As I think I said, I want to try firing up the engine at some point soon. Even though I haven’t got an exhaust system it’d be nice to at least see if it fires. If that happens then at least I’ll know that lots of things about the wiring and so on are actually OK.
Mind you, as I write this, it occurs to me that I ought to junk the bit of fuel that I’ve got in the tank and put some nice fresh stuff in. As is well known, unleaded fuel that’s been hanging around over the winter isn’t the best of things.
However, before I can do anything about this I need to wire in the secondary injectors, even though I still don’t have an airbox in which to mount them. I spoke to Andy the other day about his airbox and it’s still not available. I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand I could just wait but I’m beginning to think that I’d be better building a big aluminium box and sticking a cone filter on the front of it such as one of these, as available from Merlin. At least doing something myself would mean I could get on and do it.
In the meantime though, I needed to wire up the injectors which I’ve now done, as in the photo above. That should have meant that I could just turn on the ignition and the pump would start up and shut down; as I think I’ve mentioned this is a good sign that the ECU thinks the world is a nice place.
However, nothing happened. I could have started rooting around the new wiring and checked it all, but I decided to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a while which is to read the fault codes out of the ECU. This is done by shorting two wires on the “Data Link Connector” and looking at the FI light which is supposed to flash in a way to tell you what the codes are. I did this and it worked a dream. It told me that I’d got a duff EGCV, HESD and primary injector 1 was faulty. The first two are entirely correct as they’re not here. The last one, though, was a surprise but also correct because some muppet, I can’t think who, had taken that connector off and not reconnected it.So, one up to the Honda ECU, I reckon. Now I know how to do that it could be useful. I also managed to delete the fault codes and for a while it reckoned that everything was perfect. Until it noticed the missing EGCV and HESD, of course.
On the subject of electronics I’ve been think about a couple of things. First of all, I want to think about where I’m going to put the Power Commander. Come to that I really need to at least read the documentation as there’s bound to be a bit of a learning curve coming to terms with that. Once I do put the power commander in it’d be nice to have some way of knowing how good the combustion is. The normal way to do this is to get a wideband λ sensor installed. With one of those I could feed its output into the data logger and get a log of the air/fuel ratio during a race. Luckily, I’ve know a chap who sells widebands and he pointed me at his web site which includes the Techedge 2J1 which looks just the thing. I’ll talk to him about getting one for me. Thinking about this reminded me that when I get the exhaust system made I ought to get a λ boss welded into it, to make fitting the sensor easy.
Hmm, the expense is all mounting up. Even more so because I’ve been thinking about buying a HANS device. They’re still alarmingly expensive though.
I’m now at the point where I’m doing the last bits of putting the car back together. I actually put the tunnel panels back in today which means that it looks rather more like a car. I might even dig the bodywork out of the shed this weekend. At least once I do that I’ll get an idea how big a hole I’m going to need in the bonnet and how much the engine is going to stick out