Exhaust parts

Received all the parts for my new exhaust I’m going to build. Before I can make any headway, though, I need to learn how to weld. In order to start that, I wired up a 240volt outlet for the welder, and gave it a go. Let’s just say practice will hopefully make perfect, or at least better.

Winter projects

Now that the cold has set in, it’s time to turn to the winter projects for the car. Of course, the garage is cold, so I’m having a hard time getting up the motivation to really work on it. There’s a lot to do though, if I want to improve the performance of the car by the spring. Here’s a list of some of the planned “improvements”:

• Replace the broken fender support and fender – Still waiting for these parts from Westfield – it’s only been a couple of months you know, these things take time…
• New Exhaust – 2.5″ turbo-back – The current exhaust has several sharp bends and other restrictions after the turbine, as well as being a bit smaller than I would prefer. I’ve purchased a welding rig to learn how to weld my own exhaust. Probably not the easiest first welding project I could have picked, but it’s the one I’ve got.
• Get the boot box lineX’d, and install the boot box lid – I purchased a boot box lid with the kit, but haven’t installed it yet, since I’m still making adjustments to the rear end.
• Repair the rear left light cluster – something I forgot to post on was the fact that my wiring bundle in the rear left wheel well came loose from its (not well secured) mount, and the wires rubbed against the tire, which rubbed through the sheathing and broke the ground.
• Get rid of the Serial cable for my ECU – Since this is a project car, I’ll be tinkering with the ECU for a while, adjusting settings and getting dyno tunes occasionally to improve power/response etc. However, the serial port on the ECU is in an awkward location, and having a cable dangling inside detracts from the overall aesthetics.
• Shroud the radiator – primarily a hot-weather improvement to reduce engine temps. The nose has lots of paths for lazy air to take around the radiator. Since this also means that the air will bypass the intake charge intercooler, this reduces the overall efficiency of all my cooling components.

First up: replace the serial cable for the ECU
Since the garage is cold, and little electronics projects can be done next to the fire in relative comfort, I decided to tackle this first (I know, I’m a wuss).
I looked around a bit before deciding that my best bet is to use a bluetooth–>serial converter, since I could then connect wirelessly to the ECU from almost any laptop. I found plenty of BT->Serial converters on Amazon, Newegg etc. but they were all at least $60, and as much as $100 for something decent, and far bulkier than I wanted to have hanging off my ECU. Plus, where’s the fun in buying something off Amazon? So, I bought an HC-05-D Serial–>Bluetooth module from ebay, since it had exactly what I needed, seems to have a good reliability record, and was substantially less expensive than the commercial alternatives. Unfortunately, the module needs a regulated 5V power supply. To provide this, I disassembled an old car cell-phone charger to obtain a DC-DC converter circuit based on an MC34063 chip.

Unfortunately, the circuit was designed to output 6V instead of 5V, since this was an old non-USB-standard charger. I used this online calculator to figure out that all I needed to do was replace two resistors with 1k and 3k Ohm and voila! now I had a stable, regulated 5V power supply, designed for 12V car power input.

I installed both PCBs into a small project box, and now I have a functioning BT–>Serial convertor for a total of about $30 in parts. Haven’t actually hooked it up to the ECU yet, that’s for this weekend, but I’ve been able to set up the module with a custom device name (“BRG7″ of course!), and a custom PIN. I’ll post and update if it works when I get to test it.

Uh-Oh. Fender trouble. Off the road for the year, I think

I was happily driving along the road to work, when all of a sudden, I notice the front left fender is bouncing around more than usual, and making a god-awful noise. I pulled to the side of the road to check things out, and found that the cycle wing support had snapped off at the weld betweeen the round tubing and the flat bar that held the fender itself. To make things worse, in the process of pulling of the road, I had reversed into the spot, and bent the front part of the fender support backward, so it was now wrapped around the upper ball joint. I had to drive home very gingerly (about a mile), and in the process, completely destroyed the cycle wing.

I’m in communication with Tom at Manik, and Bill at FM, to try to get a replacement support and wing (workmanship here was clearly probelmatic), but this effectively means that I’m off the road for the year, unless I want to drive without a front fender, which I’m not overly keen on.

Very sad – I had been hoping to make it to PGP kart track to have a little fun in a couple of weeks, but that will probably have to wait until spring time now. I think I’ll take this opportunity to start on the winter projects, including fitting the weather gear, and replacing the headlights, so that I can at least get some satisfaction with making progress on something, even if I’m not driving the car.

Disappointing Dyno results

After driving the car for a while, and trying to work with the FM guys to tune the ECU my emailing the maps back and forth, I finally got the car on the dyno this weekend for a tuning session. The goal was to maximize mid-range torque and to generally dial the ECU in a bit better than it was right now. It was a Mustang dyno, which I’m told typically reads a little lower (10-20% depending on who you ask) than the more common Dynojet dyno, OTOH, it’s also more accurate.

The result was much, much lower than I was expecting The car started the seesion with about 125rwhp, and 125 lbft of Torque. Given the car’s speed (aka the butt dyno), I expected something much higher. On the bright side, it’s good to know that more power will make this thing even wilder, I guess. Ended the day with ~155rwhp and ~150 lbft of torque. Driving home didn’t really give me an opportunity to test the car, so I’ll have to see if I notice any difference in the day-to-day usage.

One major problem we noticed was that the boost from the turbo peaks at around 10.5psi @3500rpm, then starts to droop after that, to about 7.5 psi @6500. The net result is that I’m loosing a bunch of mid- and upper-range power. Probably good for another 20-30 rwhp if I can solve the boost droop. I think the problem is likely my exhaust, since it’s basically a thrown-together custom job that I had done without the guy being able to see my car, so there are several tight bends and restrictive points that are probably creating back pressure, which would prevent the turbine from spinning up properly.

All in all a very educational experience, and the next time I do one of these, I hope I’ll have fixed the boost droop, and possibly changed the cam timings a little.

REGISTERED!!! (plus a couple of other updates)

The car is now registered and legal – woo hoo!

Everything went very smoothly. I took my paperwork to the WSP VIN Inspection location, talked to the officer there about where everything came from, helped her find the VIN numbvers for the engine and frame, then she went in the office and came back maybe 45 minutes later with a couple of forms for me to sign. Then it was off to the DOL to register the car. Paid the taxes, and walked out with a license plate. It was much less painful than I expected, and took me a couple of hours in total. Then, unfortunately, I had to get to work, so I took the Interstate back, which was about as dull as any drive can be in this car, which is to say, still better than driving a Camry anywhere.

Interesting handling note on the car: the track is wider in the back than the front, which means it does tend to wander around on well-worn, rutted roads.

Before the inspection, I took care of some of the issues I noted in my shakedown run. I fitted new gearbox mountings, tightened the banjo bolt on the turbo oil feed and fitted the mesh to the holes in the nose to make it look more finished.

The mesh parts were a pain to fit. They need to be bent slightly to fit the contours of the nose, and they are unevenly formed, so they need a bit of re-forming to ensure that both big “nostrils” have the mesh at about the same height etc. I fitted the two small mesh covers using epoxy putty, which was super easy, but fairly brittle, so it can’t be used in places where there’s a lot of flex – like the top of the bonnet. For the bjg mesh covers, I fiberglassed them in. First time I’ve used Fiberglass in 20 years, and boy does that stuff stink.

The gearbox mounts were hard to find, but the ones I got (http://www.vibrationmounts.com/Store.asp?Page=Products1.htm, Part#V11Z02MMMKA040H) are a bit smaller and much stiffer than the Westfield part. I had to cut down the studs to make them fit, though. No more knocking in the tunnel, at least so far.

Another small thing I found was that the exhaust downpipe was hitting the lower frame member near the exhaust hole in the body, so I had to fix that by loosening, shifting, and re-torquing the downpipe nuts.

But there you go, all done. At least for now. There will always be things to do

Shakedown test

I drove the Westie to work yesterday, in order to test out the mechanicals and shakedown the car a bit. I identified some issues, and managed to test the car’s feistyness on some of the highway on ramps.

• The car is fast. Really fast. The power application is pretty linear, with no noticable turbo lag, but the power band really comes on at around 4k RPM. And the BOV sounds fantastic. I really thought I’d hate it, but I don’t.
• Knocking in hard right turns. Other folks have reported this as well, and it’s caused by the driveshaft hitting the handbrake mount. I’ll need to fit some stiffer gearbox mounts to resolve this, but for now, I’ll just be a bit more careful taking sharp right hand turns
• Oil leak at the turbo. Bummer. This created a mess in the side of the engine bay. It also means I can’t drive the car today, which is even worse . Not sure why this is happening, since the bolt seems to be well-torqued, but I’ll just have to re-torque it and see what happens. Next troubleshooting step will be to replace the copper washers.
• Managed to blow off an inlet tube. On my drive home last night, I noticed at one point that the car was feeling different. I drove it home a bit more gingerly, but couldn’t notice anything obviously wrong. When I inspected the car after getting home I noticed that the inlet tube leading to the intercooler in the nose had separated slightly from the silicon hose attached to it. Since there was probably positive air pressure the whole time, I doubt I took in any unfiltered air, but I’ll need to groove the pipe more heavily to ensure it doesn’t slip in future.
• Roughed in alignment is surprisingly driveable. I don’t know how, but I managed to roughly point all the wheels so that it’s very driveable at the moment. A bit of a tendency to wander in the rutted roads, but otherwise very manageable.

That’s it. Not bad, actually, for a first run. Only real problem is the turbo oil leak, because I don’t know why it’s leaking. I hadn’t noticed it on any previous runs, but today was the first time I’d used any boost.

Headlight fitting

Added the headlights last night, which meant drilling more holes in fiberglass. You’d think I’d be used to this by now, but it’s still nerve-wracking every time. Measure thrice, drill/cut once. And always use painters tape for drawing on the body

Also took some shots of the car while I had it outside the other day, and I’m loving how agressive it looks. Unfortunately, the headlights will spoil the lines somewhat, but given how it looks in the photo, I think I’ll be trying to replace the stock headlights at some point in the future with something more streamline. Maybe something like the ones on the Caterham RST-V8 Levante. Ah well, this will always be a project car, even if it will consume less of my time in the future.

Interior finishing

Spent a bunch of time sewing the gearshift and handbrake gators to the interior carpeting, as well as trying to sew some of the velcro fastening strips onto the carpet. I had planned to do crimson contrast stitching around the base of the gators, to match the contrast piping on the carpet itself, but then re-discovered that my sewing doesn’t look nearly good enough for that and gave up. Used black instead. The carpet is fastened down using velcro on the underside, and the velcro has been reported not to stay stuck to the carpet very well. After spending the better part of 45 minutes sewing in two of the ~20 strips of velcro needed just for the tunnel section of the carpeting (it comes in several pieces), I figured I would risk it and maybe have to do more sewing later.

Once the carpeting was installed, I reinstalled the seats and replaced the harness lap belts with the new ones I bought. The new harnesses have pull-up adjusters on the lap belt, as opposed to the pull-down adjusters on the original harnesses. This is necessary because their is very little room in the cockpit, and pull-down adjusters just can’t be tightened. I also installed eye bolts in the floor, with backing plates underneath the car, for the submarine straps on the harnesses (6-point mounting).

Now I only need to install headlights/turn signals, the wire mesh on the openings in the bonnet, and cut the boot box for the Roll bar rear stays. After that, it’s registration time. On that note, I got an appointment for my VIN Inspection on August 10th with the State Patrol. That’s the first step towards registration. I’m hoping to get it registered on the same day. Wish me luck.

First real drive (with video)

Woohoo! First real drive yesterday. Kept it slow (max 30mph) because the brakes are still not bedded in, and I couldn’t position the seat properly because the harnesses I have don’t fit quite right. Ordered new harness hardware to remedy the problem.

Due, in part, to my awkward seating position and unfamiliarity with the car, I was over-throttling a bit, and under-revving at other times, but it was fun. It’s [ahem] extremely responsive to throttle input. I don’t think I ever gave it more than 1/4 throttle at any point. Turns out, driving on the gravel road kicks up A LOT of rocks; I really need to install the cycle wings. It started raining just as I started to drive, so I got a chance to try out the cute little windshield wipers. They work, though I still don’t think I’ll be using them much.

Took some video by taping my phone to the rollbar. Worked out surprisingly well, actually, although the quality is still a bit poor. Thinking I need a GoPro; hmmmm:

Westfield first drive on Vimeo.

Engine running (more) smoothly

I did take the car for a very short drive, but only around my driveway. The reason I didn’t take it any further was that I was unsure whether I had enough gas in the tank to allow for the fact that my driveway is on a slope. I only put 2 gallons in at first, and there just might not be enough still sloshing around in there, after filling the fuel lines and running the car for a while.

Before I could get there, though, the first thing I had to deal with was that after all my electical tinkering, and starting and stopping the engine a few times to test my starter interlock, I’d managed to drain the battery. When I checked it, it was only putting out about 8.5 volts. Gulp. No matter, I used the Miata for a jump-start, and all was well again.

Once the car was started, however, it was pretty clear that the idle was awful. Very lumpy, slightly too low, and generally sounding pretty unwell. I didn’t want to drive it with that going on, so, off to O’Reilly’s for a cheapo timing light. With timing light in hand, I started checking the engine readings. Since I’m running a Hydra EMS rather than the stock ECU, the timing adjustment is done through the ECU, rather than mechanical adjustment of the cam angle sensor, as is normally done on the ’95 engines. The ECU thought it was sparking at about 14 degrees BTDC, while the crank timing mark was showing 10 degrees. A few adjustments later, and the ECU and crank markings roughly agreed. I say roughly, because the timing was wandering around a bit – between 12 and 14 degrees. I don’t know if this is normal, so I’ll check with the FM guys tomorrow.

With the timing sorted out and the idle up to about 900RPM, sounding a bit healthier, I got in and drove it around the driveway, then into the garage. I can tell the car is going to be a blast to drive on the street. When you push the accelerator, the car just starts to move; there’s no sense of trying to pick up momentum or overcome inertia – it just moves. Can’t wait to get this thing on a road.

One unpleasant surprise today was discovering that I have the wrong front fenders. I’m pretty sure the ones I have are the narrower version, which won’t fit the 205/50-15 tires I’m running. Fortunately, I have a second, different pair, which are the fake “carbon-fiber-effect” plastic fenders. These are not the ones I ultimately want to run, but I’ll have to use them for now.