K Series meet and diagnostics demo: June 15th Herts/Essex

[pscandoteu]

Rob Bell from the MGF register has kindly organised a get together of K series owners this Sunday.

I will be there to demonstrate the new diagnostics tool.

The meet is 10am at Friern Barnet Retail park.
the MFG Register topic is here
http://www.mgfregister.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8...

anyone is welcome to come along.

There is also a second event at 2pm ish at the Halfway House, Brentwood which will be more MG Rover focused.

[chucklebutty]

Update - a few cars turned up, of all different ilk, even a Freelander Diesel. Two of us came with Lotus Elises, a Mk2 53 plate and my March 98 Mk1.

I really didn't know what to expect, but the venue was close and getting a couple of hours out helped with it being on Father's Day. Met with Rob and was introduced to Phil, who was already plugged into the Freelander and analysing and deleting old error codes.

Phil was very keen to have a crack at the Lotus cars. There was only limited success on the Mk2, but a plan has been made going forward for more access to the car in the near future to try and address the interfacing issues. For my Mk1 the results were far better, full diagnostic access was achieved via OBD 1.9 with the car both idle and with the engine running. The engine diagnostics and any codes were all visible, and whilst the error codes were historic, everything was quickly cleaned up.

So how to describe the kit? It's a black box with a flashing LED that plugs into the service port, then into your own laptop via USB running the proprietary software from Phil. It seems to handle the Elise S1 interface without issue, at least once you've discovered where the port is. I can imagine this would be really useful to any K-series mechanics, or for a track day regular that has ever encountered a mid day engine warning light and appreciates the inconvenience and cost with stopping a track day early. It'd allow full interrogation and resumption of play [error code dependent] without a visit to a dealer or using very expensive OEM diagnostic tools.

Phil explained that he needs to shift a bunch of units quickly to fulfil a KickStarter obligation. If this is in anyway useful to you, I'd urge you to quickly approach him (within the next week) as it's very Chapman-like to see a really home grown low cost (£125) solution to help the K-Series community.

I'm not affiliated to Phil, and the usual accompanying financial warnings apply as with any KickStarter endeavour, but I do wish him luck. It's a good demonstration and far better than the handheld Ebay jobbie I borrowed to plug into another car that never quite worked. I promised Phil I'd let you guys know about the morning, and this is how it went down...