Good Head
I made some calls around town today and managed to get a Felpro MLS headgasket for $40, and a set of headbolts for $30, so I went ahead and purchased them. I was not able to find a new o-ring for the waterpump inlet tube. At least not in stock. I have one on order now. I can’t put the intake back on until I have that o-ring, so I was unable to fire the engine up with the new head yet.
Let me tell you, it was one heck of a PITA to put that timing belt on! I ended up removing the motor mount over there, as well as the rear bobble strut. I then rocked the engine forward. It promptly fell off the jack and the jack tore the oil filter open. GRRR! The timing belt tensioner on this engine is FAR different from the ’95 Neon I once worked on. It took me a good hour to figure out how to even use the thing. Once I figured it out, it was simply a matter of having me under the car reefing on the thing while I had a friend reefing on the timing belt trying to get it up and onto the last pulley. We finally got it. I hope I got the cams in the right place. I think I did, as I did a quick compression check on cylinder 1. 195psi. Very nice, far better than the 50 I got yesterday.
Before I did that, I worked on the Megasquirt.
Good Head
Sunday, March 4, 2007
This is the coolest part of the new Megasquirt rev 3 circuit board. It’s a prototyping area. Just a bunch of holes that go no where so you can add components and circuits to the MS to do other things.
I added a few more components today, a pair of 2n222 transistors, some resistors, a trimpot and a diode. The transistor on top is for the radiator fan output. The Megasquirt is already monitoring coolant temp, why not control the fan like the factory computer did. And the one below it is simply to drive the tachometer in the instrument cluster. The trimpot works with the tach output to get a hot enough signal for the cluster.
Here’s the bottom of the board showing all my little jumpers run all around it. I’ll do some quick testing to make sure it actually works, then the board can go back into the black box one last time.
That’s about all I did for the weekend. I imagine when I get the engine put back together, it’s going to run one heck of alot better than it did before.
