Tassuperkarts Garage

[tassuperkart]

While Im in the garage, I might as well show you other things I have played with over time.

This is, well WAS my old ute.
Its just a '87 Hi-Lux.
I fitted a Nissan FJ20et to it with a Datsun 240k 5 speed.
Microtech MT-8 with sequentially fired LS-1 individual coils.
2.5" straigh out zorst
A fairly small hidden FMIC completed the picture.
Once again, everything in stealth mode.



About 180Kw pushing 1270Kg with a 4.1:1 diff on the higher boost setting. Damn it was fun to deal with those pesky rice boys......AND 300zxtt jockeys for that matter (shhhhhsh)! Cant beat the noise from a high revving FJ20!!!

heres a quick pix of the last ignition system I ran on it.



The VG30det was originally intended for this thing but I learnt to hate that ute with its agricultural steering, wooden brakes and rough and noisy ride.


This is my 2 wheeled baby!



Its an extremely rare Ducati Darma SS. One of possibly 100 to 125 ever made.
Ive had this one since new (1980) Not quite as much cred as a genuine Super Sport but far rarer!
Its a genuine SS (Super Sport) spec engine fitted with an electric start.The SS spec engine had bigger port desmo heads and had beautifully made forged steel "H" section "Imola Racing" conrods with twin strengthening ribs around the bottom ends.
The external flywheel on the starter side has benn machined off to nothing removing about 2 Kg.
Its been bored and fitted with Wiseco 88mm 10.8:1 forged pistons taking the capacity from 864 up to 904cc.
The heads were done and flowed by Benny Gatt (Superflow) in Sydney and heavily ported, valve seats throated out, 3 angle valve job and fitted with modified Manly stainless 2mm oversize valves.
The heads have been converted to twin plugs and cam and ignition timing indexed by Ken Flaherty Ducati Tuning.
The cams are retarded by about 6Deg. and ignition by about 4.
Carbs are a pair of 41mm CD Hitachis originally off an XV 1000 Yamaha twin with pod foam filters.
The pipes are a 2 into 1 mandrel bent one-off set built by Phil O'Brien in southern Sydney.
Front suspension rides on shortened CRB900 Honda springs with modified foot valving, adjustable preload caps and air valves and rear shocks are Koni "Special D" (what else)!
Front brakes are modified 2 piece SS lightweight discs (ally hats and cast iron drilled rotors) to fully floating.
They rattle like mad around town over uneven surface as they have no wave washers to keep the disks central on the buttons and when highway cruiseing, the lever needs to be pumped occasionally due to pad knockback!!!!
All old school stuff! It still commands attention amongst a gaggle of Jap and Italian mega rockets i can tell you!!!

Prolly produces around 85Hp on Avgas. (70 odd stock) Who cares anyway, It cleans up other 900 bevel drives and thats all that matters!!!!!! Bwaaaahahahah! You cannot and DONT compare this kind of clunky old clobber with the current crop of hi-po lightweight wepons!

Myself and a M8 painted the bike about 15 years ago. The frame used to be black and the wheels gold but the main colour is pretty close to original.
Ill never sell this bike. Its kinda attached to my left ball. Ive been made some pretty tempting offers over the years.
AFAIK its the only genuine SSD in Tasmania and one of a handful still alive on the mainland.
The old girl sadly dun come out much tho these days. I have a Jap big bore trail bike for everyday stropping around.
Its a typical European '70's sports bike and as such is a long, low, slow and heavy steering pushing well into understeer, skinny tyred prick of a noisy thing to ride fast that results in sore wrists and a numb bum even after a short fang but youd never have it any other way.
Just that glorious boom from that 2 into 1 @ 7000 grand and all that howling mechanical music from the engine and desmodromic valve gear being amplified by the full fairing like a big speaker at you.......ahhhh!!!! They just dont make them like this anymore!!!!
Yes, they are large holes in the belly of the fairing and they are on both sides!!
Being such old school clobber, the thing leans over to buggery without much fuss and the angle of those grind holes in the Mike Hailwood Replica full fairing well exceeds 45Deg from vertical!!!! My shoes always have large grind maks on their sides after a bit of a fang!!!!LMAO!

Lastly, This is what i amuse myself in on weekends!



Its a Kestrel KC-3 Formula Vee 1200cc
All suspension is now inboard and it now has rack and pinion steering.
Disk brakes are stock VW on the front and modded VW to fit the rear.

I designed and fabricated all the suspension and steering bits and do all my own tuning and development. Just a hobby mind you.
Rear shock is actually a re-valved YZ250 Yamaha MX bike job, 40 bucks from the wreckers! Works surprisingly well.

Heres what the font suspension looks like now:



And the rear monoshock setup when it was still being made:



I added these last 2 pix just because I like then. They really shows off the Kestrels beautiful lines and that distinctive "bum" which is prolly the only bit of old school on this car!!!!

Check out the shine on that paintwork tho!!!!!!!
Its done in acrylic colours and topped with 2 pack clear with a light pearl effect.
I did all preparation and the spraying was done by Bocchino Motors in Hobart who kindly offer me assistance with bodywork and engine/mechanical supplies.
Many thanks to Nino for parts and mechanical and Vince and the boys in the bodyshop!!
You could almost dive into that paintwork such is the depth of that colour!!!!!!

This pics were taken on the dummy grid and heading to parc ferme after a race at Baskerville by my good friend and photographer Matt (Panda) Atkinson http://www.tassportimages.com/





Enjoy!!

[tassuperkart]

Well, Ive been driving the ute around now pretty much as a daily for a couple of weeks now.
I finally got around to re-routing the water lines for the water to air intercooler sos the water pump would prime correctly. Up to this point, i had been running with no water in the cooler setup.
Id only been putting this job off as its a barstardfaced job to get to the lower cooler radiator mounts. Requires most of the frontend off the car. Anyway, done.
Another issue that has reared its very ugly head is a mongrel rear main seal leak....arrrgh! I had the opportunity to change it when I first got the motor but after time i just completely forgot about it and all of a sudden the engine was finally installed and running......... my bad.
Ill pay the price now as the leak is quite substantial and leaves a 2" diameter puddle of oil under the car every time its stopped for any time.............................................. .. Out comes the gearbox and flywheel and clutch soon enough!

The original fuel and ignition tune I ended up running, which was from an SR20det, on was just too conservative and the engine, altho feeling quite willing, felt a lot flatter that i reckon it should. Seemed to be dragging a tree.

I sat down and "wrote" an entirely new ignition map with a lot more part power ignition and this suited the engine much better. I based this setup on what I had arrived at with both the FJ20et and the E15et's I have been playing with for many years.
The fuelling was excessively rich up above part power so i downloaded a couple of different ecu maps and compared the fuelling tables.

Unfortunately, none of the files included any info on what size injectors, fuel pressures and so-on were used in that tune so i had to make some educated guesses as far as fueling was but comparing different maps gave me a good idea of what other guys were doing at different boost and rev points.

So, bearing all that in mind, i wrote up a new fuel map and set about getting it running happily down low.
It has taken me a bit of time to get my head around the tuning interface of the Adaptronic ECU, being used to Microtech and EMS stuff mostly. This made it a little slow at first but instruction manuals are a wonderful thing and I learnt how to make changes easily and quickly.

Once the slow run and light load setting were good enough, i took it out on the road. Just a few dead spots here and there to iron out but in the end, it drove smoothly and strongly.
I still was doing it the old fashioned way with no AFR meter, just "seat of the pants" by ear stuff only reaching moderate boost pressures which has served me well for many years but the time has come to fit up the TechEdge WBo2 sensor and controller and get an accurate picture of what was going on.
Believe it or not, I had light throttle and light accelleration at around 13.5 to 14:1, part power sitting nicely at 13 to 13.5 and high power settings around 12.5: 1!!!!! I think just luck but nonetheless, my old fashioned tuning skills had not completely left me over the years!!
Some slight variations as the revs rise and fall but the Adaptive closed loop tuning can take care of that!

I have now enabled full time adaptive fuelling in the tuning software and the engine pulls cleaner and cleaner as time goes by.
I still have a slight stumbling from off idle to part power (transient throttle) which I have not quite been able to get rid of just yet but overall the thing pulls cleanly and deathly smooth.
It pulls so smoothly its a bit of a worry really and I find that just leaning on the throttle out of the local speed zones ends up at around 135kph, still in 3rd..........
Its very very deceptive and I find its so easy to be well over the local speed limits without realising it just running it up thru the gears. Something to get used to.

Im still not overly happy with the operation of the idle stepper motor tho. Its as if its working to it limit but the setting would point to it only running around 50% so thats something I need to get on top of as well.
I can live with how its working for now.

Im not really comfortable with the amount of noise from the exhaust tho. Its not "in your face" loud outside the car, it actually makes a very cool and menacing sound but it makes a really annoying drone in the cab at certain revs that really shits you off after a while.
Im going to shorten and mebbe re-angle the droop tip at the back. It drops fairly low and at quite a sharp down angle. Perhaps the droning is coming back in off the road....dunno, just speculating.

Here:



If shortening and re-angling has no effect then ill go and see the zorst place and see what they can reccommend as far as a further muffler in there.

Once my fuelling is tuned finely, Ill fit up the road speed and tailshaft speed sensors and get the traction control working correctly.
L8tr
E

[tassuperkart]

I did a battery relocation on the "ute of death" today.
This is to make way for the intercooler core which was living down behind the radiator bit interfered too much with airflow thru the radiator causing some overheating in traffic.

There was nowhere else I could comfortably fit the cooler core so the battery went under the flat tray like this.



I fabricated that battery bracket up from some 20 x 20 x 3.2mm mild angle i have laying around.
I inserted crush tubes thru the chassis rail and the tray rail sos the bolts did not squash the rails when tightend up.
This pix was takne from down below the level of the battery but when you look at the ute from the side the battery is not really that obvious where it sits.

Next was to run some decent cable in some insulation tubing along the chassis rail and up into the engine bay.
I got one of those funky multi connectors the ICE guys use for power distribution to splice up the battery cables and to provide for the other accessories previously ganged up messily on the old +ive battery terminal.



I soldered the ends of all the cables with a big fuckoff 100w iron I have sos the grub screws dont squash and cut thru the cable core as well.

Kinda neatens things up a bit done with this connector block.
I can move the power steering reservoir back to the next set of holes in the inner guards to make further room for the cooler core but i will need to change the way the power steer pump high pressure discharge hose exits the pump. A bit of an arse but easily dooable as I have another style of banjo bolt union which will work nicely.

I also have a Falcon AU radiator twin fan/shoud assembly coming which is exactly the same size as the navara radiator. This should cure any airflow issues when stooging around in traffic.

Next then will be the cooler core back in where the battery used to be, fit the bigger injectors and boost the thing up and do some skids!
L8r
E

[tassuperkart]

Fitted the new fan/shroud assembly.
Its an oem AU Falcodore twin 12" fan and shroud assembly.
I bought it new for $175 which is pretty cheap.

After a lot of research, i discovered that the AU Falcodoor radiator is close to identical with the Navara V6 radiator in every dimension...Yay!

The shroud required some minor.... errr... adjustment with the "wheel of death" to remove the stock brakets. Some other minor trimming saw the shroud fit exactly between the top and bottom tank/core seams.
Just a couple of 2 bob brackets bolted to some friendly bolt holes already moulded into the radiator tanks takes care of the mounting duties.

There was a bit of a clearance issue between the fan and the lower radiator hose which required me to trim back the plastic braces which support the drivers side fan motor sos to allow the hose to pass without rubbing.
It might touch a little when the engine rotates on throttle off but its a price to pay as there is barely mm's between the inside of the hose and the PS pump pulley and belt....damn its close in there lol! Only other way is to modify the aluminium hoze nozzle to change its exit angle and make up a big mongrel hose with about 3 or 4 extra elbows in it to snake around everything and back to the lower radiator fitting.....neh!

Looks almost stock I reckon! Fits exactly over the entire radiator core so ANY air coming thru each fan had to come thru the radiator.
Im quite pleased with the result.





I should have taken a pix with the radiator out but you get the gist.

I gave it a good test run today in 30Deg + heat up a narro, steep and winding 1st and 2nd gear only country dirt road about 5 Klm long. Guarantees to overheat the engine!
Temps rose to 89Deg, (switchon temp is 86Deg) and thats as hot as it got running on a single fan only.

Only hitch is that the fans draw very high amps (surprisingly 20 amps+ EACH) on initial startup and blow the relay fuse immediately...... They only draw about 7 amps each when running flatout which is what Id expect from a large fan and fast running motor.
These fans really wizz over!
So, currently, the ECU controls one fan only. No real biggie tho. The second fan relay which will be pulled in independently from the ECU by a thermal switch in the bottom radiator outlet in event the sucker really gets hot in traffic and also have another connection in parallel from the AC compressor pullin wire sos runs whenever the AC pump is running. Works as a backup system in event that the primary fan/relay fails.

The switchon temp for the ECU controlled fan will be set around 5 degrees either hotter/cooler, depending on what temp the thermal switch pulls in at so it should be rare/if ever that both fans have to start up together.

Next is to re-mount and plumb the intercooler core back in over the now vacant battery box and get that up and running.
L8r
E

[Niall]

nice fan setup, ive done that before myself and was very suprised by the high amp draw, blowing 30 amp fuses on startup!!

great thread this one.

[tassuperkart]

Thanks Niall!
Yer those fans draw a fair whack allright! Seperate relays for each motor will be the shizzle! I was very surprised as well when the multimeter just shot to 20amps +!

A little more on everyday tuning of the "ute of death".

I have been chasing a slight hesitation/stumble, especially noticeable on gentle throttle rollons since day one of this infernal conversion and no amount of asynchronous fuel pump tweaking or going to the much more sophisticated "Predicted MAP" tuning mode in the 420c Adaptronic ecu has cleared this fuckenwell annoying issue.

Speaking of which, "map prediction" mode is quite a sophisticated acceleration enrichment setup that replaces the traditional "accellerator pump" function and takes a fair whack of on-road logging to corellate throttle opening percentages, engine rpm's and MAP readings into a lookup table.
Once loaded and enabled, map prediction works initially for a preset time (350Ms) on throttle position only and ignores MAP sensor readings and looks up the table of previously determined throttle openings and map pressures v's RPM's to "predict" what the MAP pressure would actually be and determine acceleration enrichment instantly the throttle is moved rather than waiting for the MAP sensor to react.
Damn it works well when set up correctly! I like this Adaptronic clobber!

Anywhoo, I digress, back to the hesitation issue, even with the gentlest of increases in throttle, the WBo2 display shows a marked enleanment to well over 15.5:1 and higher for about 8 or 900 Ms after which the AFR's then stabillise.................... Curiously, stabbing the throttle hard from idle or savage heeling and toeing on downchanges result in no dramas at all. Only relatively gentle rollons. This particular snippet or info didnt ring any bells for a loooong time....................

Got me fooked i can tell you and annoys the crap out of me to say the least.

After lots of headscratching, I determined that the issue seems to me markedly worse from very high vacuums................................. *gears in head grinding* and given gross ECU adjustments, altho making an improvement, never entirely eradicating the stumble............And carby like stumbles are near the top of the list of things that piss me off about badly tuned engines!!!
Can the Adaptronic ECU be THAT stupid???? Nobody else I know has ANY issues with stumbles with some attention to setup so whats my problem?????

Methinks, to date I have been ignoring the most basic of setup which is the fuel pump and FUEL PRESSURE REGULATOR!! *hangs head in shame*
I have a VG30dett engine sitting on the stand which I picked up for peanuts to rat for parts so i robbed it of its FPR and plumbed it into the system.

Voilah! WOOT! Stumbles and hesitations pretty much GONE..................!!!!!!!!!!!! Silky smooth throttle response, better than factory!!
It seems that the original fpr must have been sticking, especially in the high vacuum position and required a fairly significant drop of vacuum to overcome the stiction and raise fuel pressure to match MAP changes..
Bah, not seeing the wood for the fucken trees.................... Oh well!

lastly for this installment.
I just (finally) re-fitted the water to air intercooler and re-did the piping which looks a bit agricultural but I dont really care..function over form I say!

Just have to fabricate up some bracketry to support the cooler core where the battery used to live and re-plumb the water lines to the new position.

I also scored a brand new genuine Bosch "040" intank fuel pump for 110 bucks! You get a win occasionally!
I need to drop the fool tank and fit it up.
This should take care of any future fuel supply issues once and for all when the bigger injectors go in and the boost is wound up to the "hooligan" setting for tyre frying fun and games!

More later
E

[tassuperkart]

A couple of pix of the cooler setup!

I make no apologies for the ghetto looking setup as i used whatever bits of stuff I have on hand. Silicone tube, the remains of an Ebay ally cooler pipe kit and hose clamps are a wonderful thing!!!

Heres the cooler living in its new spot:



Initially, the cooler was to face across the motor with much straighter shots at the turbo and inlet and sit with its bum down at about 45 degrees on the old battery tray but one of the cooler pipes would not sit over the top of the top radiator hose with the bloody bonnet down.... ahh well, shit happens.

Another view:



Finding a decent spot for the waterpump is not as easy as it seems in the rather crowded engine bay and still have easy/shorter routing of the water lines.
20mm I.D heater hose does not bend well at all and anything sharper than a gentle sweep kinks the bloody hose so I was forced to use a handful of little stainless elbows which I cut out of an old EGR system off another car.
You can see some of them in the top pix where water hoses poke out of the cooler core thru holes already been conveniently punched in the radiator support panel.
I was never too happy with the original position of the pump attached to the lower radiator x-member. The rad x-member was a quick workaround but the plumbing was messy and difficult to get to and hung down a but due to the way the pipes come into the pump and go into the cooler core.

This pump will not self prime at all and requires a decent head of water at it to get running so finding somewhere close to the cooler and the radiator but at or below the bottom of the radiator outlet is rather a trial!

Anyway searching around, I found a bit of room behind the low side indicator/running light which allowed the pump to be as close as possible to the bottom of the system and still out of direct water splashing.



The inlet line to the pump from the bottom of the radiator is almost straight and level with the pump inlet ensuring a full head of water to the pump inlet.
I made a very simple sort of U shaped bracket which is bolted thru the stone tray and a single hose clamp secures the pump to the bracket.
Its mighty agricultura/ghetto appearing but the pump is surprisingly secure with its hoses attached.

I dont care much for fancy looking engineering, only what works reliably with the materials i have laying around!!!!
Just gotta finish up the cooler core bracketry. I ran out of gas for the TIG didnt I!!!

L8r
E

[tassuperkart]

Finished off the relocation of the watercooler with some bracketry underneath that simply bolts to the battery box.
I was going to weld on a bracket to attach the cooler to the radiator support panel but with everything in place the cooler core sits quite stable so for now Ill prolly just leave it with its current mounts and see how it goes.

I had to get a bit funky with the water system since the new cooler position is well above the top of the cooler radiator.
I need to weld onto the cooler end tank a 20mm hosetail sos i can fit the fill point right at the top of the system but for now, i made a Tee fitting which screws into the existing outlet of the water tank. The return to radiator hose attaches from below and to carry a remote radiator cap setup on top.
If nothing else it looks kinda cool!!!!!



Bleeding the system is a right arsehole tho.
The flowrate from the pump is so high thru the system that if the water level in the top tank of the radiator drops anywhere below the tubes, it just sucks a gutfull of air and the pump stalls.
The radiator tubes, top and bottom tanks are tiny in volume in comparison to the area of the radiator and dont give a big enough "reserve" of space for air to gather.
with the pump running.
In the end I removed the radiators cap and topped it up from there which proved successful after partially pinching the pump outlet hose to reduce water flow.

I might consider restricting the water flow with a "jet" of some description in the pumps discharge hose to prevent air from being sucked down the radiator tubes and cavitating the pump.
Im also considering fabricating a remote header tank out of ally to act as a reservior and a place for air to purge to. See how it goes first.

More later
E