More Wiring, Fuel And Clutch

This weekend I did still more dull dull wiring but I think that I'm pretty much there now. I managed to complete the following.

• Signal wiring to the bike clocks for the main beam and indicators , plus oil pressure and coolant temp warning LEDs.
  Wiring for throttle pot, coolant temp, oil pressure and oil temp to the DL1
• Removed the remnants of the old ZX12 management loom and ECU.
• Connect the Tacho feed to the DL1, and shift lights.
• Made up an auxillery spiral cable to connect the steering mounted dash to the rest of the loom.

Pretty much all that is left now is to bind up the looms and clip them into place, a job that I hate because it makes my RSI damaged wrists hurt. Actually Mrs M is really good at this, I think I may have to ask her very nicely.

I also removed the old oil cooler tubes from the side of the car. My plan is to control the coolant temp using a large radiator and leave the oil temp to sort itself out. As a result the left side of the car is much much "cleaner". It's rather nice to be removing stuff from the car... hopefully this will all add up to a significant weight reduction.

I also spent some time reoruting the clutch hydraulic line, as the clutch slave cylinder is on the opposite side of the car on the CBR 1000. And lastly I connected the main fuel feed and removed the now defunct Injector fuel return line.

So now we have fuel, clutch, wiring & diff done. That leaves throttle cable, coolant and exhausts. Finally it seems like I'm getting close to finishing this engine installation.

Much Progress- Still Much to Do

Well, its now mid January, and the racing season is rapidly advancing towards me.
In the last two or three weeks I've made a significant amount of progress in lots of areas, but there is still much to do if I'm going to make the first race in early March. The major achievement of the last couple of weeks is that I've completed the initial mouting of the new differential. Unfortunately I've had to construct the mounting from heavy old steel. Hopefully in the longer term I can replace the steel bits that I've fabricated with some nice light alloy plates.

Mounting the diff was a key step on the critical path to getting this beast back to the track. With the Diff mounted I spent a long time trying to get the drive shafts sorted out. Of course with the new diff my old shafts dont fit and so I needed to get some new ones made up. It turns out that my outer CV joints are Escort based and the driveshaft cups on the new diff are Fiesta ones, true to form nothing is ever easy and Mr H. Ford seems to have used a myriad array of different splines to join the wheels to the engine on his various models, this is not helped as on a typical car there will be 4 different sets of splines (diff, each end of the DS and then in the hub.) All of which makes matching a non standard DS to inner CV joint, outer CV joint and the hub a bit of a challenge.

After bemoaning this situation to Aiden he mentioned that he has a couple of Sierra 4x4 front driveshafts left over from the Tiger he is building and that I was welcome to them.

Miraculously they had the correct splines on each end, but were too short. This turned out to be a blessing as I was able to cut them in half and fit them to the diff and hub respectively. I could then link the two with a tube and move the suspension through it's full range of movement. This gave me the total lengths of the shafts (54 qand 56 cms so I guess the diff is off center) So now with the lengths and samples of the correct splines I can get some bespoke shafts made up by GB engineering of Natwich.

With the major headache of driveshafts out of the way I was then able to move on to the next item that had been dependant upon the diff being in its final position; the rear shear plate. You may recall that I had to cut some of the structural bracing out of the rear of the car to get the new diff in. This needs to be replaced and so I'm going to get a rear bulkhead cut out of some 3mm steel and weld it to the remaining tubes. With the diff in it's final place I could now get the dimensions I needed to draw it out in a CAD package. The drawing is now with Peterborough Laser Cut and hopefully I'll get the plate back later this week for welding to the chassis. The large hole on the right is for the exhaust and the larger one in the centre is where the diff pokes through. The indent on the right hand side is to mount the push pull cable that I'll be using to control the reverse mechanism.

Next on the list was a handbrake mechanism. As my old diff also had the handbrake mechanism I need a replacement system. Rather than faffing around making something I decided to take the easy option. Wilwood do some new Powerlight 4 pot alloy callipers with an integral handbrake mechanism. These seem a good place to start, and a careful trial fit of somes seems to indicate that they are an almost direct replacement for my existing Hi Spec units so I need to order some of these and feed the Hi Specs to the ebay vultures.

The last major job that is sitting out on my activity horizon is fitting the new engine to the existing anteater airbox. This is more complicated that for the ZX12R as the CBR1000 has a secondary set of injectors that sit in the airbox, which need to be positioned at exactly the right distance above the intake trumpets. I had planned to use the existing airbox and convert it but Andy Bates of ABPerformance produces a bespoke airbox for the CBR100RR, and a quick chat and visit to seeh him indicates that the CNC milled Ally plates that he uses for the top and bottom of the box can be used to mount it to my airbox, so I've got a pair of them on order as well.

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.

More Engine Mounts - 90% there now

Well a day spent in the garage has resulted in the engine mounts being almost completed. I've fabbed up the right hand mount. This one I decided to make in a single piece, without the necessity for a central bolt as it doesn't have the nearby waterpipe obstruction that hampered the left hand mount.


Here it is in it's 95 % complete form. I just need to trim off the excess material and fit a strenghthening gusset.


With the second mount in place, even with the bolts not tightened up the engine is pleasingly "solid" with no play or movement, careful measurement between the bulkhead and the markers for the centre point of the exhaust camshaft indicates that my fabrication is within 1mm on each side. Fab.


So now I could move onto making up the mounts for the gearbox. These will be located onto a chassis cross member. This I also had to cut out, trim down and move further forward in the chassis, in fact you can see the stubs of the old fitting that I still need to grind off the tube. These mounts are made from 1"x"2 rectangular section with some bracing tubes welded in. The plan is that these will be welded to the cross member, allowing sufficeint space for the diff mounting plates between them on both sides of the gearbox. Again I'll fit a strengthening web, as the diff is a faily hefty piece of kit and I want it very solidly mounted to the chassis.


Lastly I positioned the diff in its probable final position in the chassis. It all looks like it will line up nicely along the longitudinal axis so thankfully it looks like all my careful measuring may well have paid dividends. Once I've welded the lower mounts in place I'll be in a position to take a whole load of more measurements to finalise the rear shear plate for the chassis and the diff mounting plates that Graeme at Nova will make up for me.

So Now I need to weld these mounts in, then remove the engine and finish welding various bits that are just tacked in at the moment. Then I can clean up and paint the engine bay, and finish paint the mounting hardware. Once that is all done the engine can be permananently fitted.

One Side Done

Only time to spend an hour or so in the garage last night, but that was just about time enough to finish the engine mount for one side (well bodge up the first go and then finish the second one properly). It is finished all except for a small gusset to stabilise the joint, it is within a mm or so of my desired dimension so not a bad effort really in controlling heat distortion from welding.

Now for the other side, and then the floor mounts

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.

The new engine is in ...well sort of

The CRB 1000RR is in the chassis, well when I say "in" I really mean "resting in" the chassis. It's not in any way connected to the chassis but it is within the perimiter of the chassis rails.


I started off the day by cutting out the main rear cross braces, it transpires that these tubes are actually only 18guage wall thickness, and can be cut quite easily using just a hack saw. Along with the brace went the last of the remaining diff hanging hardware and the old rear brake pipes which ran across it.

Next it was time to remove the drive shafts and my usual olympic standard ineptitude came to the fore. I'd just cut the brake pipes ... the easiest\only way to undo the highly torqued hubnuts is to have a willing assistant sit in the car with the brakes firmly on while I undo the nut with a socking great breaker bar! With the brake pipes cut that wasn't going to happen so I disaasembled the inner CV joint, and removed each of the rear corners from the car completely.

It not a major issue as the suspension bushes are badly worn and need replacing anyway... but it did slow me down a bit. With the drive shafts, suspension and brake pipes removed the engine bay was very empty, so I set about it with some more rags and thinners to get rid of the last vestiges of grease... It looks a whole lot cleaner now :-), Although my finger nails dont!


Next I cut out and replaced a useless bit of steel plate that had previously been welded into the chassis. I guess this was to allow a larger diff\chainwheel at some stage, but it is plainly useless as anything other than a spacer and its lack of rigidity probabaly contributed to the bad chassis cracks that occured in the joints at both end of that particular section last year. In fact the plate has a definate bend in it which cannot be a good thing! So I welded in an over long length of 16 guage 7/8th tube that slide nicely inside the existing rails with an inch or so of additional material inside the "parent" tube on each side of the joint


So I now the car was ready to lifted onto axle stands. However before I did this I marked all the engine bay tubes with a center line to help the alignment of the new engine installation (that's what the yellow tape is for).


Then using a couple of engine cranes I hoised it into the air and dropped it down onto some axle stands and a large sheet of 3\4 block board.




After that it was a simple matter to drop the engine into the bay and use the flat bottom of the alloy sump on the blockbard to sit it level in relation to the chassis rails. So there it, I' ve just got to decide how to mount the beastie now. If you look closely at it you can see a pair of bolts sticking out of the sides of the cylinder head close to where the lifting straps connect, there is two of these on either side of the cylinder bank. plus the four holes at the end of the gearbox casing (only two are visible in the pic)

I need to think pretty carefully about mounting frame. There are a number of factors to consider and in no paticular order these are.

• Engine alignment and centering in chassis
• Rigid mounting or mounting with metalastic bushes
• Output sprocket to diff input sprocket alignment
• Clearance at front of engine for exhausts
• Front\rear weight distribution which is affected by engine north\south positioning
• Access to clutch\gearbox\oilfilter\fuel & coolant covers & connections
• Suitable hard mounting points on the chassis
• Use the engine as a stressed member to help chasis triangulation or not?
• Height of engine\sump in relation to chassis rails
• Allignment of diff output with driveshafts.
• Access to gear linkage

Clearly a lot of quastions to answer, so to this end I've been canvassing a number of expert opinions.

Martin at the Kit Car Workshop always mounts engines using metalastic bushes, in case the chassis takes a biff. then the small amount of give in the bush can stop an engine mounting being broken off, plus it reducesn overall vibration. Martin also uses support frames that hold the engine from underneath, rather than an "hanging" from the mounting hardware

Ian Gray at Stuart Taylor Motorsport always hard mounts engines directly to the chassis (no bushes) but makes sure that he distributes the load by using all the oringinal engine mounts

Andy Bates of AB performance, likes to hard mount using an external frame or lattice that connects all the engine mounts together on each side of the unit. Thereby ensuring that the mounts can't move in relation to each other and "pinch" a bearing somewhere.

Tim Pell used to use bushes but now hard mounts engines.

Clearly there are lots of differnet answers to my many questions so I'm going to think about it for a bit using a bottle wine as lubricant.

nt

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.