February'04

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6th - 8th February - Action. PIEVAN !!!

Spent a busy weekend designing and building a custom subframe thing for the van, and now the back end of the van rolls again :-)

Custom sub thing

14th - 15th February - Action.

Fitted the subframe and swing arm things into the van, added some bracing and cut out a teeny bit more floor, being lazy I didn't grab any pictures though !!

Finally got a chance to fit the Megasquirt EFI controller to Doris and spent a while getting her to idle at a nice sedate 700rpm. I will need to spend some 'quality time' with Doris to get the mapping right because there is a bit of a stumble as you try to lift the revs gently.

19th February - Action. EFI!

Sent a few messages to http://groups.yahoo.com/groups/megasquirt about sorting out the tuning and following the advice of the collective I disabled all the other enrichment stuff so that there was just the VE table to play with. Then I spotted a dodgy connection in the 2nd bank of injectors... Hmm. Seems that I had been mostly running on 4 cylinders yesterday!! Being able to get a nice stable idle with only 1/2 the engine running must be some sort of testament to the tuneability of the MS :-)

I think that having 1/2 the cyls pumping fresh air into the exhaust 'may' have been screwing up the CO figures at the tailpipe too! (unplug a couple of injectors at MOT time ?) With all 8 injectors on it was really easy to
get the engine to rev smoothly & slowly up to 4000, with only minor vibration damage to neighbouring properties.

So the Mini has now had about an hours driving to datalog and a calculated VE map.

General running is pretty good, with none of the cutting out as you slow down for junctions that the Lucas sometimes provided. Feels a bit lean if you boot it from 1500 ish, so will look to richen up the bins there or maybe try some accel stuff. After the little bit of hesitation it pulls most splendidly up to 5000, but due to small things becoming much much bigger far to quickly, it was hard to see what the mix was doing ;-)

Seems like I have an excuse to go out for another little potter tomorrow after work too !

21 -22nd February - Action. Squirty things.

Fitted the plumbed in extinguisher on Saturday, so now if there's a fire under the bonnet, I can fill the engine bay with foam :-)

Fitting was pretty easy once I had found somewhere to mount the cylinder, where it wouldn't accidentally get triggered! One of the operating cables runs to the centre of the top front roll cage bar, near the mirror so is east to reach from either front seat. Not sure where to mount the 2nd cable though...

At present, both nozzles are at the rear of the engine bay, but one will eventually be moved to the front for better coverage. Probably better to have them both in the car, than sitting in the shed though !

Took Doris out for 2 1/2 hours of Megasquirt tuning on Sunday, with Elaine in the passenger seat playing with (operating) the laptop. Once we had got sensible settings for 40mph cruising we ventured out onto some dual carriageway to sort out the higher rpm ranges. Quite noisy driving at 5000rpm under varying loads !

Tuning the low rpm was equally amusing, because the v8 has a fair bit of torque. So in the end we had to drive up a hill in third gear with the brakes on in 3rd to be able to tune the 800 - 1200 rpm range with high load :-)

The engine feels more responsive than with the Lucas ECU, and full throttle from 900 rpm is now possible in 4th gear without stuttering or misfiring. We will need to go out for a few more runs with some data logging running to get things spot on, but it's certainly not too far off.

Pics of squirting things

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This page last modified 04/02/2008.