Ahhh ok makes sense. I thought I remembered your setup not being OEM from the get-go.

Well your gas cap has a relief valve that will prevent the tank from being sucked into too much of a vacuum, although the relief valve there generally needs quite a bit of vacuum to crack open. It's more of a last-ditch failsafe than anything.

Just to clarify, you don't have the vapor canister that sits next to the fuel filter near the right rear wheel well?


This guy.

The canister there has a vent solenoid that's always open except when the system is testing itself for leaks (assuming OEM ECU. After the key has been turned off for a certain period of time). If all of that is gone, the cap would be your only vent source.

I'm surprised your car wasn't throwing any codes when you got it given the setup. Yeah, that would generally cause a rich condition, as you would have a vacuum leak that also happened to be sucking in fuel vapors. If the vapor canister/vent was deleted, though... I guess your idle scenario still makes sense. You'd wind up with a "vacuum leak" drawing in fuel vapors right after refueling until the tank was also sucked into a vacuum and equalized to manifold pressure (since no vents and such).

I get quite a few evap system leaks at work and the easiest way to test if the system is sealed after a repair (even easier than a smoke test) is to run the car at idle, command the canister vent closed, then duty cycle the purge valve to draw the sealed system into a vacuum. Once the system is in a vacuum, you command the purge valve off (sealing the system entirely) and watch the fuel tank pressure sensor reading to see how long it takes for the vacuum to bleed off. You can suck the tank into a pretty serious vacuum before the fuel cap bleeds any of it off.

 

I should've asked you to explain that years ago, would've solved me a decent amount of headache.

The rear charcoal canister and evap are still in place. It's been a while since I looked at the diagrams but I suppose it would be worth revisiting.

All of the sensors related to the fuel system are available on the link, so I was thinking about seeing what kind of info I could get from that. I'm not sure that the evap needs to be on all the time, but I'm not sure if a better option right now. I know another one of the guys on here running link has a custom recipe that they're using so I'll have to revisit that.

Biggest thing is that I don't want to encourage liquid fuel to enter those lines. Last summer when I had a pretty shoddy vent to atmosphere solution I ended up with fuel in my engine bay, and I'd rather not do something like that again.

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I'm surprised I didn't regurgitate all of that information earlier. There aren't many times outside of work that I get to share that info hahaha.

If you can view all of the fuel/evap PIDs on the link, keeping track of fuel tank pressure while driving will tell you exactly what's going on. Not sure how it's expressed in the link, but if it's a voltage, you can just check what it reads with key on/engine off and the gas cap removed, then compare the voltages you see to that while driving.

FWIW, if you wound up with fuel all the way up the line into the engine bay, your canister would have been saturated with fuel as well, which can break down the charcoal pellets in there and clog different parts of the system. Might be worth pulling one or both of the lines to the canister and blowing some air through it to make sure the charcoal hasn't broken down into dust. That might actually explain a thing or two...

 

Got the 1050cc injectors from Z installed on Saturday. It was actually more straightforward than I expected. I ended up reusing the fuel rail spacers and harness adapters from the Flowforce setup. I had intentions to go get washers at HDR to try and diy some spacers, and had sourced harness adapters, but it seemed like both of those were going to be iffy, so I figured I'll sell the 640's a bit cheaper and not have to worry about something going wrong.

These are the injector seal kits I used. No leaks so far

I was going to use these adapters, but ended up going with the flowforce ones. These might have worked, but the connectors didn't fit super well and seemed to strain the wires from the harness.


Realized these weren't going to fit so I ended up installing the injectors without them.

So far so good. Pretty minor changes needed to the tune. I pulled info from the ID1050's which is working. I had their small pulse width correction table at first, but I was getting a miss at idle above ~13.5 AFR and some weird AFR fluctuations so I zero'd the table and that seems to be working better. Took the car out for a drive Saturday and Sunday and got the fuel table roughed in.

Honestly I kinda miss the "autotune" feature from Tuner Studio. Link has something similar, and I assume it actually works better, but it requires that you hold perfectly in the cell you're trying to tune. Street tuning with 1 person makes that pretty unrealistic (at least when I first tried it). The mixture map that corrects based on logs always seems to over or undershoot significantly. I've got a few filters on to try and keep transient states from being factored in, but I usually go from being lean in an area to being way rich, or the other way around. Regardless, I'm figuring out a workflow.

I also ordered a couple of the JST-XA connectors and pins so I can add some more signals to the Link. I only installed one expansion at first, but didn't realize that the one I installed doesn't have any aux inputs. There are temperature inputs, but I'm not sure how those would work with my oil pressure gauge and figure I'll end up using that for oil temp at some point.
Part Numbers I ordered from DigiKey were 455-4102-ND and 455-2051-1-ND. I got 10 receptacles and 100 pins for ~10 shipped I believe. I figured I'd play around with a few sacrificial ones to see how my crimp tool was going to work since it's not designed specifically for these pins. So far so good. I got one wire installed and when I tried to pull it out the insulation on the wire slipped first, followed by the wire pulling out of the crimp connector. This was with a good amount of force and not the best crimp job, so I'm pretty confident I'll be able to get some of the wires I have hanging out under the dash routed over to the ECU soon.

But now, the car sits. I'm probably going to take the next couple weeks to do a fairly large overhaul. I'm going to be pulling some of my dash gauges to revisit the wiring on those, as well as pulling the ECU to get the case modified for the other expansion harness. I've also got the Kraken kit showing up soon, which will relocate my wideband, and result in changing the routing of that wiring as well.

Thankfully my company does a 2 week shutdown at the end of the year, so I'll have a good amount of time to dedicate to all of that.

 

Good work overall sir. Cat given for digikey part #s!

All of the calibrations for the OEM sensors (tank pressure and level) are in the Mazda manual, and I posted how to configure them on my build thread a bit ago. Since we use the same plugin you could use the same settings I have. The last Link firmware update added a filter function to the fuel level, which is nice. In the manual it also mentions that the EVAP is only active during cruise at 20% DC after a certain ECT (forget how much right now), so my settings mimic that with the sine wave instead of being only open/closed.

Regarding the fuel coming out of the line: It is a possibility on a properly hot day if your tank gets hot and gets a bunch of slushing...been there done that. It is why the NBs have a fuel catch can before the purge valve, which I have retrofitted too. I also noticed that the amount of richness changes with tank pressure and temperature. Of course, I don't have a way to measure temperature, but just guesstimating based on return from trackday vs just driving around on a weekend. That said, I no longer use a 4D table to reduce fuel, and just let the CLL take care of it all.

As Z said, there is a vent valve in the canister that is used for leak testing (CDCV). It is open by default, and the OEM ECU closes it to test for leaks. Link has a connection to it on Aux 11, so either leave it unassigned, or make sure it's always open. If you close it the tank pressure will increase. I tested it at a trackday after a run and watching the tank pressure climb when I actuated Aux 11. It went from 0.8kPa, to 1.5kPa within a minute at idle, then back down once it opened. And for the sake of info, the max I've seen the tank pressure get to has been ~4kPa when I had a gigantic exhaust leak heating up the tank and climbing a mountain road.

If you need any help with any of the configs, let me know. God knows I've spent too much time on this and no-one should go through that again.

 

Here are the configs based off the Mazda Manual: https://www.miataturbo.net/build-thr...3/#post1648312

My most recent EVAP logic is like this: https://www.miataturbo.net/build-thr...7/#post1652475

The only thing I've changed is that I don't remove fuel with the 4D table and let the CLL do the rest. Because of that is why there is a condition to not enable purge if the Lambda is not working.

 

I don't have a dog in the fight here but had to give Ricardo cats for posting all that info. Good stuff, man.

Glad to see the injectors are getting a workout again!

 

Awesome, this is exactly what I was thinking of. I'll pick through those tables and likely do the same setup for my car. Really appreciate it.

Edit - I will also let you know how those DigiKey parts work out. The whole package (10 connectors + 100 pins) cost less than $10 shipped, so it seems like a no brainer.

 

Happy to help!

Damn, less than $10 is awesome. In that case might as well add the second CAN expansion and wire that to the OBD2 port for more OEMness haha. I've been wanting to do that just for fun and easier track datalogging with TrackAddict.

 

CAN we actually utilized the OBD2 port? I've never looked into it but I assumed the port was useless once you went standalone. I assume there's some kind of library for doing CAN/OBD2 translation then?

 

The port is useless by default, but you connect it to the CAN port, which is very easy to do. There are diagrams in the Link Help Page, but basically you feed grounds, 12V and CAN-h,CAN-L to the OBD port, and enable it in the ECU CAN setup screen. The Link plugin has two CAN ports than can be enabled and there is a setting to transmit OBD protocol through either or both. The trick is to set the speed low, like 250 mb/s so scanners can detect it. That’s why it’s nice two have two CAN ports, one that’s high speed for Lambda and gauges, and one that’s low speed for scanners and/or vehicle functions (for cars that use CAN dashes etc). No need for any custom scripts, programs or sniffers. It’s built in. That said, the OBD protocol in Link doesn’t have P codes like OEM cars (Haltech does). But it still provides all the expected OBD PIDs for things like Torque and TrackAddict to pick up

 

One more tidbit. Our plugins have a fused 12V and ground in the CAN expansion. So you can grab all you need for OBD in just one connector without splicing into the fuse box or other wires.

I’ve also asked in the forums and have been told a wideband controller, such as the Link CAN Lambda or AEM X series, can be directly plugged in to this CAN port 12v source. The internal circuit can take the high draw for the heater circuit in short bursts. I haven’t tried it myself yet but intend to.

 

Ran to the library at lunch to grab the second iteration of the spark plug tube seals for the R8 coils. Man, I'm super stoked about this.





Still just a tiny bit tight on the shaft, but not too bad. If anything I would probably make the hole a little smaller, maybe 0.5mm. They hug the shafts well and combined with the grip that these coils have on the spark plug, make everything even more secure/stable.

I've had one from the last batch on the car for a week or so now, including this weekend which was warmer ambient temps (maybe ~10 C/50F) and when I was driving the car longer/harder. So far the material seems to be holding up. Obviously this isn't mid summer turbo heat, but so far so good.

The original grommets that I cut up have been holding up fine as well. I still think those could be a pretty good solution if you took some time to trim them down carefully. Likely more accessible than getting 3d printed parts for most people.

 

I need to get some TPU to do my own experiments with. I've had a SADFab rear upper spherical bearing on the shelf for years now because I wasn't happy with the seal provided. A 3d printed TPU seal would be a great way to deal with that.

 

Really enjoyed the last few posts. Funny thing about the TPU grommets, I had the exact same idea a while back to seal my VAG coils on my VVT engine.

 

Glad you're enjoying it! I figure there's at least a couple people lurking around here. I know how many build threads I followed silently when I was in high school and college and it didn't make sense for me to have my own project going on.

I'll be interested to see how they handle the summer, but so far so good. I'll have to get that file uploaded here soon. It's a pretty simple design but I figure someone could use it.

 

Made some good progress on cleaning up the wiring yesterday. I ran to Harbor Freight at lunch since I don't have any impact sockets and they were on sale. While I was there I (finally) got a decent wire stripper. I've been using the strippers on an old crimp tool I got off amazon and while it's worked, it leave something to be desired. The auto sizing ones are pretty cool and so far seems to work well.

Let's start with the before. I know that none of this is the "right" way to go about this, but I wanted to highlight some of this because some people act like your car is going to spontaneously combust if you do stuff like this. I've had most of this setup for a year or so without issues, so while it's not right, I still think it's a valid way to go about it.


First sin, using the cigarette lighter to power my AFR gauge. I just used spade connectors and threw them in the stock plug, which IIRC is fused for 20 Amps. I can't remember if I swapped that to a 10 Amp, but if I didn't I should have. Regardless, these never got loose or came out and I never had sensor issues that I attributed to this setup.



Not really anything specific here, but it's a bit of a rats nest.



This metal bar was used to mount my old ECU. It worked pretty well. I used this to ground my gauges. Garbage crimp jobs/connectors are plentiful. Also note that I grounded both the power and sensor for my oil pressure gauge here. When I set this up it was just so I could tell if I lost oil pressure completely so I wasn't too worried (I also didn't really understand how a sensor ground worked). The sensor ground from the Link will be used going forward. Again, this worked fine. I ran the signal into the speeduino and got it to match up well with the gauge. Not proper, but it worked.



Fuse tap with 2 power wires crimped in. Again, it worked. The 5A never blew when powering my knock gauge and oil pressure gauge. This was a result of wanting to get things working without running to the parts store. I already had the fuse tap setup for one gauge, so I just threw the second one in there with it.

I pulled everything into the footwell yesterday and got thing separated as best as possible. Pulled out all of my zip ties and velcro ties so everything was loose. I had picked up some braided cable sleeving at harbor freight for my computer, but realized it would be really handy here as well. I bundled up all of the appropriate wires/harnesses in that so I'd have one main bundle of cables going into the gauge panel.



The cables that aren't included in this bundle are going elsewhere (ECU or power), so I left them out. I'm also going to have to change how my AFR wiring is routed as the Kraken setup will put the sensor under the car instead of in the engine bay like it currently is.

I crimped together a small spade->ring adapter so i could route the cigar power into a small fuse block I got from a friend. I also crimped the 3 ground signals together into a single spade connector as well.





So, is this perfect? No, not quite. I'm not sure how/if I'll mount the fuse block. There isn't a convenient location that I've found so far, and I doubt it's going to move around much back there anyhow. This location also isn't super serviceable, but realistically it's 2 screws or so to pull the center console and then I can get to the fuse block. I've never blown a fuse for a gauge anyway, so I doubt this is going to be a regular thing.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied even if it's a small change. It's not a very noticeable change, but I've been meaning to tidy this up for a while.

Next on the list is probably going to be pulling the ECU to add some signals for the gauges. I should also spend some time figuring out what I want to do for wiring going forward (as far as connectors, wire brand, crimping, etc...). I did watch some of HPA's wiring course which was surprisingly helpful. PS, their entry level courses are often sold for $1 during promotions and the $1 link is usually shareable and active for a long time.

Oh ya, I also got a mysterious box from Bulgaria yesterday . Conveniently I've got the next 2 weeks off from work as well.

 

Mysterious box of Bulgarian "pipes" you say? I know what that is!

At the time I bought my kraken kit (2017-2018?) he was very much not known, so sending $1400 to this guy in Bulgaria was kinda nerve wracking. I found it funny when the kit came in and the box was insured for "misc pipes $50", which I'm sure was an export/customs thing, but I found it hilarious.

 

That's very possible. Mine got stuck in customs for a bit and I had to pay an extra $30 in duties with no explanation why. Those charges always seem like a "what are you going to do about it?" kind of thing. I wish this box was only $50...

 

I'm still blown away by how quickly he's able to get things delivered from where he's at. When I needed to warranty my manifold in January, he got one out to me in six days. Given, it normally takes a long time for him to get your kit together, but his operation still amazes me.

Side note, do you follow Kraken on Facebook? Dude's been off the rails recently. Got his own foundry, has been making tons of new manifolds (EWG v-band manifold for NC as well as a RHD NC turbo manifold, all sorts of new things for the NA/NB, and he was even flashing some molds to make carbon fiber hardtops there for a bit. Wild.

Wiring updates look good, dude. So satisfying cleaning up/optimizing that stuff even if it's already functional and/or you're not going to see it for a long time.