Whatever!!!!!!!!! Gearhead-EFI Edition

[1project2many]

I asked if it was a engine out of like a S10 or something and he said it was engine GM made specifically for indrustrial uses and is not used in anything automotive. It says vortec and some number I cant remember on the valve cover. (2600 maybe?) I'll find out tomorrow.

Meet the engine family that has been used in more applications than even the smallblock Chevy.
http://gmpowertrain.com/2013_pdf/FHR...ust_122112.pdf
This engine family has been used since before the Berlin Wall came down. There are "large block" and "small block" versions, and tall deck and standard deck varieties. It's been sold in 8V and 16V versions, with carbs and injection, with and without turbos. There are Cosworth racing designed versions in AWD 6 speed equipped cars as well as barely tickling 100hp versions. It's been sold on every continent in one form or another and it's still being used today. It's found in Opel, Vauxhal, Suzuki, Daewoo, Chevrolet, Buick, Olds, and Pontiac cars as well as boats, forklifts, stationary powerplants, and other industrial applications. It's come with both Delco and Bosch engine management and distributor and DIS varieties. It's absolutely amazing just how much use GM has obtained from a single engine family.

[JeepsAndGuns]

Yep, thats it.
I wonder what kind of ECM it uses to run the propane injection? I have no clue where it would be on this thing...lol

[1project2many]

MEFI 6
http://gmpowertrain.com/pdfpage.aspx#I_EFI

[Six_Shooter]

Well, finally drove the car today with the COP conversion.

Semi-successful is the result.

Engine runs beautifully on the COP, pretty smooth, and stable. Noticed one little issue shortly after driving around, where the tach needle was not stable below 1500 or RPM, but then that issue went away. It could also be the 25+ year old tach. It's an Auto Meter Pro-Comp Monster tach that would have been bought back in the late '80s. It was a little colder than I usually drive the car in, so I'm not entirely sure what could have caused this issue, could have been the tach itself, especially since the issue went away.

The bigger issue is at higher RPM and boost. Car pulls great up to about 150 to 160 KPA then slight pulsating hesitation. I'm thinking the GM DIS ICM doesn't have enough dwell, or enough current capability to drive the coils in those conditions. I have an MSD DIS-4 that I could try, but I'm unsure of condition, I was sold the DIS-4 because the previous owner had issues, and I was only going to use it as a display item in my store I had at the time. He later got a hold of me and suggested that the issues might have been with the coil adapters and not the DIS-4 itself, so I may try it out now.

I'm going to go back to the old coil set-up and see if the issue persists. I've been doing a little tuning at the same time to try and get rid of a lean spike getting into boost, which seems to be pretty successful so far.

[EagleMark]

Sexy!

Could the heat over there be causing you some issues? Could you wrap that pipe? Teflon coat to get heat out?

[Six_Shooter]

Nah, there's very little heat on that side of the engine, the exhaust is on the other side, and the coolant pipe doesn't give off enough heat to be an issue.

I put the original coils back in an the problem is not there.

[RobertISaar]

bored: acquired Tremor Pak Plus for N64 i've had for over a decade, turns out i got a new in package unit from 1998... it even smells like the late 90s.

opened it up, the CR2032 used to create NVRAM in the controller pak(along with a Cypress cy62256vll-70snc SRAM module) was down to 1.5 volts, so i ordered a pack of batteries.... not sure why i'll need 20 CR2032 batteries, but they seemed cheap enough. those little SRAM units only draw .1uA when in standby mode... considering most CR2032s are rated around 200mA-h these days, assuming this one was, it should have lasted around 2 million hours in standby. that's over 228 years, by the way. so i'd say draw isn't an issue with them so much as the lithium battery itself just won't last that long.

what i was going to do was modify the controller pak slightly so that whenever the pak was in use, it would draw a small amount of power from the controller to charge a capacitor and use that in addition to the CR2032. but after seeing what these calculated out to drawing, i'm not going to bother since i'll probably get something like 10 years out of this new cell before it fails.



so, being dissatisfied about not modifying something, i looked toward the rumble function. this has a high/low switch on it to change what voltage the vibration motor is driven at, at 3.34 volts, it ends up at .170 amps. looked online and it seems people like to modify them to have the vibration motor draw from the controller port so that they don't need to swap in AA batteries. i decided i want to drop the current down to .125 amps, so i'm just going to put a resistor inline with it on high, which will also drop the low setting(since it looks to run through another resistor) current draw.



not being satisifed with simply copying what others are doing(see a pattern yet? ), i decided i'm going to go a step further and fill the now useless battery area with capacitors. reason being, this will offset the lag that will happen to the vibration motor's spool-up time due to lower voltage since the capacitors will charge up to 3.3 volts when the vibration motor is off and when it kicks on it will delay the drop down to a calculated 2.48 volts the resistor will cause the motor to run at, hopefully enough to where it won't be perceivable. it will also be a lot less strain on the regulation system inside the console itself.



of course, all of this is what i consider a "light" project.

[RobertISaar]

MOAR CRAZY USELESS INFO:

with 10,000uF of capacitance, the caps only smooth the voltage drop from 3.33 to 2.48 volts for .035 seconds...
20,000uF is .07 seconds
30,000uF is .105 seconds, which was my target(100mS)

i had a really small .047F(so 47,000uF) cap here that would have fit nicely, but after going through a few charge/discharge cycles, it's not going to work.... ESR seems to have gotten WAY too high with it, takes forever to charge/discharge.

so 9 3,300uF caps would hit my target close enough.... problem with that is size required to fit that many capacitors... 8 of them take up essentially the same amount of room as 2 AA batteries.



moral of this project: if nobody has done it, there's probably a reason why. time/money/etc... in this case, practicality is the loser.

[JeepsAndGuns]

Heres the MPFI propane setup. You can see the hoses running from the fuel rail to the injectors, as well as see the TB, its definately DBW.
The system is apparently closed loop as there is a o2 sensor in the exhaust pipe. It would be sweet if this could be adapted in some way for other engines (6 & 8 cyl's) It would make for a cool dual fuel setup. Mount the propane injectors just above the gas ones maybe?

[EagleMark]

bored: acquired Tremor Pak Plus for N64 i've had for over a decade, turns out i got a new in package unit from 1998... it even smells like the late 90s.

opened it up, the CR2032 used to create NVRAM in the controller pak(along with a Cypress cy62256vll-70snc SRAM module) was down to 1.5 volts, so i ordered a pack of batteries.... not sure why i'll need 20 CR2032 batteries, but they seemed cheap enough. those little SRAM units only draw .1uA when in standby mode... considering most CR2032s are rated around 200mA-h these days, assuming this one was, it should have lasted around 2 million hours in standby. that's over 228 years, by the way. so i'd say draw isn't an issue with them so much as the lithium battery itself just won't last that long.

what i was going to do was modify the controller pak slightly so that whenever the pak was in use, it would draw a small amount of power from the controller to charge a capacitor and use that in addition to the CR2032. but after seeing what these calculated out to drawing, i'm not going to bother since i'll probably get something like 10 years out of this new cell before it fails.



so, being dissatisfied about not modifying something, i looked toward the rumble function. this has a high/low switch on it to change what voltage the vibration motor is driven at, at 3.34 volts, it ends up at .170 amps. looked online and it seems people like to modify them to have the vibration motor draw from the controller port so that they don't need to swap in AA batteries. i decided i want to drop the current down to .125 amps, so i'm just going to put a resistor inline with it on high, which will also drop the low setting(since it looks to run through another resistor) current draw.



not being satisifed with simply copying what others are doing(see a pattern yet? ), i decided i'm going to go a step further and fill the now useless battery area with capacitors. reason being, this will offset the lag that will happen to the vibration motor's spool-up time due to lower voltage since the capacitors will charge up to 3.3 volts when the vibration motor is off and when it kicks on it will delay the drop down to a calculated 2.48 volts the resistor will cause the motor to run at, hopefully enough to where it won't be perceivable. it will also be a lot less strain on the regulation system inside the console itself.



of course, all of this is what i consider a "light" project.

MOAR CRAZY USELESS INFO:

with 10,000uF of capacitance, the caps only smooth the voltage drop from 3.33 to 2.48 volts for .035 seconds...
20,000uF is .07 seconds
30,000uF is .105 seconds, which was my target(100mS)

i had a really small .047F(so 47,000uF) cap here that would have fit nicely, but after going through a few charge/discharge cycles, it's not going to work.... ESR seems to have gotten WAY too high with it, takes forever to charge/discharge.

so 9 3,300uF caps would hit my target close enough.... problem with that is size required to fit that many capacitors... 8 of them take up essentially the same amount of room as 2 AA batteries.



moral of this project: if nobody has done it, there's probably a reason why. time/money/etc... in this case, practicality is the loser.

You know all that talent and time could be spent making us cool stuff?

[RobertISaar]

sometimes, it does. other times i run into mental brick walls that i can't seem to find my way around.

[RobertISaar]

drew up a rough schematic of the portions that interested me...



the important parts of it are that there are two settings(high/low). the ???? blob triggers Q1, which triggers Q2, which switches the ground of the vibration motor. when on high, battery + is fed directly through the switch and into the positive of the motor. when on low, the switch disconnects the direct battery voltage and now D1 conducts, with a roughly 1 volt drop(it's a 1N4148) from the batteries, giving two speeds. the resistors are only there to protect the transistors.

so knowing i'll have roughly a 1 volt drop to work with on low, i tested the motor itself down to 1.75 volts(it will actually be getting ~1.48 after the capacitors drain) and it was still going fairly well. can't find anything that i have that will give me any lower voltage.

i think i'll just add in ~10,000uF of caps along with the resistor and be done with it. won't give me what i originally wanted, but it will certainly be better than nothing.

[Six_Shooter]

Uhg...

I'll never buy a PLX product or recommend them to anyone.

I traded my LC-1 for a PLX R500 to a friend who really didn't need the PLX, just needed a simple WBO2 to feed his ECU and datalogging interface. I also gave him an O-meter to plug in when he needs to see the AFR in real time, which is perfect because he can use it then hide it away when not in use. It's a '71 Datsun 240Z and there really isn't a nice place to add large displays. I currently have the PLX velcroed to the dash below the gauge trio, just because it was easy, and to test the PLX.

What a piece of shit.

It's difficult to set-up, even with the instructions. I changed one of the default screens somehow to show boost instead of knock, but it doesn't actually show boost, even though I do have the MAP sensor fed into it...

I peeled the protective film off it earlier today, and that wasn't all I peeled off, the clear front panel also decided to come off.

There is a D-pad type input layout that the up button has already decided to not work properly. Keep in mind that it's been in use for about 24 hours, I installed it last night, and tonight it's giving me this issue. I tried replacing the button with another I pulled from a donor board, but didn't like the feel of it. So I re-installed the original, but turned it 180*. It's a 4 pin surface mount that uses the pins on opposite corners to make contact. So far it seems better, but I'm still not happy with it. This was a never before been used item, and from reading the PLX support forum it seems these were just poorly made period.

[EagleMark]

I had one in my hands awhile back that was for sale. It looked like and felt like cheap crap so I passed...

Sounds like it needs a review?
http://www.gearhead-efi.com/Fuel-Inj...re-and-Reviews

[Six_Shooter]

If I do a review I'll wait a bit and get some more time with it.

I found more set up information last night that should make the boost display work.

It's a model that hasn't been sold for years, so unless someone is buying a used one, a review might not be worth it.