Tuning

My first drive with boost resulted in pinging even with only 1-2 psi of boost, so more petrol and less advance was the order of the day, i also moved the air intakes under the wing resulting in air temps less than 50'c under 5psi of boost. I had to up the fuel pressure to 60psi making my 26lb injectors look like 30lb injectors, but are now maxing out at around 4500 rpm - so bigger injectors are on order.

Bigger Injectors

Received the Mototron 60Lb (630cc) high impedance injectors to replace my 26Lb ones. I got them from New Era Performance in the states, they were on a special at $439. My previous supplier (Fiveomotorsport) wanted $585 for Siemens Deka Injectors of the same specification. Turns out that The Mototrons are actually Siemens Deka injectors anyway, Not easy to see on this photo, but Siemens Deka is actually moulded into the plastic.

They were pretty much a straight swap, except my fuel rail was about 3mm higher and required a couple of washers to space it out, This is probably more to do with the face that the rail and manifold was custom fabricated around the old bosch injectors

21/4/05 Gearbox expired

Car is of the road again. gearbox expired sitting in a queue of traffic last night as i was on my way out to start mapping with latest megsquirt firmware. Ive been very careful with the gearbox, but I had an incident where I put it back into 1st instead of 3rd the other day causing a massive over-rev - I'm suprised that it didnt rip the gearbox out there and then.

7/5/05 700r4 gearbox stripdown

Stripped the box down, turns out that both the snap ring grooves on the input drum have been completely smashed out. General consensus is that its caused by high line pressure, which it was (~280 psi). After several emails to TCI Automotive, and several lame responses back, they said it was caused by a combination of an old drum and high line pressures - I contented that nowhere do they warn about fitting their full reverse pattern manual valve body to an old 700r4 (you show me a new one!) evidently I should of been seeing around 220 psi, and they waffled on about pump clearances - but it was doing 90-150psi before I fitted their parts to my gearbox. So I now have £1300 worth of useless gearbox. Sorry story on the gearbox will continue on the 700r4 rebuild page.

28/5/2005

Car now back on the road.

11/6/2005 Updates

Gearbox still holding!. Done about 150 miles on it now, getting more confident with the whole setup. No real issues with the turbo setup, was getting slight compressor surge in part throttle because the turbos are supplying more air than required. So I fitted my recirculation valve (dump valve / bov ) this was a bargain, got it of ebay for 1p !! Its off a Nisan Pulsar GTiR, this vents the over-pressure in the mid throttle without making any silly noise. Also fitted a heat shield to protect the brake fluid reservoir.

Inlet air temps are 50'c off boost and 60-70'c under boost, would like to try and get them lower, might do a water/air intercooler.

Fitted a oil temperature gauge alongside the boost gauge, what with them and the dump valve - its in danger of getting max-power!

Propshaft Safety Loop

With the added power, I was getting worried about the front propshaft failing, so I’ve made a propshaft loop. Made from 1/4" steel Its somewhat over-engineered but I wanted it to be good and strong!.

28/6/05

Safety loop requires more work as the prop hits it when going over speed bumps. Oil temperature was climbing to around 120-130'c and staying there, even driving around slowly off-boost the oil would stay high. So next projects were to plumb the water feeds into the turbos and fit an oil cooler.

I made some quick t-pieces from steel, longer term they need to be remade from brass. I tapped into the the feed coming from the top of the manifold. Both pipes get hot, but haven't actually check the coolant flow yet.

Fitted a 25 row oil cooler (biggest I could fit), oil temps now back down to around 100'c even when booting it. Also re-plumbed the trans cooler, but need to get some 90' fittings.

11/7/05 Knock Detection Part 1

Fitted my KnockSense-MS unit before embarking on trying a little more boost. The sensor is from a ~95 Renault espace, although it seem to be far too sensitive. It detectss knocks around 3k, but anything over 3.8k its on solid. Need to find a bosch eylet style one.

Ive wired it into Megasquirt, it will retard the ignition by a defined amount and also spike the coolant down to act as a 'mark' in the datalogs. I fitted the knock sensor to the inlet manifold, not the best location - I think it needs to be on the side of the block. But the current one is too bulky to do that.

In megatune, I set it to ignore knocks over 3500rpm, as its just total noise above that limit. I need another [less sensitive] knock sensor.

5/11/06 Knock Detection Part 2

Although Ive still got the knocksense connected, I soon removed the feed into megasquirt as despite trying different knock sensors and locations, it just doesn't seem able to detect knock correctly. I thought I would use idea presented in this AutoSpeed Article.

A little searching at Maplins found the "super stereo ear" part number N07AA for 8 quid is was worth a punt. An hour of soldering later, I had my prototype MK2 manual knock detector:

I attached the crock clips with the mics to the block - amongst all the clatter of the engine, you CAN hear the engine knocking if you provoke it. This is a far more reliable method than the knocksense unit.

27/7/05

Intake temperatures

Added an "optimax" switch, in other words I’ve enabled the switchable tables option in MegaSquirt to allow rapid ignition (and fuel if i want) map changes on the fly. With the recent hot weather inlet temps were reaching 100'c with ~6psi boost, I tried the ultimate in cold air intakes, but it didn't make much difference.