Milwaukee Midget

[Milwaukee Midget]

Combo tow bar/air dam from a nice piece of "angle iron" very agricultural!

Good eye there, Rex.

While I didn't grow up on a farm, I went to a high school that had a lot of farm kids. In fact, one of the most fascinating trade shows I aver attended was the Farm Progress Show, which was hosted on a farm that was operated by the family of a High School buddy of mine in 1982.

My dad grew up on a farm, and Grandpa Conrad had his share of scrap metal to trip over in the tall grass by the chicken coop. I even came across my dad's glass pack muffler that had spent some time under his Mercury - very James Dean. A lot of my friends had broken balers and rusting harrows behind the barn.

So yeah, I come by that honestly. Unfortunately, this time, I had to shell out cash rather than just cut it off of an old McCormick manure spreader.
 

[Milwaukee Midget]

Speaking of spreading manure -

I'll be on the phone tomorrow with Holley again.

For some reason the Digital Dash - a touchscreen unit with logging and programming capabilities - froze up on me. I get the dash up, but when I hit the Menu button, it locks up and no further touching will open up any further menu items.

I'll put on a pot of coffee . . .

DSCN1288 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

[Rex Schimmer]

You know what they say about manure spreaders? "Only piece of equipment that John Deere will not stand behind"!

Now back to Bonneville cars.

Rex

[Milwaukee Midget]

I sometimes wonder how it is that Holley stays afloat.

All I wanted to do was program the dash. I explained to Chris - the guy on the Holley tech line - what was happening. The touch screen function wasn't functioning, I would get to the "menu" button, touch it, it would pull up a screen with 6 different options and touching any one of them would do nothing. Shut down the ignition, lather, rinse, repeat.

He asked me what the engine was, and after telling him that I'm running a destroked MG/Rover K-series 16 valve twin-cam in an Alpha-N iteration , he tells me this - "I'm not familiar with it, but you'll need to backdate both your ECU and your dash firmware to make these work together."

I felt like I had gone to the doctor, explained my symptoms and was told to stand on the refrigerator, genuflect to the Northwest and ignite my next fart with a Bic lighter.

So I went on line and found copies of the aforementioned firmware programs - and just so you're all aware, flashing a Holley ECU takes about 45 minutes - BACKED UP MY CURRENT VERSIONS AND TUNES - and followed the plan Holley had set forth.

I put the early version of the dash firmware on a flash drive, plugged it in, synced the dash to the ECU, attempted to upload the tune and - the Holley program just shut down.

Wouldn't take the tune, car wouldn't start - and we had worked WAY to damned hard to lose it - so I reinstalled the newer version of the program and vowed to figure out a work-around.

Thank goodness the reboot and monkeying around didn't corrupt the file.

So I'm thinking about it all day - looking at the Holley Forum - poking around on Google. The problem with the Holley forum - and honestly, just about any forum that let's topics be started by outsiders - is that they become so large and unwieldy that search parameters are virtually useless. "Reboot", "backdate", "touch screen"  - yep, there's that word -  and in the context of nothing that's going to help me today.

Until I came across a guy who - completely off topic - said he had used his mouse to reprogram his dash, and that is was easier and faster.

And as certain as I'm sitting here cussing Holley up and down, simply plugging the mouse into the port on the screen allowed me to go in and do every single bit of configuration that needed to be done.

There was an assumption on the part of Chris at Holley that I wanted to fix the problem of a nonfunctional touch screen. But in reality, ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS SET UP MY DASH. I wish he would have simply said, "You know, a quick work-around is to plug a mouse into the USB port and go that route".
 
DSCN0130[1] by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

[desotoman]

Glad to hear you got the problem solved. Since you upgraded the rev limiter I think you need to update the Tach and add a 12 onto the display.

Tom G.

[Milwaukee Midget]

I don't want to seem too pretentious. 😏

[Milwaukee Midget]

https://youtu.be/KOO5S4vxi0o

[wheelrdealer]

Chris:

I love a simple solution to a complex problem. I just hate the hoop jumping to finally get the solution. I don't know much about the British cars but I always heard you just blame Lucas Electric and everyone says, Ahh, that's it.

BR

[manta22]

Glad to hear you got the problem solved. Since you upgraded the rev limiter I think you need to update the Tach and add a 12 onto the display.

Tom G.

Nigel Tufnel only went up to 11.

[Milwaukee Midget]

Glad to hear you got the problem solved. Since you upgraded the rev limiter I think you need to update the Tach and add a 12 onto the display.

Tom G.

Nigel Tufnel only went up to 11.

True, Neil, but the Twin-Cam Quartet is much louder than any Marshall stack I've ever played through.

[desotoman]

Nigel Tufnel only went up to 11.

You are correct, but I don't see the relationship between the two. 

Tom G. 

[Milwaukee Midget]

Been a solid week of steady progress on the little details that always get pushed to the back burner.

Came across a sheet of PVC at Homeopathic Despot and was able to clean up the air-dam/bumper/tow-bar arrangement quite a bit. Yeah, Rex, I'm losing some of the agrarian aesthetic, but it's still unmistakably an MG:

DSCN0143 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

DSCN0144 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

I also wrapped the header and installed a heat shield where the exhaust passes close to the water intake for the radiator. Not shown is the insulation I put on the underside of the hood to prevent the paint from blistering. And Mark - note the use of coupling nuts on the exhaust header studs - which gives me more thread engagement and have been drilled and are ready to be safety wired. (It's a long story involving a friend who keeps dropping parts on race tracks) :

DSCN0141 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

Aircleaners arrived as well - UNI Motorcycle units. It's not an ideal arrangement, but they'll keep salt from getting kicked up into the throttle bodies.

DSCN0142 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

AND - crazy as it may sound, the electronic dash has a GPS speedometer feature. All I needed was the optional GPS unit to plug into the dash and now my data logs and monitoring will include the speed at which the car is traveling:

DSCN0145 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

[4-barrel Mike]

GPS speed display will enhance the GoPro videos.   

Mike

[Milwaukee Midget]

Well, I suspect many of you are packing up for the Wendover trip - Be Safe - Go Fast - Have Fun.

I sent off my WOS entry, so I'm about 5 weeks out on my road trip. Hope to see many of you there. I understand the appeal of Speedweek, but big crowds are not my thing, and I really like the vibe of the USFRA event.

I almost soiled myself last week. I wrapped the header and hung an exhaust pipe on the Midget and started it up.  My experience with header wrap is that you tend to get some smoke off of it before it cures in place, so the smoke coming from the outside of the header was to be expected.

What WASN'T to have been expected is blue-white smoke coming from the TAILPIPE.

My heart sank. Whisky Tango Foxtrot?

We had pulled the engine off the dyno in a solid state of tune, I'd started the car in situ once everything was hooked up, and now I can't see to the other side of the garage?

Called Mark and made arrangements to borrow his leakdown checker and picked it up Thursday. I had stuck a camera with a periscope mirror down the holes, and there appeared to be a minor scratch in the # 2 cylinder, but leakdown was right where it had been when we pulled it off the dyno. The concensus was that it was nothing abnormal or extreme enough to have caused this.

The only thing different was that when I fired up the engine in the car, I hit the Accusump to prelube the engine - which dumped about an extra quart-and-a-half of oil into the crankcase and left it there - something one does not want to to, especially with low tension ring packs and idling at the lower end of the oil pressure range. And that appears to have been the problem. New plugs, and all is well, but I have to confess - for a few days, I thought the whole thing was tanked.

I did an alignment job on it today. Kind of proud of figuring this one out -

I took two pairs of welding magnets and laid a 30" x 1" piece of CRS across it . . .

DSCN0154 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

and set up my laser-level toward the back, aligning it with the side of the tire - and double checking against the wheel.

DSCN0146 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

Go to the front and measure the back of the tire -

DSCN0148 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

 and then the front of the front tire-

DSCN0149 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

calculate the difference, and you've got a fairly accurate assessment of your toe-in. And if it needs adjusting, just take 2 pairs of scrap metal and sandwich some lithium grease between them, and the steering preload and resistance evaporates -

DSCN0152 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

Factory toe-in is 1/8" - I'm at 1/4" and I'm fine with that. If it had stock 145 80R 13s on it, it would probably be closer than when it rolled off the line at Abington on Thames.

Also got the new fire bottles installed -

DSCN0151 by Chris Conrad, on Flickr

I'd want to run down a checklist, but I think I can say with a degree of confidence that if I really REALLY wanted to push it, it could be ready to race next week. But that's not the plan, and if I've learned anything over the years, it's STICK TO THE PLAN . . . unless the plan sticks it to you.

[wheelrdealer]

Chris:

I am stealing that budget turn plate idea! Thanks.

I have had starter motor eating flywheel gremlins. I think I have it fixed this time. Waiting on a flywheel from Quartermaster and the engine can go back in. I can't get on the wheel dyno until the 21st but should be ready after that. We are headed out on Tues. Sept 7th looking to arrive at WoS by mid-day Wed. I'll be headed across from St. Joseph, MI.

BR