Startup cranking

[kyle242gt]

Hi dudes-

Car is running fiendishly well, definitely time to upgrade my brakes :omg:
I am having a cold (mostly now that I think about it, I think hot's okay) start problem - if I floor the throttle and go into flood clear, it cranks just fine. If I leave the gas under flood clear, it cranks and seems to almost "stall" each rev. IOW, instead of "nuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh" it's more like "nuuh...nuuuh....nuuuuh". It's a little scary, because it seems like it's sl.ow..ing...d..o...w....n. Almost like if it doesn't catch on the first five or six cranks, it's going to crap out.

I have my timing for 80-110Kpa set to 10BTDC at 500RPM, and that seems to do a nice job; cranking timing per MT's gauge is 10BTDC. Everything lined up nicely with a timing light while I was screwing with the dist last week.

Too much cranking PW? The fact that it's struggling with gas going in, but doing fine without makes me think it's choking on the gas. Or mayhap I clobbered my starter with many MANY :oops: minutes of cranking during my trigger angle malaise.

Any other ideas? Battery's good and should be fully charged (I can check) terminals are icky but haven't been a problem in the past.

Thanks

[linuxman51]

Hi dudes-

Car is running fiendishly well, definitely time to upgrade my brakes :omg:
I am having a cold (mostly now that I think about it, I think hot's okay) start problem - if I floor the throttle and go into flood clear, it cranks just fine. If I leave the gas under flood clear, it cranks and seems to almost "stall" each rev. IOW, instead of "nuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuhnuh" it's more like "nuuh...nuuuh....nuuuuh". It's a little scary, because it seems like it's sl.ow..ing...d..o...w....n. Almost like if it doesn't catch on the first five or six cranks, it's going to crap out.

I have my timing for 80-110Kpa set to 10BTDC at 500RPM, and that seems to do a nice job; cranking timing per MT's gauge is 10BTDC. Everything lined up nicely with a timing light while I was screwing with the dist last week.

Too much cranking PW? The fact that it's struggling with gas going in, but doing fine without makes me think it's choking on the gas. Or mayhap I clobbered my starter with many MANY :oops: minutes of cranking during my trigger angle malaise.

Any other ideas? Battery's good and should be fully charged (I can check) terminals are icky but haven't been a problem in the past.

Thanks

play with the cranking pw's, try lower numbers. i've got mine to where it'll hit off and run just about every time (it occasionally dies when its below 70 on the coolant temp, just havent hacked out that spot in the WE).

anyone else not run afterstart enrichment? i've found my cars respond better if you've gotta jump in and go without afterstart.

[kyle242gt]

Thanks man, I'll try that out.

My ASE is 15 sec, 5 sec fixed to 55Kpa, 30% at 60F, 20% at 80F, and zero above that.

[Morten VJ]

I'm using ASE for 20 engine cycles.
30% lowest temp 10% highest.
No fancy fixed map value.
This allows me to start the engine Feet of the pedals from -16 to 98 deg celcius.
Engine temperature.

BR

Morten

[ovlov760]

My ASE is at 30 seconds and 30% enrichment. I find that using the IAT advance feature helps on start up.

[turbobrick211]

Question, using AIT related ignition advance, what have you guys been using for your numbers? I currently have 1 degree advance every 27* below 140*, max allowable advance + 1.1*, Pull 1 degree of retard every 15*F, when MAp above 85, and IAT above 85*. Does this sound good, what can I change to help out with the car starting? It does not like starting either cold or hot right now, it takes 6-10 tries before it finally catches and then runs perfectly fine. Any ideas?


-Eric

[the poi]

Question, using AIT related ignition advance, what have you guys been using for your numbers? I currently have 1 degree advance every 27* below 140*, max allowable advance + 1.1*, Pull 1 degree of retard every 15*F, when MAp above 85, and IAT above 85*. Does this sound good, what can I change to help out with the car starting? It does not like starting either cold or hot right now, it takes 6-10 tries before it finally catches and then runs perfectly fine. Any ideas?


-Eric
sounds like what i was running. my retard was more aggressive, one degree every 7deg F, over 85 degrees. I was mostly terrified of knock though. the other thing to consider was my powerstroke IC made boost always ambient, meaning I was getting 75deg temps at 20psi at 6 grand if it was 75 degrees outside. Ive been using those spark maps on a freinds stock IC'd car, and holy crap does the IAT fly upwards once boost come on. went from 50* to about 120 in 3-4 seconds. If my car was workin like that, I'd think I'd be even more extreme with the spark pull, and let it max itself at about 5* under. I think the best test would be uphill driving in heat, see if itll ping at whatever the max is...

[turbobrick211]

Not gonna do it. The car just don't want to start up properly. I messed with the cranking PW, ignition timing, warmup VE%'s, etc. I can't seem to get it to just start up without fooling with the loud pedal and trying 8-10 times. What am I missing?

When I open up the Warmup Wizard, for some reason the Cranking Pulsewidth box and Afterstart Enrichment box are both grayed out, and I can't seem to change any of this. What do I need to change so that I can change these parameters?

E

[linuxman51]

GAHH all you whinners i swear...

I found that by putting a hand crank on the front of the car i could start it without problem




:-D

[turbobrick211]

Hey man, everyone makes it sound so straight forward and obvious. I read through the tuning section of the manual several times, and they say to simply adjust stuff until it starts good. Well, I have been trying to do this for a couple of days now, and I still can't get it to make much of a difference. So, what the heck? What do you say Kenny? What do I gotta do to get this thing to startup fine? Funny thing is, it started GREAT before I switched over the ignition side of things. Now I can't get it to start worth crap. It also seems that I gotta richen up the mixture quite a bit with the new ignition setup, even though I am running pretty conservative numbers.



Grrrrr.

-Eric

[linuxman51]

Hey man, everyone makes it sound so straight forward and obvious. I read through the tuning section of the manual several times, and they say to simply adjust stuff until it starts good. Well, I have been trying to do this for a couple of days now, and I still can't get it to make much of a difference. So, what the heck? What do you say Kenny? What do I gotta do to get this thing to startup fine? Funny thing is, it started GREAT before I switched over the ignition side of things. Now I can't get it to start worth crap. It also seems that I gotta richen up the mixture quite a bit with the new ignition setup, even though I am running pretty conservative numbers.



Grrrrr.

-Eric


I'm tellin ya man, hand crank on the front pully is the shiz.. model T style baby

[kyle242gt]

Hey man, everyone makes it sound so straight forward and obvious. I read through the tuning section of the manual several times, and they say to simply adjust stuff until it starts good. Well, I have been trying to do this for a couple of days now, and I still can't get it to make much of a difference. So, what the heck? What do you say Kenny? What do I gotta do to get this thing to startup fine? Funny thing is, it started GREAT before I switched over the ignition side of things. Now I can't get it to start worth crap. It also seems that I gotta richen up the mixture quite a bit with the new ignition setup, even though I am running pretty conservative numbers.
Grrrrr.
-Eric
Can you run the full gamut of timing while it's running? That's tre`importante`. That would signal if the dist TA is out of whack.
Make sure your TPS is calibrated.
Get a PW gauge running, and be sure that you have 2-7ms PWs while cranking.
Get a advance gauge running and be sure it's not jumping to -10 BTDC during cranking (not that I'm leery of ignition problems :-D)
See what your cranking advance is per the gauge. Be sure that the indicated timing per MT is what you get at the crank with a timing light (not that I'm leery...)
Be sure your CLT is accurate (ish)
Check that your cranking RPM is +100 of your actual cranking RPM.
If it labors to crank, you probably have too much fuel (nu-nu-nuh...nu-nu-nnuh...)
If it cranks smoothly and easily, you probably don't have enough cranking PW (nununununu)
ASE, WU%, etc make no difference until it's running... so ignore them for now.
Review the spark settings in spark setup and in the code config areas, be sure you're using trigger return cranking, non-invert, no dwell control (unless you're using the Volvo module and know what you're doing).

/braindump mode

[turbobrick211]

Okay, I will think about it, but that means I will have to punch a hole in my NPR. Don't know if I really want to do that. But, I will go home and give it a try. Thank you for your helpful insight dear friend. You are the best.

[linuxman51]

hes got an ignition box on it, he'll wanna leave it inverted. turn your priming pulse up a smoach for those pesky hot starts, that got my car to crank like a champ (of course, now that the motor is breaking/broken in, its cranking requirements have changed, i gotta go remap that crap)

[coldfusion21]

tomorow eric i will get a dump of all my fuel stuff. not going to be much use since im running 8x8, but atleast you can have all my enrichments and stuff, and get an idea about VE.

get that CLT thing figured out. you mentioned having issues with it?

[benflynn]

mine is a pos, any cranking problems have been timing probs though

[turbobrick211]

Okay, this is really getting old. I cannot get this darn car to start when it is cold without starting fluid. I have messed with every adjustable feature, and it only gets worse, never better. I am at a total loss here.

I may have a strange situation however, see if this makes any sense. Kenny, you already know about this stuff...

When I converted over to n'Spark, I used a LH 2.2 dizzy and ended up with the trigger angle set at around 5* with no addition, which sounds wierd to me. Talking with Kenny, he said that I might need to add a 1k resistor to the wire going to pin 24, and put the trigger wire from the dizzy to pin 24 instead of pin 25, and then ground pin 25. Then I should be able to set the trigger angle to between 40-75. So, this may have something to do with my problem, but I can't figure out why it would......

It seems like the car is not getting enough fuel when cranking, but before I switched over to ignition control, I was still using the stock 240T dizzy, and the car would start up like it was brand new from the dealership. It was great. So, I know that it has got to be ignition related. I just don't know what to do. I have the 0-500 rpm bins all set to 12*, trigger angle at 1*, Priming pulse at 5, etc.

WHAT DO I DO NOW?????


-Eric

[turbobrick211]

Anyone?

[kyle242gt]

I don't know if this is going to help you or not, but I just made a breakthrough that will probably sound like old news (I tend to be a little slow).

I found that no matter what I set my low RPM bins to, I always got 20BTDC as my cranking advance. That would explain why my engine labors so badly when trying to start.

Under spark settings, there's a section for cranking advance and the trigger return/time based dropdown box. I'm using trigger return, so the cranking advance box is greyed out... but the contents? You guessed it, 20BTDC.

So I selected Time Based, changed the cranking advance to 5BTDC, and then selected trigger return again. The box greyed out, but guess what? Now my cranking advance is 5BTDC and the car starts MUCH better.

It would appear that the contents of the cranking advance are in charge, regardless of the box greying out or not.

See what your cranking advance is.

As far as trigger advance, my old nemesis, here's my advice: Set the engine to about 20BTDC, rotate the dist to sit in the middle of its adjustment range AND point at the #1 spark terminal. Then, rotate the engine backwards just until the middle LED comes on (it may be ON to start, if so, go until it shuts off then comes back on). There's NO WAY to "Isaac" a TA. BTDT.

I'm using Kenny's recommended wiring, whatever that is, can't remember.