1983 URQ Alpine White/Mocha 20VT / VEMS / EFR

[Afterthought]

Car is looking great man! Also, Jim is right. You've got a little too much heat in that. I struggled with stainless for a while and once I figured it out it's been easy since. Stainless is as much about the right amount of amps as it is about the right amount of speed. The slower you move the hotter the weld area gets.

Yeah I bought some scraps from the local metal yard and I’ve been testing things . They had a bunch of food grade stainless stuff get recycled so I grabbed a few .
Travel speed I think it going to be what I need to work on because as you said I turned the amps way down and had to spend more time in a given area .
I just like to practice here and there when I get a chance hoping it will all amount to some welds I can be proud of sometime .

The other thing I figured out is my purge gas -Y setup doesn’t work as well as I’d hoped- I need a meter on each hose because the purge is stealing torch flow or vise Versa

[Afterthought]

Some shots of the car out in the wild today . Always great to see it out of the shop. Ha










With the aluminum sheets I have laying around I’m thinking about trying to make something to cover all of the wires and coil packs there behind the head . It’s kind of messy looking back there .

[alxdgr8]

B3 battery cover...if you can find one

[Afterthought]

I have a couple B3's but not sure if I ever had one come with a battery cover. I do have the brake but any aluminum is not going to look stock. If I make it nice might look cool though.

[Afterthought]

So I had the alignment done today. Put another 5-6 miles on the car and no issues. Only thing I can see is a slight seep from the rear of the valve cover. Easy fix I-5's FTW

I am at the point now where I confident enough to start driving around and tuning.
For starters I just did a quick log slowly going from a stop to 35 MPH to see where everything is at. The first step I think is to adjust the Req_fuel setting before I start messing with things.

For Req_fuel according to the calculation I should be starting at
6.49 x (Displacement/ No. of cylinders / Injector CC/min flow rate)
6.49 x ( 2226 / 5 / 550)
6.49 x (0.80945)
=5.25
Currently I have it set at 5.1 which I think is a good starting point. Then I could tune the cells at idle to be 0.9 or 1.0 Lambda and take a little bit of fuel out
The point I am at currently, I have close to 1.0 lambda or slightly lean at idle and about 0.8 lambda with any sort of throttle input at all (say 0-15%) when cruising and maintaining speed. Exhaust looks hotter than I would expect but maybe that's due to all the extra fuel.

If anyone likes that sort of thing, I attached a log. take a look . I'm going to start reading up again, marc's instructions and Edigreg's write up.

[Afterthought]

I got lucky .
Last week I put 10 gallons in the car .
Put 20 more miles on the car last night with many stops to pop the hood , check for leaks in and under the car, and look over vemstune .
Everything was good . Did not see any leaks or issues .
Came home disconnected the battery, checked fluid levels , and put the car away for the night. This morning I came out to do the same , and immediately smelled a strong fuel smell as soon as I opened the shop door . There was a puddle under the car .
It turns out the only line yet that I haven’t replaced , the return line to the tank above the rear diff. Upon further inspection it is so brittle and nearly shattered .

This is the rare at which it was leaking with just the head pressure of he tank level .


I drained out 4 gallons of fuel . So aside from 20 miles of driving , It probably leaked 4 gallons out last night


Here’s the hose


So I think what happened is due to the hose routing the diff may have pinched it last night while I was cruising around trying to seat my rings .
Even though I have a fire extinguisher . I’m really glad it didn’t start leaking while I was driving

[Afterthought]

(Duplicate)

[DE80q]

Good find! I'm glad it was an easy-esk fix. I'm not looking forward to replacing all the lines in my B3.

[FFF]

Glad to hear / see that you didn’t have a serious issue!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[Afterthought]

There is a loop that it should run through and it wasn’t routed through that loop so I think maybe the diff pinched it . Should be good to go now

[jbrentd]

Car looks great. Glad you were able to fix that fuel leak quickly.

[Afterthought]

It’s good now . I put in new fuel hose and new clamps . Checked it multiple times . I have a total of 82 miles on the car now since I really started driving it, and no real issues.
What I need to do now is get the tuning sorted out started with the fuel map.

The way the car is currently I can cruise it and keep it right about 1.0 lambda but as soon as I give it any throttle at all it goes real rich.
I have set the Fuel pressure regulator and adjusted the Req_fuel settings in VEMS.
Have not messed with any of the injector settings yet.
Boost is disabled and running on the wastegate springs.

What I need to accomplish now is make sure I have the right numbers on my fuel VE table, and then start adjusting it.
What I need to do is figure out, since I'm doing this by myself, how big of moves to make since I have to stop, adjust, test, repeat. Probably going to be trial and error.

Here's my starting point. As you can see from this snapshot I've only adjusted the bottom left cells.

urqmap by patrick C, on Flickr

[Lucky]

If it was mine I would probably set it llike the attached config as a starting point and go for a light cruise, easy on the throttle to see where the afrs are at. The only thing that was adjusted was the ve table around what you have already set, nothing else in the config was changed.

Have a peak and see what you think, in the end only do what you are comfortable with!

[Afterthought]

If it was mine I would probably set it llike the attached config as a starting point and go for a light cruise, easy on the throttle to see where the afrs are at. The only thing that was adjusted was the ve table around what you have already set, nothing else in the config was changed.

Have a peak and see what you think, in the end only do what you are comfortable with!

What I did first is made mine look a lot closer to that.
from left to right.


So working in that range right now getting things closer. I don't have to worry about anything above 160 KPA yet. Until I get some miles on the engine. Not sure how long I need to wait before I can add in boost. Would love to throw in the springs for 15 #

[Afterthought]

now Ive progressed to here... Just gonna keep working on it . 122 miles on the car now
urqmap2 by patrick C, on Flickr

I still have quite a few things to do. The entire car needs to be buffed. I only completed the fronts.
Windshield wipers aren't working.
The glass all needs a real good cleaning or polish of some sort.
And right now the Trunk lid is not latching
My power steering has a leak (belt is off)

And lastly - tires . My tires appear to be almost unused as far as tread wear goes but they are over 10 years old and I’m thinking I need to replace them. Which leaves very few options - a few tires that are track only and some nice looking pirellis . 225/50R15 is the only size I can get unless I want to step down to 205. It looks like 225/50-15 may rub but that’s eXactly what I’m running now with so signs of rubbing.

[Afterthought]

What’s the consensus on the autotuning feature on vems ? Does anybody use it once you’ve gotten things real close ?

[Lucky]

I've used the tune by statistics a bunch. The longer the logs the better, make sure to set the lambda delay for accuracy. Once it calculates I always compare it to the log and input what I want based on what I see. If it shows a value is removing 10 numbers from a block (85 to 75 for example) I would manually enter something like an 80 then relog and see what the new value will be. That way I can avoid leaning it too much or going too rich based on a log.

Doing it like you are a little at a time is safe and will really help the part throttle drivability when the boost is turned up. It takes time but the reward is worth it.

[Lucky]

Also on the topic of tires, I am running 225/45r15s with no issues. There seems to be a good selection of good rubber, most is focused on autocross or time attack with 200 treadware ratings. Great in the grip department though!

[Afterthought]

160 miles on the engine now .
Changed oil& filter
Power steering hooked up (!!!)
Ordered tires
Looked at windshield wipers , the motor is plugged in so I guess I’ll have to start looking in more detail . Switch , relay, fuse etc.

Also need to
•continue smoothing tune out
•replace instrument cluster bulbs
•hook up tach wire (vems requires resistor I think?)
•fix trunk latch
•source new trunk struts
•replace seat frame plastic slider deal
•re torque head studs (500 miles ?)



I’m also thinking of making a belly pan from either sheet metal or aluminum with some sort of ducting on it . To make sure the radiator is getting as much flow in and out as possible .
And after that potentially moving the air filter lower and out of the heat . I’ve got a lot of room where the intercooler used to be .



I think I have a stock b5 pan laying around so I might look At that for design idea . I’m not sure if the typical path of flow of air through the engine bay , with the side mount rad. Need to figure out if I should be ducting it in from the bottom front or giving it a path out in the back

[Afterthought]

250 miles I’ve put on now in the last week or so . More to come .
Changed the oil once , probably will change again soon.
I gave up on the tune by statistics feature because it keeps trying to lean things out when I have them right at 1.0 lambda . Even if the lambda target is 1.0 and I’m at 1.0 the tune by statistics is wanting to reduce the VE values . Maybe I’ll come back and figure it out later .
Got the power steering and heat working .

[Afterthought]

Having some issue again with the cooling fan , maybe with how it’s wired into VEMS or the output itself.

Today when I went out to the car and turned the key on , the fan turned on . Started the car and it continues to run. Had laptop with me and verified that VEMS was showing coolant temp of 55 deg F. (Set point for fan to turn on is 94 C)
Turned the car off and back on and now the fan is normal . This same series of events repeated itself again later , fan comes on when car is started then turn off and back on and it is normal.

I suspect that something may be going on with the P295 output somehow allowing ground to trigger the fan relay on when it shouldn’t .

The other issue I have is that the fan I have is almost over kill. Going from off to On is a big load on the system and probably hard on the fan too.
I need either a two speed relay , so that I can utilize a low speed (this fan would probably never have to go to high speed in that case) and/or a resistor pack.
I Don’t know a ton about wiring but it looks like VEMS has the ability to run a two speed fan .

I think for the next car I am building I’d like to have a variable speed fan .

Aside from those issues car is running good for the last 340 miles. I’m trying to put as many miles on as possible commuting to work so hopefully I can figure out the wiring .

[Afterthought]

I've got a start on figuring out what is causing the car to die randomly.
It's about 4 times I've had this happen. Doesn't seem to be related to temp, load, or anything else I can correlate with. I think that I'm getting some sort of a trigger error which stops the ignition or fuel. If I coast to a stop and crank the car it fires right up.
This morning I was just cruising along around 2670 RPM and the car just stopped running. Ignition was still on and ECU still had power but it quit running. A flag shoes at the top of the VEMS with the message "Too many PR TRIG" so its going to take me a bit to deduce exactly what's going on. Since I was in the middle of the road and it was dark out I started the car and drove the rest of the way home , but obviously the triggers are fine otherwise it wouldn't start.
If anyone cares its at the very end of the log below about 13 min in.


Other than that. I got some center caps. Need to do some cleanup on the car and start fixing all the little things.
Trunk latch, drivers door handle barely opens , windshield wipers inop. , due for a rear wheel bearing.


480 "break in" miles. Im thinking tomorrow I will do the following. Then continue to go easy on it but try and rack up some miles.

-Re-torque ARP head studs
-Valve cover gasket
-Add a spring to the wastegate for 15 PSI max (n75 still disabled)
-Change oil and filter

[mr_aj_johnson]

Primary trigger is your crank trigger. Need to see a trigger log to see whats really going on. Tools menu- record trigger log. Looking for noise on the primary trigger, or dropout of the secondary.

[Afterthought]

10-4 .
Thanks for your advice .
I’ll record a trigger log and see what it looks like . Even though the car runs fine 99% of the time maybe I’ll be able to catch something abnormal .
I can also take a look at the configuration of the triggers and compare with last configurations from other VEMS/AAN powered cars I have , to see if anything stands out there.

[lorge1989]

What do you mean you haven't messed with injector settings?

You should have a table for latency, flow rate etc but those should not need to be messed with. When tuning, for now stay out of boost, keep RPM and load constant and tune in that cell only. Try to stay in that cell for 5-10 seconds at least. Then increase RPM to next cell, do it again, and again and again and again. You can probaly skip some cells to get things moving but its really tough to tune in a transient condition. Brake boosting is a good tool, although dangerous depending on if you try to do it yourself. Best way is to find some long open road and have a friend in the car helping. **best way is a dyno, but I assume thats not in the cards now.

Once you have a basic VE table you can start to mess with acceleration enrichment, coolant temp compensation and all the other little things. On megasquirt the autotune can work well but only if its steady state.