Update for 2020!
Car has been putting up a good fight with the EFI conversion, last few months one day a week for only a couple of hours I've been putting in slow and patient work.
Got the car on the road earlier in May but couldn't get the car to run worth a darn sometimes running rich, other times lean and ALWAYS had some sort of RPM cut above 3000. When it finally gave me some hope I cracked the seam of my cut non monza oil pan I modified years ago (tie rods kept hitting the hard 90deg edge). So I bought a Milodon v8 swap pan, took a risk pulling the K-member off with the car on a 4 post lift and swapped pans. The risk paid off and I was able to check in on the engine, cam, bore, rods and pistons look good. Slight downside is I used to be able to just slip by with a PF454 short oil filter between the pan and headers for oil changes but the straight edge and deep sump of the pan doesn't allow enough clearance and I'll have to unbolt the headers to change the filter moving forward. Small price to pay but my centerlink and tierods now clear even with saggy engine mounts.
Milodon.jpg
Once all that was done I tried to fire the car up and it just would not run no matter what I did, turns out I ate up a crank sensor from the trigger wheel not being mounted fully concentric. Fixed that pretty easy with a spacer to ride on the crank pulley but putting the accessory belts back on I managed to break a power steering fitting off the plastic reservoir. Finally I got ALL the issues that popped up fixed and from this point forward the car smoked like a chimney just constantly, misfiring and smoking.
Spent weeks trying to figure out what part of the tune or setup was wrong or maybe that I somehow broke an oil ring or the valve seals were just toast. I got to the point where I was ready to pull off the intake and wiring and just throw a carb on it, figure from end of May to early August once or twice a week, problem after problem that the car never had carburated. I even tried running the car off the ignition box without controlling the timing from the ECU, but the timing of everything just never seemed right. Finally I re-read the Microsquirt manual cover to cover and concluded that some of the things I had setup or done might have made the car run better but was still incorrect as per the manual. I re-timed the ignition, crank sensor and put all the ECU setting back to what was supposed to work, clean slate... AND... It still didn't run right no matter what I did the timing events were offset by +80 degrees to be zeroed on the ECU and it ran like fuel / timing were out of sync smoking like a chimney and making your eyes water.
Through pure trial and error, going back and forth between testing changes in every drop down menu and verifying the timing I came to the conclusion that the issue was the trigger-high or trigger-low setting for the ignition box was causing the offset and that I had never realized because I never checked the timing between doing this simple one click change. So now my car doesn't leak oil, doesn't leak power steering fluid and idles consistently at a desired AFR. I managed to drive the car around this weekend for the first time since May and aside from having to pull A LOT of fuel out of the tune I'm left with only a few small issues. I still have to figure out an RPM cut above 5600rpm, might be a sync issue that I need to add a resistor to the trigger wheel or it might just be the tune being overly rich. Its difficult to drive, observe and tune. I now understand why people schedule tuning sessions on a dyno but I wouldn't want to do that without having all the issues ironed out first and by that point I'm pretty sure I'll have a handle on the tuning side of things. Aside from that I'm working on a fuel leak from the filler neck hose and front tire rub issues that I've always had but
things are looking up.
That short update really turned into a long one but it covers almost a year of struggle! Sure feels good to have the car fire up and idle but I still have a lot to figure out before the car is truly road worthy again. Its pretty cool that I'm able to tune my car and work on it without physically having to change jets, picture below is me sitting in my dads garage cleaning up the tune after having driven around. The 3D VE table shows a pretty step cliff but thats because the injectors are sized for boost which is my eventual end game.
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