During a tour with Catie on my house-track I noticed an unpleasant nose-biting smell and some seconds later the MIL came on and the Duratec was obviously running on less than 4 cylinders. Of course: At the point furthest away from home.
Fortunately I could stop on a parking place shortly to query the ECU for errors via OBD:
Ok, removing the carbon cam cover I quickley noticed this damage to the injector cable of cylinder #3:
The cam cover showed some obvious burn marks and already missed some material at the contact location. Leaving the cover off and fixing the cable quick&dirty with tape Catie ran OK again to go home straight.
What has happened: The Seven was delivered from factory without a cam cover and the routing of the injector cables done accordingly. The previous owner decided to mount the Cosworth carbon cam cover, unfortunately no one including me noticed the injector cables rubbing at the sharp cover edge.
The sharp cover edge worked it’s way through the cable isolation and finally shorted the two bare conductors, the ECU delivered enough current to burn away some carbon material, hence the biting smell and the ECU recognised the shorted lines and set the according OBD error.
Repair time
I bought a sub-loom to use a ready to go injector connector with cable attached and decided to crimp it to the remaining intact piece of cabling.
The car runs fine again after the repair. I decided to leave the cam cover away since the current injector cable routing will surely lead to the same issues again. Since the spark-plug connectors seal the spark-plug cavities at the top, no water will enter the cavities boiling around the spark plugs. It will be fine to run the car as delivered from factory.