Red Betty | The Drift E28

In reply to AWSX1686 :

Water? Garage fire extinguisher might have been a safer (if messier) choice when dealing with burning grease / fluids...

You *do* have a garage fire extinguisher, yes?

I miss my E28 dearly (literally still dream about it) so I'll be following along!

Greg Smith said:

In reply to AWSX1686 :

Water? Garage fire extinguisher might have been a safer (if messier) choice when dealing with burning grease / fluids...

You *do* have a garage fire extinguisher, yes?

I do have a garage fire extinguisher... Two actually. Much messier option, but it was at the ready in case the water went badly. All's well that ends well right? ;)

Don't feel too bad, my first line of defense for fires from welding is a wet towel to smother the flames.  I had my old jeep many years ago catch on fire (long story, but moral is don't crank the engine when you forgot to hook up the fuel line to the carb on a hot engine). After I pushed my now burning CJ5 out of the garage, I smothered the fire in the engine compartment with blankets. All of this happened in probably 30 seconds and if I had not acted fast, the jeep would have burned up.  I have  a regular fire extinguisher ready at all times in the garage, but would never use it unless things got out of hand. Fire is a common occurrence when welding on old cars........ A recent lesson learned is that when your car is upside down, welding slag will penetrate the blankets you put down to protect your windshield and crack the glass. Bummer, but I needed a new windshield anyway.

In reply to dherr :

Wet towel on hand is a good idea! 

Planning to visit Blair tonight to try out some different seats and see what I fit in. I'll likely end up with a different setup just for the challenge for budget purposes, but for events besides the challenge I want something decent.  Then hopefully I'll still have enough time to do some more misfire diagnosis tonight, and get some progress. I think misfire diagnosis and wiring cleanup will be most of this weekend. There's plenty more to be done, but if I try and do it all at once then even less will get done. 

It both feels like I got a lot done and also not much at the same time this weekend. 

Friday night: 

Visited Blair at Kaiser's garage, sat in some seats, had him order me a fiberglass NRG seat. Was going to go Corbeau, but apparently his supplier doesn't carry those any more. As long as I like it I will likely be ordering a second one before May for Carlisle so I can have passengers. Will use with stock seatbelts for now till I have a cage in. 

While I was there I asked Blair if I could try out his TIG welder as I've been wanting to give it a try. Blair was very kind and grabbed some aluminum for me to practice on and gave me the basics. Obviously I will need more practice, but for my first couple minutes of TIG welding EVER, I'm pretty happy with the results. 

Stared by just laying some beads. 

The nice beads on the right corner were Blair showing me how to do it. To the left of those was the start of my attempts. Turns out I was not giving it enough juice to actually start the puddle, just enough to melt the filler rod and make a mess. Ahhhh! Once I got that part down I did the rest of the beads and started to get the hang of it. 

Then Blair has me do a lap joint. Here's the first side. 

Then I flipped it over, did the other lap join, and then started to do another practice bead and learned about heat soak... Once the aluminum is too hot it just melts away as shown on the right side of the lap joint, and the bead below. 

Fun times! Now I want a TIG welder even more.... (Tax return maybe?)

The rest of the weekend I got a little bit of work done on the car. Messed with injectors a bit to try and hunt the misfire, but didn't pursue it too far as my rebuilt injectors are due to arrive tonight for me to install Tuesday or Wednesday most likely. Really hoping that fixes it!

Worked on cleaning up the wiring a bit too. Slow goings as I don't want to cut something critical of course. 

I also started gutting one of the doors... Driver's rear door. Hasn't gone as well as I hoped it would. I don't think there's going to be an easy way to make the glass easily removable. I could just put it in and bolt it so it stays, and that would probably be fine. I'm also considering cutting the rear doors so that it's just the outer skin and attaches to the body with some dzus fasteners or something. Probably not a good idea to do until it's got a cage. Though, it's not going to do much more as it is now either....

In reply to AWSX1686 :

That's all electric windows, yes?

Any way to keep the mechanism, but gut the motor, trim panels, etc and just use a cordless drill as needed to run the crank? You might need to tack a hex nut somewhere on the window mechanism, but I'd think it *could* work. 

In reply to Greg Smith :

Was hoping to have a solution in place to be able to completely remove the windows when needed. I believe most drift events prefer this. 

In reply to AWSX1686 :

Ah. Well, that exposes my lack of drift knowledge. Still, if you get sheet Lexan or double strength Plexiglass, I bet you could make replacement "windows" that are track-safe and raiseable (using the existing window regulator as above)

Otherwise, I'd think something with Lexan and quick release fasteners of some sort. At that point, you might keep the top track, have no inside door panels or window regulator, just some sort of tab to 'lock' the lexan in place. The inside door skin would need to be pretty open if you're pulling each piece out of each door for every event. 

Greg Smith said:

In reply to AWSX1686 :

Otherwise, I'd think something with Lexan and quick release fasteners of some sort. At that point, you might keep the top track, have no inside door panels or window regulator, just some sort of tab to 'lock' the lexan in place. The inside door skin would need to be pretty open if you're pulling each piece out of each door for every event. 

That's pretty much what I'm thinking.

Door window follow up:

The issue is only on the rear windows. The front windows will be able to be easily removed before an event. The rears may just get lexan and get solid mounted in place. 

(Forgot to take any pictures of the doors last night though.)

Need to figure out how I'm going to cover the metal edges around the doors. Cut sheet metal is sharp. 

Look what arrived!

Pop out the old ones and compare...

New injectors are installed and it definitely corrected most of the misfire. Now it won't stay running though...

So if I just start it up it'll run for 10 seconds or less and then die out like it's losing fuel. 

But, if you rev it, and keep the throttle moving, it revs fine. Hold it at one spot for too long and it dies out like at idle. 

It really feels like a fuel issue. It seems like the in-tank pump is working, so I guess I have to test the in-line pump next and find where to hook up my fuel pressure tester to see if it is getting fuel. 

The fun news is, now that all 6 cylinders are firing, the sound is very nice! I think I might put the exhaust back together tonight. 

Going to try and pickup a fuel filter tonight too. 

So I did not actually get to the fuel filter on Wednesday... But I looked at it, and while I was there checked to make sure the in-line fuel pump was working. Well, I think I found the problem there. In-line fuel pump is not getting power. Most likely due to my wiring weight reduction... Not much sense in diagnosing that now as the fuel pumps will go on their own switch anyway. 

I pulled the exhaust manifolds and cat so I can weld the cat back together. Hoping to get that welded tonight so I can put it all back together. 

It's been cold, so I haven't had much motivation...

Saturday I did dig into the wiring a bit more, or rather I dug wiring out.

On the one side, I may have been a little hasty with the wire cutters, but I'm confident that I have what I need. The pile shown is pretty much all the wiring from the car, there was some stereo wiring that was already out, and all that's left in the car is the engine harness. 

From here I have acquired a fusebox and key type cutoff switch, the plan is to get those in place and then go through the engine harness and hook up what it needs. From what I can tell, I should be able to take the pinout of the ecu, give it power where it needs, and give the injectors power, and that should be it. I'm going to put the fuel pump on it's own switch, not ECU controlled. 

Since I am looking to be figuring out where I want my switches and stuff to be, I figured I should set the dash in place and then figure out my seat mounting so I can make sure everything is within reach. No pics of the seat mount right now, I'll hopefully finish it up tonight. 

Interior with dash:

Also, since I don't think I've posted pics yet, here's the current state of the door gutting process.

The rear window needs a mount finished so I can have a bolt securing it in place. There is a ziptie in place now along with the tape. 

The front window needs a mount with a pin or wing nut or something so I can put the glass in and out. 

Then of course I need to clean up the edges with something.

If you watch early Project Binky they fold out the edge of the fenders with a piece of metal with a slot in it. Since I watched that I've been wondering if maybe that would be the way to go for sharp metal edges like this, except instead of going out, you make the tool so you can roll the edge in. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

If you watch early Project Binky they fold out the edge of the fenders with a piece of metal with a slot in it. Since I watched that I've been wondering if maybe that would be the way to go for sharp metal edges like this, except instead of going out, you make the tool so you can roll the edge in. 

Thats exactly what steve did on the edges of the gutted doors on the amc

Dusterbd13-michael said:

mazdeuce - Seth said:

If you watch early Project Binky they fold out the edge of the fenders with a piece of metal with a slot in it. Since I watched that I've been wondering if maybe that would be the way to go for sharp metal edges like this, except instead of going out, you make the tool so you can roll the edge in. 

Thats exactly what steve did on the edges of the gutted doors on the amc

I'll have to check that out!

Progress!

The seat is mounted, it is very comfortable and I really like the positioning. 

I also made a switch panel in place of the middle dash vents, mounted the key'ed battery cutoff switch, and bolted the dash in. There will also be a start button, fuel pump switch, and spare switch on the panel soon. I could've gotten the panel gaps better, but this picture also makes it look worse than it is. 

Fuse box was laying on the trans tunnel for this picture, you can see in the next that I mounted it above where the passenger front speaker went. I think this location will gie the easiest access, while still allowing the wires to be fairly neat as they go up into the dash or engine bay.

Next up is battery relocation, so I can start wiring the rest up. I think moving the battery to the trunk is the most common, but I was wondering if the back seat / behind the (future) passenger seat might work better. I figure the shorter the cables the better power delivery, though If I need a cutoff on the back of the car, then I'd have to run the power wire back there anyway. So maybe trunk is the answer. 

What is the general rule for batteries in the passenger compartment? Due to weight, and future cage installation, the panel between the cabin area and the trunk is going to go away, which would kinda make the trunk a cabin area. I'm thinking I'll have to have some sort of enclosure around it.

Big win update: 

The car has started with the new wiring setup! Everything is hooked up temporarily at the moment so I could test having the new fuse box, and the ECU and engine harness only setup. 

The engine harness is pared down even a bit more than this picture now. Next will be tidying it up and wrapping it up with something. 

Inside is a bit of a mess, but in an effort to test without cutting expensive power wires I set the battery on the trans tunnel so it could reach my new fuse box, while still being able to reach the existing starter wire. It works for now. 

Here's a video of it running on the current setup. It's still a little rough, at the moment I'm not sure if that's due to vacuum leaks or something else. But nonetheless, it's progress. Getting it to successfully run after gutting all that wiring was a huge win. 

Running on ECU only, gutted wiring harness.

I've been thinking hard on going down this road for wiring, but don't want to open another can of worms at the moment. This makes me want to dive back in and just get it done the first time around.

So, now I'll tell a little about the hiccups along the way. 

Basically once I had everything out besides the engine harness, I looked at the ECU pin-out and figured out where needed grounds, where needed power, then added power and ground appropriately. Also added ignition power to the injectors and the coil. The first time this was all hooked up, it ran for a second and stalled out. I figured that was normal as probably not everything was hooked up, like the MAF or something. Tried one more start and revved it a bit to try and keep it going and it stalled out again. At that point, I called it a win and packed it up for the night. 

Then, the next day I tried to start it again, no luck. I found that the main ignition fuse had blown. (ECU, Injectors, Coil) I tried a slightly larger fuse (I think I had a 5A in to start.) and it still wouldn't start. Did some diagnosing and found that it was not getting spark. Double checked that the coil and ECU were getting power, still nothing. Then I figured, I might as well see if I have a spare ECU. (I should have 2 as I've parted out two of these cars and collected a lot of parts.) Plugged the new ECU in and it fired up!

So, somehow I seem to have blown up the first ECU...

I am wondering if that's because the coil, ECU, and Injectors were all on the same fuse. I have separated the coil to be on a different fuse now, and will probably separate out the Injectors later. I will have to pull apart the ecu and see if it's just solder cracks in the most common location, or if I actually blew something up. Hopefully I can actually fix it. 

captainawesome said:

I've been thinking hard on going down this road for wiring, but don't want to open another can of worms at the moment. This makes me want to dive back in and just get it done the first time around.

If you're not worried about lights, power windows, or anything like that, this way is my personal preference just so I know where everything is, and everything that I don't need is not there at all. Plus I HATE the "pill" style fuses that the stock fusebox uses.