LocostUSA.com

My favorite is going in for something like a rad hose for my locost. Make model and year? Not sure, but I'll know which is the right one when I see it. Same when I got my alternator, I looked through every one they had to find the smallest one. At least you can still luck out and get.someone that will let you behind the counter some places.
Kristian

_________________
V6 in a book frame build. Now registered.
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=7587
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=18172

Yep, to be fair, there's a place here in town where the manager (Gene) and his right-hand man (Theo) let me go with them to the shelves in the back and rummage through bins and boxes to find what I'm after. They'll lead me to the right general area, as in "I think there's a Chrysler pressure sensor that looks like that" and then stand back and let me look. They're pretty cool. They're also about my age...

_________________
JD, father of Quinn, Son of a... Build Log
Quinn the Slotus:Ford 302 Powered, Mallock-Inspired, Tube Frame, Hillclimb Special
"Gonzo and friends: Last night must have been quite a night. Camelot moments, mechanical marvels, Rustoleum launches, flying squirrels, fru-fru tea cuppers, V8 envy, Ensure catch cans -- and it wasn't even a full moon." -- SeattleTom

thermostat was the same for a mid 90's Corolla with a 4A series engine. Such a huge pain getting the air out of the system (jack up the nose, burping the system, engine revving, repeat and repeat), but its a happy, warmed up but not too warm camper now. I also fixed the seat adjuster so that my number 1 son (he is a big feller) can drive it. He and his brother took it out for an hour long cruise on Sunday and came back reporting no issues other than the tach still not working right. So nearly ready for the season!

26/6/2015...new tach wire and fixed!

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

A bad Seven Day...
I let my son take the Seven up to his place in NH. While heading through Boston, it lost power and he got it off of Rt93 and limped to the the Savin Hill Yacht Club. He mucked about for while and decided to call the guy that installed the Megasquirt in the car...thats me.
Drove up there with the wife. My son had noticed that the hose that feeds the idle air valve had partially collapsed and we coiled up a piece of welding wire into a springy thingy shape and put it inside the hose. Car seemed OK, so I tried a test drive....newp, thats not it. Limped back to them at the Yacht Club. I noticed while driving that the car went super lean...O2 gauge pegged lean when it started sputtering. So, it was running so spark not the issue, has to be fuel. Only things controlling fuel, but not spark as I run primarily Alpha-N are fuel pump, throttle position sensor, and the fuel table. I decided TPS was the probably culprit. I put a meter on it and it looked to be progressive, contacts had some minimal crud on them so cycled the connector on and off a few times till I had shiny copper. Started it up, drove it a couple of miles and it seemed fine. Cant say I was completely satisfied though, so I told Rob that its going to Duxbury, not NH. We left to head home with him driving the Seven and my in the chase car. We almost got back to Rt93 and it started sputtering again. Time to call AAA as I was parts and tools limited...TWO HOURS FOR THEM TO SHOW UP!!!!
Anyway, I am still leaning towards the TPS getting flaky when it gets warm. Its 20 years old and I think I will retire it whether it reads OK or not. I need this car to be totally reliable.
I will put the car on the computer this week and confirm my suspicions. Of course it rained on the car the whole way home...grrr. PERFECT!!!
Paul

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

Remember that pegging lean can be caused by a rich mixture not firing. Mine was caused by a failing (COP) coil.

Bill

Thanks for the comment, Bill.
In any case, if I went to very light throttle and little load, I could get AFRs below pegged. I am pretty sure I am OK on the ignition side of things. New TPS ordered. Will have it in a few days. Testing will probably have to wait till next week as this is looking like a busy work week.
Paul

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

Looks like I am back on the road with the Seven. Did 50 miles with it over the last couple of days with the new TPS. Spent a little time screwing with my fuel tables and EGO correction in the MegaSquirt. It drives really, really nicely!
The little bit of surging I had at light load...really only noticeable in slow traffic is completely gone.
So the fourth of July parade is today. I was going to drive my Europa in it and it puked its radiator...leaking out the bottom big time. Turn around and get it home before it overheats. Made me miss the parade completely...grrr. It is always something with cars. Anyway, out to the driveway to hose off the anti-freeze before the dog decides its a tasty treat.

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

Minor issue with the Seven...although it kept me from using it over the weekend. The relay board that I used from The MegaSquirt guys had an issue. The fuse holder for the fuel pump fell apart and killed the car stone dead...happily in the driveway. Anyway, had a spare fuse holder. After extracting the relay board (so many wires!) and soldering in the new fuse holder, back on the road.
Wife is starting to make jokes about its reliability though.

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

How soon they forget what life was like before men built cars for them. I bet even Fred Flintstone had this problem.

I'm trying to build an ECU, can you put up a picture of what seems to be a fuse holder to avoid? Do you rely on this "relay board" to do most of your electrical system? Are there not more proper hot rod style electrical fuse and relay boxes? A fuse holder breaking seems pretty bad, it's not something that happens to normal cars. For my ECU I was assuming that the electrical system would provide fuses somewhere else, so I guess I need to learn up on this.

_________________
Marcus Barrow - Car9 an open design community supported sports car for home builders!
SketchUp collection for LocostUSA: "Dream it, Build it, Drive it!"
Car9 Roadster information - models, drawings, resources etc.

Hi Marcus,
The Megasquirt relay board http://www.diyautotune.com/catalog/megasquirt-relay-board-assembled-unit-p-32.html really simplifies the wiring as it plugs right into their pre-built cable assembly. It makes it really convenient to disconnect all of the Megasquirt wiring with just 2 screws...not an issue once fully working, but until then, OH YES!
The fuse holder split down the middle where it was glued. I was able to easily repair the extracted one, but the new one was handy so I just used that.
Keep us posted on your progress with your ECU. I will need something to run my BMW S1000RR motor for my new build. Right now I am looking at MegaSquirt 3.
Best,
Paul

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

Well, I thought that I had figured out the failure a few weeks ago of the car going super lean after things got warm.
WRONG!!!!
My poor car is all ripped apart as we try to figure out why one injector bank suddenly goes lean.
If you know anything about MegaSquirt and think you may have an idea what is going on here, take a look here...
http://www.msextra.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=101&t=59537&p=446966#p446966
Paul

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

Sorry I missed your reply above. I should post a progress report soon, the actual layout has been going a little slow but with practice and familiarity it is going faster now.

I read your megasquirt forum post. It seems your doing the right things, I haven't looked at their schematics though. I don't understand your comments that seem to say the fly back and avalanche circuits are different things. What I expect you are talking about is protection for the transistor switch that operates the fuel injector. When the injector is turned off it creates a voltage spike that can damage the switch. You can use a diode to fix this, but you would like it to clamp the voltage at a high value. This causes the injector to shut off rapidly instead of staying open by the recirculating current going thru the diode.

If you use a fuel injector driver chip this flyback/avalanche diode is included in the chip. Specialised coil drivers deal with this in a much larger way and they also contain a device internally.

Anything you can think of that would help a user of my board to diagnose or deal with this issue would be very helpful. The one thing I can think of now is to use the processors spare analog inputs to monitor the signals you are looking at. Instead of needing a scope you could bring up a picture of the waveform of the injector current or voltage for example. The processor chip has about 30 analog ( A/D ) inputs and my board is offering 8 for the engine at the moment.

_________________
Marcus Barrow - Car9 an open design community supported sports car for home builders!
SketchUp collection for LocostUSA: "Dream it, Build it, Drive it!"
Car9 Roadster information - models, drawings, resources etc.

Being able to see multiple waveforms without removing the unit from the case would be a major boon to troubleshooting!
The injector driver chip does have avalanche protection so I don't need that, there are two sections of the circuit that clamps the voltage differently though. One uses PWM for dropping the current for Low Z injectors and this is a separate function through the CPU. The other is a simple zener diode through a power transistor using active flyback to maintain current levels.
Take a look at the schematic, page 4, and let me know if you have any thoughts. http://www.msextra.com/doc/general/ms1v3schems.html
At this point I have removed q15, Q12, r34, r35,Q13,R36, and shorted R38. Behavior is the same.
If anyone else wants to jump in and help. My thread over at MSextra is http://www.msextra.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=101&t=59537&p=447261#p447261
Thanks,
Paul

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!

I'm looking thru the stuff now, I never looked at the MS schematics before. You could try scoping the signal across R37 and R38 and comparing. Those are small resistances and they should tell you how much current is flowing thru the transistors Q14 and Q15. More than looking at the voltage looking at the current will let you know how the injectors are doing. You might even be able to see the movement of the pintles if you focus down into the first millisecond or two - there will be a little plateau.

If the signals look the same, maybe it's not really the injection. If they look different ( it would be nice if you can look at both at the same time ) then we can think some more.

Actually it's being a big help to me to start to puzzle thru how to debug this. On my board I don't have a way to look at the injector currents and maybe I should try to put that in. It doesn't have any of the circuitry on this page of the MS schematic though, it is just a digital signal to a driver chip and it does the injector directly. I think there might be diagnostics you can read back though.

_________________
Marcus Barrow - Car9 an open design community supported sports car for home builders!
SketchUp collection for LocostUSA: "Dream it, Build it, Drive it!"
Car9 Roadster information - models, drawings, resources etc.

I had looked at those circuits before and the traces looked normal. I remember nominally 12V on both. I did not look at the voltage across R38, but that would have been a good place to test. At this point Q15 is gone and I have shunted R38, so they are completely out of the circuit. I have also removed Q12, r34, r35,Q13,R36 in an attempt to simplify things. Behavior is unchanged. My next test this evening will be to solder the drain of Q5 directly to a wire and run that around all of the cabling directly to the injector.

_________________
Parts left out cost nothing and cause no problems!!