Greg's Horrible Waste of Internet Bandwidth

Part 10: The Design Details   Back to Part 9   So your first question will be, "can I do this?" Yes, you can. I did it and I'm not a professional mechanic, though I do have an engineering background and fairly solid mechanical and electrical skills from working on my own cars since high school. Your second question is, "how hard is it?" Well, that depends on that skill level. The majority of the components are bolt-on, such as the sensors - I tried as hard as I could to make it easy - but you'll need three basic abilities: Ability to remove and install the engine. The biggest issue here is access, with the hardest being getting to the back side of the fan housing to install the crank position sensor. I guess theoretically you could remove the front air cooling sheet metal and get to the front of the engine and remove it all while working from the underside. But having the engine sitting on your toolbox or on an engine stand makes the processes soooo much...

This situation will end in one of three ways: - Polical easing of the restrictions; - Civil disobediance; - Civil unrest. We are already starting to see the second one happening, currently in limited ways. However, absent the first option, its increase will result in increasing authoritarian response*. Which will invariably result in the third option. We only have a very limited window of opportunity to emerge out of this gracefully; that window is quickly closing. 5/29/20 update: Just as governors were finally relenting and beginning to "allow" society to emerge, the death of George Floyd happened. By then, the societal rage was too pent-up. The third wave has begun and the civil discourse and further societal splitting has begun. 11/10/2020: the election of Joe Biden has seemed to put a damper on continuing street violence, just as further COVID infections being to rise... *12/20/2020: as the next COVID wave washes over society, the governors are becoming even more a...

Tuning Back to Part 8  Wow. You've made it this far...? Good for you, you're no "TL;DR"! Or did you cheat and skip ahead...? Tuning. Another "oof, I have no idea what I'm doing." Gotta figure it out though. I began with a baseline tune from Mario at The Dub Shop (if you're gonna do this, buy from Mario)  and that's what I used to fire up the car. But Mario has not done a setup like mine; Mario has his individual throttle body setup for Type 4 engines . That's overkill for a dead stock engine like mine (and outside of my target budget). So I needed to improvise. But he knows these engines so I requested a base tune. I adjusted Mario's tune for a few things like injectors and fuel pressure. The stock FPR would only do 36psi; the injectors I used were rated at 3 bar (43.5psi). So I used the TunerStudio program and an online calculator to adjust the injector size and edited that into the tune. I reviewed all the other setting...

Ever watch Steven Spielberg's movie, "1941"? It's hilarious! Quick summary, it's 1941 and America is on edge because of the recent bombing of Pearl Harbor. The entire West Coast, and especially Los Angeles, is convinced that Japan is going to invade. Slapstick hilarity ensues as people panic, thinking there was a "Jap" soldier under every rock (which of course there wasn't). But wait! There actually was a Japanese submarine lurking offshore, with inept officers and an inept German officer on board, observing the coastline. They were there to "destroy something honorable" in Hollywood. The Japanese submarine did launch a torpedo and sank...a Ferris Wheel.* But in the end, it was the societal panic that caused the real damage: LA downtown destroyed, Hollywood damaged, anti-aircraft fire lofted all over the city at a civilian airplane (and a US Army P-40 Warhawk pursuing it). Both aircraft were shot down, one crashing into La Brea tarpits. A h...

So, Will It Run? Back to Part 7 Spoiler: It runs! But first... The drivetrain install went fairly smoothly. If you've removed/installed one of these, you realize it's really not so bad of a job. I hate, hate, hate the concept of removing a drivetrain to repair something (Lotus manual for changing the oil: Step One, Remove the Engine) but the 914 is really not that hateful. A couple wires, a couple cables, the eight (yes only 8) drive axle bolts, and the whole thing is held in by four more bolts. I used to laugh at Edd China casually removing a drivetrain on a car to do some work on it but after watching him remove the 914 drivetrain in an episode (Season 9, Episode 5, worth the watch) I'm kinda with him there (and I use his "drop on my toolbox and raise the car off with the lift" trick). Yeah, it's a pain in the butt to a certain degree, but the amount of time you save having things right there in front of you and accessible makes it so much morez bett...

"Ignition, Wiring, and Terminals, Oh My...Part Dos!" Back to Part 6 Ok, so we know where we're mounting the Microsquirt ECU. And we know how much MS harness we have to work with. And we know the general wiring concepts and what pin housings and terminals we're going to use. But there's still some outstanding questions. One issue is grounds. The MS needs two different grounds: a chassis one for the MS unit itself (it has two black chassis ground wires) and one back to the MS for the sensors. The chassis ground is pretty easy: there's a multi-pin ring terminal at a case half bolt in the back-middle of the engine. The engine grounds to the transaxle and there's a big ground strap on the back end of the transaxle to a stud on the chassis, and the battery negative wire goes to that same chassis stud. Soup. I can run MS, wideband controller, and ignition coil to that. The sensor grounds require a bit more thought. Each sensor -- CPS, TPS, IAT, MPS, C...

Ignition, Wiring, and Terminals, Oh My! Return to Part 5 The electrical design and the wiring... oof . Had I known in advance how much brainpower and effort this was going to take...let's just say it was a lot of work. D-Jet ECU Diagram 1 of 3... I began by learning all I could on how the D-Jet's electrical system was designed. "Why?" you may ask. "After all, you're getting rid of the D-Jet!" Fair point, but recall one of my design parameters what that I wanted it to be as bolt-in (or plug-in) as possible, with minimal modifications to the stock parts of the car so D-Jet can be reinstalled if desired. So I wanted to understand how D-Jet interfaced with the car and engine and possibly leverage that. I pored over wiring diagrams and schematics writing notes and reminders, and meticulously documented in a spreadsheet what each wire and circuit does. There's no write-up I'm aware of that just offers design concepts straight-up (though Paul...