Category Archives: Instrumentation

Update: Tachometer working and more

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Here’s some footage of the car from about 2 weeks ago. I mounted my GoPro to my head for the video.

I got the car aligned a few days ago. It’s really coming together:
Album of recent pictures for June of 2014.

The car is really drivable. It has an amazing sound. I have some minor tuning to do (mainly want to get a tune that allows the motor to hit its very realistic 7700 RPM red-line. Right now I’m “limited” to “only” 6500 RPM. Now that I have the tach working I feel much more confident winding it to the limit. It has an addictive sound. I’ll get some video of that in the next few weeks.

-=FeriCyde=-

The first sounds of the Aluminator

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I wanted the next video posted after first start to be a first drive — but there was a lot to be done (it’s evident if you watch the first start that there’s a lot of road in front of me before a first drive, but I was optimistic).

Still, the sound is pretty amazing. That motor has a wonderful sound and reminds me a bit of my Mach 1 on steroids. The coolant is now in the motor and there don’t appear to be any leaks (hallelujah). The transmission fluid is in the TR3650 and I’ve bolted the shifter into place for hopefully a few years. I have 1 gauge wired (fuel pressure) and the following remain: Water temp, trans temp, diff temp, oil pressure. I also have to wire up the vehicle speed sensor to the speed dial and to the Coyote PCM (and possibly find some way to get the stock electronics to see this output signal as well — since it runs the speedometer). The tach wire needs to be connected as well. I still need to wire the fan up, and the starter wiring is in a temporary (rigged) position. I’m still not happy with the route it takes to get to the starter, so I may end up cutting and re-splicing it. The ground situation to the motor/trans is still in limbo as well, since I don’t like the way it runs as well.

It sounds like a lot, but really we’re in the final stretch here. I’m buttoning things up and the car is quickly coming together. Here are some recent pics of the build for the curious:

Enjoy!

-=FeriCyde=-

Wiring and Fuel System 6/10/13

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What a busy week. My wiring harness is coming together slowly — I’ve been busy snapping together the components that make up the new harness and whittling down the stuff that made up the old harness that I need to keep — mostly sensors and some odds and ends. I have a ton of pics to share — we’ll start with these three photo albums.

The engine is coming together, but the odds and ends of the build in the engine bay are not exactly coming cheap, time-wise. A lot of small issues prevent me from having this complete — I’m almost there though. I have some bracket work to do and some painting — it’s close!

This album shows the wiring decomposition progress (looks really ugly, but it’s honestly not all that bad once you get into it). It’s extremely important that you label everything — I have a label machine and I wish I had labeled a lot more stuff while I was pulling it apart. I’m making sure to add labels as much as possible during the build.

Fuel system pictures — basically I had to cobble together a new fuel system wiring harness using the old harness connection points and a tank harness from a 94-97. Bonus! The new harness is a good 2 feet longer than the stock one, meaning I can drop the tank all the way to the ground without having to disconnect the wiring :) Well, it was there, so I took advantage of it. Some zip ties hold the excess to the frame.

Finally, here’s some youtube video of the present state of the build:

It may not look like it, but we’re nearing the end of the build! The hard stuff is dwindling and the rest is some trivial wiring and bolting together of stuff — very exciting moment to live in.

Stay tuned, it gets faster from here :)

-=FeriCyde=-

Engine bay assembly / painting / wiring

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My engine bay work continues — I’m almost done painting the primer coat (John Deere Yellow). I’m running the wiring for the battery relocation. I decided to use the hole that was in the firewall for the hood release cable — I drilled a “sister” hole to the right (looking toward the back of the car) and enlarged the hole.

The boss control pack wiring harness will be run shortly through the passenger side of the firewall using the hole for the original wiring harness. My buddy Matt explained that I could just pop the grommet (visible in the imgur album — barely visible in the video) and cut it a bit to allow for the coyote wiring.

I “deleted” the passenger air bag and fabbed a nifty bracket so I have a place to set the power distribution box (PDB) and a spot to easily hook up to the ODB2 (on board diagnostics port version two). The original ODB2 will also be live if I continue my original plan of using both PCMs (the factory one, mainly for doing instrument cluster duty).

Here’s the video below:

And an update from last week (5/10):

Here’s an imgur album that’s related to the work — some of the pictures are more useful than the video as the lighting on my 5/19 video is pretty crappy (my gopro was discharged — I need to charge it but can’t find the cable ATM).

We’re nearing the final engine fitting into the engine bay, which is so awesome. I’ve been inching down the road for months toward this day. I am thrilled to be this close.

Enjoy!

-=FeriCyde=-

Time to find out what my car weighs..

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Update: My 2000 GT convertible weighs in at 3460 lbs!

Front axle: 1980 lbs.

Back axle: 1480 lbs.
The 2000 GT on the scales

The bad news is the weight distribution of this car is (as expected) pretty horrible at 57% front / 43% rear. The good news is that the swap should vastly affect this distribution — I’m hoping to reduce the front end weight by as much as 300 lbs (and add about 50 to the rear), which would change this to somewhere around 52/48 (much better weight distribution) — I’ll weigh it again and we’ll see how close I was.

Now for the sad news: I thought I could easily build a cantilever scale.

Purchased a tension scale that can handle 450 lbs off of amazon, and then attempted to use some ramps and some ingenuity to build a cantilever scale in the hopes of getting some usable numbers like the ones above.

Except that my first attempts at this have all been pretty sorry on the accuracy front — plus, (and this is kind of important), I had no reference data to determine if my numbers (even if I thought they were good) were even in the ballpark of what the car weighs.

A ways back, one of my friends (Dustin, you’re the man) suggested I simply take the car to a truck scale and get it weighed. I really tossed this idea (and I shouldn’t have) because I wanted something I could use, repeatably, to track the progress of each modification. But it’s sound, anyway, because as it turns out, I need to know if my scale is accurate anyway — and if I don’t have reference data, I can’t know this.

I think I may finally be onto a good mechanism for the scale (and will of course, publish this data as soon as I can), but in the mean time, I’m taking Dustin’s advice, and taking the car to a truck scale before I start the project. I’ll simply have to experiment a bit along the way with the toy mechanism — and hopefully before I’m done with the project, have something to share.

I’m still waiting on the fuel system for the car — not that it’s holding me up.

Steady as she goes!

-=FeriCyde=-