Warning long read:
Well, it took much longer today than I anticipated to get the dart in shape to try start her for the first time with the new motor. As always, anything that can go wrong did.
I got a late start as I spent way too long on non-car projects in the morning. First thing I did was have a brain fart to check the motor mount bolt. Sure enough, those 2 important bolts were not tightened down as they should have been. A motor doing cartwheels in the engine bay would have been fun but disastrous. I got the fuel lines tested and sure enough the only place in the lines that I would have guessed to be perfectly fine, was the only place to leak (the large 1-3/4"O-ring that seals the top on the Aeromotove fuel filter body). And on the weekend, NOBODY had the right O-ring for me. So I got a size larger diameter and made due. It actually fit well, even if the fuel filter's doesn't quite fully assembly donw to the last turn the way it's intended. It is well sealed now even better than the tiny O-ring. As usual I forgot about 30 things and had to make about 3 trips to the store for various fluids, and small crap that I lost or didn't have. I finally get all the fluids in, and everything looked over well enough that I can sense the start up moment and my nerves are on end with fear, and hope. only 1 last thing I needed before fire up was my LM-1 wide band oxygen sensor that I need in order to tune the car correctly and see where the fuel ratio is at. Sure enough 2 hours of REALLY frustrating searching turns up nothing. I did have a AEM gauge style wideband and was fearing that hookup, but it turned out to be just 2 wires, since I had already routed the main harness last week. But I didn't trust that meter at all, so I was still nervous and frustrated but be damned I'm going to try start it.
So I get to starting it. Bring down the laptop, double check the sensors, all looks good but I just know something is going to mess up. If it starts I have a million things to do, like check the fuel ratio, check the timing look for leaks and bad things happening. As usual I'm a complete mess of nerves and adrenaline, shaking in my fear of starting the thing. But I try it anyways. Turn on the ignition, fire up the fuel and punch in the cheap code on the SNES controller. Everything livens up. So I reach for that starter button. She turns over for a bit, than makes a few coughs. I assume it's timing so I go turn the distributor to retard the ignition a bit. Try again. Nothing. turn dist, try again, small cough. The pattern is the same. Just a small bit of coughing at the first few turns then nothing. I try adjusting fuel, I start logging data form the micro to the laptop. Nothing on sensors looks bad, but for some reason I suspect its' not scheduling any injector pulses but I suspect that might just be a bug in the program not display it since it's my older program. After 30 minutes o fattempts and adjustments, I suspect the micro is choosing not to provide fuel. I pop up to the computer with suspicions of the "Disable injectors" bit/flag not being cleared. For safety reasons I require that this bit be cleared from the flash so that I know the flash isn't in the default state where all the values and flags are 1's. By setting it 0 I know that I've programmed that settings as opposed to them all being messed up and wiped. Sure enough after a bit of monkeying around, my new program isn't clearing the bit, and it's showing me that I have it cleared. Stupid programmer... With that fixed, I head back down. It's 9:00 PM but I want to be able to sleep not toss and turn all night. So I hook up the micro, punch in the cheat code and cross my fingers. As usual the adrenaline is pumping and I'm a ball of nerves on drugs. Cough and cough and starts holding it's own idle but way down at 300-500RPM and it's struggling badly. I manage to get to the distributor in time to turn it and advance it a bit and the car really starts running nicely, but is doing so at 2000 RPM. Even with a set of mufflers on the car, and a new much larger set hanging off the tail pipes, that car is still very loud and scary mean sounding. Thumps the frigging ground and makes your chest thump from the sound pulses. I'm freaking out trying to check things but manage to see the timing is at 0 degrees before I decide to kill it. I spend some time to turn the distributor to where I think about 15 degrees advanced will be and spend 1/2 an hour contorting my finger tips to move a wrenching to tighten the hold down. Try using a wrench when all you can do is use one finger tip from each hand through some very awkward contorted areas, with hot coolant, headers and motor parts in your way, then do that with enough dexterity to put the other end of the wrench on to the bolt at a 45 degree angle and turn it, then flip it and repeat that about 6 times. That wasted a lot of time and it's now 9:30 PM but I need to know that I got the timing close, so I fire it up again and the idle is still way up at 2000, so I make some turns on the adjuster and it's still idling way too fast and something is binding so that the throttle body isn't shutting down further as it should. With fear of neighbors growing intolerant of me, I decide to kill the motor, but not before I stick my hand in front of the intake and get whacked hard on the knuckles by the fan blades flying past at 2000 RPM. I check and the skin is a bit torn up, but I still have fingers attached, so I call that a good leasson not to be repeated. With the car off, and the keys thrown out to the seat like I were withdrawing my hands from a diseased snake's grasp, I head back into the house a complete ball of nerves, shaking and generally pumped up on way too much adrenaline and anxiety. Then I write this crappy writeup which I can now sum up in one quick sentence.
ITS ALIVE!!I'll be sure to check things out, fix the idle, fix my air cleaner problems and get some video of the car to post up here. I'm sure video won't do justice to how that car shakes you and make your chest thump from the exhaust noise. But I'm sure you'll get a small impression of what 600 horsepower worth of raw terror in automotive form looks, sounds and feels like. Late in the months to come I'll get you drag track and auto X video if I can. And of course the obligatory burnout video
Time to settle my nerves down now, and prepare for the real fire up and break-in procedures tomorrow. Maybe if I start drinking it won't scare the crap out of me to be around that thing...
Please tell me I'm not the only one who turns into a ball of nerves and nearly disfunctional during fire-up on a motor like this or after having done significant mechnical/safety impacting changes to a car like this?
Greg
