The car seemed to draw air accelerating aout of lefthanders too.

I guess this is where the real search fore more power of all sorts really began...more stopping power, more going power, more handling...