[acedeuce802]

I started a build thread on another site last year, so these first posts will be copied over. Some of it is outdated or changed since, but oh well, still tells the story of the build and how the build has changed over it's course.

Engine:

• LS1 from a '99-'00 Camaro
• V8r subframe
• Ported oil pump
• FM oil pan
• Remote filter with oil cooler
• Sanderson headers (picked up for super cheap, will plan for V8r longtubes in the future)
• 2.5" dual exhaust, similar design to FM
• DW300, Corvette filter/regulator
• LS6 intake
• 60 lb/hr EV14 injectors
• CTS-V accessories
• LS7 intake and MAF
• D585 coils

Driveline:

• T56
• Cheap second hand BF transmission mount to modify for V8r positioning
• Getrag G80 3.42
• V8r stage 2 driveline kit

Engine Management/Gauges:

• MS3pro
• Dual Innovate MTX-L's
• Racepak IQ3s display
• Radio delete tablet for full Tunerstudio
• Flex fuel sensor for full blended 93-E85
• Dual VSS input for traction control with 0-5V potentiometer for TC setting

Current chassis modifications:

• Revalved MSM Bilsteins, 550/400 springs, FCM bump stops, custom extended top hats
• 15" Kirkey Road Race Intermediate
• HDHCHTDDM2 roll bar
• A bunch of other stuff that doesn't really matter

The engine harness is basically done. I tore apart the factory harness, re-spliced all the coil and injector wires since I'm not using the big coil connectors, and shrink wrapped the whole thing. I may try to Raychem boot the whole thing at some point, but that could get extremely costly, and not all the connectors are set up well for a boot.

View attachment 176828

 

[acedeuce802]

This may be quite over board, but we'll see. I picked up a Quartermaster Pro 5.5 triple disc clutch for pretty cheap! This thing is crazy light, 13.5 lbs including clutch and flywheel but not including the auto flex plate it bolts to. It's brand new and I have a rebuild kit for it. It is a metallic clutch, so that will be interesting, but it sounds like I have a connection to get organic discs for it if need be. I certainly don't need the 900 ft-lb rating of the clutch, I'm more so interested in the low moment of inertia. I chose the triple disc solely to have more distributed heat capacity, which is my main concern of driving a 5.5" clutch on the street.



I'm starting to get the clutch setup together, and with that I needed a small diameter throw-out bearing. This is an AP Racing TOB. I never thought I'd have AP Racing parts on my car, but it's nice to have the hookup at work for nice parts!


IMG_20170114_154343520 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

 

[acedeuce802]

I've got the engine bay ready for a test fit, and it sounds like the subframe still has a week or more until I get it.







Here's a good shot to show the before and after of trans tunnel modifications.

 

[acedeuce802]

Test fit successful!



I picked up a Howe expansion tank and welded a bracket to fit it to the front of the head. Since I'm not keeping heat, I'll just run the bottom of the tank to one of the heater core outlets on the water pump. Then I'll use the factory coolant overflow tank, and will probably paint that.


IMG_20161111_210207005 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Then I picked up a Griffin Scirocco radiator off summit. It's small (22"x13"x3"), but it doens't look too small in person when comparing to the stock radiator. I wanted a small one to package as tightly to the LS7 intake as possible while maintaning ground clearance, and leaving room for a powerful fan. I got an early 90's Taurus fan, which is one hell of a fan. It's the perfect width for the radiator, but a little tall, but I'll deal with that with some aluminum sheet to cover the gaps. It was $85 brand new, and is a 2 speed fan. 2500 cfm on low and 4500 cfm on high. It uses a hell of a lot of current (~40 amps on high!), so I'm going to PWM it with Megasquirt. That will allow me to get some good control over maintaining the fan speed necessary to cool the motor, rather than just full fan speed until thermostat temp, then nothing until the coolant warms up again. This will save a lot of electrical power. I've got the lower mounts tacked and mostly welded, and the upper will be very simple.


IMG_20161111_210154216 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

 

[acedeuce802]

Here's some of the work on the transmission tunnel. I still need to weld back up the gussets on the interior, but I ran out of welding wire right as I finished the engine bay side. This was done with a Harbor Freight 110V flux core that was converted to DC electrode negative. I was using Lincoln wire until I ran out, then tried the Harbor Freight wire that I took out once I got the welder. Surprisingly the HF wire seemed to weld better. It ran better beads and had less spatter. I'm still getting used to the whole wire feed welder, I've primarily TIG'd up until now.


15000609_10154830642463115_325344414800891114_o by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Now that the engine is back on the stand, I got the oil pan pretty much done. I just need to pick up a new gasket tomorrow. I checked the oil pan to pickup clearance, and dialed it in with a washer. The pickup is at a slight angle, and the low side of the pickup measured to 0.160", the high side measured 0.190" and therefore the middle was 0.175" without a gasket. The oil pan gasket measures to 0.110" so that makes the range of clearances 0.270"-0.300". The spec is 0.250"-0.375" so I think I'm good.


IMG_20161113_170630722 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Current updates are mostly receiving parts. I've been pretty busy with work, traveling, holidays, etc, but I took advantage of Black Friday and picked up some wicked cool parts.

First up is an MS3pro with LSx plug and play harness. I already had a good portion of my engine harness done, but I got scared of making my own harness from scratch. I made a few mistakes on a friends MS3x, which was easy to correct with a through-hole PCB and patch harness, but if I screwed anything up with a fully heat-shrunk harness to the MS3pro, I'd be SOL. So I took the safe route and picked up the plug and play harness. It's nice because it also has a nice fuse box with it, so you really just need power and ground for the engine to run. A lot of people are questioning my choice to go standalone, so here are the main reasons. I like to tinker, so I like to do my own tuning, and I've been using Megasquirt and Tunerstudio for 4 years now. So I feel a lot more comfortable with that rather than learning HPT. MS3pro also has a lot of really nice features that make it above and beyond the old Megasquirts, so it's not like I'm running an ECU that's "worse" than the stock ECU. I also get features such as flex fuel, traction control, push-button start, PWM outputs, etc. I'll be posting up my control box in the near future, I'm using a jbperf CAN-EGT+, which is an expansion board with 4 EGT inputs, 4 ADC's, a bunch of PWM inputs and outputs, serial wideband connection, and I'm going to be mounting both this board, the MS3pro, and 2 14point7 SLC-OEM wideband controllers in a single project box. So it'll basically be a plastic enclosure with 3 35-pin ampseal connectors (2 for MS3pro, and 1 for all the jumpers I'll run from the expansion board and wideband controllers).


15252748_10154876695933115_23731628287024646_o by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Next up are a set of V8r Kooks long tube headers. These really are beautiful. It's almost a shame to sandblast them and coat them, but I believe that's the route I want to take. I haven't 100% figured out what the rest of the exhaust is going to be, but I know it will be an x-pipe and dual magnaflows. I've been talking to a few exhaust guru's, and it sounds like it may be worth running 3" piping past the x-pipe, since the headers don't have a diameter reduction close enough to the collector to make it worth reducing to 2.5" immediately after the header. The current plan is to run slip joints with springs right from the headers, then another set of slip joints before the mufflers, unless anyone has a good argument against that.


IMG_20161204_223214 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Finished up my wiring diagram. I downloaded the wiring diagram for my year, deleted the pages that I'm eliminating from the car, then pasted each diagram in a big photoshop file. Then I erased all wires I didn't need, and rearranged the power circuit, since I'm replacing the stock fuse box with a Bussmann fuse/relay box. Having a full wiring diagram will be super nice when starting wiring, and when trying to modify things in the future. I will then make closer snapshots of each subsystem, label all connections that go off the page, and print them out to make a wiring book for the car. You can't see much detail from this picture, I may post the detailed pictures if I clean up the diagram a little.


Wiring Diagram Screen Cap by Adam Watson, on Flickr

 

[acedeuce802]

Finishing up my ECU/controls box, then I should be full speed ahead with wiring! I'll most likely redo the enclosure on a mill, because my cuts look like crap. Or maybe it doesn't matter that there's gaps everywhere and I can just jam some caulk in it (haha). I flange mounted the MS3pro on the lid so I had a lot of packaging space underneath.


IMG_20170124_211246500 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Mounted on the bottom (blue board) is a JBPerf CAN-EGT+. This is a spin-off of the I/O Extender, but doesn't have any of the expansion ports populated except for the ADC ports. You can select how many you want populated with EGT conditioning circuits, and how many you want left open for analog inputs (total of 8). I chose 4 EGT and 4 analog inputs. I should say thermocouple inputs rather than EGT, I'll be using two for cylinder 7 and 8 EGT, one for oil temperature, and one for diff temperature. Two or three ADC's will be used for an accelerometer (not sure if I need Z-axis yet), and one will be used for fuel input. I have a 220 ohm resistor pulled up to 5V to create a voltage divider. If I don't use the Z-axis accel, I'm not sure what I will use but I'm sure I'll find something down the road.

All circuits that are not the ADC's will need conditioning, as they are going straight to the CPU pins. I have 3 circuits built. Two of them are transistor circuits to power a solid state relay for PWM control of DC motors. This will be to vary the speed of my cooling fan and fuel pump. It sketches me out a little bit to be running both of those critical components off of an expansion board that talks over CAN bus, so I will have switches that if the PWM signal is lost, I can trigger the solid state relay to ground and have 100% duty cycle. The main reason for PWM'ing these is power consumption. The fuel pump draws 13 amps (DW300) and the cooling fan can draw up to 40 (Ford Taurus fan). If I don't need 4500 CFM of air, then I can vary the speed and also limit current draw. The third circuit is an activate low input. Basically it's circuit protection for a ground input switch. I'll be using this for datalog input, because I ran out of digital inputs on the MS3pro (I've got a lot of controls!).

In this picture, the green connectors on the right side are the ADC inputs, and the rest is pretty impossible to see what's going on from this picture. The white connector above the CAN-EGT+ is an Ampseal connector that's really intended for mounting to an ECU, but I am using it as a bulkhead connector. This will be used to pass signals and power from the widebands and CAN-EGT+ board to the wiring harness. The wideband controllers will package to the side of the CAN-EGT+. The 14point7 SLC OEM wideband controllers communicate with the CAN-EGT+ over I2C, which is a form of digital communication. This will guarantee no voltage offsets. It's also cheap, $90 with sensor, each.

More info on this board can be found here: jbperf.com ? View topic - CAN-EGT+

This board uses the same CPU as the I/O Extender, so the documentation (that is non existent for the CAN-EGT+) follows this: I/O Extender Board v1.0 for M2/Extra and MS3

Just note that the only things that come out of the box are ADC's, I2C, CAN, and serial comm (for Innovate wideband), and anything else that the I/O Extender is capable of will need conditioning.


2017-01-24_09-16-15 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

Finally, I've got my Raspberry Pi 3 assembled and ready to mount. I bought a dash off of Welcome to Tuner Studio Dashboards! - TunerStudio Dashboards. I'll be powering it from a 3A 12V-5V regulator. I'll be managing shut down using a switch that sends a signal to a GPIO pin to command shutdown. I replaced my Racepak with this, for unlimited customization of the dash and tuning on the fly.


IMG_20170124_211428621 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

I got my accelerometer working with the JBPerf board. Right now I'm just communicating with the board directly (rather than over CAN through MS3), so I'm only displaying the raw ADC values. I think I can get over 8 ADC's with making a conditioning circuit, so I'll run the 3 axis. I've also decided to add a coolant pressure sensor. This can help detect knock (high cylinder pressure causes a very quick head float pumping pressure to the system), and can save an engine on track. Heads warp when the engine is hot and there is air in the passages, so a blown hose on track could warp the head before the coolant temperature sensor indicates an issue.

 

[acedeuce802]

Buttoned up the Raspberry Pi dash. It's a Raspberry Pi 3, 7" Raspberry touchscreen, mounted in a case that's mounted to my cluster plate. It's running Raspbian Jessie and autostarts TunerStudio on startup. I've seen OBDII reading software, so this isn't just for Megasquirt.

It's powered by a 12-5V 3A regulator from Mausberry Circuits, and has a command that when a GPIO pin is triggered to ground, it commands a safe shutdown. There are switch circuits that are intended to have constant power and switched power, but I just kept it simple. I just have to push the big red button on the right side before killing power to the vehicle. The 3 lights in a row on either side (kind of in a row haha) is a sequential tachometer, so it'll illuminate green, yellow, red as RPM's increase. The red light (shown in the second picture) is a red light for coolant temp warning (just a fail safe in case it's not super easy to see the screen). The big red buttons also have integrated lights, these are the turn signal indicators.

All wiring is crimped and heat shrunk (with glue inside), then terminated to an 8 pin Sumitomo conector (from Corsa Technic) to make it removable from one connector, without pulling any components.


IMG_20170129_172255982 by Adam Watson, on Flickr


IMG_20170129_172227193 by Adam Watson, on Flickr


Snapchat-1522824405 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

 

[GreaseMonkey2000]

I love build threads and v8 build threads just have that much more to love! Look forward to your progress! :icon_cheers:

 

[acedeuce802]

I'm trying to finish up all projects that I can do indoors. I'm really dreading going out to the garage in the cold... I made a little sub-harness for the power window switches that I'm relocating to the center stack area. It took a lot longer than it probably should've.. Everything that may get taken out as an assembly is getting connectors.

IMG_20170130_215548920 by Adam Watson, on Flickr

 

[Gts*Jason]

Nice build

 

[acedeuce802]

I updated a final version of my center stack switch panel, and brought it to life! The top left and right switches are the power window switches from the previous post. Fighter pilot looking switch is a blower motor switch, followed by the engine start button next to it, then the Accusump activation switch. The 2 USB ports at the top right are just bulkheads, and one will be used for Megasquirt communication. The 2 switches just below are a failsafe for my PWM circuits. I'm PWM'ing both the cooling fan and fuel pump, and if the PWM circuit fails, this will command 100% duty cycle. Button at the bottom is for datalog. The circular E-stop kills power to the ECU and fuel pump. The battery kill is obviously a main kill switch. The two knobs just above control traction control and launch control.


16387010_10155160362883115_8319110369273778173_n by Adam Watson, on Flickr


16487711_10155160357548115_7887680035998261698_o by Adam Watson, on Flickr

 

[acedeuce802]

I remade the Raspberry dash plate, it looks 100 times better now. It's a lot heavier than it should be, since I made it on a waterjet. Since it's all 2D machining, and the screen is 0.333" thick, the plate I made it out of had to be 0.375" thick, with a 0.08" backing plate to mount the screen. At least the 0.375" thick piece is HDPE so it's not too heavy, it's actually nice that it feels much sturdier than the Advanced Autosports panel I was previously using. The easy method would be making it on a router so I could take out material. Either way, I'm super happy with how it turned out.

 

[HarryB]

Looks ace!

 

[eypuff]

dash reminds me of a sega gamegear.. i dig.

 

[acedeuce802]

Test fit the headers with sub-frame. Seems clearances are all good to go. Next step is wrapping the headers. It took a long time to make the decision between coating and wrapping, but I decided that a combination of simplicity of being able to do it myself, cost, and effectiveness, as well as the fact that I really like the look of wrapped headers made it worth it. The trade off is possible corrosion of the headers, but I don't think that'll be an issue with the Kooks stainless. This car will see very minimal rain, so they should stay mostly dry, other than moisture obviously.

Got the clutch and flex plate mounted up! The release bearing is also shimmed to set the clearance between the bearing and the clutch forks. I made a mistake when making my adapter plate for the release bearing, so the fluid ports aren't pointed at the openings on the bellhousing, so now I need 90 degree fittings to get the lines to fit in the bellhousing. Those should be in on Tuesday so I can get the trans on the motor, and get everything installed back in the car to continue accessory mock up and wiring.

 

[acedeuce802]

Some small updates. I got the new fuel pump in. I went with a DW300. NB's aren't plug and play for these fuel pumps, so I had to wire in the new connector. I looked all over for how to do the wiring, and came to the conclusion that the wires don't need insulation, just to keep them from touching each other since gasoline is an insulator so it's not conductive. Most heat shrink is not fuel compatible. So I used crimp connections near the fuel pump connector, slid a rubber fuel hose over the splice, then used the factory twisty cord stuff to keep the rubber hose in place, and insulate the ground wire. Before anyone notices, I did remove the regulator that's still on there in the picture.

Next up, I welded EGT bungs on the 7th and 8th runners. I'm only using 2 since I'm not trying to do any fancy individual cylinder trims or anything, just monitoring for safety. 7th and 8th runners should be the hottest, and it's probably good to at least see both banks. It's been a few years since I've welded stainless, not too shabby! Makes me excited to make the exhaust.

I've always thought it was weird that the crank sensor needs plugged in before the starter can be installed. This would make for an annoying install, that you need to get the motor close to the engine bay, plug in the sensor, install the starter, then install the headers. So I put a Deutsch connector in-line that will sit right at the top of the passenger head. These are solid contacts crimped with a proper DMC crimp tool (the joys of working for a racing company, having nice tools to use!). The crank sensor wire is a shielded wire, so I had to put a pin and socket on the shielding to pass that through the connector.

 

[acedeuce802]

I dug into the scrap pile and found enough bends to make an X-pipe today, even though I won't be using it for a while.

Got the new starter in, it's a truck starter. AC Delco 337-1119 and also ordered the 2 bolts, AC Delco 11610787. This starter is 6.5" from flange to back of the starter, so it has about an inch of clearance to the V8roadsters long tubes. There is only one area where clearance is down to about 0.020", but that's on a little sheet metal piece that houses one of the screws to hold the starter case on. I can grind that down a bit, there's extra meat. You can also see the crank sensor and starter wire in place.

 

[keepitsimple]

You’re doing a great job at documenting this build! Keep it up! Can't wait to see the outcome!

 

[100percentjake]

Your welding abilities are giving me feels. Can't wait to see this thing running with that sweet-ass Raspi dashboard.

 

[acedeuce802]

Not as much progress this weekend as I'd like, but it's starting to look like an engine bay at least. I got the engine back in with the headers on so I can start fitting up oil hoses, filter mount, oil cooler, flex fuel sensor, catch cans, etc.

Be warned, V8roadsters long tube headers and the Flyin' Miata LS1 oil pan with remote oil filter mounts are not a good combo. There is VERY little room to work with, and I'm hoping I can find a combination of hose ends that keeps them away from the headers and above the lowest point of the car. I think I have a solution and will post when I have these lines made.

The oil cooler is going to mount perpendicular to the radiator, just to the right of the LS7 intake. I'll have fender vents at some point to expel pressure that builds up in the wheel wells, to help the pressure differential over the oil cooler, but there's going to be a huge high pressure zone in front of it anyway. Then the filter will mount near where it is in the picture, but the filter will hang inboard of the frame rail.

I've also got some coolant hoses that work. I picked up hoses E71317 and E72044. These match the diameters of the radiator and LS1 ports. My Sirocco radiator has 1.5" and 1.75" ports whereas the LS1 has 1.25" and 1.5" ports, and these hoses have the appropriate reduction built in. I'm just taking the 90 degree bends from the ends of each of these hoses, and using a coupler in between.

Also got the Diyautotune plug and play harness test fit on there, and started wiring up the LS7 MAF, since the harness doesn't use MAF and uses an LS1 IAT.