No (real) news... yet

Wow, has it been four months already?? Well as the title says, no real news yet... My beloved Liesel has been at Ireland Engineering for some time.

They offered to give me discounted parts if they could have my car as a tuning experimentation platform, which I readily agreed to. The downside, of course, is that I haven't had my car for several weeks now. The upside, hopefully, will be a tuned, powerful car sporting a Mass Air Flow sensor (MAF), a cold air intake, a new tuning chip and making close to 200 HP to the rear wheels!

But as with all things free (or discounted), things tend to take longer than desired... Hopefully however, I'll get the car back in a few weeks (a month?) and will find out that all this waiting has been well worth while...

Tuning update

Not much to report on this front. Progress has been slow and my tuner has also been out of town. However, he did manage to come up with a bin file that greatly reduced engine knocking, so I'm happy about that.

However, there is still significant knocking between 3000 and 4000 rpm. His idea is that we can retard timing for now, but ideally, I should get a data logger kit and provide him proper feedback (as opposed to "yeah, it still seems to knock") so he can possibly add fuel to reduce knocking as opposed to just retarding timing, which reduces available torque.

But the data logger is close to $400.- and will have to wait a while...

In the meantime, I have a suspension issue: The front struts seem to (both) be making clacking noises during normal driving. I have to take them apart to take a look, I'll post when I have more info...

Emulator test successful

Over the weekend, I followed instructions to substitute the original chip in the DME with the new Ostrich Emulator I ordered The file in the emulator was a stock file, no modifications.

Success!!

The car fired up just fine, but had a rough idle and the Check Engine light was on when it was running. I was only supposed to start up the motor to make sure the emulator was working, so I didn't run it for long.

I've sent all that info to my tuner Mark D'Sylva from E.A.T. performance along with the code on the chip. He should have an updated file for me soon. I'm stoked!!

And so the saga of electronic tuning begins...

The subject says it all. I just ordered an emulator and some paraphernalia which will enable me to load Eprom files into my ECU on the fly. Things are finally moving on the chip front, I'm stoked!! More updates hopefully soon!

Gas leak!!

Yeah, I had been wondering where that "raw gas" smell was coming from the past few days... It was me all right! Turns out that as soon as the fuel pump was pressurizing the fuel, it was leaking pretty steadily around the fuel filter.

Thank GOODNESS I happened to have a length of 8mm fuel line in my tool box. Few quick measurements and swaps and all is well again. Man, those old lines are brittle!! I'm going to get some more fuel line and go ahead and replace a few other connecting tubes as well. Thankfully, most of the lines are metal, only the connecting tubing is rubber. Glad I caught it, this could have been nasty...

New brake pads

STILL no news on my chip... This is getting quite ridiculous... In the meantime, my rear brake pads are almost done, so I thought I'd order up a set. Hawk HP Plus fit for street and track use.

I debated for a while about this, since these pads squeal like banshees during standard street use. But, I have Hawk HP Plus pads in the front and they stop SO well... so my noise concerns had to take a back seat.

I also ordered a front and a rear brake sensor cable. Trouble is, these pads, being intended primarily for track use, don't have the slot that houses the brake wear sensor. However, my hope is that I can very carefully drill a hole where the sensor is supposed to go and retro-fit them that way. We shall see!

No big news yet...

It's been a while, so I figured I'd post an update...

I ordered the chip a while back, but the guy out in Canada who makes them is taking some time to get it right, so I'm still "limping" around with the stock chip... Well not really. The engine knocks between 3000 to 4000 RPM pretty badly, but runs fine and strong anyway. I just have to inch the throttle past that point and all is well.

Still, it will be mighty fine to get that chip... But, since I don't got a chip, I had to get my jollies topping up brake fluid and steering fluid... Ah well, I suppose it's good that the car is stable and running... Take what you can get, right?