Ernie, the '61 Unibody

[racingsnake440]

I'll be following the EFI install - I want to do a megasquirted TBI swap in my El Camino in the near future

[TheSilverBuick]

Hey, I just found this thread. Nicely documented up! I'll send you a PM any time I'm rolling through or staying in Vegas if you want to BS or have questions on the Mega/MicroSquirt. I'll be watching this one more closely

Which btw, I'm going to be at the mining expo in Vegas Sept. 24th-26th.

[hauen]

Thanks for the kind words and comments, everyone. It really helps in the inspiration/motivation department. Thanks TheSilverBuick, PM me any time. Actually I do have one question, I feel kind of stupid for asking it, but here goes. The megamanual says to use coil negative on optoin - for the tach sense, so megasquirt knows what's going on, it also suggests putting 12v in to optoin + to 'smooth out' the electronicy things going on in there. Did you use the + from the coil or a constant 12V on the Thunderbird? I've looked on the megasquirt forums but either my searchfu sucks on there or no one uses points to trigger anything anymore, or both!

[TheSilverBuick]

Not a dumb question at all. The ignition setup for the megasquirt is by far and large the most confusing part of the whole set up. It trips me up every time still if I go to change something related to the tach input. I've come to the conclusion people rarely use the points/coil negative trigger.

Dang, I just looked at the pin diagram for the microsquirt, quite a bit different than I'm used too, so I'm going to take some educated guesses for what it's worth.

The Thunderbird has the Tach In wire going to the OptoIn from the (-) side of the coil since it's just a simple ON/OFF signal, and the Thunderbird has it setup differently on the 3.0 chip, I only have one input wire and then set jumpers on the board to indicate what it is.

Looking at: http://www.microsquirt.info/uswiring.htm it looks like you are correct. You'll connect the Negative (-) side of the coil to OptoIN(+) and then run the +12v to OptoIN(-). It sounds ass-backwards but that happens from time to time from the universal nature of the megasquirt, they have to label the inputs and outputs with something and some setups need a ground and some +12v.

If you are triggering directly off the coil (instead of something like a missing tooth wheel or another relatively low-voltage signal), connect OPTOIN+ to the coil's negative terminal as usual, but connect the OPTOIN- to a 12V source rather than grounding it. This then uses the flyback spike off the coil as a trigger (rather than the 12 Volt signal).

[hauen]

Trials and TBIulations

Well, I got the harness all wired up, went over everything twice, just to be sure that I didn't overlook anything obvious, plugged in the board, plugged in the serial connector and...nothing. Got out my RS232 diagram, yep, wired right, hmmm, I wonder if it would work if I switched Tx and Rx, yep, that did it. Awesome! Now onto loading the latest and greatest software, might as well get the full version of TunerStudio while I'm at it. OK, one last check, wiring good? Check. Battery charged? Check. Both MS and tunerstudio have the latest .s19 and .ini files? Check. OK, let's get it fired up and get to running! Crank, crank crank...hmmm, no tach signal. Check the coil wiring, looks good, re-ohm out the wires, they're good, make sure they're in the right spot on the board, yep, hmmmm, vexing. So after screwing with it with about 10 different ways to do things, I'm at a complete standstill. I can't seem to get it to trigger off the negative side of the coil for the life of me, I've taken the board out and tested to make sure I didn't blow out a resistor (R20 seems to be there to sacrifice itself, but it's fine) Checked U4, seems to be grounding where it's supposed to and acting like a diode where it's supposed to, provided I can still read a schematic. I'm stumped. I'm afraid to try to trigger it off the coil to the VR inputs (both VR and OPTIn go to the same pin on the processor, but they have different electronics in front of them). and I'm really not feeling converting the distributor to Duraspark so I have a VR type signal, or putting on a trigger wheel for the same reason, though if I have to I will. So I'm going to ruminate for a bit and see if my subconscious can come up with a plan, or maybe one of my fellow Bangshifters will come up with something completely different and save my bacon. Either way, it's gonna be a little while longer before the mighty 292 unleashes its 135 fuel injected horsepower (at 3800 rpm) on the world.

[silver_bullet]

time to step away and get a clear head before "I" start throwing wrenches and resistors!!

[TheSilverBuick]

Ignition is the hardest part, it's all gravy and fun after that.

[hauen]

Success! Sorta

Well, after a bunch of fiddle farting around with it, and with some assistance from Matt Cramer at DIYAutoTune, I finally got it to run. Not well, mind you, but it's running. I've got a few things to add and a lot of tuning, but it's nice to be able to be making some forward progress.

Pics, video, etc. coming soon...

[hauen]

If it ain't one thing it's anudda, brudda

So there it sits, in all of its fuel injected glory...I can hear the ooohhhs and aaaahhhs now. Well, not really, but it makes me feel better about myself.



Well, had to build a conditioner for the input signal, since I couldn't get it to run when I pulled the trouble light off of it. There still seems to be some noise in the signal, I'll probably wind up putting a capacitor in the line too and see if that helps, but it got it running anyway, plus it gives me a cool blinky light!



So after that, I got it started, and tuned up a little, still has a long way to go, but definitely better than it was. With that in mind, I fired up the camera to make a little video and got an unpleasant surprise, as you'll see.

Well at least it went out in the driveway and not hurtling down the road at 50, that could have been interesting.

Stay tuned!

[hauen]

Noise

When we last checked in, Ernie was running, but there was a bunch of noise coming through the TPS which was causing injector spikes, which was making the part throttle response miserable...and that's being kind. So for the past few weeks I've been tracking down and eliminating noise as best I can.

First step: Eliminate coil triggering.

I was using the negative terminal of the coil, while it's cheap and easy it was introducing a lot of noise into the system. As you'll recall I build a filter using a resitor and a diode, and while it helped, it didn't solve the problem. Going a step further I then added a capacitor, trying to create, in essence, a low-pass filter.

No dice.

So screw it, time to just convert it to electronic ignition. I'll just trigger it off the points, should be simple, right?

Wrong!

The actual wiring is pretty straightforward, in fact the megamanual gives a really nice drawing of how to trigger off the points and then use an external amplifier/module to drive the coil.

The input signal was beautiful; no noise, no bouncing around, rock steady in fact.

The module however refused to cooperate. I looked at it six ways from Sunday and compared the diagram to my wiring, but something just didn't seem right...see if you can spot the problem.



If you said something along the lines of why is pin 4 & 5 getting both 12v constant and trying to get to ground (through the mS), give yourself $100, you are an electronical genius!

The revised circuit looks like this.



So, gtg, right?

Wrong!

Of course I'd have a bad module, and at $120 per, not exactly cheap. Luckily Rockauto just so happens to have a wholesaler closeout for $35 per. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good...I'll never know either, but I keep trying.

So now it's working, but I've got 100 degrees if timing because of the timing in the distributor and the timing being handled by the mS. Luckily some clever soul must have considered this because if you poke around in the ignition settings you can make them static, which will let you still keep the distributor distributing. Ain't science grand?

I was still getting some noise so after a little searching I found some people have eliminated that by grounding their alternator case to the engine with a good separate ground, so I did that, and some put in a stereo power supply filter (basically a low-turns coil with a capacitor)

I still have some noise, but the truck is driveable now, so now I can actually use it again and get to tuning. I could eliminate a little more if I took the time to rewire and sort the wires near a distributor a little better (well, maybe not, but take my word for it)



Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. Power is about the same, it does seem to start easier, and it's nice to be able to tune the accelerator enrichment since I could never get it right on the Motorcraft after trying every possible combination given.

Here's a little gratuitous video of my driving it home today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDR1dQT3Y_I

[racingsnake440]

Cool, sounds like good progress!

[SuperBuickGuy]

nice job

[hauen]

Front End Install

Well, it's the hottest time of the year again, which can only mean one thing...time to work on the truck!

Although it's fairly obvious, it bears repeating, when doing a front end swap you have to have a level frame. Level is of course a relative term. Just to give you an example I put a level on three different parts of the truck.







So there you go, nothing jibes, so it's time to strip the front sheet metal off and level to the actual front frame rails. While removing everything, I noticed an awful lot of crud built up between the grill and the core support. Luckily this truck spent it's life in Southern Nevada, so this kind of crap was never a real threat to the sheet metal, but for you guys living in rainy, salty, rusty type states, I'm sure this is one of those hidden areas that could slowly work on rotting out your core support.





Anyway, back to stripping the front end. It all comes off pretty easily, if you can't figure it out on your own, there's some really nice copies of factory manuals floating around out there, usually on .PDF and usually free or very cheap. Once that's off, we can get down to brass tacks.





Frame width is 34", the CV front end has a couple of locating pins, located 31.5" apart. Some people will tell you the pins are located on the "axle" (hub, if you prefer) centerline, some will tell you they aren't. Well, after measuring it out with levels and plumb-bobs I can tell you with about 99% certainty that it is not at the exact axle centerline, but it's close enough.



So by now, if you've done anything like this before you're probably asking yourself, "How does he know where the wheels are going to wind up? How does he plan on locating this?" When I first undertook this project I wondered the same thing. There's plenty of information out there but no one was really clear on how to line these things up, especially with the fenders off. There are plenty of methods to do this, some good, some okay, some not so good. The method I came up with is probably somewhere between good and okay, the nice thing about it is, at least on '61-'63 unibody Fords is, it's repeatable.

You want to find your bump stops. If some yahoo removed them at some point in the truck's life, that's okay, just find the two holes in the middle of the frame near the axle centerline. The bigger hole is for the bump stop bolt, the smaller hole is for a locating tab. It's nice of the factory to help us this way, it's just too bad they didn't look into their crystal balls and move the bump stops in about another 3/8 of an inch. Oh well, beggars can't be choosy.



So we know the frame is 34" wide, the pins are 31.5" apart and the bump stop holes are indexed to the axle centerline. With this knowledge, we know that we can split the circle of the bump stop hole, measure 1.25" in from the frame rail on each side (34"-31.5"=2.5"...2.5"/2=1.25"...elementary skool maf roolzzzzz d00d!) and mark it.





Once that's marked, you have a bunch of options for making your holes. I'll let you decide that. My neighbor had a plasma cutter, and after screwing around with punches and step drills I decided to screw all that noise and just burn holes. Someone on one of the projects on here gave me the idea when they took a big washer and used it as the template for the plasma. It works really well! Just be sure to dress everything afterwards with a step drill or a rat-tail file or some such. Test fit everything afterwards and if it all lines up and looks good, you're ready for the next step...More hole drilling!





Ugh! Tedium, thy name is drilling. This seems like as good a place as any to stop.

Stay tuned!

[milner351]

Cool.

Measure 16 times, cut once.

[Beagle]

I'm watching this pretty close, I want to do this with my Lightning. I keep looking for the right deal on a Panther subframe. I'd like a more modern drive for the L, it's days of trailer pulling are pretty much done.