Stiggy Pop
In the cool kids club
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2011
- Location
- Granville, MA
Well for better or worse I've spent way more time the past several weeks driving than in the garage! That means no big "wow" progress to show, but I've made some incremental steps that have really seen the 2.0 revision of the car coming together.
The microsquirt and crank sensor deal has been a complete non-issue since I last posted. I haven't had any problems starting the car, and I have not had a single sync loss event driving. I'm not sure why the cranking cleaned up, but I've started it dozens and dozens of times without a problem. I've also bumped off of my 6850 rev limiter with no problems.
The way I have the thing wired seems to be unique to my setup at this point - the couple other guys doing this have the +/- flipped from what I have, and have needed shunt resistors to get a full rev range. For posterity, my Volvo CPS connector is wired to a DIY autotune microsquirt harness as follows;
VR1+ to pin 1
VR1- to pin 2
Shield to pin 3
NO resistors in play anywhere. Seems to be the ticket for me. I wonder if the other guys flipped theirs if they'd still find the need for resistors?
At any rate, that issue is sorted and allowed me to move on to the tune. I've still got Kenny engaged helping me out with maps, and we went back and forth a lot on this trying to get the thing pulled in line. I was having a lot of trouble getting the car to run smoothly, all of my low throttle cruising driving was in the 11-12:1 AFR range, really really rich. Then under load it'd bog down rich, then spike up lean. It was basically wrong in every condition, but the car was still drivable at least. We went back and forth until the lean spike was more under control and I tried to add a few pounds of boost in. At 15psi it was detonating like crazy... ugh! At this point I was getting pretty frustrated, as I really wanted to be moving on to other things with the car. I sent another log off to Kenny and kind of threw my hands up in the air. He wrote back and said "hey it's only making like 11psi, do you live at high altitude?". That was the tip I needed!
I had been looking at logs and gauges but I was too hung up on AFRs and didn't PAY ATTENTION to my MAP line. Thanks to Kenny's kick in the pants I looked at what the kPa value really meant and yeah... donde esta mi boosto?? As soon as I saw it I knew that was going to be some kind of answer. I put my Motiv Powerbleeder on the MAP sensor and put a steady 15psi into it... wouldn't ya know Tuner Studio was showing about 11psi. I opened up the MAP/BARO cal menu and DURRR the settings were wrong. They were set to 'Custom' values which I assume are from my ms2 setup which had a 2.5 bar sensor. I selected the GM 3-Bar sensor from the drop down and the readings fell into place. I drove it around for 15 minutes, ran the VE Analyzer and the clouds parted, birds sang, and all was better in the world. Lesson learned: pay attention, and tuning is much better done when the ECU knows how much air is actually entering the engine.
I beat myself up over it a bit, but really this is all great learning experience stuff. The hassle getting the crank sensor and AFR's in line has forced me to get more into the megasquirt stuff and now I can actually look at Kenny's changes and understand what he's doing. If anyone is going MS or struggling to get their car dialed I can't say enough about how helpful he's been and what a difference it has made for me with this project. I've got the boost up around 17psi now and we're just getting the final smoothing touches on it. The nice part is that after a few hundred miles on the new setup, I'm finally actually feeling the changes. I think the intake manifold really makes itself evident over 4k rpm, the car just seems to have a lot more pull at high revs with the same boost levels over last year with the stock manifold. No clue what it's making for power, but it really rips. People weren't lieing when they said Holsets come on really hard. Lot like riding a two stroke dirt bike which I love!
Otherwise I've picked away at the interior a little bit. I have all the dash plastics back in place. Everything I do on the interior takes forever because it has been literally years since I took the inside of the cars apart. So I'm going through my piles of plastic, picking pieces, washing them, lookin at em for a while, then sifting through bolt buckets going "hmm this one? nope. Maybe one like that? close needs to be longer.". Majorly time consuming but labeling every single thing that came off the car wasn't that practical either. I have two main things left to accomplish on the inside: wire up and put in the aux gauges, and finish the doors. My redone door panels look great but the clips no longer line up. I need to spend a day fiddling with the key-holes to try and get the pins in line so I can get it mounted and put door pulls on, window switches etc. Also thinking more about a shift boot since I'm cutting noise out of the cabin elsewhere, and it's shooting superheated tunnel air into my face on 85 degree days.
Engine bay has been pretty static lately. I still need to build a new harness for the H4 lights, and add some clamps to some lines. I had a bunch of left over DEI heat shield so I covered a chunk of the hood because the turbo is bubbling up all of my paint on the underside. The heat the thing generates is just crazy. I'm not sure how long plug wires or coils are going to last with how close it all is. I may have to break down and buy a turbo blanket but A) they are butt ugly B) ugly AND expensive. Other things I'm considering are re-drilling my coil bracket to shift the coils towards the intake a bit, as well as maybe some kind of heat shield between the downpipe and the head (saw Homer do one I really like). My new favorite idea is that if I ever paint the whole car, I'm going to graft a SAAB 900 hood vent into the flathood over the hot side of the turbo.
But really what I'm thinking of now is the other engine. Since the tune is there, there's nothing stopping me from putting the built motor in. I brought the RSI head to the machine shop and they cc'd the chambers at 60.5cc. With the block I have and a stock gasket I end up right around 8.2:1 SCR. Lowish, but should be good for smacking a lot of boost on it with pump gas. With a nice light rotating assembly, good gearing, and a lot of airflow I'm really not worried about off-boost performance.
So, besides driving it every time the sun shines, plans are:
- Decide on a headgasket (see discussion here on gaskets with my o-ringed block: http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=309656)
- Assemble the long block and start getting it dressed for action
- Work out fan control with the microsquirt and swap in the Nissens rad and fan that's sitting in the shed
- wire headlights
- door panels
- aux gauges
- I might end up relocating the oil filter
- want to clean up my wheels and put a set of tires on it
- would like to add an idle control valve
- knock sensing!
Plenty to do. I'd like to have the built motor in this summer so it's broken in and making real power this Fall. I really want to dyno it this year. It's all doable stuff, but summer is a lot busier so I've been getting less days to work. (also Dad runs off to his lake house instead of helping me with my old Volvo )
~~ Random thoughts on the car
- It's really fun. I have a goal to go to at least one auto-x with it this year so I can learn it better. It's very stiff and the power comes on in such a way that I really need to know how to control the car.
- It gets way more attention than I expected.
- The Aeromotive 340 fuel pump is loud. I wouldn't DD a car with it. It's loud enough that a guy walking 30 feet behind the car on his cell phone stopped and looked over surprised when it primed before starting the car yesterday. Ok for what the car is because it kind of sounds badass but it's definitely noisy.
- I need to watch where I'm pointing when I start it! The car "marks it's territory" everywhere. Uncatted car and rich mixture I guess.
The microsquirt and crank sensor deal has been a complete non-issue since I last posted. I haven't had any problems starting the car, and I have not had a single sync loss event driving. I'm not sure why the cranking cleaned up, but I've started it dozens and dozens of times without a problem. I've also bumped off of my 6850 rev limiter with no problems.
The way I have the thing wired seems to be unique to my setup at this point - the couple other guys doing this have the +/- flipped from what I have, and have needed shunt resistors to get a full rev range. For posterity, my Volvo CPS connector is wired to a DIY autotune microsquirt harness as follows;
VR1+ to pin 1
VR1- to pin 2
Shield to pin 3
NO resistors in play anywhere. Seems to be the ticket for me. I wonder if the other guys flipped theirs if they'd still find the need for resistors?
At any rate, that issue is sorted and allowed me to move on to the tune. I've still got Kenny engaged helping me out with maps, and we went back and forth a lot on this trying to get the thing pulled in line. I was having a lot of trouble getting the car to run smoothly, all of my low throttle cruising driving was in the 11-12:1 AFR range, really really rich. Then under load it'd bog down rich, then spike up lean. It was basically wrong in every condition, but the car was still drivable at least. We went back and forth until the lean spike was more under control and I tried to add a few pounds of boost in. At 15psi it was detonating like crazy... ugh! At this point I was getting pretty frustrated, as I really wanted to be moving on to other things with the car. I sent another log off to Kenny and kind of threw my hands up in the air. He wrote back and said "hey it's only making like 11psi, do you live at high altitude?". That was the tip I needed!
I had been looking at logs and gauges but I was too hung up on AFRs and didn't PAY ATTENTION to my MAP line. Thanks to Kenny's kick in the pants I looked at what the kPa value really meant and yeah... donde esta mi boosto?? As soon as I saw it I knew that was going to be some kind of answer. I put my Motiv Powerbleeder on the MAP sensor and put a steady 15psi into it... wouldn't ya know Tuner Studio was showing about 11psi. I opened up the MAP/BARO cal menu and DURRR the settings were wrong. They were set to 'Custom' values which I assume are from my ms2 setup which had a 2.5 bar sensor. I selected the GM 3-Bar sensor from the drop down and the readings fell into place. I drove it around for 15 minutes, ran the VE Analyzer and the clouds parted, birds sang, and all was better in the world. Lesson learned: pay attention, and tuning is much better done when the ECU knows how much air is actually entering the engine.
I beat myself up over it a bit, but really this is all great learning experience stuff. The hassle getting the crank sensor and AFR's in line has forced me to get more into the megasquirt stuff and now I can actually look at Kenny's changes and understand what he's doing. If anyone is going MS or struggling to get their car dialed I can't say enough about how helpful he's been and what a difference it has made for me with this project. I've got the boost up around 17psi now and we're just getting the final smoothing touches on it. The nice part is that after a few hundred miles on the new setup, I'm finally actually feeling the changes. I think the intake manifold really makes itself evident over 4k rpm, the car just seems to have a lot more pull at high revs with the same boost levels over last year with the stock manifold. No clue what it's making for power, but it really rips. People weren't lieing when they said Holsets come on really hard. Lot like riding a two stroke dirt bike which I love!
Otherwise I've picked away at the interior a little bit. I have all the dash plastics back in place. Everything I do on the interior takes forever because it has been literally years since I took the inside of the cars apart. So I'm going through my piles of plastic, picking pieces, washing them, lookin at em for a while, then sifting through bolt buckets going "hmm this one? nope. Maybe one like that? close needs to be longer.". Majorly time consuming but labeling every single thing that came off the car wasn't that practical either. I have two main things left to accomplish on the inside: wire up and put in the aux gauges, and finish the doors. My redone door panels look great but the clips no longer line up. I need to spend a day fiddling with the key-holes to try and get the pins in line so I can get it mounted and put door pulls on, window switches etc. Also thinking more about a shift boot since I'm cutting noise out of the cabin elsewhere, and it's shooting superheated tunnel air into my face on 85 degree days.
Engine bay has been pretty static lately. I still need to build a new harness for the H4 lights, and add some clamps to some lines. I had a bunch of left over DEI heat shield so I covered a chunk of the hood because the turbo is bubbling up all of my paint on the underside. The heat the thing generates is just crazy. I'm not sure how long plug wires or coils are going to last with how close it all is. I may have to break down and buy a turbo blanket but A) they are butt ugly B) ugly AND expensive. Other things I'm considering are re-drilling my coil bracket to shift the coils towards the intake a bit, as well as maybe some kind of heat shield between the downpipe and the head (saw Homer do one I really like). My new favorite idea is that if I ever paint the whole car, I'm going to graft a SAAB 900 hood vent into the flathood over the hot side of the turbo.
But really what I'm thinking of now is the other engine. Since the tune is there, there's nothing stopping me from putting the built motor in. I brought the RSI head to the machine shop and they cc'd the chambers at 60.5cc. With the block I have and a stock gasket I end up right around 8.2:1 SCR. Lowish, but should be good for smacking a lot of boost on it with pump gas. With a nice light rotating assembly, good gearing, and a lot of airflow I'm really not worried about off-boost performance.
So, besides driving it every time the sun shines, plans are:
- Decide on a headgasket (see discussion here on gaskets with my o-ringed block: http://forums.turbobricks.com/showthread.php?t=309656)
- Assemble the long block and start getting it dressed for action
- Work out fan control with the microsquirt and swap in the Nissens rad and fan that's sitting in the shed
- wire headlights
- door panels
- aux gauges
- I might end up relocating the oil filter
- want to clean up my wheels and put a set of tires on it
- would like to add an idle control valve
- knock sensing!
Plenty to do. I'd like to have the built motor in this summer so it's broken in and making real power this Fall. I really want to dyno it this year. It's all doable stuff, but summer is a lot busier so I've been getting less days to work. (also Dad runs off to his lake house instead of helping me with my old Volvo )
~~ Random thoughts on the car
- It's really fun. I have a goal to go to at least one auto-x with it this year so I can learn it better. It's very stiff and the power comes on in such a way that I really need to know how to control the car.
- It gets way more attention than I expected.
- The Aeromotive 340 fuel pump is loud. I wouldn't DD a car with it. It's loud enough that a guy walking 30 feet behind the car on his cell phone stopped and looked over surprised when it primed before starting the car yesterday. Ok for what the car is because it kind of sounds badass but it's definitely noisy.
- I need to watch where I'm pointing when I start it! The car "marks it's territory" everywhere. Uncatted car and rich mixture I guess.