Starter’s orders
We’re getting there with the Escort, but as ever with a car which has been restored and has fundamentally very little wrong with it, the tasks which end up at the bottom of the to- do list are the small but tedious ones – usually the finishing touches which require obsolete parts or a lot of time spent in diagnosis. One such issue with the XR3i is the coldstart system, which has been disconnected ever since we’ve had the car. Being an earlier XR3i, our car uses the regular Bosch K-Jetronic injection system as found on pretty much every 1980s injection engine. This uses a very simple system to richen up the mixture on a cold start – a thermo-time switch sensor in the cylinder head is connected to a fifth fuel injector in the inlet manifold which adds fuel when the temperature drops below a certain level.
The common issues with this system are either a dribbling injector which doesn’t quite shut off, or a failed thermo-time switch. Our car would start quite happily from stone cold with the system connected, but with a warm engine it wouldn’t start at all, suggesting that the system was activating when it shouldn’t and leading us to suspect the thermo-time switch was at fault.
As acquired, the car was running with the electrical connector to the cold-start injector disconnected, which meant it started happily when warm but required some tickling and patience for the first few seconds after
a cold start. Unsurprisingly with a Ford of this era, the part is no longer available, or at least not under the original part number. However, Bosch’s classic parts operation provides a useful cross-reference and we were able to order it under the Bosch part number. The correct part is rated at 35 degrees and eight seconds, and rather usefully it turns out to be shared across a huge number of 1980s European cars.
Fitting it is simple but fiddly, if you get my meaning. The sensor is hidden away under the inlet manifold, but once you reach the sensor it’s a simple case of unscrewing the old and winding in the new before connecting it up and trying it out. The result was a car which started easily both hot and cold.
While we had the spanners out, we also decided to tackle the misfire the car had developed since standing idle for a few months. Investigation revealed that the ignition leads were in a distinctly shoddy state, with the coil lead’s terminal covered in overspray and one of the plug leads coming apart in my hand. A new set of NGK plugs and a set of leads was duly ordered up from the local motor factor, who must have wondered if he’d slipped through a hole in time when the gent in front of me at the counter asked for a Granada water pump...
The rotor arm for the Bosch distributor was harder to source locally, but again research revealed the part number to be shared with several other cars, so a rotor arm and cap were duly ordered up too. With that done, we’re now acutely conscious of the rattling interior which seems to be largely created by the loose parcel shelf. Trim parts for the Mk3 aren’t easy to source, but it looks like we’ve got what we need so that’s the next job.