After a hugely disappointing week last week with
motivation levels running at a low ebb I approached this weekend with
little enthusiasm, however I'm happy to report that I've got a great deal
done, and that my boxes of parts waiting to be fitted to the car are
considerably more empty :-)
First job was to complete cleaning of the TBs and fit
them to the car. After cleaning the TBs and I trial fitted them to
the car, but it became apparent that if I completed the installation
I wouldn't be able to access the temperature sensor on the cylinder head.
I need to fit a T piece here (that I currently don't have) so that I can
fit the DigiDash's sensor as well as the one needed for the ECU, so I took
the TBs off again.
Sit in car making brrrmmmm noises:-)
Nope, I didn't do this, and neither did my mate
Tim, who's
building a Fury RGB racer and actually got his engine running this
week and making brmmmm noises of it's own. It really highlights to me, how
slow my progress has been. Actually I had thought about going to see Tim
do the big startup, but too much to do here I'm afraid.
Next I spent a rather unpleasant hour and a half
fitting the last two exhaust headers. I'd left them off the engine
as I didn't have enough heat insulation for them. The
discomfort from the irritating heat wrap that I rubbed my arms up against
while contorting myself to get on the mounting nuts is quite a salutary
lesson not to do that again.However, I also
trial fitted the remainder of the exhaust system to ensure that the header
alignment was correct. It will have to come off again to be bound in
heat tape (which I currently don't have), but at least I'm not tripping
over it anymore. :-). I am a little concerned that It passes through
the rear suspension, but I'll take off the springs and move the suspension
through it's full range of movement when I permanently fit it into place.
Most of the rest of the weekend was taken up with
wiring.
This is the engine management loom that I had
chopped out of the bike loom waaaaaay back in January.
Looks like I'll be spending the rest of the day knitting :-).
First job is to decide where to mount the ECU, the
regs prohibit it's location in the driver's compartment, but also say that
it must be easily accessible for inspection.
Eventually, after I've checked that the connectors
on the loom will reach the appropriate places on the engine I decide to
locate it in the nearside side pod and make up some brackets for it. It
should be free of most of the spray here, but I'll make a little
protective ali box for it later.
In order to allow the scrutineer's to inspect
it I cut a small hole into the inner skin of the car, this is just
big enough to show the Kawasaki Part Number sticker on the ECU.
Which is the bit I guess they'll inspect to ensure it's the standard unit.
The whole of the rest of the day was then spent,
locating specific wires in the loom and either running them forwards to
the Dash (ECU warning light, Tacho feed etc), running them backwards to
the engine bay or extending them.
I quite like doing the electrics, yes it's a bit
slow, but provided you can read a circuit diagram, and are methodical you
can cut many unwanted circuits out of the loom.
Indeed I managed to disconnect the alternator's
rectifier unit so that I can position it in the engine bay. Essentially I
turned the rats nest above into the slightly neater loom on the left. With
lots of labels on it too! I'll bind it up when I've finished running
any remaining car circuits for things like the racing light, and my
Autocom intercoms.
Sunday May 16th
I didn't get much time today, but I did manage to
complete all the sensor wires for the Digidash,
These include, oil temp & pressure, water temp,
oil pressure warning light, tacho, neutral indicator, brakes on\warning
etc etc. Now when I power the dash up it shows meaningful
readings... 18-19 deg c for the temp gauges ..... it was blooming hot so
that could well have been the ambient temp of the units.
All in all a very successful weekend :-), breaking the
back of the ECU wiring is a big step forwards as I had been mentally
putting it off for some time. I just need to complete the power and
earth connections, along with fitting the Anti theft 100 Ohm resister into
one of the main feeds and she'll be ready to power up.
Hopefully it won't become a smoking ruin, and the ECU will not issue any
fault codes.
Several new bits of kit turned up today :-)
Firstly my brake calliper brackets and disks arrived
back from the machine shop.
The brackets have had 8mm deep pockets machined in to
the face, to allow the mounting nuts to be recessed into the bracket and
clear the disk face.
.
The disks themselves have had the centre hole relieved
by 1.5 mm and now actually fit over the hubs. So it was now possible
the trial fit the complete package to the rear hubs.
I had to cut down a couple of bolts, but this picture
shows that the mounting nuts now clear the inner face of the disk
Hooray!. Hi-Spec have made a reasonable job of the bespoke brackets,
it looks like the radial spacing is correct, as there is a small gap
between the disk rim and the calliper. However, the offset is about
2mm out as the disk isn't running in the centre of the calliper.
This however isn't a major problem, as a couple of washers between the
upright and the bracket will move the calliper outwards and centralise the
disk. Unfortunately I now need some more bolts as the ones I've just
cut down will be to short once the spacing washers are place. A quick spin
of the wheels indicates that the run out is ok too.
I can't permanently fit the rear brackets yet, as I
need to fit the disks to the front uprights so that I can take enough
measurements to get my friendly machine shop to make up some mounting
brackets. Oh and I need some longer bolts and self locking K nuts .
The
other thing that turned up today was a replacement push pull cable for the
gearshift. This one features rather natty quick release ball joints
on each end and the all important swivel action that stops the cable
binding and allows the gear lever to return to it's rest position.
I didn't have time to do much with it, but I did get
the ball joint fitted to the selector arm, and rough check indicates that
the cable is close to being the correct length, although in this picture
it's at entirely the wrong angle, and I think once I've welded the
mounting brackets onto that chassis tube it's going to need a coat of
paint.
This picture (of the rather cluttered) cockpit shows
a trial fitting of the cable's likely finishing position. The
grey lever is the original gear shift which previously connected to the
gearbox using a solid bar. The connecting rod is one I knocked up
for the previous cable and is way too long. But it looks
entirely feasible that I can make up a mounting that can be bolted onto
the existing gear lever support.
This
evening I spent a good deal of time crawling about under the car,
measuring, re-measuring, cutting drilling and grinding all to make this
one little bracket. It's function is to restrain the gear shift
cable in the engine bay. I'll weld it onto the chassis rail along
with a supporting web tomorrow. Hopefully I can also get the front
support made too. Then I'll have a working gearshift, and can repair the
existing rather large hole in the firewall. I will also have (at last)
completed one fully working system on the car.
I had a bit of a bad back today so that I didn't fancy
lying under the car doing welding. Instead I made this. It's a
1 inch high digital gear indicator based on a 7 segment LED display.
I'm sure my friends who are professional electron
herders will regard it as an abomination (or at least my wiring) but it
worked first time :-)
The Digidash will provide a gear display, but at the
expense of loosing either the speed indication or the tacho, as you choose
which of the three displays is shown in the centre section of the
unit. I'm quite sure that I'll get lost in the sequential gearbox
and forget which gear I'm in, so a separate permanent display seems a good
idea, besides I'd quite like so see both the gear number and the tacho or
speedo at the same time.
The ZX12r wiring loom provides a gear sense switch that
switches a sensor line to earth when a particular gear is selected.
The circuit diagram for the display is shown below. It basically
turns off the LED segments that aren't required when a gear indication
line goes low. With just power and earth connected it shows "8",
when in Neutral it shows "0" although I might add an extra diode
to the "D" segment to make it say "n".
Total cost less than five pounds and I will
mount it just above the steering wheel in the area below the mandatory aeroscreen.
BTW I used 1N4001 diodes not the 1N914 diodes specified in the diagram.
I've also decided I will mount an isolating toggle
switch next to the display on the mounting panel just above the steering
wheel. I would imagine that in a wet race the display might generate
a lot of glare, so it would be handy to be able to easily turn it off.
The switch will simply break the 12v supply line, another refinement might
be a rheostat to control the display's brightness but that can come later.
Today I have mostly been making big sparks!
First job of the day was to weld the support bracket for my gear
change cable to the chassis tube below the engine. The only way to
realistically get at this was to lift the car vary high off the floor and
drop it onto some axle stands. This was achieved easily enough using
Tim's engine hoist that I'm
storing in my garage until he sells his Dax. With the car up high it
was relatively easy to position the bracket and hold it with a
welding magnet and mole grips while I tacked it in place. The only
things I had to be careful of was to ensure that it was positioned to
allow full movement of the cable in both directions from it's rest
position, and to ensure that it didn't protrude below the engine bay
floor.
With
the bracket tacked in place I positioned the cable in the bracket
and connected it to the gear selector on the gearbox. Moving to the
front of the car I powered up the Digidash and pulled the cable.
Gearbox "snicked" nicely, and the gear indicator on the DigiDash changed
to show "N" for Neutral.. Fab!
I then crawled under the car again and welded the
bracket properly into place. I had planned to put a supporting
triangular web between the bracket and the rail ... but empirical testing
(me giving it a good hard tug) showed that it probably didn't need it.
I then painted up the chassis rail and selector
lever the picture shows the completed installation, although I have added
a cable tie to ensure that the cable cannot wriggle out of the bracket.
OK
now I can turn my attention to the bracket at the front of the car. If you
scroll up to the picture of the trial cable fitting on the 17th May You
can see that the gear lever support passes very close to the mounting nuts
on the cable. I spent the next couple of hours fabricating this
bracket onto the change lever support. It's essential that both ends
of a push\pull cable are properly supported so the vertical plate
was added to ensure that the bracket didn't flex and introduce any play
into the change mechanism.
After much measuring, trial fitting, clamping
grinding and welding I was happy with the bracket, so I completed the
welding and sprayed the whole unit up in red primer. I did briefly
consider reducing some of the weight in the unit by drilling some holes,
but this assembly is about as low in the car as possible and Class A has a
rather generous minimum weight limit of 560 Kg so I didn't bother.
After giving the beast a top coat of satin black
chassis paint it was ready to be fitted to the car.
I also re sprayed the gear lever, in a natty metallic
silver. I could test the thing properly now, so again
with the Digidash turned on, I sat myself in the driving position and
tried it out. It works great! The lever movement required is
about 1.5 inches (forwards or backwards) and the gears snick nicelyy
between 1st & neutral.
There is no noticeable play in the system and you seem
to get a reasonable amount of feedback through the cable too. The
one thing I had worried about was that there might be too much friction to
allow the change lever to move back to the centre position (this essential
for the bike gearbox to work properly). I needn't have worried the
lever moves back to the central rest position very nicely.
The last job of the day was to repair the huge
hole in the firewall where the previous gear change rod has passed through
it, this was effected with some 16guage ali sheet, a rubber grommet
and some Tiger Seal.
So there we have it, the very first system on the
car that is fully complete. Another step forward, I pronounce myself
"very pleased".... Time for a beer I think :-)
Today was mostly spent doing jobs around the garden in
the scorching sunshine, felling trees and shifting rubbish and so on.
But
in the cool of the evening I did find some time to have a go a making the
brackets to fit my Hi-Spec Ultralight 4 callipers to the front uprights.
I'd previously done some careful measuring, and I
basically knew that the bracket needed two sets of holes at
130 mm centres, with a lateral separation of 18.5mm. 1 set needed to
be tapped M10 and the other set of holes needed to be drilled 10mm.
One of the jobs I quite like doing is tapping out a
hole to take a thread. There's something quite therapeutic in the regular
rhythmic movement of the tap handle, 3\4 turn forward, 1\2
back...... 3\4 turn forward half back... etc. But it's quite
hard to get the top started in the hole perfectly square, and if you get
it wrong then the tap will actually start to tear out your newly formed
threads as it tries to straighten itself or worse it will break.
The easiest way to get around this is to mount the tap
in a pillar drill and form the first few threads by winding the chuck by
hand, this ensures that the tap starts squarely in the hole.
Don't under any circumstances turn the drill on.
Anyway after half an hour of careful measuring,
drilling and tapping I had this bracket, sorry it's not
totally focused, shiny surfaces seem to confuse my digicam's autofocus
system.
A trial fitting on the hubs showed that the bracket was
nearly right but not quite perfect. (again my stupid camera has focussed
on the floor :-( )
Basically the gap between the disk and the caliper is
uneven, the calliper needs to move about 1.5 mm inboard, so the gap
between the mounting holes needs to be 17mm not 18.5. The disk will
run fine as there is currently a gap on either side, but the perfectionist
in me wants it to be correct.
The second issue is that the mounting bracket is much
too thick, I always knew this and was going to get the bracket
milled down to the correct thickness by my local machine shop.
However measurement of the gap shows that if I make the bracket out of 1
3\4 x 1\2 ali bar it should be just about perfect. So it's off to my
local supplier for some more aluminium. On the plus side the
calliper and bracket are nicely positioned parallel to the disk.
More measuring, drilling and fitting of brackets to the
front callipers this evening. A couple of hours work and a big pile of
aluminium swarf on my bench resulted in this much thinner bracket than
before. It may not be totally clear from the picture but this
calliper now has a near perfect offset, in that the disk now spins in the
centre of the gap where the pads will be fitted. However, I now have
a new set of problems. This bracket is only 12mm thick but still the
disk edge is some 8 mm inside the edge of the calliper. This is important
because if the pads don't entirely cover the disk face they can develop a
lip at the outer edge which you have to remove with a file or it will
eventually prevent the brakes from working properly. Also if
you are not using all the pad you are not getting maximum brake effort,
and might be introducing unnecessary loads which will stress the calliper.
So the calliper needs to move still closer to the
centre of the hub, which means I would need a dangerously thin bracket.
Therefore I will have to get the calliper supports on the hubs machined
down. This will also allow me to use a bracket that is thick enough
to support the calliper using threads tapped directly into it (20mm thick), rather than
fitting a nut to the inside face, which as you can see from the pictures
is unlikely to be successful due to limited space.
However I'm not going to do anymore work on these
brackets until the new disks and pads turn up and I can measure the pad
overhang. But then it will be off to my local machine shop again.
A big bunch of stuff turned up today from Vehicle
wiring products, if I get a good run at it this weekend I should be able
to get the car electrically complete.
Today I spent six straight hours doing wiring, and I
still did
n't
get the car electrically complete.
However I did make a very big step forwards in that I
turned this little yellow LED on :-)
Most of the day was spent finding and connecting the
appropriate sensor wires in the ECU loom. I had already done much of
the preliminary work with many a long hour spent pondering circuit
diagrams and I was quite sure..... well 90% ...... well OK I was
just pretty hopeful .... that I had identified all the correct wires in
the bike loom and had decided what to do with them. Some needed to connect
to earth, some were to be cut off and bound into the loom and some
were to connect to either an ignition switched or an un-switched supply.
Today was the day to put all this theory into practice. So I spent
many a dull hour crimping and heat shrinking.
When I was happy with the sensor wiring I connected the
earth cables and then the power cables with FIA switch turned off.
I connected all the engine sensors, and things like the vehicle down
sensor, and finally inserted a 1 Watt 100ohm resistor in the grey ignition
switched ECU power line. Instead of the fuel pumps I connected in a
12v fog light and there it was ....complete. So now there was
no way I could put it off any longer, it was time to turn the the beast on
on and see what smoked!.
So with not a little trepidation I turned on the FIA
switch and flipped on the ignition!. Nothing.. no lights, no
warnings, thankfully no smoke but nothing. Hmmm a quick
check around reveals why... no fuses!. So I insert a 15amp
fuse into the unswitched supply and a 10amp fuse into the switched supply
(as per the bike loom) and try again.
Several things now happen. "Click Click" go the
main ECU and fuel pump relays, on comes the yellow ECU LED and on
comes my substitute light\fuel pump. Two seconds later off goes the ECU
light, and about 10 seconds after that the fuel pump relay clicks
again and the light turns off.
Fantastic.... that is normal operation! ECU warning on
for two seconds then off indicated no faults in the ECU or the
sensor wiring, and the fuel pump should run for 10 secs to
pressurise the system and then shutdown until the starter button is
pressed. Best of all there is no smoke anywhere. I
haven't toasted the ECU :-), and I seem to have got the wiring correct.
Fantastic! Of course the real proof comes when attempting to
start the engine but I can't do that for a couple of weeks as I've the
oil, water and fuel systems to complete. But a system that is
reporting "No Faults", a fuel pump that runs correctly and an ECU that
isn't a smoking ruin is a very big step towards actually getting the thing
to run. Fab!
The other thing I did today didn't quite work as
perfectly. While faffing over the circuit diagrams I found a water
temp warning sensor. "Great" I thought that's a switched to earth sensor
that I can use to drive an LED on the dash to warn me of a water over
temperature condition. Then even if the Digidash fails mid race,
provided I don't have any warning lights from ECU, oil or water I can
continue and avoid a DNF. So I ran the wires through the loom,
drilled a new hole in the dash and fitted the green LED (I only had a
green one spare) that's lit in the picture above. And here's the
problem, it shouldn't be lit with the engine off. So I go back
and recheck the wiring and circuit diagrams, and it transpires that I've
screwed up! The sensor is a variable resistance sensor to drive a
gauge not a switched to earth unit to drive a light! So the LED will
always be lit. Hmmmmmm I've got my electron herding friends
working on an Op Amp based circuit to change the variable output from the
sensor into a binary on\off for the LED, with luck I may even be
able to adjust the trigger level. If this fails I'll just install a
switched to earth sensor from Peugeot that fires at 110 deg C... but this
will need a T piece in one of the coolant pipes. So all is not
lost... good job I didn't screw up the ECU wiring in a similar fashion!
Today
I set to with the intention of completing the Drysump installation, and
therefore completing the oil system as a whole ( I am vary bored
with wiring). This required me to make up and weld two new mounting
brackets onto the chassis rails. Pace have warned me that the HF
vibrations from the bike engine are liable to crack the welds on the dry
sump tank. So two things should be done, firstly the tank
should be mounted on rubber bobbins, and secondly there should be no load
applied by the hoses on the joints. This is easier said than
done as -12 hose is really quite inflexible.
So a morning with Mr Angle Grinder, and his mate Mr MIG
gave me two nice little brackets on the chassis rails in the corner of the
engine bay and the addition of 3 mini exhaust bobbins gave me a
flexible mounting for the tank. I did have to grind some other
brackets off the chassis though... so a sparky time was had by all.
I then spent a couple of hours measuring and assembling -12 fittings and
now the installation is complete. I have to say that it looks very
nice, but it still galls me that in the smaller picture there is over £200
of high pressure unions and hoses which are mandated by the regulations,
almost all of which are unnecessary as the lines to and from the scavenge
stages are low pressure. Only the -10 line in the middle of the
photo is a high pressure line.
So with the dry sump system complete, a new filter
fitted and 35 quids worth of Putoline Syntec + in the tank, it's time to
turn the engine over on the starter motor and see if I get any pressure.
Er No .... a loud click and not much else indicates the battery is flat...
so that particular test will have to wait.
