Eagletalon.net

The mad race to the shootout is finally over, so I have some time to write up a recap of the events that happened in the weeks and days beforehand…

Just as a random note – I started writing this back on 08/27/11, and have kind of forgotten about it. Wow

My Kiggly Racing HLA Regulator

Anyway, The road to the shootout was long and very much delayed. Many many times. It started around April of 2011 as a conscious decision to freshen up the motor. The engine in the car has originally put together back in 2004 when I started on the road to making the car RWD. It basically sat for four years after being initially put together. I also made the decision to freshen the motor because the car had three seasons, countless passes and a bunch of dyno time on it. Compression was down a little bit to around ~140-150 per cylinder, where it would normally be around 180-190 in any given cylinder. I also had a few other new items to install – one of them being a Kiggly Racing HLA regulator:

Additionally, it was just kind of time – So, I started pulling things apart.

My Pauter rods connected to my JE Pistons

With the help of Jeremy and Warren, I spent a few hours tearing the car down. With a few capable guys, the car went from running to completely apart in about 3.5 hours. Not bad. I certainly can’t complain. If I didn’t have lock-tite and/or safety wire on everything, it would have gone even faster. After getting it all torn down, everything looked surprisingly good. I was happy with almost all of it. One of the more interesting things that I found was the strange amount of oxidation on some of the parts. All in all, it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was pretty strange nonetheless.

JE Piston Oxidation

Additionally, there was also some oxidation (rust) on most of the cylinder walls. Again, this isn’t a big deal because the car ran for three seasons like this, so not a huge deal. The main bearings looked decent, the rod bearings looked even better, even though both of them had wear. Not unexpected.

The original plan was to pull it all apart, hone the block, replace the rings and bearings, and then start putting it back together. The reality, though, was that I ended up being done for the day. Crap.

The original rings that I purchased were the wrong rings. JE apparently updated their piston design for the 4G63 at some point in the past 8 year (Imagine that!) and I didn’t realize this until after I had files the top ring on the pistons. The second ring, however, was much thinner than it needed to be. So, I had to order another set of (correct) rings, which took about a week to get here. I also found some issues with the head that I wanted to get fixed.

The head that I was using was a completely stock head, aside from the Springs and Cams. What I found when I pulled the engine apart was pretty interesting. Between Cylinders 3 and 4, there are a few things: a head stud hole and a coolant passage. In addition to that, there was also an additional unwanted passage between 3 and 4 that ran underneath the seal ring on the head gasket. This was certainly not supposed to be there. To fix this issue, the head would have to be replaced.

My Crankshaft, sitting snugly in it's block

These issues put me weeks behind. I had to source a head (I actually ended up sourcing like 5 heads, but that’s a different story) get machine work done to it and order new rings. The short block actually went together pretty well – pretty uneventful really. The crank and new bearings plastigauged out to spec without a problem, and everything went back into the Talon. By June, I had the block back in the car and waiting for the head.

Unfortunately, it took another 6 weeks to get a head I was happy with. I took a new head to a local machine shop. The shop itself did a decent job on a deck to the head, and did a valve job on the head, too. By now, though, it was the beginning of August! I had to hustle to get it all together and ready to run. The weekend before the shootout, the head was finally ready to go – I bolted it on, finished up the rest of the unfinished business on the car, and fired it up.

Next up: The Dyno!

More images can be found here.

For Sale: 1991 Eagle Talon Tsi AWD – white exterior with black Mitsubishi interior. I’ve decided to sell this car. I actually really like it, but I’m not going to do what I wanted to do with this car so I’m going to sell it and start other projects. It’s almost entirely stock. It has just under 150,000 miles on the chassis, just over 8,000 miles on an engine rebuild.

I don’t know the entire history of the car, but I do know it was purchased new in Tennessee and spent most of it’s life in Tennessee, until the end of 2006. That’s when it came up to Michigan to live next to the RWD in the garage. I drove it just a little bit before it developed a rod knock, so in 2007 I pulled the engine and replaced it with a fresh rebuild. The crank is uncut and the engine has .020″ over 95+ pistons on 1G rods. I also ended up replacing a wheel bearing, front driver’s axle, front brakes, alternator, clutch, pressure plate, OEM throw out bearing and probably a few other things that I can’t remember. I have not done any performance mods to the car, and was pretty much stock when I got it. The car itself is in pretty decent shape, especially considering that it’s 20 years old.

Exterior-wise, the body is in relatively good shape and only has a few dings as you’d expect on a car from 1991 – the worst one is on the hood next to the turbo bulge and can be seen in the pictures. The paint is a little dull and could certainly at the very least use a professional buffing, but is okay and certainly not falling off the car or anything. The other outside body panels are decent – all the plastic is there and in the right spots and the bumpers are not cracked or scraped up badly or anything like that. the car currently has a set of Konig Tuner wheels, which unfortunately have a terrible finish on them, but are physically in good shape. The tires are Khumo Ecsta somethingorothers Z-rated tires, which have around 15,000 miles on them if I had to guess – tread is good but they’re getting to be pretty old at this point. I also have the original white swirlie wheels along with a sketchy set of tires that will go with the car. All the windows have aftermarket tint on them, which was probably done back in the ’90s – the side and rear quarter windows are okay, but the back window is bubbling.

The interior is in okay shape – I don’ know who did what or when, but when I got the car, it already had many of it’s interior components replaced. Someone replaced the headliner and neglected to put the sun visors back in the car, so they’re missing. The seats have been replaced with the seats pictured, which are Mitsubishi seats (not Eagle seats.) The car originally had the stock beige light gray leather interior, and if you’ve ever owned one, you know that the driver’s seat never lasted very long. The stock radio didn’t work when I got it, so the car has a simple replacement CD/MP3 Player and I’ve also replaced a few of the blown stock speakers with other stock speakers.

The car has working A/C. It’s awesome.

The car needs exhaust work – it’s not super loud, but there’s definitely an exhaust leak of some sort going on. I haven’t looked into it. I think the original 14b is still on the car. Every once in a while there will be a whiff of oil when you’re stopped at a stop light, so I think that may go at any time. I have another used 14b I will include with the car that seems to be in good shape; it has normal shaft play – nothing excessive. Additionally, the transmission does not shift very well. At this point, I really think that it’s time for a rebuild on this. To help clarify this a little bit, the shifting is pretty notchy when the car is cold, but once warm the shifting is better. At times, a 5 to 4 downshift will not want to happen and will crunch a little bit. The 1-2 shift is certainly the weakest of the bunch, but will generally not crunch unless you’re trying to shift it at high RPM or you’ve done something funky with the clutch pedal. I’ve gone through and adjusted the master cylinder and the flywheel has not been cut (it’s newer than the car – the one that came with the car had hairline fractures in it when I went to replace the motor.) so I’m pretty sure the issue is with the blocker rings.

Overall, this car is decent enough to drive around on a daily basis, but if you wanted it to be nice, you could spend as much time as you wanted and have a great project car. I’m looking at getting a classic, so that’s why I’m selling this. Price is $2500/obo. If you have any questions, want any other information, or need additional pictures of anything then please Contact me.

[Updated 04/03/11 to add more information about the transmission and correct information about the original interior color. The original interior was Gray, not Beige.]

WARNING: Geeky Stuff ahead!

Over the winter, I have been diligently working on a new part for the Talon. It’s probably fair to say that I’ve been spending way too much time working on it, but it’s starting to come together now, so I’ll tell you about it.

Last year, I spent a lot of time looking at professional data acquisition systems for the Talon, but ultimately made the decision to make my own drag race data acquisition box. Now, If you don’t know me, you might think I’m a little crazy to do something like that, since it’s not really normal for people to decide to do such things. But, if you know me, you know I’m crazy enough to actually just go and do something stupid like that

I literally looked at dozens of systems, and while most of them would be somewhat adaptable to what I want to do with them, many of them are kind of sub-par. Edelbrock has a system that logs has software for “Windows 95/98/NT” – it’s 2011 for crying out loud! There are a systems containing 5Hz GPS units – something completely useless for a nine second drag car. One professional “modular” system I found has a 12.2Hz sample rate (12.2 times per second) and they claim that they are adequate because they log twice as fast as your foot can move. All of these systems cost more than $500, but many of them aren’t even as adequate as the $65 in parts I used on my first datalogger I told you about earlier. There are some systems that are very capable and very cool – and very spendy. At the end of the day, all they do is sample data, save it somewhere, and let you look at it later – it’s the details that you really need to compare. I want a capable system, but I just don’t race enough to justify $2500 for a data logger. Would I take one if given to me? Hell yes I would. Can I justify buying one? Well, no, apparently I can’t.

And so began my original logger (pictured above.) It was a decent system, but much of it was through-hole construction and it was all designed to interface with my laptop, which was going to be in the car at all times. Throughout the past few years racing, I’ve had a harder and harder time keeping a laptop in the car. Between 1.3X 60′s, along with the ridiculous heat in-car, I just don’t like subjecting any laptop to those extreme circumstances any more. I actually had three or four situations where my laptop just locked up from heat – I don’t exactly blame it. If you’ve been inside a tin can in 95 degree heat at a track in the summer, you know what I mean

Anyway, last year I started designing a new board and spent a lot of time trying to determine what I wanted to do. I am familiar with Atmel microcontrollers, but haven’t spent very much time on embedded applications so I wasn’t sure exactly what processor I wanted to use. I spent time evaluating some .NET micro controllers and didn’t like the lack of speed that the managed code offered, so I looked at using c code running on ARM processors. Thinking that would be quite a learning curve, I decided to stick with Atmel processors, but use their big bad awesome new ATXMEGA processor. So, that’s what my new logger is based on.

The main processor on the logger is an Atmel ATXMega192A3 running at 32MHz using an external sixteen channel 12-bit Ti ADS7953 ADC to acquire analog data. On the Analog side, I’ve setup four 0-12V channels, with the other twelve channels being 0-5V analog channels. I can measure a ton of stuff with this – Battery voltage, fuel pump voltage, accelerometer data, suspension sensor data, data from TPS sensors, AIT sensors, CTS sensors, and a bunch of other stuff if I’m so inclined…

I also have a bunch of digital signals – six input that measure on or off on a 12V level. This allows me to measure other things I don’t need the analog signals for, like my Line lock or my trans brake. Additionally, I also have four tachometer inputs so that I can measure Engine RPM, driveshaft RPM or whatever else I want to measure. These are controlled by a second ATXMega processor, which is probably complete overkill for the application, but still less expensive than analog options available for measuring this sort of thing.

Aside from the Analog and Digital acquisition options, I also have another add-on to the board that allows me to log six Thermocouple channels, along with CAN information from the Haltech. Of course, I will have to write software for the datalogger to do that, so I will probably have to do some hacking to make that work, but that’s down the road a little bit anyway.

All of this will be accessible through a microSD card that is integrated into the datalogger – this means I won’t have to have my laptop in the car in order to capture all this data – it will go straight into a format that my laptop can read. I will be able to pop the card out of the datalogger, put it in my laptop and open up the file immediately. So, the end result is that I should have a bunch of data from each pass that I will be able to look at and tweak the car to meet my needs.

My first logger would log at 150 samples per second. Even with more channels, the new logger should be able to log more than 200Hz without a problem. This will help me a lot. I’m just waiting on the prototype boards to come back from the fab house. Once that happens, I will start soldering it all up, and then write code for it.

Working on getting parts together for the 2011 season. I actually received this for Christmas:

I don’t need to say much about it – Kevin’s parts speak for themselves. Beautiful – functional – necessary. Kiggly doesn’t really make anything that’s not necessary to go fast.

And yes, I need to post more I will here in a little bit. I have a lot to talk about regarding the end of last season, and Shootout 2010. I took third in Bracket 1.