another Alfa Romeo conversion

[festy]

Exhaust back together, and WB working well.
It showed idling around 12:1, and as soon as I opened the throttle it went >15:1 :O
I quickly realised that I'd been mucking around with KINJFLOW settings trying to lean out the idle a bit, and vaguely remembered reading something about idle using it's own injector pulse values - which would explain why massive KINJFLOW changes wasn't having much affect on idle mixtures
I set it back to my calculated value which resulted in 13:1 at part throttle, I better do a bit more reading before I try and tune this thing

But two 10 minute runs about half an hour apart resulted in an overheating engine again, so decided to try and sort that out.
I pulled the radiator and found that someone had used a nasty stop-leak product in it at some stage, most of the pipes were clogged so started cleaning it out.
While that was soaking, I replaced the water pump, although the new one looks pretty crappy.
The mating surface was nothing like flat, and the pump was full of swarf from the impeller housing machining - not loose chips, but they'd be in the coolant within a couple of minutes of running

waterpump_not_flat.jpg (106.89 KiB) Viewed 7741 times

most of the swarf removed already, there was lots more

waterpump_swarf.jpg (117.3 KiB) Viewed 7741 times

So after cleaning it up and fitting, hopefuly no more pump issues.
Next, I found that half my 2-piece top radiator hose was slightly larger diameter, and was leaking under pressure so replaced that.
Then tested the thermostat, it was barely opening at 95 deg and sometimes not opening at all by 100 - bugger. And when it doesn't open fully, the bottom plunger doesn't close off the radiator bypass hose - so water just circulates around the engine
I removed the thermostat (had to break it out of the housing) and blocked the bypass hose - replacing the thermostat will probably involve machining up a new housing
So put it all back together once the radiator was unblocked, I'm hoping that's the end of my cooling issues.

Next I popped the cam cover off to fix a small oil leak, and thought I'd check the valve clearences while I was there.
They were all far too tight - plus the bearing caps were in bad shape, most of the buckets could do with replacing, and one of the shims was cracked.
One of the exhaust shims looked burnt, so guess there's a valve that hasn't been sealing too well. I'm going to put together a leak-down tester to see if I can gauge the valve conditions.
I've got a slightly warmer set of cams that I'd like to put in, but they're a bit rusty so I've got them in an electrolisys bath to see if they can be brought back to life. If not, I'll pick the best set of standard cams I've got for now.
So this afternoon's job is to pick the best set of cam bearing caps, buckets and cams I have on hand, and try and shuffle shims around to get clearences right.

[Holden202T]

geez you've had your fair share of issues !! atleast your slowly ticking stuff off the lists!

with the cams, can you get the lobes linished ?

[festy]

I could, but even those cams are far from agressive so I'd be better off putting the money towards a hot regrind.
I can polish the bearing surfaces on the lathe, and electrolysis is cleaning up the lobes nicely but I'll probably stick a set of the stock cams in this arvo anyway because these ones won't be anywhere near ready in time and if I leave the engine apart for a week, I'm likely to lose interest in the project and move on to something else

I have reminded myself a few times that 15 years ago this car was a collection of parts rotting away under a tree when I rescued it, so it's in remarkebly good shape if you look at it that way

[Holden202T]

yeah and you have done a hell of a job to get it delcoed and running so you have to stick with it

[festy]

This car has always been known in our house as "the brown alfa", but I think it's real name is Murphy
After changing the water pump, cams and followers the other day, I reversed it out of the shed to get the mower out - and the brake M/C let go, leaving a nice green mess on the floor
So swapped in a spare of unknown condition, filled it up... and the pedal wouldn't budge
So lines back off, cleaned out the ports, still no movement so I jumped on the pedal and it came free. It looks ok, but I might chase up a kit for the original M/C for when this one starts leaking

VE learn must be doing it's thing, because after idling for a while then putting around the yard a bit the VE table is showing some changes that I didn't make, and AFRs are starting to slowly get out of the plug-fouling range.
I've got the MAP and RPM radius set pretty high for VE learn, assuming that while I'm trying to get some sort of ballpark for VE, larger radius values will more readilly match up target cells for learning?
Here's the recent changes:

ve.jpg (138.32 KiB) Viewed 7681 times

My AFRs are still all over the place, but I can't do much at the moment because we've had so much rain that I'd get bogged if I tried to drive it to get some logs

wb_hist.jpg (91.15 KiB) Viewed 7681 times

And I started hacking up a relay coil to drive the tacho, but ended up with this instead:

tacho.jpg (111.01 KiB) Viewed 7681 times

That's not it's final resting spot - I was just making sure it worked before going any further.
As you can see from the pic, the tacho isn't anywhere near the driver's view in RHD versions of these cars, so will probably rip out the speedo and put the new gauge right behind the steering wheel. The speedo is a mechanical drive and the cable is broken, so it's not doing anything for me anyway

Looking at my logs, my alternator isn't charging, so will have to strip it down and see what's going on with it... I'll end up with a completely rebuilt car at this rate

[Holden202T]

your right about the larger radius, it will catch more cells but it will also be less accurate, but as you say for getting in the ballpark its the go, can then tighten the radius as time goes on to get it even closer.

another option if you wish is to use the wideband log histogram, any drive you do just record the log, then play it back to popular the histogram and then use the numbers in there to put into the wideband converter spreadsheet along with your current ve table and your open loop afr table values and it will re-calculate a new ve table to paste in..... this also is not 100% fool proof, you do need to look at the graph after and make sure theres no stupid spikes in it but it will help you get most of the table pretty close with just a few drives.

[festy]

Thanks for confirming my guess on how it works - I'll leave it set as is while I'm getting the numbers roughly right then drop back to "fine tune". It seems pretty tricky to get a VE table in the right ballpark on a 'new' delco'd engine, I used antus' G200W as a starting point but just to sort out idle I've been adjusting cells by huge amounts - I guess the two engines don't have a whole lot in common

I was planning on doing the log->spreadsheet method before I noticed the VE Learn doing it's thing - but I couldn't find that spreadsheet anywhere

[VL400]

Link posted here the other day .. https://pcmhacking.net/forums/viewtopi ... eet#p22004

It needs to find a new home as its a very handy tuning tool!

EDIT: New home is the 12P thread, first post.

[festy]

Well I won't be using that spreadsheet any time soon

This morning I found a spare alternator in amongst my spare parts collection, so pulled it down and gave it a quick look over.
It didn't look too bad so cleaned up the slip ring and brushes, greased the bearings, gave it a clean and swapped it over.

alternators.jpg (82.11 KiB) Viewed 7611 times

The I grabbed my alternator tester and started the engine to see if it was working properly. A few seconds later, the engine just stopped dead.
I had a quick look under the bonnet for any obvious problems, then tried to turn it over but there was obviously no compression

Pulled the plugs and cam cover, and found this...
Both valves open on 1 and 3:

valves_not_happy.jpg (63.97 KiB) Viewed 7611 times

A little more valve clearance than when I set them the other day:

bent.jpg (76.69 KiB) Viewed 7611 times

Broken exhaust camshaft:

camshaft.jpg (55.57 KiB) Viewed 7611 times

Not a good morning for me
The thought of just pushing the car to the back of the shed and forgetting about it has crossed my mind

[VL400]

It makes for an interesting thread, but this Alfa sure is testing you Hopefully not too much damage with it only idling along and not full noise