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YASVT (Yet Another Sixteen Valve Turbo) - now 16V Whiteblock (LS)

Given the way the wires corroded away to nothingness, I'd have been better giving them a half-hearted twist and slapping electrical tape on.

I ordered some heat-shrink crimp connectors and a ratchet crimper. And some of those heat-shrink solder tubes as well.

I remembered there are some solder joints I did under the hood as well, mostly temp/oil gauge wires, fan wires, stuff that wasn't in the pre-built harness.
 
http://www.aeroelectric.com/articles.html
great site chock full o info, worth deep diving

http://www.aeroelectric.com/articles/rules/review.html
Only rosin core solder is allowed for electrical connections, because acid core solder (available in hardware stores for hobbyists, decorative and similar applications) eats away at the plating on your wire and eventually the wire itself. Failure will result(not may, will result) from the use of poor quality and/or acid core solder.

I normally used rosin core, but I had this acid flux sitting around from doing copper pipe plumbing, where it works GREAT. So I tried it on a wire solder, and it worked GREAT. Super easy to make a nice wet flowed joint.

I never even pondered the thought about what the acid would do over time. And there's no way to remove all of it, even if I had tried. It wicks up into the insulation on both sides.
 
I got the insulated heat shrink connectors and the proper crimp tool yesterday, and I have some of the pre-soldered 'heat up and you're done' connectors arriving today. I'll play around with them outside the car and then pick one approach and replace all the damn butt connections I did.

Lol/groan/sigh. If I'd spent even half a second googling the use of acid flux, I'd have seen that you can't use it on wiring.
 
I've switched to the low-temp solder type that you linked earlier - manily cos (on the C30) CANbus is so sensitive, it's safer to avoid potential system errors. You can get them cheaper by the 100 off Amazon, though - that aliexpress link, they are more than double the unit cost.
 
It's been humid, hot, sweaty, and mosquitoes have been hungry. All of which makes me less inclined to sit around doing finicky electrical work. Still, I did reaplce all the soldered connections in the passenger footwell - interfacing the car with the MS harness. Maybe 25 or so? I didn't tug on all of them, but 2 or 3 of them did come apart easily while snipping them out, so I am certainly fixing what would have been issues in the short term.

Now I just need to do a handful more under the hood and all the acid flux solder joints will be gone. Oy vey.
 
yea it's hotter'n the hinges of hell and my a/c units aren't here yet to boot. still, I'm going to suffer in the shop today and try and get the engine and trans back together, and at least in mine, I really need the lift back available for other stuff. next several days are going to be (hopefully) devoted to shop re-org, I got halfway done back in december/jan, and haven't gotten back around to finishing. may just be famous last words.
 
yea it's hotter'n the hinges of hell and my a/c units aren't here yet to boot. still, I'm going to suffer in the shop today and try and get the engine and trans back together, and at least in mine, I really need the lift back available for other stuff. next several days are going to be (hopefully) devoted to shop re-org, I got halfway done back in december/jan, and haven't gotten back around to finishing. may just be famous last words.

I'll gladly pay the extra $$ for the cost of electricity to have 75? in my shop. Swestin my ass off just working out in the garden this morning. I don't remember the humidity being this bad last summer around this time.
 
I reverted back to an old tune, to get rid of all the weird 'adjustments' that got made while the wiring was bad/going bad/etc. Yep, it's all back to VROOM again. w00t.
 
Temps have cooled a bit here in the midwest, where the lack of A/C in the wagon isn't such a terrible thing, just mildly annoying.

Well, that and working from home has simply left me with very little reason to leave the house, other than going to ride bikes, in which case I take a car with a bike rack. And A/C... So the wagon has mostly just sat around all summer. And the PV as well. Dug them out of the garage over the weekend (things tend to.. accumulate... behind them, over time.

And the kid's 940, which hasn't seen much use (he's doing virtual school and never needs to go anywhere for the time being either).

The Volvo 'elephant walk':
5zi9vR7h.jpg


The wagon ran fine, as expected, was slightly smoking from one of the spark plug insulator boots when I got back. Er... totally normal. Ish. Whatever. vroooOOOMMBRAAAAAAAAP. Yeah, that gets your attention pretty well when you've been driving slow cars all summer.

I was going to drive the PV around some too... but the carbs were leaking a little bit. Some from the bottom, some from the tops. I guess the ethanol in the fuel has finally done some damage to the seals? Most of them will probably swell up and reseal, but some of the rubber gaskets (like around the idle jet/throttle ports, whatever they're called) were cracked and crumbling, that's not gonna reseal. So rather than drive it around with gas slowly dripping down n the exhaust manifold and alternator, I just parked it again and ordered a couple of DCOE rebuild/gasket kits. And a couple of sets of soft mounts.

Put a little R134A in the kid's 940, the A/C was short cycling and blowing cool air, not cold. I had to recharge it when we bought it, that's been a while. So it has a slow leak, but so slow it's not worth tracking down and fixing.
 
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Drove it for the first time in a while. Sigh, it's not making as much boost as it should. Haven't looked into it. But it was building up to only 3 or 4 psi. Which is a lot of HP still, but clearly not hitting boost control (WG's didn't open), clearly less HP than it should have. It's running on all 8 (verified with MS coil/injector test mode), WB showing it was getting plenty of fuel, not sure why it wasn't feeling like playing any harder.

I guess I'll pull the air cleaner off and see if the new turbo (only a few hundred miles on it so far) is bad. If so, I really need to triple check the oiling situation, although there's nothing too complex about it. Maybe just a bad Chinese turbo? It was a slightly nicer version of a dirt cheap Chinese T76 - this one supposedly had ball bearings.
 
Well that was refreshingly simple. The BOV - held in by a finicky PITA snapring, had popped out. So it was making 3 - 4 psi of boost blowing air out of the 1.5" hole where the BOV was supposed to be. Some idjit must not have seated the snapring fully when they assembled it.
 
Speeeeeeaking of eejits, I drove it the other day. Somewhat cooler weather, and it was acting all glub glub rich, too much fuel! So of course I set about driving it around some, doing a bit of autotune, doing a bit of smoothing, got it all running nice and clean again. Then... I happened to notice I'd left the IAT sensor unplugged after removing the cold side piping to refit that BOV. So basically it thought it was -100 bazillion degrees air temp.


*SIGH*

That did remind me though, the IAT has always unwaveringly said '70 degrees' - and I'm pretty sure it's not a wiring issue - because if I unplug the sensor it goes full cold, and if I touch the wires together (briefly, hopefully that's not bad, ahem) it goes waaaay hot. So it seems like the fixed resistance is coming from the sensor itself. I bought another one, we'll see if that works.
 
That did remind me though, the IAT has always unwaveringly said '70 degrees' - and I'm pretty sure it's not a wiring issue - because if I unplug the sensor it goes full cold, and if I touch the wires together (briefly, hopefully that's not bad, ahem) it goes waaaay hot. So it seems like the fixed resistance is coming from the sensor itself. I bought another one, we'll see if that works.

Let me know how that works for you. I have one that's doing the exact same thing on a microsquirt. It constantly shows 70F when plugged in.:???:
 
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