cygnusx1

I have recieved countless PM's requesting pictures of how I adapted the BMW/Recaro 318 (early vintage) seats to the Z rails. I finally had my seat out and a camera handy. Here you go!

Yeah I run the LC1 reading through MSII through the Megaview display.. I calibrate every two months or so. I will recal tomorrow morning. I need to do a compression check ASAP. Have to get the tool.

Yup, what would cause that? Recent work done, fuel tank removed and welded, new BPR8ES plugs gapped to 0.025". It had the miss with the old plugs too which is why I changed them. Backflushed the injectors to rule out a plugged injector. Added gas-dry and injector cleaner to the tank. EDIS seems to be in excellent working order. The miss is only heard/felt at idle and not isolated to one cylinder. Confirmed by pulling plug wires. Driveability is great and strong. If I set the AFR's so that my LC1 wideband reads 13 the engine has a terrible misfire. In order to stop the misfire and get a smooth idle, I need to get into the 10.5 AFR range. Last week, and forever before that, the car liked 13 AFR at idle. Any ideas what is going on? Is my O2 sensor giving me the truth? . Here is the initial thread in which I investigated the EDIS system: http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?t=154117

Strange stuff happening... I pulled the injectors and back flushed them by pouring injector cleaner into a hose that was stuck onto the end of my air gun. Then I pressed the injector tips into the hose, squeezed the air-gun trigger, and triggered the injectors with an electrical circuit I made. It certainly blasted all the cleaner through them backwards, nicely. Very messy but it looked effective. I reinstalled the injectors and the miss was still there once the car warmed up. I busted out the laptop again. It was idling around 12.8 AFR which is where it always likes it. I turned up the Ve to get about a 10.8 AFR at idle and the miss just about went away! Now it idles betweeen 10 and 11 AFR with an occasional miss. I also tried varying the base timing which had zero effect on the misfire so I settled back to about 26-27 btdc, where it has always been. Strange? Why, all of a sudden, do I need such a rich mixture to idle smoothly. Weak spark? Timing change? O2 Sensor giving me bad readings? Moving this thread to MS section.... http://forums.hybridz.org/showthread.php?p=1073766#post1073766

This theoretically works, but how accurately? Anyone going to give it a try and compare it to a real scale weight? When I fix EVERYTHING in my Z, which might be never, I am going to try this for fun. I will drive the four tires onto left over floor tiles to get a smooth surface to measure from. http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-weigh-your-car-127482/ For those of you that think it's bunk, or a waste of time...maybe this video is for you: http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-determine-if-she-s-a-hooker-or-a-cop-77614/

Thats one way to lower your car.

Austin, since I am laid off and need to keep my Solidworks fingers exercised, I came up with a concept LCA. It's a bit "mechanical" but that's the M.E. in me coming out. It retains the twist rigidity of a solid arm but allows for simple toe adjustment. Caster can be easily done with spacers on the outboard end, and camber could be done by bolting the outboard plate on instead of welding, allowing the use of shims/spacers to lenghten the outer section. It's only rev1 and totally a "freehand" concept that might spark some other ideas. There is a lot of room for improvement and simplification. The two holes in the inner triangle are clearance on top and tapped on the bottom to clamp the swinging arm. The swinging arm has a radius slot that allows the angle to be changed. All loads are transferred through the kingpin and the outer plate fits snugly to the inner arm section so that it can't twist in the horizontal plane.

Very clean! Post more pics and videos.

I just picked up one of these at Radio Shack for my Z. It's a 160 watt total output speaker bar. It sounds great. It has an ipod dock and a remote controller. All you need to do is get a decent power inverter in the Z so you can plug this baby in. It's about 20 pounds, 32" wide with a ported sub. It has all kinds of brackets that can be used to secure it in the hatch somehow. It has great bass and sounds very sharp. Easy in and easy out of the car for cruising or racing. http://www.pacificgeek.com/product.asp?id=845164

A bad spray pattern would show up more at idle. Yup I run MSII. I tried going very rich and very lean at idle with no change in the miss. As soon as I load the engine, the car runs smoothly. I have a hunch that something that the welding shop used to flush the gas tank (radiator shop goo) is in the tip of one or more of the injectors and making it dribble instead of atomize. At high air flows, the dribble would atomize and burn normally. At low airflows, I could be getting a liquid drool, dripping into the cylinder, which actually quenches the ignition. This could also explain the increase in popping backfires on deceleration. Raw fuel in the downpipe igniting. Plausible? In the last two weeks I have removed the fuel tank twice, and had it patched by a radiator shop. It seems logical that something got into the fuel system since the guy rinsed it with what looked like fluids from an old radiator boil tank. Another point is that my fuel filter, is not the best. It's pretty small and high-flow, and does not do a great job of catching small particles. I need to put in a better filter too. With MSII and my wideband, if an injector misfired, MSII would richen the mixture on all the injectors to compensate. Raw fuel is detected on an O2 sensor as LEAN. Basically, it would be tough or impossible to draw any conclusions from the AFR readings. The sparks are very strong and consistent on each plug. I confirmed this visually and audibly. You can hear the arc easily when it jumps the two inch gaps. Hint: Wear rubber gloves and use insulated channel locks with a LOONG handle to hold the wires! Or Not. <---this guy knows what EDIS can do for you!

My crank pulley is tight now so it's not wobbling on the keyway but it still misfires at idle and light throttle. The gap changes by about 0.005 around the disc. I think that's well within sensing tolerance of the system. Classic symptom of a faulty injector is a rough idle and part throttle driveability. Since I visually observed the spark on each cylinder by holding the boots away from the plugs, I did not see any miss or abnormal sparking, I am shifting to a fuel issue. Here is a part number that you can start with: ACDELCO Part # 2132555

Fuel pressure is good and holds. I pulled each plug wire off one at a time and ran the engine. I observed the misfire pretty much equally no matter what plugs were "off". The engine seemed a touch smoother with cylinder #3 spark wire removed. Each wire produced a very consistent bright spark with no misses and good rhythm. I tried the other EDIS module and it made no difference. I ran older maps with the miss showing up in all of them. I am switching my story here. I now think that it's a fuel problem. The fuel tank was out of the car, flushed and welded twice within the past two weeks. There is a good chance that something got into the fuel system from all the recent disturbance. The car runs GREAT at anything above 1/4 throttle. Either there is bad gas in the car, water in the gas, or one or more injectors have an issue with spray pattern. I may try to back flush them, check the patterns, or I may send them out for cleaning and blueprinting. I am going to use up this tank of gas before I do anything else.

I dont have a compression tester so I am going to start by doing what I can. Fuel pressure and hold test. Injector Backflush. Swap EDIS-6 module with spare. Test an old .msq file Purchase a spare dodge coilpack tomorrow. Try to find vacuum/exhaust leaks.

No I just paid some guy off the street $459 to install a brand new MB.

I cleaned the fuel filter out when the tank was out. My AFRs are also pretty normal the entire time. I have another EDIS-6 control module I can plug in. Maybe I'll try that real quickly. I don't think it's a wobbly tooth wheel because that hasn't changed from the original install. I'll also throw in an old map to see if it's a program issue. Any ideas on how I can isolate it to either a fuel or spark problem? I'm trying to keep in mind that it's the most obvious that gets overlooked.

Hmm, I added Gas Dry just in case there was any water left in the tank from the washout for the welding repairs. So far it hasn't helped. I think I'll pull the injectors again tonight to make sure they aren't dripping under pressure, and maybe take a sensor gap reading at four places around the wheel to see how close it is. It is also backfiring a lot when decelerating at high vacuum. Something is definitely screwy, and has changed within the past couple of days. The only work I did is a fuel tank repair, prior to me noticing this problem.

So, the local Advance Auto had the exact sensor in stock. It's a 1997 Taurus V6 sensor. After drilling it and grinding it for proper clearances it bolted up to my bracket and I set the gap. I also noticed that there was a little bit of rotational play in the crank pulley. I know that the keyway in my crank is a little fudged from when the original pulley came loose, so if the pulley bolt loosens a little, the crank can wobble. This MUST be the cause of the misfire. I tighened the crap out of it with locktite and finished mounting the new sensor again. Crank the key and the car fired right up. It still has the miss at idle. It runs VERY good and I don't feel any miss while I drive anymore but the idle miss is there and maybe worse. I double checked all the settings in MSII and checked the wires and connections. Like I said, the car runs faster and smoother than ever. Just an idle miss. The crank keyway has always been bad, but the miss just began after two gas tank swaps. My next test is going to be a compression check. I am now begining to think it might be a head gasket again. CRUD! I plan on rebuilding the turbo this Winter, so a headgasket is not too far out of the way anyhow. BTW last night I took out the fuel injectors and tested them. I thought one might have been clogged but they seem OK. Listen to the video I took of the car idling. Please explain???? Misfires.zip

My car has had the EDIS-6 for quite a while now. After removing the fuel tank twice to weld leaks, today I noticed that the car had an odd intermittent miss at idle. It always had an occasional miss, but this was more frequent. About every two seconds or so, a cylinder would drop out with a bump in the idle. I thought that my fuel maps were off a little, so played with the idle mix and could not settle the miss. I installed a new set of plugs. Same thing. I pulled off all the plug wires one by one to observe a nice strong spark that would jump about 2"!! Wow. I decided to hook up my inductive timing light to observe the flashes. The light flashed fast for a couple of seconds, then half-time for a half second, a miss in the flash, and then back to fast flashing. It did this on all the plug wires. It seemed to correspond with the miss. But I could not say it was missing on only one cylinder. It seemed like all of them were dropping a spark every once and a while. Almost like the miss was phasing with the firing order and moving from cylinder to cylinder. I confirmed it wasn't a single cylinder by pulling spark plug wires one at a time and observing for the miss. It happend no matter which wire was off. So I decided to adjust the gap on the EDIS crank angle sensor. As the car was running, I used a lever to close the gap. All of a sudden, I closed the gap too much and wedged the sensor against the tooth wheel. The engine ground to a halt. The sensor now has a small notch sawed into the tip! Whoops. WTF was I thinking????? Or was I. I was able to back up the sensor, and re-fire the engine but it was missing worse and eventually would no longer idle. Soooo. This sucks. I need a new crank angle sensor and then need to solve that miss that I was getting. I was able to feel the miss while driving steady with minimal throttle. Once the engine was loaded, the miss would go away. Now, since I bought this stuff on ebay, can anyone ID this sensor? It needs to be exactly like this one, angled connector body, to clear the AC clutch. :sad: (NOT SHOWN IN THE PIC) I drilled a hole from the bottom, to pin the location of the bracket against the AC bracket, sinice it uses only one bolt.

Being laid off, I spent the morning in the grocery store catchin up on a few items. While standing in the cereal section, I heard a woman announce over the PA, "We need a hand jack in the men's room please!" I swear that's what she said! I wonder if it was the same guy in trouble again! Not a headline but certainly the best announcement I will hear today.

I got hit a few years ago...by a Pathfinder. I was in the crosswalk and the guy comes barreling around the corner towards me. He slammed on his brakes and I put my hands on the hood and pushed off. I was thrown back about 10' and landed on my feet. I was sore for a few days. Could have been worse. Cars don't kill people....people kill people.

Are you serious?????? "...and no additional photos will be sent, so don't ask." Nice....some people....

Right in the middle of a huge project, I often ask myself WHY? Trust me, keep crackin' It's worth it. You are in a good position (and so is your Z) to get it done right. Nice work.

Not sure if Clive told you but I have an original 76 four speed with about 70K original miles on it. All it needs is a bell housing from any 4 or 5 speed Z tranny. Cheap.

Do I hear the sound of peeling vinyl graphics?

Cool. Did the other owner come out to see what was going on?