Been spending a lot of time on the car lately. Most of which was agonizing over a laptop wondering why the damn thing won't start. But first...
We had confirmed the FPR wasn't R'ing, so I ordered an Aeromotive adjustable unit and fittings needed to drop it into the new fuel system. Drilling/tapping the Cosmo turned out to only delay spending the $150 on a new one I guess. Glad to have solved a problem though. The Aeromotive thankfully fit in without any problems, and was even able to stick the gauge from the Cosmo on the front of it. What purpose does a fuel pressure gauge under the hood serve after base pressure is set? none... but it looks cool.
To offset some frustration with other things I polished more metal. The Moto-Lita that I'm "borrowing" from my Dad has a lot of cool nostalgia/heirloom value that I really dig, but it also had that "sitting in the basement for 25-years" thing going on. That makes for cool weathered leather and a crummy looking center. Spent some time and hand polished the spokes and beauty ring. It came out awesome!
I really like that it is time-period correct, and that it has seen action in some other cool cars to go through the family. I grabbed a 6 hole to 9 hole adapter that someone had linked me to earlier. Originally the wheel came off of a rolled over K5 Blazer and was sold by Hickey Engineering. The Hickey horn button was really sticky and was going to take some work to function. I saw a Triumph/Sunbeam button on eBay for $17 shipped so I grabbed that as it was nice and clean without any effort. I'm thinking that I'd really like to get an enamel R Sport sticker made for the center. Have to ask Dave Barton if he can do custom sizes.
In combination with the seats, the
feel of the car has really significantly changed. Last year driving around it felt like an overpowered old Volvo, complete with folding chairs and school bus steering wheel. Now I'm sitting
in a set of bolstered seats, holding a wheel that's under 27" in diameter and has more than .25" of meat to hold on to. It actually feels like it's meant to go fast. Love it.
OK on to the starting issues. With the FPR done I was kind of hoping that all my problems would magically go away. It turned out when I drove the car the first time it was EXACTLY the same, and I was bummed. I ran it around a bit and decided to play with VE Analyze. The analyzer corrected a lot of my absurdly rich idle/cruise very quickly. It also smoothed out a lot of the on-throttle lean spiking. It helped enough that I felt like things were moving in the right direction and sent some logs to Kenny for review. My big complaint at this point was it was like a lightning strike to get the car to start. It seemed to start easier without a resistor across the CPS (turned out to be placebo), but that also meant I was limited to ~4,500rpm before I lost sync.
Kenny told me quickly that the micro was losing sync during cranking. I put a LOT of time the past week into figuring this issue out. I don't think there's a thread on msextra about "#2 sync loss during cranking" I haven't read. I spent almost 4 hours on Monday trying every combination and permutation of resistors to try and drill down to a cause. I grounded my CPS shield wire to chassis, then to signal ground, cleaned up my engine ground and moved the uS ground to the same spot as the battery, grounded the head. Nothing made a lick of difference. Even with every relay pulled and just spinning the starter I was losing sync. Megasquirt guys love to say "noise noise noise!" so I got lost in that rabbit hole a bit. I was literally losing sleep thinking about pulling my new harness out of the car, or just giving up on the VR sensor altogether.
Finally, I tried one thing on the list I had pushed off: looking into how the crank sensor was wired up. Conveniently, Qwkswede wired his microsquirt to stock CPS first, so I copied him. His layout was in line with what Kenny had said - VR1+ in the middle (pin2), shield on pin 3, VR1- on pin 1. Since the car ran so well once started, and I only registered sync loss during cranking, I was pretty confident that the CPS signal was OK. Honestly part of the reason I left it to last was because I've found de-pinning the Bosch Timer Junior connectors to be a bitch for some reason - and I did destroy a terminal taking it back apart.
Anyways, I finally pulled the connector apart and swapped the polarity of the +/- signals. Leaned in the car, hit the key, VROOOM. Not a moment's hesitation. I took a few logs, everything was clean, re-started the car probably 12 times and did a little victory dance. So right now I have the stock Volvo CPS wired to the DIY microsquirt harness as follows:
VR1+ to pin 1
VR1- to pin 2
Shield to pin 3
I haven't driven it yet, but if the start and idle are any indication I'm in business. Getting this figured out was both a huge relief and reward. This is definitely the most involved I've gotten with the megasquirt/tunerstudio stuff, so it was a good experience to start understanding things more, and also to troubleshoot an issue with the ECU without throwing my hands up in frustration (well, that did happen a few times).
I'm also glad because this means I can take my car to eeuroparts on Sunday without fear of being stranded on the show lot with a non-starting car. I lost some time for my "show prep" stuff to all of this, so Sunday afternoon I decided I really didn't want to show the car with dead paint. The car looked OK, but it really was completely dead decade-in-a-barn oxidized paint. The car has about 6.5 feet of single stage on it, so no reason we can't shine it up.
Never wet sanded a car before, but a light colored car with a mile of paint is a good place to start. I just did one sanding step of 1500 grit and man, what a difference. I could see as I was sanding the layer of crap getting cut off the top. It was bringing a much brighter color out. I also sanded off a good bit of Rust Bullet overspray from when I did the bottom of the car. I went over it with the paper while sensior followed behind me running the wheel with a heavy cut compound. Yes we did it in the sun, yes we know how to detail cars. This was really done on a whim "let's see how it turns out" kind of thing. The car can and should be gone over again to get the best finish out of it, but we were both surprised and thrilled with how it came out.
Have learned pretty fast that every job on this car is easier when you pick it up a bit. Thing is a back breaker.
After the compound it was gone over once more with a foam pad and glaze to take some swirl out of it. We've spent two solid years working hard on the car and I feel like I spend so much of my time looking at it... it's SO NICE to have a shine on it. Kind of like the interior, it helps bring the car to life and takes it one step further away from barn car status. Only downside is that now I'll actually care about the finish, and it's really amplifying my desire to refinish the wheels.
Before Sunday I'd like to drop the back seat in it and get the door panels on if I can pull it off.
The other exciting thing about getting the microsquirt tune closer is that besides driving it now, I can start thinking about the "hot" engine going in the car. Time to start buying studs/gaskets/seals etc. and start thinking about getting the long block assembled.