my build thread, e30 with a 9 inch

[wazzu70]

Thats really cool Perry. I have been thinking of picking up a makerbot to mess around with. You have shown me lots of good uses for one!

Does your company do "one off" parts or are they mostly set up for larger orders?

[someguy2800]

Thats really cool Perry. I have been thinking of picking up a makerbot to mess around with. You have shown me lots of good uses for one!

Does your company do "one off" parts or are they mostly set up for larger orders?

Yeah we do. We have a minimum order value of $150. If you want something cheaper than that and arn't too concerned about asthetics or dimensional accuracy try shapeways. I had them make a 3d printed ceramic morter and pestle for my wife awhile back.

redeyeondemand.com

shapeways.com

[wazzu70]

Thanks!

[someguy2800]

http://youtu.be/zbuQ7wMZhfQ

Finally got my radiator hose so I could heat cycle the car for the first time. The ticking noise is just the fuel injectors opening and closing. These are the loudest injectors I've ever heard. Bosch 280 158 040, polaris snowmobile injectors.

[Colby Colbs]

Braaaaappppppp!!

[auaq]

Perry, is it safe to say - Finally!

[dohcdoh]

This thread delivers! Sounds good man, can't wait to see the run times.

[E36 HateR]

Congratulations! Those injectors make your car sound like a Cummins lol

[Mossman11]

I want to have your babies. Apologies that I am a man so it probably will never happen.

[vollosso]

Why does it sound so "braap-y"?

[someguy2800]

Why does it sound so "braap-y"?

equal length exhaust manifold combined with straight through muffler? Its actually reasonably quiet at idle. It sounds like evil angry sex at 7500.

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I want to have your babies. Apologies that I am a man so it probably will never happen.

apology accepted, but try a little harder next time your picking a gender.

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Congratulations! Those injectors make your car sound like a Cummins lol

yeah I'm kind of dreading explaining to every other person what the clattering sound is.

[NOTORIOUS VR]

Nice dude! Bet you you're happy to finally get the beast running

[LagWagon]

He was grinning just riding in my slow poke of a m3, I can't imagine his expression when he fired that thing up for the first time

[Colby Colbs]

I said BRAAAAAP cuz that means ready to rip. Just clarifying that.

[someguy2800]

I just got back from a drive. Put about 30 miles on it. My laptop decided it doesn't want to run on the battery anymore so I couldn't do any tuning. The map is pretty lean so I couldn't push on it. It drives really nice but it is really loud and the clutch is really grabby. My throttle pedal sticks in the fully closed position so its impossible to modulate the throttle under about 20%. Without ant throttle control its a handful at stoplights. Its like driving a tilton with metalic disks. I'm going to put a clutch pedal stop in tonight and see what I can do about the throttle. I had it up to about 80 mph and no driveshaft vibration so thats good.

[vollosso]

I said BRAAAAAP cuz that means ready to rip. Just clarifying that.

Hah my question wasn't relevant to your post.
The engine just sounds much more aggressive than I'm used to.

[black bnr32]

are you sure thats injector tick? wouldn't loud injectors be 'ticking' at a higher rate? sounds like its one tick per rpm. i confuse.

[someguy2800]

are you sure thats injector tick? wouldn't loud injectors be 'ticking' at a higher rate? sounds like its one tick per rpm. i confuse.

It is actually one tick every other rev. I am not running sequential injection. I had the ecu set to fire all 6 injector simultaneously once per cycle.

I fixed my laptop so I could go out in the garage and mess with the configuration on the mega squirt. The first thing I did was change the injector sequence to fire each bank alternating every revolution. Now with only 3 injectors firing at a time it is much less noticeable. Still loud but not as bad. When I was driving earlier I could hear the injectors firing while driving 80 mph down the interstate. Crazy. I'm sure it will be much better with the hood and firewall cover on. I don't have the fan on the car so I am running without the hood. Sure fire way to solve an overheating car by the way. Ditch the hood and it will run cool all day with no fan.

I also messed around with the tune a bit. I am not running an idle control valve so I am using ignition timing to control idle speed which takes some fiddling. I am having an issue with a bog when you just barely open the throttle off idle. I think this was another contributing factor to why I was having such a hard time driving the car away from the stop today. I thought the clutch was just locking up really abruptly but I think much of the problem was that when I would try to give the car gas as I was letting out the clutch the motor was stumbling. I played with the accel enrichment which helped a bit. I think the problem may lie in the injector dead time.

I also found out why the throttle pedal was sticking closed. There is a little bracket with a rubber pad on it that the pedal linkage rests on with the pedal all the way up. The brackets holding the pedal linkage were bent enough to allow the linkage to move sideways enough to get caught on the side of the stop. After fixing that I was playing with the pedal a bit and noticed the pedal travel was really short. To go from closed to wide open throttle the pedal was only moving about 2/3 of the way to the pedal stop on the firewall which was making it hard to modulate the throttle at low speed. Apparently the pedal ratio is different between an m20 and m50 throttle body. So I decided to change the pedal ratio. After measuring I decided I wanted to increase the pedal ratio about 50%. My first thought was just to redrill the hole in the pedal linkage that pull on the throttle cable but the geometry would be all wrong unless I moved the hole in the firewall, so I decided to do it at the throttle body linkage. To do this I cut and welded the bracket where the cable end attaches to increase the distance from the pivot point to the cable. Stock the distance was 45mm and I extended it to 67. Below is a stock one compared to the modified one.




Now to correct for this and keep the cable in line you need to move the where the sleeve of the cable attaches as well. As it turns out a non vanos throttle body has a slightly different throttle cable bracket than a vanos one, so all I had to do is swap over the bracket. non vanos on the left, vanos on the right



Here it is at wide open throttle. I ended up bending the bracket a bit to improve the angle later.



very happy with the resulting pedal feel. The pedal now travels all the way to the stop as it should.

[someguy2800]

drove another 10 miles or so tonight before it got dark. The clutch is still quite a handful but with the throttle mods and an added clutch pedal stop it is workable now. Drives pretty good now. I am still getting a bad stumble on throttle input and after reviewing datalogs I found that my accel enrichment's are way off. Once thats sorted I think it will drive pretty good. This turbo manifold is doing work. Boost threshold in 4th gear is only 2500 rpms. 5 psi of boost by 2800. I didn't push it any harder than that and only to 4K or so. I need to sort out the enrichment's first.

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Spent the night working on my megasquirt. I used to build these all the time but its been 4 years since I've even touched one so I had to do some relearning, but it all came back pretty quick. Tonight I added a circuit to control the radiator fan and also to control the secondary fuel pump. This board has been worked over pretty hard as its been through a few cars. This board came form a friend of mine who attempted to install on a 240sx but gave up after ripping one of the traces out. I desoldered the whole board and rebuilt it from scratch and repaired the ruined trace. As you can see there is quite a bit of custom work done to it.







I have a second heat sink mounted under the board for the 6 ignition drivers and added an additional DB15 connector to the end of the case so all the ignition power is directed through its own dedicated connector and away from the rest of the circuits on the board. It runs wasted spark, firing two coils at once. I also have a three spare transistors in the proto area to be able to run relays. One of them is setup to run the coolant fan and the other two will be for water injection. I had a circuit built to provide a tach output signal to the stock cluster but removed it tonight as I have no use for it anymore. I also have it wired for launch control and vanos control. I have also relocated the map sensor to the engine bay instead of internal. Future plans will be to log EGT through megasquirt, set up a circuit to activate table switching for vanos, knock sensor input, and maybe boost control.

My favorite mod is that I figured a way to run a 2 wire idle valve and another output by utilizing existing component space that would otherwise be wasted. Normally when running a 2 wire idle valve you need to mount a larger transistor is a spare spot on the heat sink as the transistor in the board is not large enough, thus leaving it unused. But since I am running coil on plug with drivers on the bottom side of the board, that leaves the old ignition driver slot unused. By removing a couple components and running some jumper wires I am able to run the idle valve in the ignition driver slot, and use the on board idle transistor as a spare output. In this case I am using the idle transistor to control the second fuel pump. I have it programmed to turn on the second pump at about 1 psi of boost and keep running for 15 seconds after it drops back below the threshold. Also I decided to run without the idle valve, so I will now be using the driver in the ignition slot to activate the vanos solenoid.

Here is a pick of the front of the car showing what I did with the front structure after cutting out the core support. The bar on the bottom is a piece of left over roll cage tubing. I bent it on my harbor freight pipe kinker and it is welded to both frame rails all the way around. Should stiffen up the frame rails considerable compared to the old piece of shit core support.



The radiator is out of a 95 M3. For mounting it has a rubber bumper on either end tank so I decided to use these rather than just using the top and bottom lips. I used some scrap tubing that I found which the rubber bumpers fit into perfectly to make some little cups for the bumpers to sit in and welded them directly to the frame rails. Still working on the top mount.



The spal just barely fits between the radiator and intercooler. I actually ordered the fan from BeCool, but it was just a spal. Didn't even bother to put there own name on it. The radiator has been moved to the rear by about and inch and a half. I have the fan attached directly to the radiator.



Now there is a method to the madness of why I am using a pusher rather than a puller fan My idea was to separate the intercooler from the radiator to prevent heat soak, and also I wanted to set up the fan so it would actually draw air through the intercooler while running. This should really help pull the heat out of it at stoplights and in the staging lanes at the strip.

Here is a test of the theory. I'm very pleased with how much air is drawn through the intercooler.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn8nXO86zi0

[someguy2800]

Here is a rather crappy video of me driving and shifting for no reason. Didn't really turn out but oh well. I need to make a mount to put a camera on the roll cage or something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GdUPYvqObw



I drove around for an hour or two tonight. Car drives awesome now that the accell enrichment is fixed. As you can see in the video my wideband died so I couldn't push on it. I've had really bad luck with innovate. Might try an AEM. So far the wastegate has never been open lol. The car is very fast even at no boost. I ran it down an on ramp tonight to redline up to 100 or so keeping it out off boost with my foot and it really moves. Now that the car isn't spitting an popping and stuttering constantly the clutch isn't too bad but still demands your attention. It would be superb with a different disc. I am moving next week and gone this weekend so I have to put the little monster away for now.

[Kame36sedan]

Ive had a lot of troubles with AEMs also, they did recognize it and give me a whole new gauge but not until 3 months and 2 gauges 3 o2 sensors and 2 harnesses. Ibpaid 90 bucks or something and sent it im for repair they supposedly fixed it and sent it back to me a month later, received it and it did the same thing. So I sent it back and then they said when they tested it they didn't let the o2 warm up so they figured it was fixed. But they ended up sending me a new one under warranty... but if it was under warranty why did they try and charge me for the repair in the first place? Lol

[auaq]

Love the gauges.

[someguy2800]

Ive had a lot of troubles with AEMs also, they did recognize it and give me a whole new gauge but not until 3 months and 2 gauges 3 o2 sensors and 2 harnesses. Ibpaid 90 bucks or something and sent it im for repair they supposedly fixed it and sent it back to me a month later, received it and it did the same thing. So I sent it back and then they said when they tested it they didn't let the o2 warm up so they figured it was fixed. But they ended up sending me a new one under warranty... but if it was under warranty why did they try and charge me for the repair in the first place? Lol

Yeah after some more reading I think I am going to try another innovate. I also didn't realize that the AEM will not allow you to free air calibrate, and is not programable. Although it is a pain to do, I feel it is something that should be done. The AEM sensors are apparently calibrated from the factory with a resistor installed in the harness to normalize each sensor. That great except what happens 10,000 miles from now? Many newer cars are using the standard bosch sensor now so you can get replacements from the parts store.

Also I have read many stories of really slow response times. Actually on my LC1 I have not been impressed with response time. The attached is a screenshot of a datalog from when my accel enrichments were f'd up. Basically what was happening is whenever the ecu was seeing an acceleration event it was dumping fuel do to me not rescaling the values when I swapped injectors. If you analyze the whole datalog, the time from the pulse width spike to the time the wideband begins to react is about .2-.3 secouds, and takes about .4-.6 seconds for the signal to fully bottom out. The newer innovate stuff is supposed to react in the .05-.1 second range. I also don't like the fact that the aem will only display up to 17:1. I think I might try out the MTX gauge.

ScreenHunter_18 Sep. 13 23.41.jpg

[Kame36sedan]

Yes they supposedly have "lazer cut chips" installed. But im guessing its done at bosch and not AEM? But I also know you can simply cut and splice an LC1 style o2 and connectors into the AEM as long as its both the male and female connectors used.

[someguy2800]

the problem is that they will not be calibrated without the chip. That is how AEM calibrates them, rather than doing a free air calibration like the rest of them do. AEM doesn't make anything. They are just a parts rebrander. Not that thats a bad thing.