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 Mounts Started

Well after a night to contemplate my engine mounting choices I made a few decisions

1. The engine will be hard mounted... it is quite a long way from the perimeter of the chassis so I'm hoping it will be OK
2. I'm going to externally bridge across the two mounts on each end of the cylinder head to distribute the loads across them.
3. The front mounts will be triangulated to the existing mounting ears if possible. and the rear gearbox mounts will be fitted to the chassis floor members.
4. The upper gearbox mounts will be connected to the main diff hardware, and I'll stabilise the diff hardware by connecting it to the rear chassis rails, thus stabilising the rear gearbox mounts.
5. If possible I'd like to get the engine in and out easily... which means no inaccessible mountings like the cylinder head fittings on the ZX12r.

So having got it all worked out in my head, I then went into the garage, looked at the engine "in the flesh" and then spent a further 45 minutes umming and aaarhing as I reworked my ideas.

First job was to align the engine height. This was easily achieved as I simply sat it on some 2 inch box section that was positioned on the sheet of blockboad. This positions the sump about 1 inch above the main floor level, but it actually still sits in the airflow as the floor slopes upwards towards the rear. I did this deliberately to get the sump in the airflow as I think I'm going to need the additional oil cooling.

Next I was necessary to align the engine so that the output sprocket points along the longitudinal axis of the car. It took me a while to work out how to do this. But eventually I spotted that the center of each camshaft is marked on the casing. The cams will be definitely be perpendicular to the output shaft so measuring from the bulkhead chassis rails to the centre of the exhaust cam on each side of the engine and ensuring the measurements are identical should align the sprocket correctly

So I spent three or four hours today cutting welding, measuring, drilling and tapping bits of steel. By the end I had ended up with two pieces of the first mount as shown in the picture. The piece that is bolted to the block bridges the engine mounts. It has some standoff sleeves welded into each end to move the mounting away from the engine so that it can clear the water pipe union that you can see just below it. the middle boss is actually tapped M12x1.75 and has sufficient room at the rear for a jam nut to be fitted once the mounting bolt has been wound through it, that way it shouldn't come loose from the vibration. Incidentally this sleeve isn't threaded all the way through, the first 5mm or so is drilled to 12mm clearance to allow the bolt to get a start in the correct alignment. My experience with holes threaded right to the end is that they are a pain to get started, particularly if you trying to align heavy stuff like engines, but with a short section of clearance the job is much easier, having changed an engine in the paddock I'm hoping that little things like this will help a lot should I ever have to do it again. This was another reason for going for the single bolt connection on each side of the cylinder head.

The other section of tube connects to the existing mounting ears on the upper bulkhead chassis rail. The sleeve in the end is not threaded but is accurately drilled to a 12mm bore. Next I'll triangulate the end of this mount down to the mounting ears at visible on the lower chassis rail in the left of the picture. So I've made a start... just this side to finish... the other side to do and the gearbox mounts to get done. Then I can say the engine is mounted.

The threaded bushes and clearance sleeves are all made from 5/8th OD, 12 gauge wall steel tubing. One of the oddities of steel is that it is still mostly sold in imperial measurements. However it is important to buy tube that has smaller a bore than required and then drill it out to the bolt shank size. This will stop the bolts rattling in the tube and hold everything together nice and tightly. I'm using M12 bolts and 5/8th x 12g is a very handy size as its bore is about 10.2mm. This means that it can be perfectly tapped to M12x1.27 without the need to drill a pilot hole and it can of course be drilled out to 12mm for a nice snug sliding fit. Lastly it's OD is almost exactly 16mm which makes it easy to cut mounting holes in the box section tube using as stepped hole cutting bit.

A dirty job

Today I spent a couple of hours cleaning down a generally getting the engine bay ready to have the new engine fitted. This involved large quantities of solvent and whole roll of workshop paper and much cr4p under my fingernails. However the engine bay is now pretty clean and non slimey to the touch. Which will make working in there much easier and should also improve the quality of the impending welding.

You can clearly see the scars of previous development work on this chassis, the triangulation tubes have plainly been moved around to accept different engines from time to time and the floor bracing has been modified to accept different diff\ chain wheel combinations plus there are no end of areas where brackets have been welded on and subsequently ground off when not needed. In fact one of the major tubular cross members has been removed and replaced with a plate which will clearly flex I'll be replacing this with a new tube in the hope of increasing chassis rigidity.





Incidentally the mounting ears you can see on the front chassis rails appear to be just wide enough apart that I could use them for the new side on mounts for the CBR, that could be handy.


Next job is to remove the driveshafts as these will also need changing to match the new diff, an then cut out the diagonal cruciform bracing at the far end of the chassis.



The configuration of the new diff is to have the chain wheel behind the drive shafts (in the picture the engine mounts to the left), so a chunk of the casing needs to stick our right where there is a chassis rail. My plan is to replace the tubular bracing with a shear plate not unlike the one in the pictures of the new chassis, and I've found a local company (Lasercut in Peterborough) who will make me a one off economically. So this weekend some careful measuring and a couple of hours with a CAD package should see that sorted.
Once the cross bracing is cut out I can start fitting the new engine + diff proper.