Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Maintenance & Servicing Workshop Note: Immobiliser C.2016...........

Production on mine started September 2016 picked up from dealer January 2017.

Mine was delivered at the end of June 2016.

Further update:

Tested again this morning. Garage below 5 degrees C, but full battery from yesterday's charge.

Immobiliser disarmed in two seconds. So........I'm thinking that this must be battery voltage related. The sensor coil is permanently live, as it has to read the key before the ignition is switched on. My instinct tells me this shouldn't be 12volts, but I haven't tested it. Clearly there's a very tight margin around 12volts whereby any reduction de-sensitises the coil.

I don't see an easy fix to this, other than a fully charged battery.

Maybe the new painted chassis type is effecting the grounding?

Maybe remove or bypass the Morgan fitted immobiliser and use an alternative method of immobilising the car. That's what I did when I removed the old ECU.

Not sure how easy that is on the more modern cars but one of our electronic gurus should be able to find an answer.

Plenty of stand alone immobilisers on the market.

I'll leave that one for the experts Bob. I think it links into the ECU so may not be a simple fix.

Update: well as at 27th November it still disarms at two seconds, without any more charge into the battery.

But I haven't finished yet. I'm going through all the main connections. I've done the battery, which was OK. The battery earth is bolted onto the battery cradle cross-member. This is bolted onto the chassis. and locates above the lower rail.

I don't know if the holes for the battery cradle crossmember are drilled before the autophoretic coating, but I do think having this arrangement may cause trouble later on.

So today I've added a supplementary earth lead from the battery cradle pivot bolt, to the fixing bolt on the chassis. I scraped away a bit of the coating under the penny washer to get a good contact, and tested it for continuity.

Tomorrow I'll look at the other main earth contact points. There's one in the spare wheel cavity in the offside corner, and two onto the bulkhead above the brake servo.

Dave, I know Allon White told me the earth that is onto the heater box on the passenger side inside the car can often be faulty.
Mine was loose & I also ran another line to the safety hoop to be safe.

Right the next steps.

First, because today was warm and wet, when I opened the garage door I got a light covering of condensation. This allowed me to test the heated screen, which was pretty good as it turned out.
They do tend to have odd non-working strips..............



Back to the story then.

The next image shows my supplementary earth lead from the battery carrier to the chassis. Not really necessary but a belt and braces add on. It tucks away quite nicely.



At the rear I removed the earth connection pictured here, scraped away some of the coating under the fastener (to improve the contact area), and replaced it with a dash of ACF50.
I found a cigarette stub inside the spare wheel cavity.....burned right down to the filter tip.



Then I made up a supplementary piece of earth cable for the bulkhead area.



Behind the brake servo are two earth connections onto the bulkhead just visible here. I piggy backed my new extension onto both.........The one on the left put up a fight, it was hard to start the nut, and access is terrible............



This is a better shot if the one nearest the gearbox:



The end of this cable is attached to the fastener here.....this bolt goes through the chassis above and to the left of the clutch pedal in the drivers side footwell. Again dripped with ACF50, then Tectyl 506 wax over the top.



My thinking is this........the immobiliser issue seems to be with cars from 2016, and of course what changed in 2016?.......... the chassis treatment. So then I'm wondering if the earth connections through the autophoretic coating might not be as robust as through the galvanised finish............... and might degrade over time.

So we'll see what happens now.

Finally I have one more question for the panel..............

Now, my immobiliser light flashes regularly without the key in place.

With the key in place the light goes out in two seconds and stays out, even when the engine isn't started.

If I leave the key in the ignition, the light stays out.

BUT....I have this memory that when my Plus 4 was new, with the key in place but the engine not running, it flashed rhythmically, like two flash, pause, two flash, pause, and so on.

Can the panel check this out please and report back?

Thankyou!

I think the Plus 4 would have used the Ford Visteon EEC-V ECU. No flashing with the key in and ignition on unless the chip had fallen out and then it would flashing rapidly. The slow flash is when the key is out showing the immobiliser is armed.