Eagletalon.net

I’ve been working on getting things tidied up for the start of the season – lots of random stuff has been going on, so I thought I’d share a quick overview of some of the things I have going on right now:

My Driveshaft Sensor

The new Haltech is almost all buttoned up – I just need to make a mount for it – that should only take a little bit to actually do; I just have to do it already.

I have a new driveshaft speed sensor – this will be used for both the Haltech and the Logger that I’ve made. The sensor is simply a magnetic pickup sensor – it’s actually the same sensor that the Haltech would use for a crank trigger, except that it’s been re-purposed by mounting to the rear differential on the car. My part on this has pretty much been buttoned up – I welded  a bracket to the diff, and mounted the sensor to the bracket. The only thing left is getting the yoke collar made, and I’m waiting on my dad for that since I don’t have a lathe.

I also worked on beefing up the 4-link brackets. The original brackets are simply some 3/16″ plate steel welded to the differential – I had always planned on boxing them but hadn’t gotten around to it – I had actually kind of forgotten about it until last year. So, since the car was down for a bit and I was already welding on the rear differential I decided that now was the time to finish this part up. So, I took some 1/8″ plate and cut and bent it into a shape that closely resembled the shape of the existing 4-link brackets. Then, I took turns tacking it into place with my torch and massaging it into a close fitting shape with my sledge hammer.

4-link bracket being boxed - this was taken during welding

The picture to the left is what the driver’s side bracket looks like – this was taken while I was welding it up – the end result is completely welded on both sides, so it’s as sturdy as it can be now. This really beefed up these two brackets – they’re just freaking solid now. It actually took me a while to do these, although they look relatively simple. The differential soaked up an amazing amount of heat – while welding it, the brackets really didn’t get even hot to the touch, but I took precautions and pulled the teflon-lined rod ends out of the differential while welding  near them. The rod ends are pretty expensive, and being lazy is not a good excuse to have to replace them – they should last a long long time.

Once that was done, I was able to paint these brackets back up to protect them and get holes drilled to re-mount the brake lines. Once completed, Rick came over and helped me bleed the brakes and get a few other things on the car buttoned up.

Oh, yeah, I also replaced the wheel studs on the rear of the car – I had never really liked the studs that were on there, and the new ones were about 1/4″ longer. They look nicer, too – I’m kind of sick of looking at rusting black-oxide coated hardware

After that, I spent a lot of time measuring up valve heights and head stuff. I’m working on getting a new set of cams in the car. Basically, I want the largest cams that will fit, but I’m finding that I’m going to have a difficult time getting really big cams in there. Kevin Kwiatkowski helped me out a ton with all the valve information – I provided him with numbers and he provided me with lots of information about different cams. Kevin is crazy, but in a fantastically delicious sort of way Anyway, the end result is that I have a set of cams waiting to go in the car, but I need to upgrade the springs that I have first or I will end up facing some valve-float, and I don’t want that. So, I’m working on that right now, and hopefully will have that issue cleared up soon.

I have also been doing some other random things in order to get ready for the season – making plans and the like. I want to get some sort of notification list or something going because people always ask me what events I’m going to, or ask me to let them know when I am planning on making it out to the track. Unfortunately, it’s hard to stop on a race day and say “George, Bill, Bob, Harry and Mike want to know that I’m going to the track – I better spend the next hour on the phone” – those are all fictitious names, but you get the idea…

A Picture from the camera mounted in the car

I received a Countour HD Camera as a Christmas gift, which is just about the perfect thing to receive, aside from cool car parts It’s basically like other semi-ruggedized cameras in that it has an aluminum case and meant to stand up to some abuse. This sort of thing would be perfect for, say, a drag car. Because of their size, they’re not created to produce the best images in the world because of the lack of optics on the thing.

Even still, It should give me a great reference to check out my driving, consistency, track conditions and even a rough idea of engine RPM and boost levels. This will be a really good tool for me to be able to use for my own purposes. And, of course, it gives me a way to let other people ride in the car, even if they can’t actually experience every sense of what it’s like. If you really want to know what it’s like, you’ll have to build your own

The ContourHD Mounted to my roll cage

I think I spent about 20 minutes on the mount for the camera. the camera itself comes with a flat-surface mount, is essentially foam-rubber and apparently designed to dampen vibration. I have no flat surfaces in the center of the car with which to mount it, so I whipped up something quickly. After all, it really didn’t make sense to make it all that complicated. I had some stock .125″ 6061 aluminum laying around and ordered up a vibration-dampening pipe clamp from McMaster-Carr (one of my favorite places to shop, since they carry almost everything) that was the appropriate ID of my roll cage tubing. Then, I drilled a few holes in the 6061 plate, put a few rivet-nuts in the vibration-dampening clamp and bolted the whole setup to my roll cage. Now, until I get the car running and tuned and on the track I will have no idea how well this will actually work, but time will tell. I’ll let you see the results. I’m hoping it will be okay.

Over the weekend I worked on getting the new Haltech Platinum Sport 1000 installed in the Talon. Previously, as I said earlier, I was running an E6S-8, which was just too limiting for me and what I want to do with the car.

So, Saturday afternoon I spent a couple of hours pulling the old ECU out of the car, and putting the new ECU into the car. It was pretty straight forward in that I was able to pull the pins out of my existing Haltech connector and install them into the new Sport 1000′s connector without too many problems. Throughout the whole exercise, I ended up having to crimp and splice about 10 wires into the system, and five of those were ground wires! The new Haltech has a concept of a set of pins exclusively for sensor ground which the old ECU didn’t have along with multiple grounds to be used for the Haltech itself, whereas the E6S only has one ECU ground pin. I also ended up re-wiring the shielded cables that the Haltech uses, since the old setup bundled all the grounds for a bunch of items into one big ball of solder (Haltech did that from the factory!)

So, after the new cables, I turned it on and hoped that it would start. And it did. Pretty easily. No drama, no issues, no problems. The battery compensation map needs to be adjusted, and it runs rich in general, but it’s not bad. I will have to do some tuning though, no doubt.

Randomly, Q16 is weird fuel. You know your brain cells are dying, and you know it’s not good for you, but you don’t mind the smell anyway. It’s weird.

I’ve been using an old Haltech E6S-8 to tune the Talon for the past two seasons, but have been pretty limited on what I

The Haltech Platinum Sport 1000

am able to do with it. I was mainly having issues with the fact that the MAP sensor algorithm on it is pretty messed up.

Early last year, I made a MAP sensor scaler to scale the voltages coming out of a 5 bar sensor down to something that the E6S would be able to handle. This helped me keep resolution on the MAP while still being able to run the amount of boost that I wanted to run. The scaler works correctly, and the MAP sensor works correctly, but the Haltech has a fit with both of them. The issue with this old E6S is that the ECU samples the MAP sensor when it’s first switched on, and uses that as the 0 position of all of it’s maps. And, the way the Haltech is setup, it’s limited to a 3 bar sensor. This should just be a software setting (The software needs to know what MAP sensor you’re using to show you where any particular load level is – IE 30psi of boost is at bar 32) – but otherwise, the E6S should just linearly scale all other values. It’s a complicated explanation and unfortunately I am having a rough time coming up with a simpler way of explaining it. What it boils down to, though, is that a 4 bar MAP sensor should make my 0 position roughly position 6 on my fuel map, but the way the E6S is setup, it’s still at bar 11. This effectively limits me rescaling my existing maps in a linear fashion, and defeats the purpose of trying to scale the signal in the first place. Other ECUs don’t work this way, not even something as old as the E6K. In addition to these limitations, it was harder to deal with having to run DOSBOX on a laptop and try to conserve power and the thing only logged about 4 or 5 samples a second on a good day, downhill. It allowed me some data, but not nearly the amount of information I really need to be able to pick up anything funky that may happen. Aside from these issues, in order to really be able to read data effectively, Mark spent a fair amount of time reverse engineering the Haltech datalogging binary information and putting together a log reader to use to read .HDL files so that we’d be able to more quickly read through logfiles, since the log screen lets you see about 12 lines at any given time in the old DOS software, and you can’t display all the data points that are logged at any given time. Welcome to 1991 :-p The plus side of these issues, though, were that I learned more about the Haltech than I ever wanted to know.

To fix this stuff, I contacted Jay at jayracing.com – he’s been around a long time and makes some other good products – I’m also running his Alternator Relo kit on the Talon. He gave me a good price on a Haltech Platinum Sport 1000. I don’t know anyone else running one, but hey I’m a glutton for punishment so I ponied up the cash for it. I decided to go with this over an AEM for a bunch of reasons. First off, the E6S, E6K, E6X and other ECU’s all use the same AMP connector. While the connector is physically different from the Sport series, the pins inside the connector are the same. If I’m good, I can remove the pins from my E6S’s connector and put them into my new Sport connector with some minor shuffling of wires. If I don’t luck out, I may need to run a couple wires, but it’s a lot better than making an entirely new harness to upgrade to a new ECU. The other main reason I chose this was because of the software. I spent a bunch of time re-familiarizing myself with the AEM software. Back in the day, I tuned an AEM for a friend of mine, and absolutely hated all of the modifier tables for everything on the AEM. I also hated the complete lack of documentation and the table values containing completely arbitrary numbers – was I modifying an absolute value, a percentage or what?! I guess when you’re running a street car and have all the street time to tune an ECU it’s one thing, but I don’t have that kind of runtime on this car so I want a simpler setup.

The new ECU Manager software from Haltech is actually not terrible, which is a compliment to them in a way. It’s much more familiar coming from their old DOS software, and is no more complex than it needs to be in order to fulfill the available tuning options. I like that I can size many maps to my liking – If I don’t want a 16×16 fuel map, I can take columns or rows out – and I can specify the values of the columns and rows if I chose to do so. I can also specify calibrations for differing sensors, with many popular sensors calibrations already programmed in the software. They also have a powerful number of setup options, and one of my two favorite things about the new hardware are the fact that I can finally setup a closed loop boost controller, and that I can setup launch anti-lag. Awesome

The fuel map I'll start out with on my new Haltech Sport 1000

My Haltech Ignition Map

Attached are a few screen shots that give you an idea about what the software looks like. The first one is a shot of my fuel map I will start out with. It’s basically a port of my map from the E6S, and unfortunately there was no conversion path from Haltech, so I threw a bunch of data into Excel and made up some interpolation formulas to transpose numbers from my old ECU over to my new one. The new ECU is also setup to use my 5 BAR map with it’s full scale, so I won’t ever have to rescale my maps for something silly like that. This map, surprisingly, only took me a couple of hours to make up. The input methods of the new Haltech software are familiar, while still allowing a more efficient way to enter data over their DOS software. It’s not the greatest of any software I’ve ever used, but it’s a step forward for Haltech, for sure.

The second map here is my Ignition map. I am running really conservative numbers on the map, and know that I will have room to play with these in the future. I should be able to add a bit more timing up top.

I’ll let you know how the install goes

So, what’s going on lately with the Talon? There’s a small list of things that I need to do that are general maintenance items, along with some other enhancements that I’m working on. They follow in no particular order:

I ordered and received a new Trans Brake solenoid for the Powerglide. The existing solenoid works okay, but seems to weep fluid from it, and I’m not quite sure why it did that. So, I’ve decided that the best thing to do is replace the whole thing. That should fix that problem

I also ordered a new brake discs for one of the front brakes. The car had a slight shimmy on the top end slowing down, and throwing a dial indicator on my discs showed that my left front was about .015 from being completely straight. The new one is .005″, which is about the same as all the other discs on the car. Now, I just have to remember to drive it around a little bit before making a run to season that one up a bit.

I have also been working on a somewhat ridiculous project – data acquisition. Oh sure, I could have gone out and purchased a complete system, but I feel that existing systems have ridiculous price to performance ratios. Most systems cost somewhere in the 600-800 range and end up having severely limited inputs. (under 5 analog inputs, and only one or two digital inputs) and I just couldn’t have that. Or, you end up spending in the $2000+ range to have some actually adequate inputs. So, I’ve created my own hardware, and am in the middle of writing software for it. The system will sport four thermocouple inputs, Driveshaft and Tachometer RPM, four digital inputs and 12 analog inputs with a full 0-5V range on them. I will be able to log lots of stuff with them. And, I have multiple inputs – four of them to be exact. The total cost for all four units will be less than the cost of the lowest end data acquisition systems I could find. Of course, this just reinforces what kind of geek I am. a cheap one!

Time to get back to working on the datalogger…