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Inspired by those of you in the Mechanical Failures thread, I'm going to venture outside of my comfort zone and start a thread on the various things I have going. A few years ago I started a new job and met a few folks as into cars (and junk cars at that) as I was. After much cussing and discussing, we decided to jump in to the 24 Hours of Lemons race. Everyone here has probably heard of it by now, but if not, your car has to start as a sub-$500 lemon, and then you endurance race it. So we bought the epitome of a fast, lightweight, race-ready vehicle: a Volvo 940 non-turbo wagon! We ran it one race with the stock red block but slapped a turbo on it. It ran like garbage but gave us an intro to how Lemons works. Brief aside to how 24 Hours of Lemons does things: there are three classes, A, B, and C (and now there's E for electric but it's new and not many people are running it). A is for your e30s, e36s, e46s, etc. The class for "you'll finish and be competitive." B is for your less competitive but also not likely to blow up. We landed here with the stock motor but just a turbo. Class C is where the fun stuff is. This is like the "you'll probably blow up but it'll be fun the whole time" class. We love running in this one because it's a bunch of weird cars doing things the bizarre way. Lots of the decisions we've made have been to stay in C. There's also an award in Lemons called the Index of Effluence, or IoE. This is the holy grail of "you brought the worst of the worst and did a thing, congrats." We've never won this, but are gunning for it. Like all good projects, this one spawned even more, and aside from garbage race cars, I have a few of my own I'll touch on. Progress is slow or even backwards on some of these, but maybe a thread will help keep me on pace. So, here are some pictures and I'll discuss status of some of them as things go. A note: lots of these vehicles are group purchases, and live all around. I can't take credit for a lot of work on some. The OG Volvo Wagon. Now has a 1UZ, and for a while now has run on three carbs: a one barrel to idle and then rolls on to two two-barrel carbs as throttle increases. Spark provided by an HEI Chevy distributor driven off a cam pulley. Is currently undergoing a switch to EFI with four "independent" throttle bodies off Ford 4.9L straight sixes Ford EDIS ignition using Dodge coils I managed to ram-jam in. Finishing the last full 24 hour endurance:  Then whoops we bought another race car. A 1983 Toyota Starlet! We raced this once with the stock tiny 1.3L four cylinder, then upgraded to the H27 V6 out of a Grand Vitara. It then likes to explode engines. More on that later:  You know what would be neat? A box truck that the Starlet fits in! Surely this one that has been sitting since the flood would be reliable!  Ah beans, a Festiva that has had the front hubs already swapped to drop a Duratec in? Better snag that and then ignore the easy route. Instead, a Volvo XC90 V8!   I have a few personal projects going on, too. First, a 1954 International R110 pickup. I've actually driven this since high school, and was my first car. The engine that was in it had compression that rapidly fading, so I decided to upgrade. Was originally a Jeep 4.0, but before I got it running the Chevy Atlas 4.2 straight six out of a Trailblazer started looking more appealing, so I'm currently swapping that in. Apparently all my pictures of it are awful, but here it is without a bed or hood to do suspension measurements:  My grandfather's 1977 Ford LTD. I inherited this when both grandparents passed. I drove it all through college, and is one of those cars that I love so much, despite it not making sense to most people. It has a 400 in it, but needs lots and lots of work. Currently languishing at my parents place. I'm not sure what the goal is. It sure would be fun to put that Godzilla Ford into it.  E/N reasons, but I've been opposed to off-roading. Some guys on the race team have been slowly coaxing me out, and talked me into this 1987 Dodge Raider. I bought it sight unseen (they found it for me and went to get it). They catfished me a little bit by not showing me the "bad" side, but who cares.  Then there's daily driver stuff: a 2020 WRX I snagged when my X1 started having normal high mileage BMW problems, and a 2010 Ford F150 that has normal F150 5.4L problems I've been trying to stay on top of. Okay, then the big other Mad Science thing I'm working on: it's a set of custom circuit boards for engine monitoring, dash display, trans shifting, telemetry, attempts at driver coms, etc. for the race cars. The team has affectionately nicknamed it CANTbus. This is purely a passion project but I really enjoy it. I'll go into more details on it. 
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Feb 22, 2023 18:38
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Oh, gently caress yeah, getting in on ground floor for this one
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Feb 22, 2023 19:22
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i don't understand how you have the ability to do one of those things, let alone a whole list of them, so that's major points in your favor. on top of that, looks like you have pretty good taste. looking forward to this.
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Feb 23, 2023 05:23
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The last race we ran was a bummer in the Volvo. We opted to only run one car, since a full 24 hours with two cars sounded like torture. Plus the Starlet's bad engine consuming problem was still there. First a bit of history. After a failed attempt to run the 1UZ on snowmobile carbs (gee whiz, no accelerator pumps), we switched to old Ford carbs. The joke here was that it's like the old Mopar Six-Pack or Chevy Tri-Power, except you got thirsty on the way to the track and drank one. So we had the Five Pack Try-Power.  This got rid of one problem, too: on the stock red block fuel injection we had bad fuel starvation in high G cornering lower than like 2/3 of a tank. When you have giant bowls full of fuel, it's like a reserve fuel tank! This created other problems: it ran pretty rich at anything other than WOT, and thus fouled plugs. But, it ran strong. So we threw that all in the trash because we're idiots and went to a fuel injection setup, as I mentioned:  We didn't have time to track test this, so it was a shitshow. After wasting so much time debugging, we gave up and put the carbs and HEI back on to finish the race. Turns out it was just a bad Megasquirt. The other awful part of the race was that we had replaced the fuel tank with a cell to avoid that starvation problem. BUT the in-cell pump came loose and banged up the cell foam, which then kept clogging the pump and lines time after time after time with tiny bits of foam. So we would go out, run laps, then come in when it started losing fuel, then clean poo poo out, fix whatever we could, go back out. Nothing beats stinking of gas at 3am, exhausted as hell. Also we lost a front hub in the middle of the night, but we had a spare. But we finished. One up-side is that our new brakes worked. As you can imagine stopping a V8 engined, heavy, endurance Volvo was too much for stock brakes, so we had upped to Wilwood calipers and rotors from a Focus for a few years. Even with those you would lose pedal after a few super fast laps. BUT! There's a Swedish company that makes an adapter kit for the 940 to run XC90 calipers with 370Z rotors, and you can get Raybestos R4-E race pads for the XC90, so I put those on. Huge increase in rotor mass:  Since that bummer of a race I also fixed the fuel cell, and installed the new Microsquirt. Plus since this thing is street legal, I can do some tuning when nobody is looking, so there's a Raspberry Pi running TunerStudio on a touchscreen. Danger to Manifold splash screen needs to be installed.   There is so drat much still to do. I had new throttle shafts made since you can see in the ITB pic above it's a janky setup. It also idled WAY high because the butterflies had holes in them for the Ford, so I had Send Cut Send make some without. There's an oil cooler to go on (with remote filter), and it needs to basically be rewired with my CANTBUS system Rev4. I also bought a spare engine I need to rebuild, since this one has had A LOT of racing on it, and it's feeling weak. Compression and leakdown are okay, it just feels down on power.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:39
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Ground floor. Holy crap, this should be fun.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:57
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Alright, dumb question but did the imgur app get rid of the way to see the bbcode? It's a pain airdropping them from phone to my computer, converting from HEIC (because Apple), then uploading. Nothing makes you feel old quite like stupid tech problems. When we got the Starlet it was totally packed full of mouse poo poo. Putting a cage in it and prepping for any welding was brutal; for instance we had to use a hole saw on the sills in order to fish out and blow out all the mouse nests in order not to burn the car down when putting in the cage. That's where the mouse / rat theme for this car came from. We ran our first race in it with the stock 1.3L four cylinder, with a whopping 51 ish hp. As the copy reads on the original advertisement I got: "features a miserly 1.3L engine." It's enough work prepping all the other STUFF a car needs for a race, we figured we'd run it once stock but pass tech, and then swap later. Here's that massive 4 cylinder:  You could drat near drive the whole track without lifting. We made a gigantic spreadsheet of potential engines, their weights, and their outputs, and what our resultant power to weight. We discussed for weeks. And then somehow all that went in the garbage and we just got an H27 V6 out of a Suzuki XL7. The Grand Vitara has the smaller H25 in it, but much better flowing cams, so we put those cams in the 2.7 for a franken motor. It might look like there's all the room in the world, but about any other engine would require extreme firewall mangling, and realistically it's a handful enough since it's such a short wheel base and light. It's gone through many iterations of fuel and spark. Here it is with a custom intake with a Weber carb feeding it, and this is the Ford EDIS as well:  It's now on fuel injection. The original intake on the H27 is this weird looking Starship Enterprise looking thing with a crossover in back. We blocked the crossover, then used little Honda throttle bodies on the front, linked by some 1/4" extensions.  And it actually sounds pretty good for a V6: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh4Gug1mlss Because the old rear end was the size of a grapefruit, we narrowed a Ford 7.5 and put in an LSD with 4.56 gears to really make it spicy on track. That was an issue all of it's own, but it's working now. Okay, down sides. During two races now, it has exploded engines. In particular, it has exploded them in roughly the same spot on track, and the same piston is the culprit. It doesn't look like oil starvation, it's like the top of the piston at the oil ring just sheared off. Carnage ensues. One last small detail: I was driving both times, and though correlation is not causation... Engine 1:   This one let go in the middle of the night, so there was no chance to get to a junkyard to yank a spare and fix it. And because I was driving, penance was paid:  Then a second engine blew up:  This was during a race that wasn't a full 24hrs, but rather a 10 hr day, overnight break, then an 8 hour day. Since we had overnight to put in a spare, we slapped a 2.5L in, and finished the race. We also won an award called the "Heroic Fix."  But more penance was paid:  Smart folks would probably give up on the H27 by now, but we are not smart folks. We bought a used NASCAR (I think) dry sump pump, and are currently in the process of making all the bracketry, oil pan, etc etc etc. We may even be super dumb and are looking into custom pistons. The team member that's heading that up also seems to have found a way to use some off the shelf conrods. Of course all this is expensive and time consuming, so up in the air if it'll be ready for the June race. The H25 has held together, so worse case we run it with that.
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Feb 25, 2023 18:13
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those tattoos fucken rule, holy moly i hope the cost of your penance doesn't count against your $500 car budget speaking of which, how do custom pistons and a nascar dry sump not just immediately blow that up
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Feb 25, 2023 22:17
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Sounds like oil starvation no? Was it on a high G turn or something? I'd guess the dry sump should fix it, and custom pistons are good insurance too. That Starlet looks and sounds like a lot of fun.
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Feb 25, 2023 22:44
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Go the mighty 4k, I'm trying to convince my friend to hot up the 4k in his ke20 but efi manifolds are mythical beasts and I refuse to carburate
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Feb 25, 2023 23:05
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Raluek posted:those tattoos fucken rule, holy moly Lemons is weird, in that the $500 rule is fairly loose. Basically everyone has multiples more than that put in, and a huge chunk of folks are running cheater-ish parts where you can't see. But the "BS Inspection" judges basically want to see you're following the spirit of the competition. Rumor has it that the judges could call you on it and hand you $500 to take your car if they think you're way outside the lines. The interesting thing with our team is that the judges like that we do things the bizarre and interesting way, so they give us a LOT of leeway with budget. We're not showing up with a spec e46 or something and saying it's a Lemon. big dong wanter posted:Go the mighty 4k, I'm trying to convince my friend to hot up the 4k in his ke20 but efi manifolds are mythical beasts and I refuse to carburate Aww, we could have sold you our 4k EFI from when we had ours. Applebees Appetizer posted:Sounds like oil starvation no? Was it on a high G turn or something? I'd guess the dry sump should fix it, and custom pistons are good insurance too. I agree that it sounds like oil starvation, it's just odd the bearings and everything else don't look like it. Neither engine had been losing pressure at all before, but you're absolutely correct: long back stretch into a sharp downhill, super sharp high G turn, back on heavy throttle, BLAM. Second engine held on for a little while after that turn than the first, but still near it.
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Feb 26, 2023 04:10
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Dr Rocksalt posted:I agree that it sounds like oil starvation, it's just odd the bearings and everything else don't look like it. Neither engine had been losing pressure at all before, but you're absolutely correct: long back stretch into a sharp downhill, super sharp high G turn, back on heavy throttle, BLAM. Second engine held on for a little while after that turn than the first, but still near it. It would be cool if you could retro fit some oil squirters under the pistons or something, I remember all the Mazda BPs having those because of the turbo motors. I think that's more for cooling tho than for starvation issues IIRC
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Feb 26, 2023 04:57
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Dr Rocksalt posted:Lemons is weird, in that the $500 rule is fairly loose. Basically everyone has multiples more than that put in, and a huge chunk of folks are running cheater-ish parts where you can't see. But the "BS Inspection" judges basically want to see you're following the spirit of the competition. Rumor has it that the judges could call you on it and hand you $500 to take your car if they think you're way outside the lines. The interesting thing with our team is that the judges like that we do things the bizarre and interesting way, so they give us a LOT of leeway with budget. We're not showing up with a spec e46 or something and saying it's a Lemon. yeah this mentality really turns me off of lemons, tbh. it turns it into a popularity contest, instead of who can build the best car they can within the rules. and the organization being able to wipe out all that hard work with $500 in cash really sucks too.
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Feb 26, 2023 05:08
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Dr Rocksalt posted:But more penance was paid: This was always going to be a great thread, but these tattoos turned it into something even more brilliant already. Awesome work mate.
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Feb 26, 2023 13:51
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Wow this thread is... I don't even know what to say. drat. I want to see PCB designs! (And also more of everything else)Raluek posted:yeah this mentality really turns me off of lemons, tbh. it turns it into a popularity contest, instead of who can build the best car they can within the rules. and the organization being able to wipe out all that hard work with $500 in cash really sucks too. I think part of it is that they tend to give you more leeway if you aren't cheating to win. Like, cheating to make your extremely poor choice of a weird motor swap that you can't get parts for anywhere hold together for anything approaching an entire race is not going to bother anyone because you're just trying to have fun, but cheating specifically to make your super reliable engine in a super reliable car much faster, that's not cool.
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Feb 26, 2023 19:59
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kastein posted:I want to see PCB designs! I put some time into the "Rev4" versions of these boards yesterday and tonight, so good timing. These started as just a way to do data logging, control shifting, and a few other things. The code got huge and cumbersome, so I went to this somewhat modular design. There's a Main card that shuffles data where it needs to go, and then each individual device card does its own thing. The engine input card checks RPM, oil pressure, temp, etc. The transmission card checks gears, enables solenoids, etc. GPS card just does GPS things. They all report their individual data to the main, and then it passes that data to a card if it needs it. For example if the steering wheel says "Hey, driver pressed the up shift button," the main card will then get that info to the transmission card, which will take it and then upshift. The coms method here is SPI, so it's reasonably quick. The heart of each card is an Arduino Pro Mini, so I have to be clever about memory usage. My other goal is to use as many pre-made sub-devices from Adafruit and Sparkfun as I can since libraries already exist for things like the GPS breakout or say a rotary encoder. Main:  Device card (this one is the transmission):  Here are a few as they slot into the main card:  Other devices that are located remotely, like the steering wheel, connect via an ethernet cable. This isn't ideal, but I haven't been happy with anything else yet, bearing in mind cost is an issue. For the Starlet I also made a Coms Panel, which has an LCD for showing data, a few displays for random stuff, and then some lights to tell the driver to pit or stop. This was done through a device card that had a 4G card, so you just texted the car's number, and it would get interpreted. AT BEST this only KIND OF works, which is a bummer. More debugging to come on that, because it's a cool idea. My plan was to also then use it to transmit live data via an IoT server, which I had working on the server and GUI side, but never on the car side. Again, a bummer, and I ran out of steam on that headache. Coms panel:  The Volvo's steering wheel, running on the new Rev4 hardware, that I need to install and wire in:  
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Feb 27, 2023 05:47
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Trying to break up posts, since I'm apparently wordy. Elephant in the room time: I mentioned "controlling the shifting," and yep, both the Starlet and Volvo are automatic transmissions. Release the rotten tomatoes. BUT HEAR ME OUT! They're both versions of the same Aisin trans, which is electronically controlled. Meaning in order to push through the gears, the trans needs two to be either engaged or disengaged for whatever gear you want. Meaning my electronics have total control over the gear you're in, and no engine computer brains interfering. If you have the line pressure cable fairly cranked up, you can get pretty drat good performance, if you can tolerate a few oddities like some gears freewheeling on downshifting, things like that. So with this in mind, I grabbed some paddle shifters from a racing sim rig company and use those on our steering wheel to make a paddle shifted transmission. It works alarmingly well. The OG box I have in the Volvo is an extremely old different type of setup that used one Arduino Mega to control a bunch of stuff all in one GIANT program that is ungainly and runs slow. The cool thing about that one though is that it had a Raspberry Pi inside that logged the data to its hard drive / SD card. I had meant it to transfer to an FTP server running in the paddock through a track-side router, but that also never really worked well. The wifi acquisition was just too slow most of the time for the car blazing past. But after the race I pulled the data, and you can get some neat plots. I wrote a GUI to look at all this kind of stuff:  The 1UZ power steering pump and reservoir on our version sit right above the alternator. One race boiled over and dripped on the alt, ruined it, and then just drained the battery more and more until it died. We fixed it overnight, and then went racing in the morning. Plotting battery voltage by lap (going from red to green) is cool looking, so I had it printed.  I got some small Volvo stuff done this weekend, though I broke a piece I needed. I also found some PCB errors that took me a while to fix, which I had to skywire to resolve. It was warm enough blast some paint on the timing cover for the Atlas, and I got that put on this evening. Had to call if short in order to bake a birthday cake and decorate it for my oldest daughter tomorrow. Dr Rocksalt fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Feb 27, 2023 |
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Feb 27, 2023 06:07
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Motivation has been flagging just a bit, but I've been trying to chip away. I found out the hard way that a protective cover is a good idea on the steering wheel circuit board. The last version I did was just a plexiglass piece with connector cutouts, but I went a little farther on this version. For this one, I designed a flat plexiglass piece that can be folded down to cover a lot more. That, along with some other pieces (engine block coffee table assembly pieces, sun shade for the steering wheel, and 4.2 Atlas secondary air blockoff plate) arrived from Send Cut Send last night. Un-bent, double checking my fold lines:  Then I clamped it to wood with a sharp radius, applied copious heat with a heat gun, folded it down, and let cool while holding it. It actually turned out way better than I'd feared, though there is room for improvement: 
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Mar 1, 2023 16:59
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That all looks pretty great! Interesting idea making it kind of a backplane in a card cage, too. If you were to go to production with this I'd suggest moving the Arduino components directly onto your cards and stripping out any extraneous stuff you aren't using on them, but for one offs for racing this looks very solid. For telemetry I would consider a 900MHz link, either serial extender type or possibly ZigBee. I used this for a very similar application (flight testing an experimental aircraft) and we had pretty good telemetry coverage out quite a ways.
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Mar 1, 2023 23:13
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kastein posted:That all looks pretty great! Interesting idea making it kind of a backplane in a card cage, too. ZigBee could do mile range not line of sight? For some reason I got it in my head that was relatively short range, but if not, that would be rad. Totally agree on just putting bare bones ATMega / Arduino basics on there. I’d originally planned just that for this spin, but laziness got the best of me. Also it’s been kind of a reality check dealing with chip shortages. Sure, you hear about it all the time, but then when I went to buy some chips it was a wake up call of “oh yeah, out of stock and lead time of years. Neat.” Things like the LED controller chip or the USB FTDI chip were just not in stock anywhere. eBay to the rescue some times, but for the LED chip I was just out of luck and had to pirate as many as I could off of old boards.
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Mar 2, 2023 03:31
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It looks like I totally brain farted and yeah ZigBee is 2.4 ism not 900 ism. Advertised range is up to about 100m, you might be able to extend that using a vertical collinear dipole antenna for the paddock base station and stick it on the tallest post you can manage. I see some products advertising up to 2km on ZigBee but never used them and can't vouch for them. If anyone on your team is a ham radio operator you could use the ham 900mhz band at basically any power level you could conceivably desire using 900MHz handheld radios along with some home brew FSK modulator/demodulator setups (mod should be easy, I may even have a circuit for it on hand, demod with an RTL-SDR?) as long as you don't encrypt, pause regularly, and identify regularly. That is, if you don't want to use the mid 3 figure price tag 900MHz rs232 extenders I'm seeing online, which seems like a waste of money to me.
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Mar 2, 2023 03:43
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kastein posted:It looks like I totally brain farted and yeah ZigBee is 2.4 ism not 900 ism. Advertised range is up to about 100m, you might be able to extend that using a vertical collinear dipole antenna for the paddock base station and stick it on the tallest post you can manage. I see some products advertising up to 2km on ZigBee but never used them and can't vouch for them. ubnt used to sell some 900 MHz nanostations, if ethernet is an option. looks like they're still a couple hundred bucks on ebay tho
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Mar 2, 2023 09:35
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The Atlas is very slowly starting to come together. Some pictures: The head bolts are torque to yield, and are known for snapping on removal.  "Dang!" you might say. "That one almost broke! Lucky you!" To which I would reply:   That stretched one was the ONLY one that came out willingly. Some LS head stud kits can work, so I went with those on reinstall to simplify next time. The hydraulic lifters were almost all bound up, so it took a lot of degreaser soaking and brake cleaning to get those freed up. As it sits now (being lazy and not painting EVERYTHING):  One major hurdle is the oil pan situation. First, the Trailblazer / Envoy / etc version is front sump, and I'm guessing I'll need to run rear. Nothing some fab time won't remedy, just not looking forward to it. The scarier one is that the two small bolt hole bosses for the oil pan on the back of engine by the rear seal cracked when I was getting the oil pan off, since it was held in by about six pounds of RTV of various colors.  That will be unpleasant to fix. I also got a Send Cut piece in for the secondary air block off and painted it (looks like garbage yay).
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Mar 5, 2023 18:08
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Dr Rocksalt posted:I also got a Send Cut piece in for the secondary air block off and painted it (looks like garbage yay). I had good results using their plating service. It does add about a week to the processing time, though.
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Mar 5, 2023 21:55
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ryanrs posted:I had good results using their plating service. It does add about a week to the processing time, though. Oh cool, I guess I'd forgotten they do that? Thanks for the heads up! In a wildly poor exercise in prioritization, I made some progress on my coffee table. Designed these mounting plates:  The rod bolt holes were close to enough to M10x1.5 tap drill size that I just tapped them. Please ignore that I couldn't get the countersink deep enough to be totally flush. Then bolt through to the head bolt threads.  I thought the head bolts were M10, but boy they sure did feel sloppy going in. Turns out they're M11x1.5. Well rats. Might be okay for just a coffee table. I'll need to find glass at some point, and figure out something for the foot situation. I don't want to run alpha-n tuning, so I made IAC blockoff plates for the Ford throttle bodies with hose barbs that have a path to below the butterfly. Previously we'd done this with only one throttle body and called it good enough for getting stuff working, but you could see the ripple since it was only getting vacuum signal from two cylinders. I'll tee all of these together. It was absolutely mission critical that I take time to spray these gold. 
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Mar 6, 2023 02:16
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It's been one of THOSE types of weeks. You know the ones. Progress has felt negative, but I got the throttle body sets somewhat close to assembled, with gaskets made. They'll be ready to go on as soon as a team member gets in gear and cuts the adapter plates to go from the Ford spacing to the 1UZ spacing. He bought an ancient cnc mill from a machinist we used at my old job for less than scrap metal price, and he's battling it to get it working. That's taken forever. Speaking of that machinist, his apprentice bunged up my throttle shafts, cutting too much into some areas that needed to seal inside the throttle body. I think this is partially my fault for saying the radius of some cut didn't matter. So after all this effort I've put in, I may still end up with an infuriatingly high idle. I suppose this is how experimentation goes. Here are the two sets:  One reason that the old setup idled so high was that (most version of) the Ford throttle butterflies had small holes in them, I'm guessing for idle reasons aside on top of the idle control. I suspected this was part of the high idle issue, so new brass ones were made:  That jig you see them sitting on was to help align while off the lower intake manifold, since the butterflies bolt in from the bottom. This way I had the spacing correct while being able to actually see the bolts. I used brass bolts, and tried to peen them over as much as I could to prevent backing out and sucking into the engine (above picture is prior to that). I also used Loctite out of paranoia as belt and suspenders. A 1980 Dodge Colt popped up for sale, and I tried to get it bought, but it sold. I keep swearing that I won't buy any projects until I finish some of these I'm working on, yet somehow always end up cruising Craigslist for garbage.
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Mar 10, 2023 07:04
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Coffee table glass and legs arrived: It's just chilling in my basement until I figure out a destination for it. A race team member came by today and we dug into the replacement 1UZ. Just when I thought I was going to be done scrubbing nasty junkyard parts, I get to do it more! And this time there are even MORE valves! Hooray!
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Mar 12, 2023 04:52
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"New" 1UZ is fully broken down, except the rotating assembly in the short block. Before: After:  It was gross. A rebuilt engine may make the car go faster, but what REALLY makes it go faster are gold valve covers.  I thought I went on heavy enough to get good coverage (so much so that I got infuriating runs), but it still has some light spots. Oh well, won't matter when there are valve stems violently ejecting themselves through them. Speaking of, I lapped the valves, since they were also nasty. Pre cleaning on a brass wire wheel shows how much grossness was on them:  The Atlas for my old truck is fairly buttoned up now. The harmonic balancer is a brutal 110 lb. ft plus 180 degrees. I made a crank stop out of some scrap metal, and it sheared right at 180 degrees.  Luckily nothing got torn up. And to be fair the holes I drilled were offset from center, since it was leftover from another jig I'd set up.
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Mar 17, 2023 02:06
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Bit of a frustrating weekend. I loaned my Ford pickup to a friend that was having car trouble, and he let me know that it sounded like a brake was dragging in the rear. I took it out, it did in fact sound awful. Crawling under showed me a pad was down to the metal and chewed up the rotor. I don't know how I missed that since inheriting it a year ago. The wheels were frozen to the rotors, and of course the rotors were frozen to the axle flange. At least the rotors had tapped holes I could thread into to push them off. It was due for an oil change, but Rockauto sent the wrong filter, which I only noticed when I went to screw it on. Always fun to head to the parts store mid-job. Progress on everything else was slow, since I had to catch up on house work and then took time to do fun stuff with my girls. The library is SO EXCITING when you're learning to read! They also talked me into Slurpees while we were running for the oil filter, since I'm a giant softy, and they're good sports about stuff like that. Race team member dropped off the adapter plates to go from the UZ to the Ford throttle bodies. I think there was some breakdown in time / communication, since he drilled one axis to fit the bore, but not the other. (with an old spacer plate):  He's right that we're not making 1000 hp and it probably doesn't matter, but it bugs me so I may do some die grinding when I have a chance. I've had a few dumb hold ups on circuit stuff. I want to get a fuel control card and a dash panel / display card in before the race. The fuel control card has to differ from my normal design due to the LED control chip being out of stock forever, so I have to use a different one, which requires triple checking availability, function, re-wiring, availability of Arduino libraries, blah blah. I think I settled that (until it doesn't work when boards arrive). The display card hold up was me over-engineering stuff: I wanted the card to automatically detect and switch power sources if it was powered from the main control box versus car power. That way the user has the option, and if it's a high current card (like a Raspberry Pi doing graphics), it won't over-draw the main box. On top of that I wanted it to avoid backfeeding current places. I was trying to be all clever and stuff, but last night finally gave up and decided to just make it jumper selectable. Now I'll proceed with actual layout of that one.
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Mar 20, 2023 04:48
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Welcome to AI's newest Showcase Thread for that image of WTF alone
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Mar 23, 2023 01:55
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Good lord almighty, that's a sight.
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Mar 23, 2023 02:02
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EVERYWHERE 
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Holy poo poo what a thread.
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Mar 23, 2023 14:32
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I remember seeing the Try-Power on the Lemons Youtube channel and thinking "Now THIS guy gets it", it was fantastic.
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Mar 23, 2023 15:18
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Kafouille posted:I remember seeing the Try-Power on the Lemons Youtube channel and thinking "Now THIS guy gets it", it was fantastic. That video had a few people really displeased that we'd take EFI away from a 1UZ. But hey, it's back now! Here's the throttle body sets back on after die grinder-ing the adapter plates down:  Strictly speaking there weren't any show stoppers from firing it up... until I decided to ruin that chance by starting in on the wiring job. With the new CANTBUS system, I have to change a bunch of wiring. The original wiring is a mess, so I'm taking this opportunity to clean it up and correct a lot of things that have always bugged me. One big issue is that the switch panel was way too far away for our shorter drivers once they were strapped in. The e-brake on this rear end has never worked, so I put a panel there, which took way longer than it should have, and involved making a custom bracket (which I then had to cut the corner off of because I'm dumb and didn't realize it hit a panel light):   I realized after assembly that the black starter button is a bad idea, so I have a red one on the way. I also know ditching the e-brake isn't great, but hopefully when we eventually swap to a better rear axle that gets remedied. Now on to the drat relay and fuse wiring, which will take forever because everything does. Moving the switch panel down also allows for the addition of a CANTBUS display panel, which I needed to get somewhat figured out so that I can lay out that board and order it, along with a fuel system card, so that I can justify putting a fuel level sender in the cell last fall. Here's the current panel layout as made in Front Panel Designer if you all have any suggestions:  Giant rectangle in the middle is a 20x4 LCD (with buttons to the left and rotary encoder to the right to navigate the menu), and the circle below that is the wideband. Square between the timing 7 segments is an 8x8 red-green matrix that I used in the previous build for pace indicators, like if the driver needs to speed up or slow down (provided I get 4G coms working better). Lower left is six LEDs for general use like showing if the steering is disconnected, and below that are switches for general use, such as switching the 8x8 matrix to show lateral and longitudinal acceleration. Lower right is where the circuit board mounts, so it's fairly off limits. Probably stick the team's logo there. My first name is "Shon" and was highly amused with this box some wire came in:  I sure do, box. I sure do.
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Mar 26, 2023 02:19
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CANTBUS. Love it.
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Mar 26, 2023 06:16
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  I had a very important fabrication project to finish yesterday. Seven years in the making! Wiring on the Volvo is taking eternity as expected, but coming along. Not really much to show there since it’s in the “breaking eggs” part of omelette making. Wires everywhere. But I "finished" the new switch panel, even if I'm not 100% thrilled with every aspect.  In International pickup news, I bit the bullet and ordered almost all of the remaining front end suspension pieces for the air bag Mustang II setup. I went with manual steering rack, since I snagged an electric Prius power steering unit to use. There is a company that also makes Mustang II spindles that use modern Corvette bolt-on hubs, rotors, and calipers. I haven’t even unboxed everything yet. My reasoning for jumping to this part of the project was to get an idea for where the crossmember will be, so that I can get the engine dangled in to see where the mounts will be and if I need to pick up off the crossmember. THEN start figuring out how bad the oil pan fab is going to be.
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Mar 30, 2023 07:33
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This last week has just but nibbling away at the wiring atrocity. There aren’t any interesting pictures to show until I get it all cleaned up and installed for real. It’s one of those projects where my desire to have it done really well and in a final, permanent state is battling against just wanting it done so I can move on. The “done well” side is winning, so it’s taking time. Progress wasn’t helped by some weird viral poo poo that had me drat near immobile most of the weekend. Boo.
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Apr 3, 2023 16:27
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I'd mentioned previously that I had a blank spot to stick a logo on the display panel I was making. I wanted to get that order out the door, so I finished it up. I opted to go with the most danged obnoxious design I could: Apparently my subconscious wanted to channel Gravedigger? Which reminded me: I've always wanted to have patches made and put on jackets for the team with our dumb nicknames on them. I might design something and see what that would cost.
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Apr 4, 2023 17:02
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 Here's where the engine bay stands now. The only hold up of attempting first start is to fill the trans with fluid, since I'd drained it for a different problem. I have a remote oil filter relocation kit to put on to aid in the install of an oil cooler. I really, really don't want to put it on the fender well there on the right, but I'm struggling to place it anywhere else. For reference, here's the stock oil filter situation. It's kind of ungainly.  That whole "arm" will get replaced with a nice -10AN piece to the cooler and filter. Bonus is that it has 1/8" NPT ports for pressure and temp. They were definitely on the large side of the NPT, so I'm afraid my stubby temp gauge is going to leak. Because it's Friday and being a dad is fun:  Swedish fish sushi! With rice krispy treat "rice" and watermelon Airhead "nori." Here's the version of a jacket patch I'm most happy with, and feedback is appreciated. I went through many color combos, fonts, etc, but this one felt the best so far. A company I found quoted $210 for six, and then I'd drop prob another $100 on nickname front patches with "GBC" on the other front side. Then add on ~$70 per jacket, and it adds up. I dunno, may have to skip for this race as much as I wanted to surprise the crew, just because I've been on a money bonfire tear.  The outline isn't supposed to be even, FWIW. That was hand drawn somewhat on purpose, somewhat artistically, somewhat "I want to be done now."
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Apr 15, 2023 02:01
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Very neat, I had to zoom in to comprehend what the patch was. It kinda looked like a demented chicken with horns at first. I can't wait for my kid to get older so I can do goofy stuff like that sushi.
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Apr 15, 2023 12:00
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sharkytm posted:Very neat, I had to zoom in to comprehend what the patch was. It kinda looked like a demented chicken with horns at first. This is now my head cannon for that image.
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Apr 16, 2023 01:54
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