We turned up at the centre 3 hours early. Apparently the booking was at a completely different time! Bad start :( We were SO bored we even discussed different ways of getting in and out of the car in a high speed fashion. 3 hours is a very long time... enough time to read 'Car' magazine cover to cover and still find time to be bored.
Eventually the tester came over, not a minute early (despite seeing him pass the previous guy a good 20 minutes prior) and we got straight into emissions. Since the last time, i have richened the engine a little due to the lean lambda last time. Bad move it seems.... failed on high hydrocarbons, CO2 and lambda, basically i'd gone too far the other way. A tweak of the throttle pot position relative to the butterflies, and another attempt... Also failed, i'd gone too far the other way. Settled for a middle position and it passed on the 2500 rpm but failed idle for too much CO2. At this point i'm sweating - standing over the exhausts is tough, and they're glowing red! Another small twiddle, and failed again. Starting to get desparate... he says its been too long and i have one more attempt. I increased idle speed, made a small lean adjustment and it passes idle... and with another tweak passes 2500 rpm.... and fails idle. He re-calibrates and we go again... and as a total piece of luck pass. More luck than judgement, especially as the laptop ran out of battery before the end and i was guessing the pot voltage and RPM!
With that out of the way, and the time almost 5pm, he clearly wanted to go home, so we rushed through the rest, and he passed us! (It really was that quick... he didn't even look at the seats!) WOO HOO!
So... a good blat home to blow the cobwebs away, rip off all the rubbery bits, and registration tomorrow. Still got to swap seats, fit dash, fit aeroscreen, but we'll see what the registration process looks like first.
For reference, these were the emissions readouts:
FAST IDLE TEST CO 0.19 (Max 0.20) PASS HC 69 (Max 200) PASS LAM 0.997 (0.97-1.03) PASS
