MegaSquirt Cold Start Up

Those of you that think you have great drivability, check out this video from early Friday morning. 

My other car was showing 9*F (with 20-30mph gusts), the coolant temp was in the teens (you can see it fairly clearly in the video, it was almost 40*F during the day so I didn't expect the engine temp sensors to be as cold).  If I’m really careful I can get going and run it through the gears without using the gas pedal and stalling, even when this cold, but I wasn't going to try while shooting video.

Cold Start- 87 Trans Am + Megasquirt

Details:

• 87 Trans Am
• LB9 engine – 305 TPI with _a lot_ of miles on it (it gets <800 miles to a quart of oil) the odometer reads >120K miles and I’m not sure if it’s correct
• T5 transmission (5 speed manual) which a previous owner put a lightweight Kevlar flywheel/clutch assembly in that did nothing for smooth driving.  With the stock ECM/tune it would try to stall all the time unless you gave it a lot of throttle, even in warm weather, even when warmed up
• Megasquirt 2/PCB 3 running MSExtra firmware
• It’s running my 93 octane “race” tune on 87 octane.  I quit loading the 87 octane tune after I got the knock sensing/retard working really well. 
  • It has run 13.6@99.9mph in the quarter at the track recently with this tune.
  • It seems to be averaging 22-24mpg in mixed driving (DC metro doesn’t have true “highway” driving until you get quite a bit out of the area, traffic just sucks).

I keep hearing people that swear by carbs say that they have drivability as good as any EFI car.  I’m pretty comfortable with carbs but I can’t make one run like this and I’ve never seen one run this well.  Maybe just when it’s cold, warm, economy, driveablity or performance, but not all of them.  Typically this lean a mixture will want to surge and buck and won’t make best power (though they’re not incompatible with a carb because they’re in different ranges), and if you richen it to get the driveability you loose MPG.

The funny thing is that this car does less weird stuff driving around than my 2012 SHO, well at least the engine... the rear axle is another story.

Harwood 3” Cowl for “The Project”

It turned up yesterday. 

I’m not impressed with Old Dominion shipping.  The driver was pretty cool, I just backed my truck to the back of the tractor trailer and he just slid it in (yea, my Cummins Dodge is BIG, it was only a few inches below the deck of the trailer) but the guys at the dock sucked, didn’t seem to want to do their jobs- they couldn’t seem to figure out how to call and arrange a delivery, after a few days of trying I finally got the dock number from one of the main centers and called the guy that was supposed to call me.  For that matter, it was getting delivered to a business so they should have been able to delver anytime instead of letting it sit on a dock for a few days.

Anyway…

The back corners were banged up (actually poked through the box) and the space behind the passenger side headlight got smacked by something but otherwise it’s in good shape.  Nothing that I can’t fix.  I was surprised, I weighed it and it was 26-27#, where the stock ‘bird hood that I had on the car was 57-58#, and I know that a formula style hood is in the low 70’s.

I decided to test fit it on the project car around 3am last night, actually Christina helped me get it on the hinges around 10 when I ran out to the gym, I finished bolting it on later.  I’m betting the neighbors appreciated the impact driver.  I had about ½” gap in places, more at the front.  It also sat about almost 1” high at the back and more than that in the front:

When I got home tonight I spent a few minutes moving stuff around while grilling some ribs and ended up with it pretty well aligned.  I still need to move the headlights around, and the passenger side has roughly 1/32-1/16” more gap and sits slightly higher than the driver’s, the front bumper is crooked/needs to be fixed (the steel bumper support was partially crushed and twisted when I bought it, I have a nice aluminum one from my ’83 to replace it eventually), this is what I ended up with (need to find some weak struts for it).  I’m pretty happy with how it looks:

The dinged up spots need a little body work, but the back corners have slightly the wrong angle anyway, so I would have had to sand most of the banged up areas off when I finish it. I’ve also aligned the headlights a little better but didn’t bother taking any additional pictures.

BTW, I think that these are the only real pictures I’ve posted of this one anywhere… My wife has named her Cherry, but I don’t know if she’s going to stay “Cherry Red,” we’ll see…

TPI Tuning - Hot Rod June 2000

This is a very popular and often asked for article on the f-body and corvette boards about tuning a TPI setup (like the L98 used in the f-bodies and corvette, and the LB9 in the f-bodys) and it is usually pretty hard to find a readable copy.

It was written by Ray T. Bohacz and originally published in the June 2000 issue of Hot Rod, and I’m sure has been republished a bunch of times since. This copy was originally scanned by Sean Oetting (black89ws6 on thirdgen), which I took, cleaned/straightened up and resized.

Enjoy!