10% of the progress, 90% of the time

I'm down to the predominantly little jobs. I picked up the shifter arm when I was last in the UK, so I fitted that to the flat-shifter solenoid,



I need to finish the wiring, and there is now nothing in the way of this, so i've been out with my soldering iron, loom tape, and zip ties. The engine bay is now complete, with the flat-shifter-max wired in, and connectors ready for the rest of the flat-shifter post IVA.

All the engine loom is tidied away nicely, however I think i will need to make a support for the bike loom as its a little too short to sit on the bulkhead nicely.



Next up was the bonnet catches, these are aluminum cases with locking pins, these look pretty nice, and are strong enough, however the bonnet has a pretty poor fit around the side-pods, as the pins are not locked, I think they may end up coming loose due to the side pressure.

To stop this happening, i've bonded and riveted in some plates to the bonnet, the plates have a pin in them which goes vertically through the side pod, this keeps the bonnet in place horizontally, whilst the locks keep it in place vertically.



Next job is to fabricate the mounts on the sidepod that secure the bonnet to the car.

Trip to Zeeland

It was sunny so I went for a drive in the seven with tunerstudio running to see if I could improve things, I couldn't but the drive was lovely.



Basically, there is not enough variation in MAP pressure, and the rate of change is very steep off idle with no change at higher rpm. This means that the VE table is pretty flat.





Subsequently, I changed over to TPS based fueling, the result is a much more responsive drive, throttle response is like lightning in comparison, and it feels and sounds like its set up properly. The AFR is much closer to the AFR target. I've only ran autotune for about an hour or so on what was a relatively quiet drive, so the edges are not tuned yet, but for the most part its pretty close. Its certainly very drivable



Whilst I was trying to get Alpha-N working I hit a few idiosyncrasies in the tuning software. There are three fueling options for megasquirt: Speed Density; (MAP Based) Pure Alpha-N; (TPS Based) and Blended.

For now I'm using Pure Alpha-N, however when I set the fueling algorithm to Alpha-N in either tuner studio, or megatune it was still using MAP for fueling. For whatever reason it was using the blended algorithm. This seems to be not a bug, but slightly misleading name, Pure Alpha-N is essentially blended, but starting with Alpha-N rather than MAP. Therefore I set the Threshold to 9k in the Alpha-N blending dialog.



In addition, I had ego correction active at idle, this results in an idle which falls and rises all the time, setting EGO correction to be active above 1200 worked a treat.

Seven engine rebuild (again)

Well after a disasterous start to the year, it was time for a new engine. The root cause of the failure was the lubrication system possibly caused by a blocked oil cooler.

I got a short block from Jem Engines, its a 711 crossflow bored out to 1700cc, with fully balanced internals. The engine is fitted with ARP con rod and fly wheel bolts. I reused the Kent 244 cam, and burton stage 3 head.

The first thing to do before building anything was to thoroughly clean the head, as the bearing failure had likely resulted in a lot of crud going around the engine, I stripped it completely and used pipe cleaners to go through each oil passage, and cleaned it with gunk degreaser and compressed air.

Afterwards I painted it black (it was blue) to match the block. I used hammerite and so far it seems to be doing the trick.



Next was time to do the ARP bolts, Eric gave me some ARP Lube, so I torqued them up to 40 ft lbs.



I can build a crossflow in a couple of hours from memory alone now, I could even remember the number of degrees to set the cam to, although this didn't stop me from making a hash of it the first time and having to re-time the engine after everything was built up.



I used a competition gasket set from Burton, Eric recons the best way to get a dry seal on the sump is to evo-stick the gasket to the block, then use a little blob of silicon around the rubber seals on the end, and tighten it up gently.



I tried this, the result was an enormous oil slick on the garage floor after the first drive so I'm back to experimenting with silicon... The engine was back in the car in less than 4 hours, ready to start, or so I thought.



It fired up first time, but made a noise that left me clutching my wallet.



It turned out that the oil pipe was ever so slightly grazing the con rod bolt, this thankfully was easily fixed with a gentle tap from the hammer and it finally ran smoothly. Getting the sump off in-car is a real pain, however if I loosen off the engine mounts and replace the gearbox->engine bolts with longer ones, I can use a crow bar to seperate the engine from the box about an inch which is enough to get to the rearmost sump bolts.

The fury lives

After two destroyed wiring looms I finally got the engine wired up properly in the fury. The trick is to completely ignore the wiring diagram in the owners manual.

The first time, I wired it up based on the colours and connections indiciated in the manual by shortening the loom, and things were very confused. After an enormous amount of faffing i got the ECU to intermittantly function.

The second time I got exactly the same results but with no functionality by wiring it directly from the wiring diagram. The reality is that there are quite a few additional connections, earths, shared VRef feeds etc, that are not indicated on the diagram, as well as a few circuits for the ECU that are simply missing, immobilizer for example.

What I did in the end was wire up ll the sensors, get the ecu to report fault codes, and work as expected, then on at a time removed things that were not connected up to anything. This left me with a minimal loom, including relays, fuses etc. I then followed each wire to the fuse box, and cut it at the fuse box end. The cut wire was then re-routed, and extended/shortened as required to the engine feed wires.

Each time I did this, I turned everything on and made sure that things were still functioning, this made it easy to find any problems if I introduced any.

The result is that I now have a handful of wires coming out of the bulkhead to power and control the engine, these are tidily spliced into the engine loom which also goes through the bulkhead to the ECU.

The end result was that I could start the car, it fired up first time, with no fiddling which was just what I'd hoped for. I let it tick over for a while checking for bad sounds, leaks and any problems.

Things got pretty smokey as the heat wrap burned off all its chemicals, but settled down nicely, the side pod gets pretty hot, above the manifold where there is no heat shielding, but stays pretty cool everywhere else which I hope will be fine. I think I will make another hole in the rear of the pod to let the air out when driving though.

Hans came over so we fired it up again and had some fun with the loud pedal.

Since then I've taken it for a quick spin around the garage car park, this is going to be great when its on the road.

Fury Progress

Has been slow, lots of things getting in the way of moving forward, engine wiring has stalled, i can't seem to find a fault, and am wondering if its the ECU. I also have an oil leak (Joy) from the o ring in the sump, so that needs to come off and be fixed.

I've been trying to get little jobs done, but have been plagued by broken parts, wrong sizes, shorts, the seven has current priority, but am aiming to get going again in a month or so. I am making progress with the dashboard though.

Mallory Six Hour

Despite the seven going belly up en-route, we entered the Mazda, it was pretty good fun, we were doing 1:9s-1:11s with Edwinas, and my lap times were consistent throughout. Paul had a small off, failing to turn left into the Edwina chicane but didn't clout anything which is the main thing.

The car held up ok, however post Cam belt change the (new) fan belt gave up after 2 hours and we had to repair that, and a split hose which cost us about an hour. In the afternoon the rear tyres were off, so we rotated the inside and outside rears which made the car much more drivable.

People were very friendly and we got a lot of encouragement throughout the day. We were pretty fast through Gerard's, but just didn't have the power to get the speed up the hill towards the hairpin, so we did find ourselves out-braking people into the hair pin, being overtaken down the hill, then overtaking them again round Gerard's which made things pretty interesting.

Lotus had a clear win, with some good driving and team management. We were the only mx5 to finish (out of 3 starters) and came mid way up the finishers which was good enough for us. In all honesty i was just glad we didn't bend it, or worse, vomit in our helmets like some copilots.

Houston, we have a problem (Twice.)

Despite being thrashed incessantly for 4 weeks through morocco resulting in only self inflicted trauma, the seven has now left me stranded by the side of the road twice in 3 weeks. The first through a head-gasket problem, the second due to something big going bang.

The end result is that the block, crank, rods and head are back at Jem Engines, where they will be cleaned, bored/ground/skimmed and balanced, before being sent back for the final build. In preparation for the six hour at mallory I thought I should try to put as many miles on it as possible, sadly following the two dry days in March, there hasn't been much dry weather in Holland since which meant getting out in the car has been difficult at best and not possible the rest of the time.



The weather in Western Germany, and Luxembourg was due to be not-wet, so off I set, laptop running auto-tune in the passenger seat, following the Waal/Rhine over the border, then heading cross country towards Trier, the TomTom provides a lovely route, (Set max speed to 40kph) about 4 hours into the drive, somewhere near Aachen, I came into a small town and as I slowed down into traffic, and up to a red light, i noticed the engine was stumbling a little, queue comedy smoke screen as the revs fell to idle and i had to nurse it to keep it from cutting out.



I could feel my hand rushing towards my wallet as I thought of all the possibilities, but when i realized it was just a head-gasket, my next thought was to get it to Holland so I could be recovered directly home. I was about 60km from the dutch border, so I hopped on the Autobahn direction Maastricht and hoped for the best, about 5km later the temperature shot up, so i pulled off, cooled down and poured in 3 liters of water, queue more comedy smoke at idle, but was fine for another 38km where i had to do the same again (Thankfully, i was feeling thirsty earlier.) I made it about 10km over the border before it was out of water again, and managed to pull into a service area to call the ANWB.



I then spent 4 hours waiting on the ANWB, who got lost, then sent a guy that couldn't tow it, who got his mate with a beaver tail that didn't fit the car..... In the end it made it on a flat bed, after my ordeal by the side of the road, I was only just able to cope with 3 hours of dutch country music in the truck home.



The gasket had failed, and was repaired the next day. The following week I was due to take it to the UK and park it up at Paul's house in preparation for Mallory meaning i could fly in in Thursday night, get in the car friday, and all would be fine. I set off, everything was going well, then on the M2 I noticed oil pressure was a little lower than normal, I assumed it was just the thinner oil i'd used post-head gasket, but pulled over to check there was still some in it, there was, so off I set again. I got to my favorite spot on the M25 when there was a funny noise, the engine changed pitch, and overheated whilst i did a 4 lane dash, at this point i noticed i barely had any oil pressure and had that sinking feeling.

I ditched the car, and spent a long time on the phone to the ANWB to try to get recovered, in the mean time i noticed that i was getting enormous blow back out the crank case breather, this was going to be expensive.

The car was then recovered and despite every mechanic trying to tell me it was the fuel pump, or a wiring fault, despite me explaining that this thing called an immobilizer was cutting the connection because they hadnt wiggled the fob.... Its back in holland now, there is a lot of metal floating in the sump, so it looks like a bearing had failed either as a result of low oil pressure, or possibly the root cause. I'll continue stripping it down and hopefully figure it all out soon.