Kickstart

Could try using Morning Star for the family reference! All the best Katy

Alan Turing

This just popped up online:- http://www.galileo.engineering/biturbox-fuse-box/ Replacement fusebox for the Biturbo series, using more modern fuses and hard PCBs. The fusebox is by far the biggest problem with the twin turbo Maseratis Looks like €750. Might have to start saving! All the best Katy

His Esprit series I was enjoying, but seems to have had a hiatus All the best Katy

Presume the 2 units are MAP sensors. Switches look normal for the Biturbo series, but a bit dirty. Relays look like generic ones rather than specific ones. But be careful. The relays used on the Maserati had a different pin out (pins 30 and 86 reversed) to the common relays All the best Katy

No sign of anything in the loom to connect that random switch to. Hopefully the hunting idle is just the idle control valve being a bit dirty. All the best Katy

You have my sympathy with the Hispano. Was scary enough fiddling with the electrics on a Lotus Europa and realising how much of them had no fuses. With the Maserati I have avoided taking the seats out, but dash is out, and that meant taking out the windscreen wiper motor and mechanism, which was harder than it should have been. At least I can strip and clean out the wiper motor. No problem. 430 is very similar underneath. Are the brown switches the centre ones for fog lights, etc? Does your 430 have a switch on the steering column shroud? The 222 does, but not connected to anything. Things suggest it is for parking lights, but not certain. As an aside, seems there are 2 different fuse boxes. Look the same but connect differently. From memory identified by a green dot on one type. All the best Katy

Some parts I have found before. Front fog lights are Lancia Thema. Front indicators are Fiat 127. Some parts on the original cars A/C was Chrysler sourced. But a bit surprised to find a Bosch motor in the heater when in the 1980s Italian stuff tended to avoid imported components unless essential due to tax. Hopefully the replacement will work (and at under £40 brand new, not that badly priced - I hope to never have to change it again). Annoying bit for sourcing bits is the relays. Standard sockets but different pin outs. Hence using a standard off the shelf relay available anywhere will cause all sorts of problems. Future job is to rewire the sockets and fit standard relays. I would hope a Hispano Suiza might have had a simpler wiring design! There are 438 wires listed (with a mere 56 colours) in the Maserati wiring diagram I found. All the best Katy

Well, pay day so having got a replacement heater casing for the Maserati (so 2 together - should be able to make one good one!), but still needing a blower motor I ordered one new from Eurospares yesterday. But today they emailed to say they can't get one. Ooops. Googled for Maserati heater motor and looked at the images. A Mercedes one looked very similar, and I my better half noticed a Bosch part number on the Mercedes one. Couldn't see a part number on the Maserati one as the mounting bracket (which clamps around it) was rivited over that area. Few minutes with a Dremel and the heads of the rivits were ground off and the bracket removed revealing the part number. Didn't match the Mercedes one, but gave me something to search for. Bosch "0 130 063 015". Searching that looks like Bosch no longer list it in their catalogues, but also found another listing suggesting it was superceeded by "0 130 063 013" - which also isn't listed by Bosch but it is more common. Seems used on the Mk3 Ford Escort and available new from a few places for reasonable money! So, ordered one of those. Price was low enough to take the risk. Hopefully it fits. And as a bonus, it was 1/3 the price that Eurospares listed the Maserati one at. Fingers crossed everything works fine. Maserati wiring mostly cleaned up last weekend (various alarms, trackers, immobilisers, etc, fitted over the years). Even found a flashing LED for the immobiliser taped up in a corner. So hopefully will make reasonable progress soon. Minor issue with a few circuit misbehaving but not too worried about them. Although the wiring "diagram" is awful - it is a physical layout of the car, with just wires from connectors / components having a number and going into a loom bundle - then you need a list of all the numbers which tell you wire colour and which items the wire goes between. All the best Katy

No unique to any make. A friend of my fathers bought a Porsche 911 in the early 1970s. Only a year or so old but a fairly hard life. Took it on holiday for his honeymoon in the south of Ireland (not renowned for high quality roads at the time) and the front suspension punched its way through the inner wings. There was quite a bit of rust! All the best Katy

Managed to shuffle the garage around a bit and got the RS125 out . Gave it a quick wash. Needs a battery, fresh coolant, brake pads and bleeding the brakes, then fairings on. I bought this bike new in 1993. All the best Katy

Suspect that spoiler is mostly on the late cars, so mostly the 4.24v. Late cars had a few revisions such as the headlights, but rare in the uk. A lot of cars were imported and then not sold for a while. Found an article years ago from 1991 reported on the importer going bust reporting that they had sold 4 cars in the first quarter of 1991. Ours was one of those 4, but was built in 1989. Took quite a while to work through the stock of new cars All the best Katy

Meh, what Maserati called full production, Ford would call their run if prototypes! All the best Katy

The valve on the vent of the power steering reservoir is not universal. Some seem to have it but not all. On the 222 the bonnet vents drop rain water on top of the reservoir, and not sure if the valve helps get water into the reservoir! Not sure on the coils, but at one time we had a Fiat UNO floating around, and the coils looked Tegan same as the ones on the 222. All the best Katy

When they are selling half a 400k~700k Golfs each year in Europe, it will take a long time for the older ones to die off just due to numbers. All the best Katy

There are a lot of toys on modern cars that I don’t want. And some that are useful. Lane assist, cruise control, automatic gearboxes and similar features I do not want. As in I would pay more not to have them. I hate the way they encourage me to drive. I need the stimulation when driving (and for example regularly changing lane on a motorway to overtake, etc, is a necessity for this). These kind of functions just remove more stimulation. Fuel consumption trip computers, tend to get me paying attention to things that don’t really matter. Sat nav just feels like being nagged. As a map, useful and will happily use an electronic map, but not constant directions. Not yet had a car that nags much about gears or speed, but they would drive me mad - or just trigger a ‘stuff you’ reaction, and have me change down when I get sick of it beeping at me to change up! Things that take away control such as automatic lights, automatic wipers, indicators that do X number of blinks when touched, heater systems that turn on the a/c automatically when demist is selected, etc, I don’t want. Plenty of convenience features I do like. Electric mirrors, so I can adjust them both while able to see what I am adjusting them to. Electric windows (but please, not one touch electric windows). Electrically adjustable seats (so seat back angle and base angle can easily be adjusted). Remote boot release (but not fully electric opening - I don’t want to wait that long). Central locking. These are things that effectively give me more control, and I am prepared to take any small potential hit on reliability. Might explain why I am driving an MX5 these days! While modern cars have got more reliable, when things go wrong it is often harder and more expensive to fix them. Very easy for an older car to be written off just from a component and labour to fit it. And sometimes with components keyed to the car, parts become unusable 2nd hand for no good reason. A friends car needs a new knock sensor. Small bolt on component, but position means removing the intake manifold, hence add the cost of gaskets. That is going to be fun. And a thermostat on an MX5 is harder than in should be, hidden under the intake. All the best Katy

Potential issues with some 2 strokes is of the run premix. And if the ethanol separates from the fuel, and from the oil pre mixed with the fuel. Pumped system is a bit different All the best Katy

The tanks are rather different. The ones that seem to have a problem are the thick ones which are suitable be painted, rather than the cruder types used under covers, or under cars. Super unleaded is not certain to be ethanol free. Claims it is in some areas, but even that is a bit uncertain. So a reasonable chance you will be going out of your way to pick a fuel which is labelled E5 or like like (as a requirement) and relying on a claim it doesn’t have ethanol in it. Getting a new tank made would be very expensive, given the complex shape, etc, then paint on top of that. Probably £1500 minimum, and easily a lot more (factor in a fitting for a locking petrol cap, mounts for the internal fuel pump, etc. Quite a few makes seem to have suffered. Currently probably the easiest solution is to drain the fuel out where you get home and leave it empty, just refilling it when going out All the best Katy

The percentage displayed is not necessarily what it actually contains. Tanks that seem to be suffering are the thick white plastic tanks. Aprilia, Ducati, Triumph, etc. All the best Katy

There are a couple of factors. First point, it is possible to remove the ethanol if you want. Add a load of water, let the water absorb the ethanol and separate , then decant. Down side is that ethanol has a high octane rating, so in effect is working as an octane booster. Removing the ethanol will have an effect on on octane rating. And as you are dumping 10% of what you paid petrol prices for, you may as well spend 10% more on higher spec fuels in the first place. Ethanol has a lower energy content by volume. You will need to burn more of it. However a bit more of 5%/10% of the fuel is still not that much. Any car with feedback from the lambda probe will do this all on its own most of the time, although possible potential issues at full throttle when many ignore the lambda sensor and just do the fueling from the pre defined maps (flat out run down the autobahn might be interesting). Anything with carbs or a basic fuel injection system (so anything inflicted with the basic Bosch K Jetronic system) can’t do this. If lucky it is set up a touch rich for safety, so this is just using up some of that safety margin. Ethanol does affect some rubber components. I still haven’t found any low pressure fuel pipe that is completely resistant to it (although some just harden far more rapidly on it). Needle valves in carbs can suffer (as an aside with Dellorto carbs on bikes, seems they revised the needle valves - older ones with a black tip are not ethanol proof, newer ones with a brown tip are). Possibly the biggest problem will be plastic fuel tanks. Even on E5 a lot of bikes were suffering with the tanks expanding and buckling. All the best Katy

Hopefully should be easy to source new brake seals. All the best Katy

The ATE system was used by a few people. Alfa used it on the 75 in the USA (they called it Milano there), and think Volvo used it. Unfortunately it can fail in such a way that you got one stop if you were lucky. Hence could be quite a problem. Our 222 has anthracite headlight surrounds. All the best Katy

Presume that is the run out special edition for Japan which were an Evo which were a bit of a mix up of parts (hence the good clock). Base engine is a GM unit, with effectively Alfa heads. Not heard any real horror stories of them going wrong (on the 2.2 the cam chains seem to go early in their life) All the best Katy

Not sure I have ever seen that badge on a qp4. The evolution was made with both the v6 and v8 engine (but they dropped the 2L v6) All the best Katy

Honda Jazz? Neighbour had one in the mud 1980s All the best Katy