Move Out Smartly: no Dawdling.

One of my grandfather's favorite expressions was "Move out smartly: no dawdling." 

I think he picked this up when he was in military service. I'm trying to follow his advice this week. Escaping from ECU Gremlin Purgatory boosted my morale and motivation so that lends some charge to grandad's exhortation.

This text color is code for "ominous foreshadowing."

I brush painted the inside of the door in preparation for test painting the outside. I am not sure what I will do with the insides of the doors in the long run. I have more of the peel-and-stick faux leather I used on the dash, and would like to figure out a way to include some of the cherry wood laminate. But whatever I do, it probably won't cover up all of the fiberglass. I will shoot a matte clear coat over this to minimize the texture of the fiberglass and brush strokes.

Above: sample of AST114D Buckinghamshire green - modified recipe with finer-grained metallic flakes than the original. This the two stage urethane base/clear process that Aston Martin uses when they want to evoke the original DBR-1. Not sure how it will look actually painted, but just fooling around in the can is not super promising.

If I don't like the two stage base/clear test, I already know what the answer is: a three stage process with a transparent middle layer aka 'candy.' It's more expensive, more work, and more unforgiving of errors. But gosh it sure looks nice. The way this kind of finish plays the light and highlights the curves, and the sense of depth, can be just lovely. Emphasis on "can be" because if executed poorly it can be a disaster.

ARGH Back to the Valley of  ECU Tribulations

Ominous foreshadowing fulfilled. I ran the engine enough to realize it was insanely too rich, with black plugs and the air/fuel sensor pegged at "Drowning in Fuel." Turns out the FIC 650 injectors may be a bit much for a normally aspirated 1.6L Miata. Pro Engine Tuner advice was that the 1.8L OEM injectors give a little extra capacity over the OEM 1.6L injectors (260 vs 230) without drowning the motor in petrol, and passed me these

After changing the connectors back to Miata, I plugged them in and found two of them weren't working. Or possibly I'd gotten a bad crimp on the connectors? So I traded the injectors... without turning off the ECU. 

Doh!

Instantaneously lost connection between ECU and TunerStudio and then saw this pop-up:

So far I haven't figured out how to get this error message to stop (reset and restart didn't work), and haven't been able to re-connect to the ECU.

I called the ECU vendor and confessed to my folly. The tech support guy was sympathetic and offered me a discount on an upgraded replacement ECU. When I started this project they had two product lines: the bare-bones economy Micro and the top of the line Mega. My new upgraded ECU is the Mini; midway between Micro and Mega. So the upshot is that I blundered my way into an upgrade.

In the meantime, Paul The Actual Mechanic Who Actually Knows What He's Doing helped me sort the injectors with this super cool injector cleaner-tester device.

Two of them were perfect from the start and one responded to just a split-second in cleaning mode - but the fourth one is a goner. Fortunately it's not prohibitive to get just one single OEM 1.8 injector so that's on the way.

Still working toward shooting primer on my test door - and eventually shooting my test sample of AST115D. Most of the pre-do's for painting the door are also pre-do's for Byron's Dalek project. Given the mess and hassle of setting up for primering and painting, it's convenient to do both projects at once. So we have a parallel manufacturing facility for sports cars and evil robots in the garage.

OK Now We're Really and Truly Into It

I got the new MS3Pro Mini ECU and started working on the retro fit. 

The Mini orients differently in my Electronics Locker. So I 3d printed this wedge-shaped adapter - which has the same screw hole pattern as the Microsquirt and tips the connector upwards. It would have been a very tight fit for the ECU itself sitting flat, with no room at all for the wiring loom connector. After printing a few tests in PLA+ I printed the final above in ASA - a more finicky but also much more heat resistant material.

One nice thing about 3d printing is the ability to design in sockets for captive nuts. The Mini isn't much larger than the Micro, but it is a bit bigger and the fit was tight even for the micro. Trying to get a tool down underneath the adapter to hold the nuts still while tightening the screws from above would have been the kind of job that inspires repeated uses of potty language. But with the nuts firmly stuck into the adapter, no potty language was required for this install.

Above: starting to de-pin the connector. The Mini uses the same connector as the Micro, but the pinout is different and there will be a couple of totally new wires. Having started this, I wondered if I should have left most of the pins in place and only changed the ones that needed changing, rather than depinning everything and transferring all the "keepers" to the new connector. It's a moot question now.

Painting Has Begun

Massive paint setup in the driveway for Byron's Dalek parts. His painting skills are coming along nicely. I managed to sneak in my test door. This picture was taken after shooting the epoxy primer. We did manage to get the urethane primer on within the 24 hour limit (after which all the epoxy needs to be sanded for the urethane to stick).

Sanding the urethane primer round one. I used white epoxy primer and grey urethane primer - so whenever I see white it's time to stop sanding.

I wasn't sure of the paint sample way up yonder above and kept hunting. Found something on The Spray Source website that looked promising and ordered a sample (immediately above). Yes. I have found my color. This is it. Fortunately this is a two stage product and therefore arguably within the scope of my alleged painting skills.

I think I will still shoot the door in the other sample color, just for practice and as a test of my prep level. But when I shoot the whole car it's going to be Gump Green from TSS.

Back to the Wiring

Today's big surprise was realizing I hadn't run any wires for the front turn indicators. Fortunately this dawned upon me when the wiring harness was all apart, so it wasn't a terrible hassle to add them.

Above left: electrics closet after installing new ECU and rewiring/repinning. Above right: much-neatened ignition wiring. 

Below: I started to count how many times I have re-wired the fuel injector connectors... then realized I don't want to know. This time it needed to be re-wired because the MS3Pro Mini uses sequential injection instead of batch.

With all of my experience after wiring and re-wiring, I was able to tidy up some details here and there. I have also learned (the hard way) not to wrap and secure the wiring until everything has been tested and demonstrated that it works. Tidy wiring generates a high degree of Nerd Satisfaction.

Like a lot of jobs on this project car, I am finally starting to feel like I know what I'm doing when it's just about time to move on to the next job.

We Have Startage! (Again)

There were some hiccups in rewiring. The ECU company developed a chart to help keep track of the wiring changes for upgrading from micro to mini but I thought the layout of their chart was confusing so I made my own, which turned out to be even more confusing. So, first time through, I got almost all of the pins plugged in to the wrong sockets. But eventually got that sorted and tried a first start.

Or perhaps I should say 'second first start' since I have had the engine running before, with the old ECU. This first start iteration was much more satisfying than the first first start, because the engine fired right up on the first try - without having to touch the throttle - and immediately had a stable idle. 

The black soot heaped up on this spark plug is an engine crying out "I'm drowning in fuel! I need air!"  Not shocking because I'd been struggling to get the O2 sensor working correctly. The O2 sensor sits in the exhaust pipe and sends data to the ECU, which in turn is how the ECU manages the air-fuel ratio.

If a little green light coming on and a virtual gauge showing a plausible value are the highlights of your week, you have probably been a resident of ECU Debugging Purgatory. 

It took about 30 minutes with the multimeter to figure out that instead of powering the O2 sensor driver with a 12 volt supply, I had wired it to rely on the fuel level sender for power. Which, with half a tank of fuel, turned out to be 5 volts. Shockingly, it works a lot better with the requisite 12 volts.

Distractions

A middle aged project car guy cannot live by broccoli jobs like wiring alone. There has to be time for silly fun toy stuff.

Yeah, I know, a tire brand best known for dirt track racing in the US makes no sense on a tribute to British endurance racing. But 'Hoosier' is also slang for an Indiana native, which does apply to this project car as well as its owner/builder and his father who raced on Hoosier tires in the 1970s. And the Hoosier Tires factory is located just up the road in Lakeville IN. So I really can't make a faux racing car toy without putting faux Hoosier tires on it.

When I'm done with the faux tire branding, the next step will be to put the tires on the car and drive it around the neighborhood.