Engine Management Splicing Completed

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, as I've been away trying to do myself in by strapping a couple of planks to my feet and chucking myself down a french Alp. However, we're back home now and I've been able to make a bit of progress on the car in the Christmas-New Year Lull.

Basically today I've just about finished splicing the engine management loom into the beastie. I think you'll agree it's looking a whole lot neater.

In no particular order I have

• Removed the existing starter solenoid and main fuseways (these are already on the car and not needed from the bike loom)


• Identified and spliced the switched and unswitched power supplies from the switchgear in the car to engine management loom.


• Identified the interlock cables (Pin 22) and tied these to permananetly to earth.


• Lenghtened and reorientated a few cables.


• Identified and removed all the wiring, relays and fuses in the bike loom that correspond to existing car systems such as lights, indicators etc.


• Fitted and spliced the alternator\rectifier circuits into the battery after the EFI switch.


• Identified and routed the engine kill circuits to the EFI cut off switch.


• Identified the Oil Pressure, Neutral, L & R indicators and main beam cables for the indicator lights in the clocks and got these ready ot be spliced into the car circuits.


• Removed the Fan power feed. The fan is controlled by the ecu via a relay as the ECU knows the coolant temp. As I already have a water pump\fan circuit in the racer I didn't want to power the fan from the ECU power supply (as it was in the original bike loom) so I looped my fan power supply over to the bike looms relay so that it can still be ECU controlled, but is actually powered by a seperate circuit.


• I looped the Fuel pump power supply from the bike loom relays via my seperate dashboard switch to ensure I meet the blue book requirements for a seperate switch.


• I spent at least 5 hours (on and off) staring at curcuit diagrams


• Fitted the high current circuit from the existing solenoid to the starter motor.


• Connected the clocks.

So after all that I was ready to to power it up and see if I had fried the ECU.

Ok! Kill switch on .... mmm no smell of burning. So ignition on and it runs the fuel pump for about 5 seconds and then it stops which is normal, plus the tacho does a full sweep to indicate that it is working properly too. Graeat Stuff!

Then I hit the start button, I think I can hear the injectors firing and the fuel pump runs continuously... so it looks like I've defeated the interlocks correctly. Huzzah!

I did have one problem. The CBR1000RR has a thing called a steering damper or HESD which is under ECU control. This I don't have and it's causing the ECU to display it's Malfunction Indicator light in the clocks and giving me a flash code of 51... "Steering Damper Open Circuit".

As the MIL light is bright red and also turned on by things like the low oil P switch I'd quite like to kill the damper based error so that I can see "real" engine based errors as they occur.

Now the ecu controls the damper using a two wire solenoid to open and close a restrictor valve (not unlike a normal ISCV in an ignition circuit I suspect) both cables connect to the ECU. According to the manual the damper test procedure is to measure the resistance of the solenoid. It should be between 6 & 8 ohms. so after a quick chat with my electron herder friends on CAM7 I cross connect the appropriate two wires with a 68 ohm resister and bingo the warning is gone. It seems that the diagnostic circuit is none to clever and anything other than an open circuit in roughly the right range will be fine.

Now when I short the low oil pressure line to earth the light comes on and I get the appropriate warnings, fab!

So now all that remains electrically is to

1. Identify and connect the tacho feed to the DL1


2. Ditto the coolant and oil temp feeds


3. Connect the throttle position sensor to the DL1


4. Connect the light circuits for indicators, main beam to the clocks so that the appropriate warning lights work.


5. Fit the new Palm pilot display for lap timing and temp displays


6. Bind everthing up and clip it into place.

After a day doing nothing but wiring I decided to do something mechanical and made up a little bracket to mount the clocks. I'd been pondering how to mount them for a while as they need to be a fairly long way from the plane of the old dashboard! In the end I decided to mount them on the steering column itself so that they rotate with the wheel, mainly because it was the simplest thing to do!

While playing with the clocks I also found that the CBR1000RR appears to have a configurable shift light. If you pwer them up holding the select button it seems you can set the rev limit\shift light point to be anywhere between 4500 and 12500 rpm... cool I wander what other tricks this thing has up it's sleeve.

Engine Build Up, Ready for Mounting

So it’s been a few days since my last update and in this time I’ve made significant progress in fitting the new engine. The mounts have been finalized, trimmed down and fully braced up with strengthening gussets. This may seem a bit of overkill, but experience has shown that the high frequency vibration from the bike engine can the welds. Lastly they were painted up. They are fairly sturdy and probably wildely over engineered, but they do hold the engine nicely rigid.

I've also completed the floor mounts, in the engine bay, and painted up the tubes. It is all nice and clean now waiting for the engine's installation

I’ve collected the new sumps internals from Nova. Here you can see it’s component parts including the sealing O ring, swinging arm and bearing and internal gauze debris filter.
So I bolted it together and got it already for fitting to the lump. As part of this process I drilled and tapped the sump to take an NPTF oil temperature sensor. Unfortunately I had to use a NPTF converter to step the oil pressure sensor out a bit, as it initially stuck to far into the sump and stop the swinging arm from rotating which would have been a bit of an own goal!

Lastly I drilled the sump plug so that I can lock wire it into place and fitted this to the sump. After which the engine was ready for fitting.

Another good piece of news was that I discovered that those nice Chaps at the Kit Car Workshop can cut down and customize my drive shafts to make them fit the new Diff. Although I will be facing a challenge of linking Fiesta inner CV joints to my existing Escort outers

nts

Engine Mounted, Engine Management Wiring Started

I felt I got a lot done this weekend. Firstly I got the engine mounted up and loosely fitted in place. I say “loosely” because none of the mounting bolts is yet fitted with a nut and tightened up. Nonetheless the engine feels rock solid in the chassis. Which is very pleasing.

So with the engine position finalized I could now start working on the major connections to it. First on this list was the gearshift.

The Gearshift on the CBR 1000 RR is on the same side of the engine as that on the Kwaka, but that is where the similarity between the two ends. Not only is the CRB shift lever at the top of the gearbox, but it also shifts in opposite directions to the Kwaka. The upshot of this is that I need to put a bell at the rear end of the gearshift connection rod, to change the direction of the shift action and ensure that I keep the current action of “pull the lever to shift up and push to shift down”. Nova have kindly supplied a neat little bell and so I spent a good couple of hours building and welding in this little tower to support its pivot point and a short extension bolt for the existing connection rod.

This worked really nicely and I ended up with a nice short throw on the shift lever at the front of the car. Currently it feels a bit stiff, but I was pulling it from outside the car with my arm at the wrong angle and it is likely to become more free moving when the engine has hot oil flowing around it’s insides.

With the engine and gear lever in place, I could now move onto the engine management and wiring. This is a major piece of work as reworking the engine management loom to fit the new orientation is always time consuming, but basically the process is to fit all the sensors and connect the loom to them. Then decide how the loom should run back to the car to reach the ignition switches, instruments, battery etc. Then you unwrap and dissemble the loom and move wires around to their new positions. Invariably there are wires that need to be shortened or lengthened to handle the new orientation. Then you rebind the loom. The process always involves staring at fuzzy wiring diagrams for a couple of hours and always remember to check twice before cutting out cables. It is also a prime opportunity to add any additional circuits that need to be run for such things as oil and water temperature sensing, tacho feed and anything else that you might want to feed to the data logger.

At this stage it is also time to identify the ignition interlocks cables. Interlocks usually eventually switch an ECU Pin to earth via the side stand, clutch and neutral gear indicator switches, usually via a diode cluster in the fusebox. They can all be defeated by identifying the ECU pin affected and permanently connecting it to earth. On the CBR1000RR the affected ECU Pin is pin22.

So before I could actually do all the wiring detailed above, I had to build up the top engine of the engine, including the TBs and airbox. So at the conclusion of the weekend I had achieved a lot ,I had an engine in the bay, with most of it’s induction system fitted, a "work in progress" engine management loom and a working gearshift. There is still much to do but for once this is good progress.

At the end of the day the wiring loom looked like this... Sorry about the crappy quality of the picture but it appears my camera didn't know quite where to focus... currently I know just how it feels ! It's a bit of a rat's nest of cable at the moment.