Wednesday, June 21, 2023

The Third Squid of Hermes

 Whoah. So here we are, 8 months later... I had planned to write a post about my wiring harness. Did I write a post about my wiring harness? Nope. But I did build a wiring harness. For the third time since I've owned this car, I have built a complete engine wiring harness. And as you might know by now, I kinda like building wiring harnesses. So now I guess I'll write a little bit about this wiring harness, because I did put a bit of effort into it.

There were a couple things I decided to change this time around. First I wanted to have a wiring bulkhead, or a connector on the firewall where the wiring passes through to the interior. Did I strictly need this? Nope. But it's nice.

the old wiring pass through. there was a rubber grommet in the odd shaped hole

chopped out for the new connector plate

new connector plate ready for welding

connector mock-up

 

The other thing was that I wanted better engine protection. My new ECU has the ability to place limits on the engine based on oil pressure, knock levels, and fuel pressure, so I added provision for those sensors as well as oil temperature to the new harness.


The old harness as removed

Stripping it down to re-use most of the wires and connectors

The new firewall connector prior to sheathing.The loops are for flexibility.

New connector on the firewall

all sheathed up

full harness

I think there were 35 devices connected to this harness
  

After completing the engine bay side of the harness, I needed to make an interior harness. This would provide connection to the ECU, supply power to the ECU, injectors, coils, a few other sensors, and also some CAN bus communications provisions.


ECU plugs populated with wires

plugged into the ECU

planning wire routing

wires run, but not sheathed

Interior side of the engine harness 95% complete

While I was at it, I decided I should also clean up my under-dash wiring to the fuse panel. It wasn't terrible before, but I could do better. It took way too long to perform the wiring tidying, as is normal for all my projects.

Fuse panel before

Fuse panel after

So that's pretty much it. Wires. Neat, eh? Also, as you might remember from my drive-by-wire conversion post a mere 10 months ago I now use an electronic gas pedal. I used a pedal from a Subaru BRZ, since it has a pedal mounted on a metal shaft, which is much easier to modify to fit my car than the standard all-plastic accel pedals found in most cars today.

cutting and welding the pedal

test fitting the pedal


Final pedal positioning

Everything back in place and all buttoned up again

the good stuff, we keep it well hidden in the garage

topping off the radiator

With all that done, it was time to have yet another "first start". Of course a first start is always special, but I'm really hoping I can avoid any more "first starts" for a very long time. It's kinda like when everyone gets to attend Uncle Darrel's fourth wedding and we all roll our eyes as he's saying his vows. Ok maybe not that bad but anyway... here's what you came for: a shaky video with terrible audio. Enjoy.

 
Well that catches you up to about January of this year. With a little luck and the low low price of  whatever it is we're charging you suckers these days, you'll get another update before January of next year.
 
PS: Looks like ol' Frank is out there living his best life. Take that Barb!




Sunday, December 18, 2022

Engine McEngineFace

Oh hey. It's me again. And while all y'all forgot all about me and my crusty car, I have been hard at work doing things as slow as possible. Let's see, where did we leave off... ah yes, we talked about the shiny intake and totally jumped over the engine. Well today we'll talk about the crusty engine for my crusty car. Of course this engine is not crusty at all compared to the first V8 that I put in this thing. This time I was able to get a powerplant with less than 100k miles on it, which appeared to have lived it's life in California. Upon teardown, things looked pretty good. This engine came with GT40P iron heads, which are similar to the GT40 iron heads I had been using. Because there the heads that came with this engine had had some intake and exhaust valve leakage and my old heads had been rebuilt recently, I decided to just repair and re-use my old heads. Because GT40P heads are somewhat desirable, I was able sell the new heads.
 



Minor wear marks on the cylinder bore

Carbon buildup prior to scraping
While repairing my cylinder heads, I needed to remove the valve spring keepers. I have a tool that I have used in the past, and it has worked fairly well. In this case it worked like an aspiring actress/waiter in L.A. county during 2020. So I went to everybody's favorite smelly tool store, Harbor Freight, and got an 8 dollar c-clamp. After an hour of grinder/welder artistry, I had a usable valve spring compressor.

Custom tools, not to be confused with premium tools

Doing the work
 
Out came the valves and I took another look at the ports. As you can see in these photos, the exhaust port has some horrendous ridges. What you can't see as well, is the throat area of the exhaust seat. It is quite constricted, so while I had it all apart I decided to do a bit of porting work. I concentrated on the exhaust port, but also did a bit of intake work as well. Somehow I failed to take any pictures after the porting.
 
Ridgey McRidgeface
 
As you may remember, this engine met its demise when pistons and valves became intimately acquainted and as such, many of the valves were bent. I decided to replace all the valves with a stock replacement part, but when they arrived, I noticed a ridge on the valve that was sure to kill low lift flow, particularly on the intake side. Of course this is nothing that can't be fixed with a little redneck engineering.

Left: after    Right: before

Valves were chucked up in the drill press and lightly touched with a die grinder

Then came head re-assembly, which always involves a lot of measuring and re-measuring. In this case, it also involved a lot of shims. Previously when I had set this head up, I think it only took two 0.015" shims to get all valve spring heights within spec. With the new valves and the valve lapping I had done, many combinations of shims were required to meet spring height specs.



Valve spring height measurement

I was able to use my old valve spring compressor for reassembly

Then there's the cam. Of course you never want an engine to blow up on you, but the fact that it took the shiny new cam with it was a real gut punch for me. So I decided to go with the same cam again as I had last time, a Lunati VooDoo 272/280 advertised duration cam with 0.550/0.565 lift. This time I retarded the cam timing slightly to shift the power band to a higher RPM range. I even got all fancy-like and "degreed" the cam like an old fart. Will it help me make any more power? Probably not, but I'll be able to brag to boomers about how I degreed the cam. Most importantly, this time, I put loctite on the cam sprocket bolt. Having valves that are not bent does help make more power.

 


The glue to keep the engine from self-destructing again
 
Once the heads were re-assembled and the new cam installed, I could stick them together. I was able to re-use my ARP head bolts. Because half of the head bolts on a smallblock Ford go into water, those bolts were coated with a sealant, while the other bolts were coated with ARP specified lubricant. Using my trusty Harbor Freight torque wrench, I torqued the head bolts to 70 ft/lbs +/- 2 ugga duggas. I should probably get a legit torque wrench, but that's boring.



If there's one thing that wastes massive amounts of time when working on cars, it's cleaning and painting. You'd think I'd just stop doing it, but for some reason I keep doing it. It's not like it really makes any difference, and with my track record it will just have to come out again and be replaced in a year. Yet I persist.

Before painting, I added a couple bungs to the oil pan, just in case they could be of use in the future. You never know when you'll need a clean bung-hole. 

Then the paint went on. Again I used Detroit Diesel Alpine Green, since I was really happy with the old-school industrial look.

Because I am tired of replacing the engine in this car, I have finally decided to get serious about monitoring certain critical engine parameters and implementing protection strategies. With this install I decided to add an oil pressure sensor, fuel pressure sensor, oil temperature sensor, and knock sensor. 

Oil pressure sensor

Fuel pressure sensor

Knock sensor, this will be mounted at the rear of the block

The oil temperature sensor will be installed in the small bung

Finally it was time to install the engine. This always feels like such a big step, but in reality it's like an hour and a half job that I can do in one night after the kids have gone to bed and I've cleaned up after the daily destruction. Compared to something like cleaning and painting painting the block takes a couple weeks of nights after the kids have gone to bed and I've cleaned up after their daily destruction, it's practically nothing. 


So there we are, the engine is sitting in the engine bay. But of course it still doesn't run. There is still something to be done, the car guy's greatest fear [loud spooky noises] WIRING!!!! [/loud spooky noises]