No updates in 2 weeks! What's happening to this thread...

I got the car aligned after getting that new subframe in. We dialed in 3 degrees of camber in the front. Cody, the guy who aligns my car, noted that we had something like 6 degrees of caster there, and could dial in more camber if desired. We left it at 3 for now. I might try to play with alignment more next year, but for now I feel like 3 is a happy medium.

Two weekends ago I got to officiate my friends wedding. He and his wife have a turbo 86 and an SSC car that they autocross together. Always a bit stressful getting the script written and dialed in, but a super rewarding experience.


This weekend was the final autocross of the season. Cold enough in the mornings to want tire blankets, but warm enough in the afternoons to spray the tires down. I ended up taking 1st in XB both days, which I'm pretty sure gives me the class win for the season. Super stoked about getting 10th raw and top 20 Pax on Sunday. I was only 0.8 seconds (Raw time) behind a multi time national champion STS driver in his 1.6 NA... I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing I'll try to get a video uploaded of my best run from Sunday.

Still trying to figure out what to do for tires next season.
For 245/40/15 the options are pretty much RT660, Nankangs ($400 more per set), or Vitours which are still questionable regarding their legality in SCCA. The 660s are good enough, but they leave something to be desired compared to Bridgestones or Yokes. From what I've read the Nankangs need a lot of heat to grip, so early and late season would probably suffer. With the price differential I could almost get 2 sets of 660s on sale for the same price as the Nankangs as well. Falken's revising the 660s right now and I believe the 660+ will be out later this year.
Who knows, plenty of time to debate it.

I've also been working on getting that house purchased. I'll head to sign all the closing paperwork in about an hour and hopefully will be moved in by next weekend. Been a busy couple of weeks, but all good stuff.

Photos from the last PCA event came out today too. Bonus photo of the Tracker from earlier in the thread.

 

Nice dude, congrats on officiating the wedding! And on wrapping up the home purchase, and on the W this past weekend! Damn, busy couple weeks for sure haha.

You got any gopro footy from the event?

 

Thanks Z. Yeah, I'll try to get that footage uploaded today. I was going to upload it earlier but I tried some new software that only exports in 30 fps. I'll just upload/edit on youtube later today and post the link here.

My roommate also threw his GoPro and GPS setup in the car, so I can probably grab that as well.

 

Generic, "it's not much, but it's mine" post.


Got everything moved over to the new place on Wednesday. It's been a whirlwind since then. Wild how much stuff you need to operate a house.

Car projects will probably be on hold for a little bit as I get the house dialed in. Maybe I need to start a build thread for the garage, at the very least it's getting a bunch of lights and having some gaps sealed. The garage isn't huge, but I've still got more space to move around the car than I did at the old place with another car parked next to it. I'm sure I'll be breaking it in with a project sooner than I expect.


Before all the junk got thrown in.

Home at last. PS - I'm planning on bringing the tires into the basement before it gets too cold.

 

Stoked for you dude. The new garage definitely looks like an upgrade from your last one space-wise. Nice you've already got shelves and storage in there, although the wood looks like it may be older than the car itself

Can't wait to see what you do with it!

 

My realtor pointed out that this house was built around the time World War II was finishing up. That was a really weird frame of reference to hear.

It very much reminds me of my grandparents house, but I think it'll shine up pretty good with some small changes. The wood is old, but it's sturdy.

 

Better late than never I guess. Here's my final run of the autocross season. God... Autocross looks so slow on camera

EDIT - I should also mention that I couldn't get any grip off the line that day. Once it heated up a bit in the afternoon I was able to launch decently, but most of the day was spinning 1st off the line even with fuel cut (IE, no boost off the line). Building heat in the brakes was hard as well. Definitely would have benefit from dual driving that day.

 

Ehh, everything looks slower on camera. What's obvious is that you were driving the thing hard! Looked like a good run.

God, I miss having blow off valve noises.

 

Hmm... I wonder if, and how, you could get those back?

PS - Offseason stuff is starting to happen.

 

The shop rags I ordered came in today! They even came with some 1000cc injectors as a bonus! Pretty soon my car is just going to be takeoffs from other people on here.


Also, the Speeduino has had a good run, but I finally got tired of some of it's shortcomings. Enter the G4x.


Thanks to @curly and @Z_WAAAAAZ for helping me get some parts in before I have to start making mortgage payments

 

Nice driving in the video! Seemed exciting to me haha.

I hope the G4X rocks your socks like it did for me! You should undo mods to your harness that were needed for the speeduino, like any resistors to the idle valve etc. Super excited to see how it goes for you.

 

@redursidae I just went back through your thread to see how you modified the case. Got started in on it at lunch, hoping to finish up after work.

That's a good point, I do still have that flyback diode on the IACV (I think Link calls it the ISCV). I'll keep that in mind.

I already corrected the tune for some of that. My EBC is hooked up to my purge valve wiring, so that will probably get changed in the future. I'm also not using the stock oil pressure or knock sensors anymore, but might figure out how to utilize the factory wiring in the future. It would be nice to be able to get everything connected without cutting the factory harness up.

 

I actually shipped the injectors as a kit. The rags are to clean up any fuel you happen to spill. Or oil deposits that might be anywhere else on the car Stoked to see you getting some use out of them.

 

Purge output is Aux 12, so you can assign boost control to that and leave it wired as is. Knock sensor is wired to Knock In, but the stock sensor sucks, get a standard Bosch donut sensor and make a pigtail using a cut up stock sensor. The stock oil pressure switch doesn't go to the ECU, only the instrument cluster. But if you spliced into the wire at the sensor and ran it a few inches up to the PS pressure switch, you could assign it to DI 3. I've ran almost all my Link installs without utilizing the pressure switch. You can make it blip idle like it does stock, I don't think it's necessary though. Looking through the list of digital inputs, that's the easiest one without using DI7/8/9 on the expansion harness.

 

Thanks for the input Curly. I'm using an aftermarket Knock gauge (FWLR Tuning Knock Detective) which uses one of those Bosch sensors. Previously I had no way to monitor for knock (No knock protection setup in Speeduino) so I was using that gauge's headphone jack to listen. It also has a signal output that I had wired into the Speeduino so I could look at it in logs.

Similarly, my oil pressure gauge is an AEM unit so I've got an output signal that can be wired into the ECU as well.

I did get the MAF disabled after the ECU was complaining about low voltage there (removed the jumper so I can use it for other things if desired). I also got the EBC signals setup.

My wiring has become a bit of a rats nest lately. It's on the list to get a small fuse block hooked up with a relay and clean it up, but that'll happen later.

 

Went out yesterday at lunch and started ripping things apart for the Link install. The injectors are going to wait for a bit. Might as well get the car up and running happily on the Link with a known good setup first. I'm also hoping that this will start me down the path of cleaning up my footwell and dash gauges. None of it is too bad (IE me in highschool installing car audio equipment), but I'm not happy with most of it. I have standards, I just don't always meet them.

I'll give some overall thoughts at the bottom.

For a baseline, here's what I've been working with.



All of the wires have either spade connectors or little dupont connectors on them, I've just wrapped them in tape for a bit more confidence that they're not going to disconnect randomly. The signal grounds should be going to the ECU, but I haven't had any issue's I've attributed to those yet. Power (at least switched power) for most of the aftermarket gauges are coming from fuse taps, which was a "temporary" solution.

It's all been working well, and I haven't had issues, but it's not the way I want it to be done.

Regardless, I got all of that ripped out, vacuumed the dog hair (no dogs living at my place now, so hopefully it's gone for good) and got to work modifying the ECU housing.



Drilled some holes for the USB Cable, Extension Harness and Map line. I should've drilled these closer to the edge of the case, as the fitment is pretty tight, but I was able to get all the wires settled in there without too much fuss. I wrapped some loom tape around the lines/wires for a bit of added protection.

Got into everyone's favorite "under the dash" position and it bolted up pretty easily. Just in time for me to realize I should've spent more time planning (classic mistake) because all the wires were exiting the case straight into my clutch pedal.


Note that my toe is about to turn the USB cable from a straight to a 90, and this is with me being careful of foot placement.



So that get's to come back out. I'm going to blame it on my friend being over. I never focus as much or as clearly than when I'm working alone. Regardless, we went to fire it up and nothing... Just a bunch of cranking. Corrected a few issues in the tune such as disabling the MAF, but still nothing. I did get to use the ignition test mode to confirm the plugs were firing, which Speeduino doesn't have, so that was a nice improvement. Didn't even sound like it was trying to fire. At this point, I'm pretty sure the users manual says "Don't keep cranking, diagnose and fix the issue", so naturally I kept cranking and eventually BOOM. Honestly surprised the neighbors didn't call the cops.

At that point we hung our hats for the night and called it. I figured something with the trigger setup was wrong. Got some feedback from Redusidae and Curly, and sure enough, I was way off. I'll correct that and hopefully try to fire it up tonight or tomorrow. For reference I was at 210, when I think I should have been closer to -10. I believe the link accounts for the offset in the MX5 36-2 Trigger setting, while the Speeduino setting I was using was generic and had no baseline to go off of.

So far the Link hasn't blown my socks off (I mean I guess it did almost blow them off), but I'm just nitpicking. At this price point I think a 3d printed housing seems reasonable to include. Modifying the stock housing isn't a huge deal, but it would be nice to have been able to bolt it straight to the stock brackets and plug it in. I'm also not a huge fan of a proprietary USB Cable that costs $60, or the fact that the cable is quite short. Personally I like being able to set my laptop on top of the car and look at the tune that way, and the USB cable just barely reaches. I also thought the USB header placement was odd, as it puts the wires right into the MAP line. Oh, and I only got 2 of the 4 stickers they advertised on the box

These are all very minor gripes. A USB extension cable isn't hard to find, and once the housing is modified again (completely my fault on the mistake there) and bolted up I doubt I'll ever think about it again.



Overall I'm really excited to get the car up and running and start playing around with the actual tuning of the thing. I'm crossing my fingers I didn't damage anything with that trigger angle. Pretty sure I was firing the injectors close to BDC. The timing light wasn't showing any strobes, but obviously the plugs were still firing.

 

Changed the trigger offset to 0 and she fired up immediately. Not surprising with what I've heard from Curly, but for not tuning start up at all it was surprisingly happy to start.

I couldn't get it to idle, but I was mostly just aiming to get it to catch for now. Next on the list will be to remove the ECU, reroute the wires to the opposite side of the housing or the back and then reinstall it. Hopefully we'll be driving and street tuning by the weekend.

 

I'm sorry you only got 2 stickers....wtf! That's like $200 right there.

I'm glad she runs again! That's awesome. I doubt you caused any damage by firing on the exhaust stroke. Maybe if you had a cat, but even then, meh, been there done that a few times (backwards OEM trigger yo) and the cat was still intact. Is your map setup for modelled or traditional fuel? Wondering which avenue you decide to take. I use modelled in mine.

 

Thanks man! I decided to go with Modeled Fuel. Sounded like it was more complex, but also more powerful. Traditional sounded like it was targeted at people who took their ECU to a shop and never touched it again. I like turning *****, sometimes to my own detriment

 

Ok, pulled the ECU back out, drilled new holes, reinstalled. Still not wanting to idle. I'm going to double check the injector data I punched and see what I can figure out. Pretty confident I'll be able to get it to idle with a bit more time, it was just getting late and I'd rather not **** off the neighbors.

For reference here's where I made the holes in the ECU case. Still not in love with the expansion harness fitment, I ended up running it straight out of the ECU case and zip tying it somewhere as a strain relief. Thinking back on it now I should've made some holes in the ECU case to zip tie the harness to, but it should work fine as is.

It's also worth noting that the USB cable is touching the firewall behind the ECU with it setup like this. Another couple millimeters and it probably wouldn't have fit. Super close, but it'll work.


New tool day, Garage Sharpie was aquired

Covering up the old holes with my hand.

Note that I used a file to elongate the hole for the expansion harness wiring.


This thing is going to be a PITA to remove in the future. The MAP line is internal to the ECU with no quick way to disconnect it. When I do need to remove it I'll probably cut the MAP line and use a splice connector to make it easier to service. Same with the expansion harness. I should be able to remove the harness connector through the ECU case if needed, but I don't think it will be fun. TBF, I shouldn't have to remove it more than a time or two going forward to add CAN or whatever other connectors I want, so not that big of a deal.