It's Alive!.... Now What?

Tonight a huge milestone. The engine runs! Runs really well! Thanks in no small part to Simon at Specialist Components! Thanks Simon!

We're faster than you are.

I'm the one with the sunglasses

Back from the BUB motorcycle Speed Week at the Bonneville salt flats in Utah. I could write a book with what I've learned. I think my biggest take away aside from all the memories of a truly awesome time and the thrill of being part of a team that set a new speed record (146.5mph) in our class, is that to get a bike on the salt at Bonneville is a truly monumental task. Especially a s special construction streamliner. If I’m going to have this bike on the start line next year (2011) I'm going to need a small, hell no, a large miracle. That’s just to run. To be ready to the point of actually challenging a record is… well I don’t know. This isn’t self doubt. It’s just my current analysis after seeing where I need to be by the end of July next year. But fuck it! Here we go!

Donut Create More Work for Yourself

This is the intake manifold with what was the MAP sensor nipple drilled away to accept the fix.

A firewall type vacuum nipple from Summit Racing. (Thank the FSM I had this onhand)

On the bottom of the intake manifold is a very small and even more delicate nipple that is the take off for the MAP sensor. Just trying to remove the small vacuum line from it to get the manifold off the motor is enough to break off this nipple. How do I know this? If you have to ask…. The fix was thankfully simple. A Firewall type vacuum fitting an O ring and an 8MM drill and here you go. Better than new. With the turbo there could be easily 30psi of boost in the manifold so the repair had to be substantial and secure.

Slave to Minutia

Filling the fluids. Crank the motor over at each step and see what leaks. And there are always leaks.

Don't reuse Banjo bolts. This was the cause of the major oil leak I had. The repair manuals on modern machines all stress the warning not to reuse bolts and seals, especially ones that see high stress or many heat cycles etc. Glad that failed here in the shop and not on the course. Next I filled the cooling system. By the oil filter assembly is an oil cooler that is a heat transfer that is cooled by engine coolant. The coolant line that comes from the block was leaking despite new seals. turned out that I had used bolts to secure it that were 15mm too long and they were bottoming out and not allowing enough force to be applied to them to seal properly. Proper length bolts, problem solved. The motor now holds water.

What Happens When You Give a Monkey an Oscilloscope?

Going throught all the sensors one by one to make sure they are all working and the ECU is seeing the right signal. Looking at the VR sensor for the crank and the hall effect sensor for the cam position.

a vidieo of the signal from the VR crank sensor:

The Moment You Realize the Water is Way Over Your Head!

Finishing up a couple of connections on the wiring harness now that the ecu is plugged in.

Testing continuity. Making sure that all the wires go where they are supposed to and that none are crossed.

My goal for the night was to get the wiring harness installed all the power and grounds hooked up properly (there are several of each), and get the ECU talking to the laptop so that I can look over the parameters. So far as all that’s concerned, and in the works of the great decider GWB “Mission accomplished”. And just as hollow as those words turned out to be so to was my goal or at least the feeling I know have in my stomach. I got the ECU connected and the software is talking and I was able to download the maps and all the base config settings. After looking over them for a few minutes the only words that come to my mouth are “HOLY SHIT!” It’s late and I’m tired so this is probably simpler than it looks but the number of variables is a bit staggering. I’m at the base of what at first glance appears to be the Mount Everest of learning curves. There are 8 sub menus for the maps for fuel delivery and timing, Fuel pressure control, fuel correction factor, boost control, sensor calibration (pretty straight forward) all the auxiliary functions. Under each of these are maybe 4 or 6 more sub menus such as the MAP target pressures VS Throttle position and target oil pressures VS RPM. As I write this my feeling of having been thrown off the deep end is turning into excitement. This is illuminating just how much I underestimated the complexity of getting a motor like this running and more importantly tuned for power beyond what the manufacturer ever intended the public to see. I know that as I get this project refined I will have a far greater knowledge of diesel tuning than I ever imagined and it’s really exciting. Now that I have the ECU on line it’s time to test all the sensors through the ECU, make sure the reference voltage from the ECU is getting to all the components that need it. From there I'll make sure the ECU is reading the TPS (Throttle position) and then see if we can get fuel pressure to the rail and from there see if the injectors are ready to do their job. I've tuned a number of aftermarket injection systems on various gasoline engines and I can tell you that they didn't really prepare me for just how complex this is. The level of precision that this system has is much greater that that of a gas system. On a gas engine the spark timing is the most precise function followed by fuel metering. It seams that the timing and duration of the fuel injections on a gas engine however isn't even close the the millisecond accuracy required to make a CDI diesel perform at peak efficiency. But I'm only starting to understand this. Fun stuff!

Belts Outa da Way

Finally the belts for the Alternator and the water pump are in place, tensioned properly, and tracking right without hitting anything. On to the next thing I thought was already finished.

Unintended

I have to relocate the alternator. It was would have been great where it was, not adding to the frontal area of the engine, but it had 2 problems. One was that there was no belt tension adjustment built into the mounting. Two the alternator belt interfered with the water pump pulley mechanism. I think there is an easy fix by mounting the alternator off of one of the right side engine mounts. This of course will no doubt cause a problem when it comes time to design the engine to frame mounts, but at this moment I have no plans to use that mount anyway. For simplicity sake I decided to make this new mount out of steel. I yelled at the CNC mill “make a bracket” and what you see in the pictures is the beginning of the part. I have a much longer post that should have preceded this one about making the arm for the water pump belt tensioner, but I haven’t gotten around to that one yet as it should be much more involved. In I’ll explain the origin of yelling at CNC machines to make parts in that post.

Turbo Exhaust Adapter 2

The finished turning, It will get a flange welded to it for mounting.

The adapter as it looks on the turbo

Turbo Exhaust Adapter 1

The smooth transitioning bore done.

Your Car Is Worse. Trust Me.

This is what 40+hours of wiring harness building nets you. Continuity is good,and until the ECU gets here there isn't much else I can do on this. I just hope that I got all the pin outs right and that things that need the reference voltage and those that get power are all correct. Nothing more fun than debugging a multi variable system. Especially one with this may variables. At this point I have to wonder about all the things I haven't been able to check. Fuel pump, injectors, compression in all the cylinders, oil pump, you get the picture.

From Tonight's Chinese food. Karma is behind us 110%.

If This Actually Works The First time....

36 hours in and almost done. A Lot of that time was spent trying not to engineer myself into a corner. I do think I managed to over engineer the entire thing by twice the effort I should have put into it, but when it comes to the development stage, I hope it will pay off. In this image, beside the Mess on the bench, you may have noticed a lost BMW R bike engine and drive train, as well as the stepper motors and controller for another project I swore I'd have done by the end of this year. Donut ask me how that's going. In planning my own demise I am now confident that it will be under the crushing force of the avalanche of all the unfinished projects that will have reached critical mass around my 90Th birthday. Thus securing my legend for posterity. Right?

There's Something Zen About Wiring

I for some reason find wiring or working with electronics calming. The problem is that around here I don't seem to get to concentrate on something like this for very long, so of course this has taken far longer than it should have. Here’s the current state. The main 34 pin Amphi connector is about 2/3 populated. The smaller 21 pin is almost done and then all I have to do is tie all these back to their sensors which are all connected my Metripak connectors so that should be fairly quick. Some of the time its taking is determining what gauge wire to use and that’s partially based on what colors I have available. I dismembered some of the smart car harness to get a good selection of colored wire. Since only solid color wire is easily available new chopping up and existing harness is a good way to get wire with unique color combination. A must to keep everything organized, in even a simple harness like this with about 45 to 50 wires. Gauging is another story but so far I've been lucky with the selection I have. Word of advice; when you are building a connector with 34 pins, start from the middle and work your way out to the peripheral positions. If you try to build it by starting at number 1 then you will be fighting to keep it organized and to insert new pins/wires once you get the first row done. FWIW. I don’t need all this to get the motor running. However, I will want some of these sensors for tuning and still a few more will be part of the data logging to see how the motor is performing overall and where I may be able to optimize

Lightening Strikes 24 Times (with countersink)

The pulley I made yesterday was feeling a bit on the heavy side so I decided to add some go fast lightening holes.Now if the belts I ordered would just get here I can finally realize my fear that I made the pulley too big.