www.RX7fb.com

Steve, when you painted the iron parts of your engine gold, what type of paint did you use?

I think I used a Hammerite 'straight to metal' rattle can. It certainly was hammerite and wasn't a special engine paint or high temp paint. I's not looking so good by the exhaust ports now, but you can't see that with the engine built up. The rest of it looks great still under the dirt

As for a little update on Rexanne, life got in the way yesterday and I wasn't able to get her ready to leave the garden before my insurance company shut up shop for the day so I'm waiting patiently till I finish work tomorrow to get the insurance swapped over and take her out for a drive. I might start tomorrow's work tonight to try and be ready to driver her while the suns still up tomorrow!

Time for a small update of where I'm at with this, and a bit of an insight into the megasquirt experience.

It's been the best part of 2 weeks now since I thought I would be ready to get driving Rexanne again. I've hit a large number of snags this time round, many many more than the previous two megasquirt builds. It can be a very frustrating time, searching through the manuals and forums to try and work out if I've got any settings wrong and trying to understand why those setting are.

Since my last update where I was pleased that the car had started a couple of times I then discovered that once up to temp the pressure in the cooling system showed up a weakness in my manifold adapter and coolant started leaking in to the intake. It took me some time to realize this is why it wouldn't start on Monday. To add insult to injury when I re-sealed it I managed to buy the wrong sealant by mistake and that didn't work. Another trip to the motorfacors and I had the sealant I meant to buy and I got that problem solved.

She was keener to start now but still not great. Some investigating later and I'm getting a weaker spark on the front leading plug than all the others. None of the sparks look great though. I swapped some things over and decided the coil was at fault. With the coil swapped the car started even better today. Well enough that I took it out of the garden and tried it on the road.

It seemed ok on light throttle but as soon as I applied any load at all it started missing massively. It felt like a fueling issue. But before I could sort the fueling issue I was now suffering with the laptop not communicating with the megasquirt. A number of hours of head scratching later, it seems that now the megasquirt is all packed up and squashed into its case some of the signal wires are running too close to high current power wires. So I need to do some re-routing. This is the sort of frustrating issues that megasquirt often throws up

For now I've just opened the case back up so I can work on the fueling. No matter what I did with the fueling it still felt like it was a mile out when I started to load the engine. I made it up the road a couple of times, complete with plenty of back fires, but it's not really drivable for now.

That's as far as I got today. Having done some thinking tonight I wonder if all the coils are damaged and producing a poor sparity ate being blown out when I open the throttle a bit more. This is my first experience with direct driven coils, logic level coils normally require a 'going low' signal to charge them and having always used logic level coils I had been repeatedly warned to always use going low outputs. Direct drive coils require a going high output, and in a moment of ignorance I did initially connect them wrongly. This basically means they shorted out for a number of seconds. I thought I'd got away with it but I'm starting to think that's not the case.


Next time I get out too work on the car I'll be testing this theory using my original Fb coils. Fingers crossed this is the last of the teething problems and I hadn't made any more stupid mistakes!

I meant to say...

This is the megasquirt experience that puts most people off, I think if Id had this much trouble with my first megasquirt build I'd not of done it again. That said Ive not made life easy on my self. Ive made a number of choices with this build that not tried and tested from the choice of throttle bodies to the rx8 style coil on plug ignition with megasquirt. Still in my current work situation I've got more time than money so I still happy to have done it on the cheap and used megasquirt!

it's guys like yourself Steve, who are doing pioneering and bespoke builds, that push the boundaries and develop the megasquirt setups for others to follow....
Development problems are inevitable I suppose and as frustrating as they are, you'll overcome them. Nothing is ever as easy as it looks!
I often see the phrase "I'll drop a 13b turbo engine in it" when talking about 1st gens .... I've used that phrase myself but again, although it sounds straight forward, reading the threads of the guys who've done it both on here and on Exile, it's anything but.
Every one has hit some sort of snag that required a bit of head scratching, but that's what it's all about I suppose, each install is unique and takes a lot of research, dedication and skill.
I've thought about putting a turbo 2 engine into a fb for about 15 years but it's the above issues that have put me off and at my age, I really can't be arsed to learn about efi and ignition systems and everything else that goes with it which is why I stick to the Elford setup..... where some one else has already done all the development work for me! . Even with that though, it took 18 months of research to finally suss the ignition control box and how the ignition retarded etc but now I know, it's just basically a plug and play sytem which suits me fine.

Getting back to Rexanne, this setup is going to be awesome when you finally iron out the problems... I can't wait to see and hear it.
Stick with it!

Thanks for the vote of confidence Ian

I feel a bit more upbeat about it this morning. I was always expecting a few problems, it's just frustrating how many I've suffered with on this project. That said if it does turn out to be damaged coils then that could have been the major issue stopping me from starting / driving her from the start.

I can say from the short amount of time that she has run that she's going to sound awesome

It's the amount of variables that have been broached, and most of these haven't been touched in the the same combination so research has obviously been tricky. Rather than stupid, it makes Steve a pioneer but pioneers rarely have an easy life!

I know well the trials and tribulations of going outside the norm and doing every change all at the same time - the fruits of my labour are still yet to surface, but coming together slowly.....

Well done on the perseverance mate - you'll be sorted soon!

Cheers dude

Tonight there was a breakthrough!

Wired up my FB coils on the leading plugs and she fired right up. Been for a 20 min drive to get the basic fuel map somewhere near and she's beginning to drive like a car again! Considering she's basically only running on the leading plugs there's not much ignition break up, and not bad at low rpms/ high vac either.

So I best hunt out some more FD trailing coils! (anyone got any going spare?)

Got plenty to be getting on with. Have lost all my interior lighting somewhere along the line and my drivers electric window, I need to finish installing my Megaview, I need to raise the rear suspension a little more.

After all that I can set to work on the tuning. Can't wait! Will get a video up in a couple of days to show how she sounds. Sounds pretty damn wild and the throttle response (where the map is somewhere near) is to die for!

Great news Steve! We all had faith

Let me know how tuner studio cleans up the map for you - I'd be interested to see how well it does.