Oops, seems i moved some of the August and September pictures around. here's a couple from august:
Here's the ground down upper control arm mount that gave me enough clearance
Shifter and shut-off lever mounts. (From driver to passenger side is battery disconnect, parachute, fuel disconnect)
SEPTEMBER 2012 (since the last september post's pictures were moved around on my site, and i added new ones, here's a better post)
Prototype switch panel
Everything mostly in it's position at this point. Once it's all set i'll pull it all out and do some final bracing/welding.
Rear bumpstop spacers. some 1.5" OD x .5" ID steel tube that i pressed in some nuts, with the tube cut to the length i needed. Just bolted to the frame rail.
Finally installed the driveshaft. I'm 5'9" for reference. 6" aluminum x 70-7/8" between u-joints. Found a truck place in texas that could make it. This is why i had to redo the transmission tunnel.
In an effort to clean up my wiring i made a little power/ electronics section behind the dash. some 1/2" tubing bent, fuse boxes, buss strips, and relays were eventually mounted to the right on the bar going to the firewall
When i mounted the wheels on, i realized i'm going to have to move the oil filter and oil tank. lots of space when aimed straight ahead, but due to new spindles/wider tires (for the road), it hits way before steering lock. Going to move it forward 3" so i also have room to mount a rock shield between the wheel and tank.
At around this point I attempted to start cranking on the motor. I got a decent signal from the crank, but i simply was not getting fuel. I looked, and the carb wasn't giving any. Not wanting to waste more time, i just pulled it and reinstalled the EFI intake. When i went to pressurize the fuel system, i saw my fuel filter head was leaking like a sieve. too much welding, and i hit a dirty porous spot when adding a new bung..so it was shot. luckily i still have my old oil filter head. I pulled the 1-1/8" filter nipple and had a friend CNC me an adapter to fit me 1"-14" fuel filter thread. perfect! (need to upload the picture of the new one) Not often you see a Caterpillar filter on a C&R head. haha. This is the oil filter head as i took it apart. 12an in and out, and an 8an "primer" inlet for pre-start electric pump.
I then attacked the steering and made the tubes. doing a simple cross-over style. When the front end gets to a better ride height, there should be plenty of clearance.
Now, the wall of text...
The weekend of Sept 15th i finally got back my fuel filter adapter, so in all aspects, i was ready to crank it up. Pressurized the system, tweaked some settings and went to town. The issue i had last year was a bad crank sensor, so this year i put in a hall type sensor to hopefully give me a better signal. After about 10 minutes of fiddling with the settings..i got it to run. Still was getting an intermittant loss of sync, but i could at least hold it around 1500rpms for a few minutes. The downside is it was running pig-rich and so only after a few minutes it fouled the plugs in died. HOWEVER. I was able to capture a little of the second attempt before i called it quits for the night:
And yes, i know i need to flip those cinder blocks.
http://youtu.be/1AVqEbvSYJIStill running rough due to the way rich (10-11:1) fueling, and bad crankshaft signal...but this is 100% better than i had it last year. now that im in the ballpark, i just need to whittle it down. I have a few electronic parts coming so i can hook up my oscilloscope to the signal feed and hopefully get that dialed in some more. Also a few resistors and bits that i need to solder in place. If nothing major pops up, I'm hoping by the end of the weekend i can have it moving under it's own power out to the driveway!
As of today (Thursday 9/20) i put a new set of plugs in, and tweaked the ECU a bit more. If my resistors and electronic parts are waiting for me when I get home, I'll try starting it up again this evening in hopes of at least getting it to idle properly. Since it's taken this long just to get it running, looks like i'll be missing the last ECTA run this year.