Isabella - The 6 Million Dollar possessed FIat

[NGEN]

Wow, Released from the Dealer Jan 31st, then total transmission failure March 5th, 5 weeks later?

Ya don’t get me started. They wouldn’t own up to what we fee was a bad install.

[texanbrit]

Yep, and that's while trying to drive it gently.

The dealer found silver glitter in the transmission fluid. So it was taken apart to see.

The gears all were trimmed a little, just the edges of the teeth but enough to stop the gears engaging.

The clutch was a mess, stripped bare in less than 1000 miles.

The dealer said the LSD was broken so that was sent back to Wavetrac under their lifetime warranty.

It turned out the LSD was fine, the dealership didn't understand the difference between limited slip and a locking differential. Wavetrac still did a full inspection and replaced all the seals and then sent it back. Can't say enough about how great they were.

I found a deal for two gearboxes, a low mileage 2015 and a zero mileage M32 6 speed box.

I asked the dealership to put the LSD, C510 and the OEM clutch back in to get me back on the road again. I sent the FX350 back to Clutchmasters to see if they could do anything with it.

Still not sure what went wrong. I suspect the dealership screwed up the install of the LSD, but difficult to prove that. Perhaps trying to drive gently I was doing something wrong, but still can't imagine that it would die so quickly.

[MadFiat]

I probably did everything wrong in installing my clutch Masters 250 and it has survived about 7000 miles so far..... I suspect in your case the dealer fubar'd the install somehow.

[texanbrit]

Since it seemed that this would take more than a few minutes to fix, I decided this would be a good time to get a sensible set of wheels. This served two purposes, firstly to get me around while Isabella was broken and secondly to remove Isabella from the daily commute and let me promote her to a pure fun car status.

I found a nice little 2012 500 Pop with super low miles on it. Paid cash for it with the promise that if I didn't mod her she would last me for many years.

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I lasted about two weeks before I remembered that I had some Braid wheels and Abarth seats doing nothing, but that's a whole different story.

The dealer experience was truly dreadful this time. My car sat forlorn in their parking area for a long time; and trying to get them to work on it was painful and frustrating.

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At one point I was told that my car was on the rack being worked on; I drove by the dealership and saw my car still gathering dust and was told that I had been bumped for a "more important" customer. I was not amused. My favorite day was when they called and said they were done, but there was a problem. The car would not go forward without stalling, the tech thought perhaps it was the tune and a flash would cure it. I couldn't figure out how a tune would impact the manual transmission and clutch, so I rushed over there to prevent the flash (not fast enough as it turned out). I checked the car and found that the cables were out of whack. It was impossible to select first and the reason the car stalled was because they were trying to pull away in 3rd. I don't understand how they couldn't know this, or even fail to notice that there were only 3 available forward gears.

May 16th I got the car back. The dealership did cut me a massive break on the labor costs as an apology and after Bryan had spoken with the general manager.

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You'll notice the DRLs are missing in the picture. Bryan and I had been trading lights, don't remember why, and my current set weren't installed. We had about a month left before the Sisters run in June, but now I had ideas.......

[Mangavideo]

[texanbrit]

So I noticed looking at the DRLs that I could see the intake filter on the Fenderwell. My brain said "hey! that seems like a good way to let air in". I knew Shaggie had done something similar with his Abarth, so I reached out to him and asked him what he had done for turn signals. He suggested that turn signals were for the weak minded, and I was left to come up with dumb ideas on my own. At the same time Bryan issued a challenge to find the first idiot, sorry I mean pioneer, to mount the Diode Dynamics 18" light bar in the front fender vent. So I bought an 18" light bar and a pair of amber 6" bar and we started figuring it out.

I also had a stack of unspent money from the dealership knocking a big chunk off my bill. That needed fixing so a Wilwood big brake kit, front and back, helped balance that out.

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Also added the bumper tie-downs in the hope they would hitch up the sagging bumper a little (they didn't) and a pair of Hella horns as somewhere along the line the OEM horn had gotten mangled and sounded pretty sad.

All was ready for Sisters and we had a great time!

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You'll notice additional cosmetic changes. Silver mirror caps, found for $1 on Ebay. Some carbon fiber door handle covers, which fit very nicely and Road Race carbon fiber eyelids, which barely fit at all. Received a gift of carbon fiber valve stem caps from Byron, which complete the look.

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[MadFiat]

Yay all fixed forever never to break again!

[texanbrit]

Yay all fixed forever never to break again!

Not sure about fixed, but certainly less broken from this point

[texanbrit]

This chapter should probably be called "Enough with the codes already".

The car had been consistently throwing a P0300 code ever since it came back with the rebuilt head and cam upgrade. I could never actually feel a misfire, and if I cleared the code it seemed to come back whether I ran tuned or stock, drove hard or not. There was nothing tied to a specific cylinder so I didn't think it was plugs or coils. Then the day before the Sisters run it threw a code for the upstream O2 sensor as well and decided it would start going into limp mode at random times. I was also getting some random P0299 and P2261 codes.

I ignored the through the Sisters weekend and the car behaved well, except for the occasional in flight reset to get out of limp mode.

One of the raffle prizes at Sisters was the MS-R Biposto kit; and I decided that now I have the Pop it was time to lose those rear seats. I concentrated all my efforts into winning that and came up empty handed. So when I got home I dropped my order for that and a new PTP turbo blanket.

The biposto kit is super nice, but hard to photograph (black on dark grey).

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I also had both O2 sensors replaced and removed the MPX light weight pulley in the hope that it would cure the P0300 (It didn't).

This is when my wife decided she needed to have brain surgery and annouced the fact by passing out at the wheel and killing the Range Rover.

[mr16valve]

Hope that your wife is ok.
Following your P0300 code closely - was planning the CB cam during Thanksgiving holiday - I might wait.