Mick's 70 Lowlight

So the engine is back together and installed in the bus. After some pondering I decided to blend in the second plug but it didn't really give me too much more in the way of chamber cc's so I decided to assemble the engine and see how it works with the higher CR. The theory is high CR low boost.

So I reassembled the engine and hooked it up to one of my ignition systems as a test. The engine ran okay, if only for a short while as I did not have the oil cooler hooked up and there's no doghouse cooler installed.

I did a compression check on the engine and registered about 180 on each cylinder. So with confirmation that the heads were no longer leaking and I was getting compression it was time to install the engine.

So I spent some of Friday installing the engine ready for today. So after getting a bit sidetracked with my aquarium I managed to get the engine started this arvo. There's still a lot to sort out before I can start on the tune - The wideband is not working which made it run like a smoke machine as the fuelling correction was turned on (oops), the wideband connector had ended up full of water from the rain last night and blowing it out with an airline obviously didn't fix it, I'll try swapping it out for anther one. I also fried an ignition driver. Evidently pairing up the igniters for the twin spark is not such a good idea

So this evening I soldered in new drivers, going to try and run two in parallel and see if that fixes it. If not I'll run some extra wires to the second coil pack and configure them wasted COP. Definitely some benefits to making your own ECUs 😎

In the rush to get the bus running, I was a bit lazy and didn't make up a smaller blower pulley as I had planned (time poor), so the one that's on there was previously making 10 psi on the carbureted set up. I'm undecided if this will be a problem with the 9.8 CR. Will see how it goes. I don't really want to grenade the engine if I can help it, but I'm happy to push the limits a little in the name of research (or is it laziness lol)

Although the idle is high its interesting to see that it's showing some boost at idle. The tell tale in tuner studio also shows 6psi when revving it. Will be interesting to see what it shows under load.

It seems nice and responsive, even with basic desktop mapping and running form three cylinders. Can't wait to get it running properly and take it for a spin.