95 disco... What's it worth?

[ptschram]

I was wondering if you were going to chime in to this one PT.....

I love my Lucas trucks. They run and run and run and run and run and run.

223K on my DI, 205K on my '94 RRC-no, they don't last and are very difficult to work on, anyone with a Lucas truck must bring it to me to fix it!

 

[discostew]

what don't you like about it?

It's not reliable . It's prone to all sorts of misdiagnoses and a whole bunch of failures. If someone doesn't know and understand the system they usually damage it by pulling the rotor off. I've seen at least 20 times someone put a module on the side of the distributor when the system already has the updated module location. So in efect the truck has 2 modules working against each other and the truck of course still has the problem the dumb ass was looking for in the first place. P.T you keep saying lucas trucks but G.E.M.s is also a lucus product. Do you mean cux and then is your old classic cu engine management. The statement was made that distributor discos were more reliable than discos with coilpacks and a crank sensor. I stand behind my statement "bull shit ". I think if I owned one and was ok with it, then I would put a Proline distributor in it . That system seems reliable and I've put them in more than a handful of trucks.

 

[cmb]

For what it's worth, I think the 14CUX is a great engine-management system, principally because it's fairly simple. My vehicles have been quite reliable, and I strongly prefer a simple distributor-spark system over the hideously complicated OBD2-compliant systems such as GEMS.

My credentials: I run a '93 RRC, '94 D1, '94 D90, and an RV8-powered TVR, all with the 14CUX. I wrote the Wikipedia article on the Lucas 14CUX, I'm reverse-engineering the firmware that controls it, and I've written a software library to interface with the ECU via its serial port. I feel like I understand the system pretty well.

--Colin

 

[robertf]

I've seen at least 20 times someone put a module on the side of the distributor when the system already has the updated module location. So in efect the truck has 2 modules working against each other and the truck of course still has the problem the dumb ass was looking for in the first place.

neat, but it makes my head hurt thinking about how thats even possible. 20 times huh?

 

[robertf]

My credentials: I run a '93 RRC, '94 D1, '94 D90, and an RV8-powered TVR, all with the 14CUX. I wrote the Wikipedia article on the Lucas 14CUX, I'm reverse-engineering the firmware that controls it, and I've written a software library to interface with the ECU via its serial port. I feel like I understand the system pretty well.

--Colin

I saw your work on the 14cux interface and I'm impressed. I tried a bunch of very crude methods to get it to talk but couldn't figure out the bizarre packet format.

Have you used a tracer to map rom locations to tune resistors? Thats the point I got to before I shelved the project.

 

[cmb]

I saw your work on the 14cux interface and I'm impressed. I tried a bunch of very crude methods to get it to talk but couldn't figure out the bizarre packet format.

Have you used a tracer to map rom locations to tune resistors? Thats the point I got to before I shelved the project.

I know the locations of each of the five fuel maps stored in the PROM, although NAS ECUs do not allow fuel map selection with a tune resistor. (It's explicitly disabled in the code.) I haven't yet compared a NAS PROM image to a European/RoW image, but I plan to do that as there should be some interesting differences.

I'd be happy to answer any other questions about this, but we should probably have that discussion in another thread so as to not hijack this one too much

 

[discostew]

OK all joking aside now. Wofraat the truck can't be worth more than 2500 without the extras you say it has. It really can't be all that clean if its been here in Chicago for its whole life. I paid almost 4k for a very clean 99SD and then put about 4k into it to get it how I wanted it. I still feel like I paid more than I should have for the truck. That being said , CMB please go forward and highjack the shit out of this guys thread. Oh ya,robertf it may be hard for you to wrap your head around me seeing that mistake 20 times but I should tell you that I have been around these trucks exclusively since the mid90's. I have done Pre Delivery Inspections on 95 discos and peeled the original shipping plastic off them. I have never done anything for a living but fix cars in dealerships since 1981, Oldsmobile master technician at age 22 and Land Rover technician since 1995. So an irritating ass hole yes I am. But for 50 hours a week for 31 years I have been fixing cars for rich folk. I have had plenty of time to form my opinions.