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You must have enough to make this post. Most don't ask and most don't give for help. I guess it is just the way it is. Here is one for sticking up for yourself.
Originally Posted by sonofthehill
What no ******* cats for me bro?
Like I gave a **** anyway! LOL
Got my oil today and took the car out at lunch. Ticking noise was present. Pulled into the garage after driving around a bit.
I'm pretty confident at this point that the ticking noise is just loud injectors. The stethoscope around various points on the fuel rail (what I could access) was certainly noisy and clicky.
I also remember thinking that was where it sounded like the noise was coming from when I first looked around.
It sounds like this isn't uncommon for EV14 injectors. I'm coming from stock injectors so I guess my ears aren't used to hearing loud injectors.
I'm going to monitor the sound and fuel system as I continue to break the engine in. I assume it could have something to do with something else in my fuel system, as the rest is stock aside from the fuel pump.
For clarity, I'm running FlowForce 640 CC Injectors. These were used by my roommate for a while in his car but never saw boost. The noise might have been present previously in his car, but it was never attributed to the injectors if it was.
The best part is that the next couple days are going to be pretty warm here, so it's a perfect time to go cruise and get some miles on the thing!
What no ******* cats for me bro?
Like I gave a **** anyway! LOL
Was this directed at me or SimBa? Have a cat anyway for being a go-getter.
Keep us posted on the noise and your engine break in process. I don't remember my FF640s ever making an audible noise inside my cabin, but I also got them new and only ran them for a year and change. They did make an audible clicking noise if you put your ear in their general vicinity with the car running though.
Thanks, I plan to! Took it out last night and got the mileage up to 110. Went to the parts store and dropped off all of the oil I've been going through. One of the employees who "doesn't like cars" and "is a truck guy" said he would like cars if they were all painted like mine. I laughed.
Got into some boost and higher into the revs. The car still seems happy, although it clicks like a train on the tracks at idle. I'm not sure why it's so apparent in the cabin compared to the rest of the noise the car makes.
I was finding some slight hesitation when getting higher in the revs, but I looked at the logs and my TPS appears to be a bit noisier than before, and it's been triggering acceleration enrichment pretty frequently even when holding the pedal steady. I was seeing my AFR's spike rich while cruising, so that should fix it.
Idle is still hunting around a few hundred RPM and the AFR is inconsistent. I'm on open loop, but my IAC and Fuel values are stable in that region (IE, all the same value) and it's still oscillating a lot. I'm not sure if that's the injectors or something else. I've got my idle advance setup again, so maybe that'll stabalize things a bit.
I'll put more miles on it today. Might run around and return some of the specialty tools I borrowed from friends; mics, T gauges, ring filer.
I'll probably drop the oil again around 300 miles or so and see how it looks, but I'm feeling pretty confident about everything now.
Directed at??? Holy smoke, 500 cats, hopefully animal control doesn't get wind of this.
You guys should know by now that I am usually talking out my ****. I am so full of **** that I need to vent some now and again so I don't exceed burst pressure. But seriously, don't forget to peek in the oil filler hole for glitter. Annnnd... Don't take me too seriously.
Car is still running OK. I've got an ignition or fueling problem somewhere I'm pretty sure. The car hesitates around 4K RPM like a very soft ignition rev limiter. I'm assuming the same issue is causing me to have to idle super rich.
I've got some injector cleaner to run through on the next tank. If that helps I'll probably pull and clean the injectors.
Outside of that I've got about 200 miles on the car now. I'm planning to drop the oil around 300 and turn up the boost when I resolve the misfiring.
Got a log of the misfire occurring? Is it under heavy load or just anytime you get around 4K?
Certain kinds of injector cleaner work really well, just make sure you run the recommended ratio. Pretty sure I killed an OEM fuel pressure regulator on my car by putting a bottle of the stuff in on a near-empty tank lol. I’m sure you don’t need to be told, but I like sharing that story/info lol.
Logfile is attached. The misfiring can be seen around 626 S. It's a longer log, I took it on my way to the store.
You can also see the rich idle. It's pretty smooth right now, just running open loop + ignition correction. If I pull some fuel to get above ~12 AFR then it oscillates wildly and spikes to very lean. Not like a rough idle, but like a misfire.
It seems to be running better when it's cold.
I ran this same ignition setup with no problems before I pulled the engine, and had run ~10 PSI on a few pull (ran out of injector). I did put new plugs in (BKR7E) when the engine went in. I gapped them down to 0.030 last night but it doesn't seem to have made any effect. Running 3.5 MS of dwell, which is what I was running before.
I might steal the wires off my roommates NA tomorrow and see if that helps at all.
I plotted the RPM/S below so you can see where it's stumbling a bit easier. The worst dips are actually going negative. I realize a screenshot like this isn't too helpful, but figured I'd throw it up. Notice that RPM/S is going negative
Looks like you’re at 88kpa when it occurred in that snapshot. Does the misfire occur under load only or will it show up anytime the engine’s at around 4K rpm. Ignition misfires are usually exacerbated with more load.
If rpm/s is what I think it is (a measure of crankshaft acceleration/deceleration), then those dips in the graph when the engine is under load will correspond with any misfire. We’ve got a similar function with our Ford scan tools that uses CKP sensor acceleration along with cam position sensor info to identify what cylinder is misfiring in real time, and reflect it in a similar type of graph as shown in your log. From what I’ve seen, though, I don’t think there’s a similar way to see this in TS.
I believe your understanding of RPM/S is correct. I just graphed it here because it makes the changes in RPM easier to see than looking directly at the RPM graph.
I cleaned up the ground under the intake where the ignition coils ground and reseated the plug wires to the coil packs. It seems like that helped a bit, but it could just as easily be in my head. It was still misfiring. I'll swap my roommates plug wires in this afternoon and go again.
It seems to misfire under light or heavy load. I haven't been putting my foot into it too much though because I figure it's probably not the best idea to flog it when it's running weird and only 200 miles into the new engine.
Not a bad thought. I think they're compatible (1.8NA vs NB1), although I'm not sure how much my roommate wants me to disassemble his car. I'll think about that though. If it is ignition related I'm not sure what else it would be unless I got bad plugs somehow (ordered through Amazon, so it's possible)
I fixed the misfiring this weekend. I'm going to do my best to explain it here although I'm still trying to figure out exactly what was going on. TLDR Fueling issue related to my trigger setup on Speeduino
Speeduino does have support for a missing tooth trigger wheel (36-1, 36-2, etc...). However there is currently no support for the Miata's cam trigger. In theory this means you need to run semi-sequential fuel, however I had my car setup with a different trigger pattern and the car seemed to be running fine. I tried a few other settings including semi-sequential and a different cam pattern, but the car didn't want to run. I DID have the car fire up, but it was dying as cranking enrichment tapered off. I believe I could have changed my fuel table and corrected this, but at the time it didn't seem like an improvement over what I had.
I found some custom firmware that was released a few months back with support for the Miata cam profile. I compiled and installed that yesterday. I had a similar experience where the car was dying after cranking. Convinced I now had a valid trigger setup, I started adding fuel. I had to nearly double my idle fuel and retune my entire VE table, adding ~15-30 points across the map. Maybe more in some places.
With that change I'm now able to rev the car happily into the 5K range, although I'm waiting to put a few more miles on the engine before I want to get to redline.
I believe that the cam signal is never referenced once the car is running, so I'm not sure that the cam profile actually fixed the issue. Like I said, I think one of the other configurations I used would have worked as well if I retuned my fuel table. I was not seeing sync loss before, I was hitting my AFR targets, and I was setup to run sequential fuel.
My idle is still unhappy above ~12 AFR, but with some new confidence in my trigger pattern I'm going to see if I can correct that via tuning. I also added some fuel injector cleaner to my last tank of gas, so I'm going to see if that does anything.
Cat given for the in-depth follow up. Glad you're (hopefully) past it and ready to continue breaking in the new motor!
I was gonna say this deserves a post in the Speeduino section but it looks like you already beat me to it haha. Hopefully this helps someone out in the future!
I'm hoping it helps someone. I still want to try to figure out what was really going on.
Changed the oil again this weekend at ~250 miles and it looked the best of the changes so far. Didn't cut open the oil filter.
I'm probably around 300 miles now. I haven't been babying the thing, but still don't want to go all out on it. I'm running ~5 PSI but haven't been flooring it. I realize that there's not really anything to break in at this point (rings are seated by now), but I still want to let everything settle a bit before ripping on it.
Having said that, I took the car out to the nearest fun road before I fixed the stumbling. No laptop, so I was able to carry a bit of speed into the corners. Feels good to be back in the car.
Heck yeah dude, you're getting there. I remember taking it real easy on my engine until ~580 miles the first time around, then adding 9psi around that time, then stepping it up to 17psi at 900ish miles.
Second time around, I was at full boost by about 300 miles lol. The first time breaking in your in built engine is probably the scariest, but after reading about guys driving up and down the street and then breaking their engine in by doing dyno pulls (one of my buddies included), I figure we're probably erring on the side of caution haha. I'm more cautious about ramping up RPM over time during the break in than I am with load now.
Good thing you can drive it properly again. Being able to use the car for its intended purpose gives you motivation to keep on trucking through the technical issues haha.
I think this thread has been successfully derailed, but I'm going to keep going with it.
Took the car out to figure out my idle today. Still couldn't get it to idle any leaner than ~12 AFR and realized I was running at half sync. Thought that was a code issue but eventually realized I forgot to plug in my cam sensor when I was troubleshooting yesterday. So I drove it on batch injection yesterday and a bit today, just happy that I could rev it out and that the idle was smooth enough.
Well, when I realized the cam sensor was unplugged, I plugged it back in and went back out. Immediately my car was smoother on light throttle cruise (prior it was super jerky). I was able to lean my idle out a bit, at least into the 13's, and could likely go further but I'm going to do that another day.
I think the voltage correction chart that I got from flow force was also a bit aggressive. I smoothed out the part of the chart around 14.0, so now I'm getting similar correction from ~13.7V-14.3V. Pretty sure some of my electrical accessories (fans mainly) were kicking on, causing a voltage droop and causing my injectors to swing ~5%. I think that was the main cause of the wild oscillations I was getting.
I'll do more in the next couple days to make sure things are working in a few different environments, but I'm starting to get very confident in the car overall. ~400 miles in and just got the boost turned up to ~10 PSI. This things gonna be quick.
Apparently there is a bug in the Speeduino FW I was using which caused a variable to overflow at 914 RPM and would cause the injector PW to drop to almost zero, which is what I was seeing in my datalogs. I thought it was a hardware issue, but the PW value in MLV is what the ECU is commanding. I thought maybe it was being thrown off by a mechanical issue with the injectors. There is a fix in the latest master firmware (not an official release yet).
I corrected that and now can idle smoothly at 850 RPM, ~14.7 AFR. Just crossed over 600 miles with the engine.
Last oil change was conventional at 500. Planning to swap over to synthetic at 1000 miles and then change again when the engine reaches 3k miles.
01-29-2024, 04:52 PM
1
Have a cat anyway for being a go-getter.
I just wasn’t sure if you wanted props from me or Sim. 
