Hakan, that's really awful. It sucks when a loving companion passes.

 

My sincere condolences. This is the price we pay for their love.

 

Thank you very much guys.
All I can think of is, the poor thing is all alone in the cold damp ground in this rainy night.

I am ******* emotional about this. Eddie was by my side for 12 years, and we shared the good and the bad together. He would lean on me when he was shaking because chemo was too hard on him, he would just quietly come up to me and show me whatever problem he had, like a deep cut on his paw, and I never made him memorize commands - I would just talk to him like a person, and he would get me.

He would never accept a treat in the kitchen. He would just walk over to his favorite place in the living room, and I would have to take the treat to him there.

The vets told me his life expectancy would be 3.5 years max, given the fact that he was born on the street, was malnourished in his early days, and yet he got to see well past his 12th birthday with us.
He got cancer when he was just 2, and we fought tooth and nail to treat it. Surgery, chemo, the works.
He was just too weak to fight it the second time around when he was 10, and a single chemo session after his latest surgery almost killed him.
Poor thing stopped eating about a year ago, and we were hand feeding him every day, using a large syringe at first, and then squirting food in his mouth from a cake decorating bag.
I would research and cook meals for him, and then run them through the food processor so it would become smooth and creamy, allowing us to push it through the bag with a nozzle at the tip.

Please do not mind me for rambling. I just feel like ****. And my wife is all the way in Cape Town this week.

 

It is not rambling when you express your love for a treasured friend.

And he is NOT in the cold ground. That was just a shell. He is happily waiting for you across the rainbow bridge.

 

Sorry for your loss Hakan; it is always hard to lose someone that close to you. And although it may sound harsh, in his case death might be the salvation from all the pain he was going through, so it may be for the best.

 

I have not been driving for a while, because Coronavirus.

Now that things are easing up over here, I had a chance to hit the highway, only to be greeted by a newfound "slight hesitation" under high load and high boost.
I thought it could be the plugs, but that never happened before.

I immediately logged the "slight hesitation". You can see it start at 15.8 and 52 seconds.

Any thoughts?

(Log and tune attached)

 

Guess what...

It WAS the damn plugs. I feel pretty stupid.
Went to the garage and pulled the plugs. The gaps were almost 40 thou.











A quick cleaning, followed by gapping them down to 25 thou worked wonders, and the car pulls just great with no objections whatsoever.
4th and 5th gear pulls at 21 psi max.

 

I would love to see a dyno chart of your car, would be interesting to see the powerband. Glad missfire was an easy fix.

 

I just received the 4 port MAC solenoid.
It is genuine as far as I can tell. Checked a bunch of comparison sites and images.

So, my new adventure will be figuring out closed loop boost control using this 4 port valve.

I will also be converting all vacuum operated controls (HP-LP bypass, HP bypass and IWG) to electric.
Came up with a pretty simple scheme for that using linear actuators.

 

I figured I really need to learn the nitty gritty of closed loop control.
Just throwing random numbers in the p, i and d boxes will not teach me anything even if I get the magical combination in the first round.

So, I downloaded MATLAB. And, I am all over the interwebz to learn as much as I can about closed loop control systems.
I'm pretty sure I will figure it out without blowing up my engine.


The reason why I want to go with a closed loop - 4 port EBC system is losing pressure in the upper rev range.
A 3 port solenoid always provides pressure to the bottom port of the wg, and sometimes to the top chamber. This means pressure in top and bottom chambers will be equal at best, meaning the WG will only have its spring pressure to fight against the exhaust pressure in the manifold.
And that pressure eventually does overcome the spring and boost drops.
A 4 port solenoid loads the top chamber only if needed, and holds the WG shut, not allowing the boost to taper.

That is my theory.

That, and a 3" exhaust should let me hold 18 to 20 psi all the way to the top.
Then it will be a good time to dyno the car.

 

3 port is the way to go unless you want a large dynamic range. Control will never be as good with a 4 port due to... physics. With a 3 port, you want the spring to be sized such that the maximum relative boost is less than ~2.25 the springs rated WG pressure. An 11 psi spring is great for the range you are trying to hit.

Be aware that the PID in the MS is something called a "type C". The PID equations are essentially derived from the derivative of the traditional PID equation with the objective of removing the setpoint from the P term. If you want to write it up in MATLAB you will probably need to code it yourself, as I am not sure the MATLAB PID app has a type C version. The released MS 1.4 code has a pretty easy to follow algorithm that can easily be ported to MATLAB.

 

In for dyno

 

I am really not very happy with the 4 port MAC valve.

 

Modeling the control law in either continuous or discrete time (side note, is a megasquirt even deterministic for boost control?) in Matlab or SIMULINK should be realtively straight forward, but I am very doubtful MS has the data logging cajones or flexibility to carry out the experiments you need for a relatively complete System ID. Modeling ICEs can be a real intensive fair from what I understand.

In my 2¢ you'd probably be better off spending your time doing a really thorough job of a tuning recipe like Ziegler-Nichols.

 

Gents, I need your opinion on a curious/unpleasant phenomenon.

My engine shuts off unceremoniously at full load, full throttle, nearing redline.
I then have to cycle the key to fire it back up. Trying to bump start while the car is rolling without cycling the engine does not help.

This happened 3 times over the past 2 years, and the latest one was about a week ago.
I have no logs, neither can I log it, because trying to duplicate this condition produces no results.

My ECU must be resetting or completely shutting off under some extremely rare circumstances. That's all I can think of.
It's an "Enhanced" MS2 by Rev. The car has been running great with it since 2012.
I mean, I torture tested the car at the F1 track and this never happened there (OK, I did lose a cam sensor once on the track).

What do you think?
Where do I start chasing such an "ethereal" problem?

msq attached...

 

I had this happen to me in my Jeep during rush hour. 65MPH+, then nothing. Talk about a bad situation.

Turns out is was a bad crank angle sensor, and replacing it solved the problem.

 

80amp main fuse thing still good?

 

As far as I know.

 

My boost control problems are over.

First off, the 4 port solenoid was a waste of time. The main reason behind this is the lack of resolution in the Boost Control Duty Table for my case.
I have 2 turbos, boost comes on at almost idle, and has a tendency to spike pretty much at any rpm if left unchecked.

Also, I was hitting boost limit if I was just rolling on the throttle in 4th or 5th gear with the open loop setup. Had to do with the fact that the engine was not gaining revs fast enough to "spend" the amount of air generated by the turbo(s). If we adjusted the duty table to avoid this, full throttle boost had to be pretty low.

So, I went back to a 3 port solenoid, and turned everything down (way down) and drove the car that way for a couple days. Boring as hell.

My tuner friend (whom I mentioned a few times so far) suggested we hit the road and adjust my boost levels once and for all.
Filled up both tanks (gas and water) and hit the road. My friend opened up the laptop and said "time for closed loop".

I objected.
Because, I know setting up closed loop control is a hair pulling experience. It overshoots, undershoots, you pull PID values out of your ***, try and get it right, takes forever...

He insisted.

I just drove, following his instructions. About 15 minutes went by. He said we were done. I said get outta here.
So I took the car down to 1500 rpm in 4th and punched it... Rock solid 18 psi all the way. I tried rolling on the gas, same thing.
Not 17, not 19, exactly 18 psi. Damn.

I would never imagine it would be this easy. (My friend kept snickering and mocking me on the way back - he really is a good tuner)

The only thing that needs to be ironed out is the boost taper starting at about 5500 rpm... Goes down to 13 at redline.
I have a larger turbine and its housing on the shelf, and I will also be installing a 76 mm exhaust all the way, with a custom muffler.
That should help, if not solve the boost taper problem.

Needles to say, the car is much nicer to drive now.

 

We are Jelly. That is, those of us that spent lots of time and had lots of boost cuts occur while doing it.