tortuga

Ah the need for speed, will make you bleed!   
Can you do write-up with additional pictures of the helmet test?  
Good attitude Cody, heal quickly and smartly!   
b-safe (er)

ahhh, frick dude...
Heal up, I'm glad you're ok. It looks like things could have ended up alot worse.

Damn. Just tell the ladies you swerved to save a rabbit   

Glad you're in one piece man.

Damn, that's some road rash. That's what I get nervous about with my bike is something like this so I usually just putt around on mine. I replaced my tires when I got the bike. Those things were in really bad shape. The previous owner even tried to cut a grove in the rear tread like he was retreading it. Needless to say that was not safe at all.

OUCH!
That makes my paranoia with tire condition worthwhile!
Good thing you had your helmet on.
Hope you heal quickly!

Jbird

  
Damn, that looks painful.
Wishing you a speedy recovery

Shit bro,that looks like in the movies......shit.

Thanks for the support everybody!
I got my skin graft surgery about 3 weeks ago and I'm finally getting close to normal life again. I returned to work this past week and once again making riviera parts. The insurance company didn't give me anything for my bike so I'm on my own with that. I'm gonna fix all the necessary stuff and do the naked street fighter scheme on it now I guess since the expensive portions of the fairings are pretty f**ked. Medical bills - I hate them. Why does the same hospital have to send me ten separate bills and all separately ask me for the same insurance information like they aren't in the same building full of inter-networked computers.. rant over

Little projects with the tortuga

James and I are working on something 'ZephTheChef' sorta pioneered - running another ignition control module to the coils to get more spark energy. The premise being that the ICM has a built in current limiting circuit that cannot be overcome by any practical means. The solution to cheaply get more spark is to literally have two (or more) ICMs running in parallel. 'Zeph had really good results with it. It's only useful if you are encountering a misfire problem due to insufficient spark under the stresses of high cyl airmasses ie. making a lot a power and wanting to run a decently normal gap .040"+. On unmodified ignition systems, moderate to high boost turbo/blower/nitrous cars tend to need really small gaps like less than .030" to prevent breaking up really bad at the top end. The problem with just running a tiny spark plug gap is it usually makes the idle suck and can reduce fuel economy due to incomplete combustion and stuff like that. The duel ICM mod is fundamentally very easy and cheap to do. The only work to it is figuring out how to nicely mount and electrically adjoin everything. That's what me and James are working on. He's pretty much looking to make a bolt on product for the 3800 community although actually lot of other applications use the same ignition.


There's some prototype heat sink plates to go in between the two modules James came up with.


This is the base plate I made for the tortuga to make the stack of ignition pieces fit my car. I needed this because my belt wrap is right in the way of my spark plug wire boots coming off the coils and the rear coil would also hit the beltwrap if it was raised and not offset forward. It would be a non-issue for a car without a belt wrap. You could just mount the two coils and heatsink right in there.

The other little thing I'm working on now that I've found the way is the steering wheel buttons. In previous posts, I think I showed how that all works using the wireless remote/receiver setup. It works fine 98% of the time but one annoyance aside from the complicated stuff to do something so simple is that if I'm holding down the button to spray nitrous, it sometimes cuts out for a split second which screws up the whole air/fuel situation and feels very disconcerting. I took my steering wheel adapter hub and machined it so that I can fit the factory airbag/accessory clock spring in place to use its harness for my buttons instead of the wireless set.


unmodified adapter hub - clearance issues all over the place



I machined the flange off and tapered the back side shaft that sits down in the center of the clock spring so after grinding a little tiny bit of plastic out of the center of the clock spring, it all fits beautifully. I've been driving it around unconnected to make sure everything's jiving and holding up ok before I do the whole install. It's probably not a big deal to anyone but me but I'm very happy about this after fighting with all sorts of wireless sets that couldn't handle the task.

I really hope to get things kinda together again in time for a few test&tune runs this year and see how it does on the top end now that I have the maf set up to handle it and positively see what the ignition can handle. The chicago half mi event is supposed to be in Oct some time. I'd really like to get a t&t day in before that so we'll see how things go.

I'm seriously jealous that you have the means to fabricate your own stuff. Nice work. I'm curious as to how you wire those ICM's together. Is it literally wire-for-wire parallel?

The Zeph guy ran his dual ICMs with no heatsinks and said it worked fine, just ran hot all the time. So this way they will both have some passive cooling (perhaps cooler than stock). I want to run it such that the 2nd ICM is powered (via a relay switched by my boost sensor that also triggers my fuel pump voltage booster) when it's needed. I don't know yet if the two ICM's running together will come with any drawbacks like increased RFI, reduced component life, electrical draw, etc. so I'd prefer to run it in dual mode only part time. Scott, yeah the harness is all run parallel to both ICM's and the primary terminals just get combined together. Definitely a good idea to run a better ignition lead for both ICMs while you're doing the wiring. We've made a plan for how to nicely join the coil leads of the ICM's today. James is going to water jet some terminal inserts to slide down onto the coil primary leads on the top ICM that stick out the side to jump down to the bottom ICM which just needs it's coil terminals bent straight sideways. The details will make more sense once we have pictures and stuff of this.


There's a vid that Zeph made recently with one ICM at the beginning, then powers on the 2nd.

I've recently been getting annoyed a little with my exhaust noise. I decided to try wrapping my front muffler with the DEI stuff because I remembered back when I first installed it, it made a little local noise like a tiny sound kinda like the headers and I felt like that was the area that was bugging me lately. Come to find out my downpipe v-band flange is screwed. It's puffing out exhaust through two good size rust/stress holes right in the flange. Also the bottom of the flex lost some of its outer meshing although I don't notice any leakage there. I need to get this taken care of. My initial thought is to find a new flex joint with a v band on it from zzp maybe and take it to a shop to get welded in. This kinda sucks though. The car sounds kinda trashy right now - I don't like it at all.


This is one hole. I didn't get a view of the other side but there's just as much puffing out that side too.

missing portion of my flex braiding

that came out nice anyway. I kinda wanna just do the whole rest of the exhaust system.

Hey! I know that sound!!! It sucks.....   

Abaddon wrote:

Hey! I know that sound!!! It sucks.....   

+1. Exhaust leaks suck. You spend an hour or two putting everything on and then days trying to get it all sealed. Then when you get a leak somewhere the whole process starts over again.

Dang bro....I hate that.

I realized I had some 1" exhaust wrap left over from something so I just wrapped the joint up tight and it's noise-free once again. That'll buy me some time at least since replacing the flex and v-bands is something of a project since I'm sure I'd have to completely uninstall the headers, buy the pieces, have them welded somewhere

now on to maybe making a harness for the dual ICM mod

I did get the double-stack (dual ICM) basically done last weekend. Sometime when james gets back from taking the 442 to get a cage put in it, we'll do some testing on it to make sure it's doing what we want. Next up is rewiring the steering wheel buttons and even more importantly, figure out why my wideband hasn't been working and then I can get back to the track, tune, and get my goal this year.

DICM porn commencing...



my custom base & relay center


James water-jetted out those stainless electrical terminals to be installed to the top ICM. They just bite into the original coil primary leads and let you put a standard 1/4 disconnect terminal on em.



If you look compare the two ICM's in the pics there, you can see the milling I did to have the terminals sticking out through the side and recessed down underneath the original seals.

The terminals on the bottom ICM don't need anything to be added because you can just bend them down to come out the side which means you just need to mill/grind out the side like the top one. I did it with a vertical mill but you could just as well grind them by hand and seal it up with silicone after - this is just my cosmetic preference.





This is something I came up with pretty much on a whim but it worked fantastically. I didn't really love how the fins of the heatsink just pushed down on the irregular top surface of the bottom ICM so I made a composite plate to separate them. I made to use the factory coil primary seals to seal off the bottom ICM so I didn't even use silicone on it. The sandwich cavities are sized to allow the lower quick connect terminals to recess into the ICM right up to the seal for better side clearance.


Practically a bolt on at this point. Only thing not finished in this pic is the yellow lead there which just gets a fuse and a ring terminal to go onto the battery jump post and loom put on it and done. If you're wondering what that red terminal coming out of the loom right by the ICM connectors is, that's just easy access for the tach lead for dynos and stuff. This harness is a little bit of a pain to change out especially if you have never done it. I might actually make a one-to-two plug for it for the first lucky customer of this product of James' choosing.


By the way, there's my wiring diagram for the modified ignition (main power) feed for the ICM's Like I said before, every other wire is simply duplicated. You could also just duplicate this ignition wire too but that circuit is already heavily taxed from an electrical standpoint and we're adding another ICM to it now, plus that's how you can switch on/off one ICM as needed like I did. The only other wire that could perhaps be left unduplicated would be the 7x reference output to the PCM since it doesn't need two but I decided to leave it since this provides total redundancy which is better if one ICM fails one day, you swap one lead on the relay and you're back on the road.


harness & base installed


the layers laid out




It doesn't look like it's unusually high actually but before this, those rear three wires were routed underneath the beltwrap.


good clearance from the belt which was a problem with my first base design


relay wiring worked out great. It's hidden from sight but you still have good access to it

it's blurry but there's the pressure (hobbs) switch to turn on the second ICM at ~4psi

So - the dual ICM thing - that's basically making the coils give off a second spark? Or are you literally just trying to increase the amount of voltage the coils can give off? I don't see an accompanying second set of coils (or second spark plugs). Wouldn't you do better with a bigger power feed wire to the coils instead?

Sorry if I missed this part - I realize you are trying to get higher voltage, just trying to figure out how this works. You aren't actually increasing the coil's output?

deekster_caddy wrote:

So - the dual ICM thing - that's basically making the coils give off a second spark? Or are you literally just trying to increase the amount of voltage the coils can give off? I don't see an accompanying second set of coils (or second spark plugs). Wouldn't you do better with a bigger power feed wire to the coils instead?

Sorry if I missed this part - I realize you are trying to get higher voltage, just trying to figure out how this works. You aren't actually increasing the coil's output?

Not actually adding another spark, just getting the same spark hotter. It would be another spark if the second ICM wasn't getting the same crank signal The stock coils are capable of plenty more current/voltage but the ICM limits primary current no matter what. It also has its own dc-dc voltage regulator so you can feed all the voltage you want to it and it'll make no difference to the secondary side. However with two or more ICM's creating primary charges, the coils end up just getting more current (circumventing the current-limit of one ICM alone)

Cool, thanks for the explanation. Makes sense.

Cody, have you considered modding your front bumper to open up access to the heat exchanger?

charlieRobinson wrote:

Cody, have you considered modding your front bumper to open up access to the heat exchanger?

I definitely wanted to. I thought a lot about it and tried to pull something off but ultimately I couldn't figure out any elegant way to do it.

I did make it to the track yesterday with my buddy. It was at least 75f all day - everybody was dying hot. I didn't accomplish much but gained knowledge for the next trip which may or may not be this year - probably not. I pretty much confirmed I fixed my big problem from the last track day of running out of maf hz and maf table in general. Maf frequency is right where I want it but tuning is a little bit of a problem because I don't have any nice way to log the high end of the maf table for adjustment - especially the range that'll only be hit when i'm spraying. I did 3 runs the whole day. I ended up doing the first run, looking at the commanded afr vs actual(wideband) afr and then manually bumped up the higher end of the maf table by a percentage which was a half-hazard guess and then did another run. The AFR looked a lot better - still not really great but definitely moving in the right direction and getting a safe result afr. I hate doing that rough manual adjustment because I won't use it later but just to get down the track. After looking at the log from the 2nd run I decided to go ahead and spray the next run. Before the run I changed my 1-2 & 2-3 upshifts so that it stays in the lower gear until I hit the WOT shift mph requirement no matter what the tps is so it wouldn't spin and bog again like I did in the 2nd run. I'll remember to do that right off the bat next time. (dedicated dragstrip tune). I also reduced the shift mph for the 2-3 shift just a little to give myself some more buffer for completing the upshift while spraying without going over budget in rpm. So the 3rd run I launched pretty ok (2.061 60ft) and I was lookin pretty good but then it never upshifted to 2nd. I accidentally left the shifter in '1' (from the burnout). I realized it and shifted to D real quick and went on so I started spraying after the shift was completed as planned but then the damn thing didn't upshift to 3rd for some reason so it was just hanging up at 6600rpm (about 100mph) while I was spraying and everything. I have no idea why. Immediately after that run I had a misfire. I went straight for the spark plugs and #5 had the ground electrode burned completely down and #1 had zero gap both burned to hell. #3 looked perfect and I couldn't touch the backs because it was way too hot. Thankfully I brought a new set of plugs and thankfully I was symptom-free after replacing them. I got really lucky considering. I'm going to check/replace the backs tonight.

My buddy Kevin's built 88 notchback. It runs consistent mid to high 11's with a 5spd. Pretty typical N/A 347 motor, drag radials, partially gutted, etc. This was actually a mustang club event at the track and I think I was the only non-mustang pitting in that area. I bet that whole group got some funny ideas when I pulled up in there with my buick and troll face sticker on the window haha.


#1 & #5 spark plugs after 3rd run.


2nd run I spun real bad and upshifted super early. Listen to the GTR next to me get through literally 4 gears while I'm in 2nd haha


3rd and final run of the day complete with all 'oh god' moments
My friend got a video from outside of this run that was really funny I'll eventually post. It's on facebook but I don't see a way to share it here

Good lessons! I always, ALWAYS let go of the nitrous when I shift. It's quick - off - shift - on and I know everything will be okay.

We mounted the nitrous switch right on the column shifter in the '69 so your thumb is right on it during the run.

Those spark plugs...  umm, you have a wideband O2? What was it during spray?

Edit - also, the #1 with 0 gap? That only happens if something impacted it. See if you can get a camera inside the spark plug hole. I bet you chipped a piston.

AWESOME

Did you beat any stangs? wanna see some of out of car race vids!

YEEEEEEEEEEEEAH!