another Alfa Romeo conversion

[Jayme]

if be double checking that ref angle.... for the commanded timing to line up at about 5 deg crank advance, we ended up at 55 deg ref angle

[festy]

Yep will do - but it was a closer starting point than the default 10 degrees
There's still a few things I need to do before I can start trying to tune it - like install a radiator, throttle cable, fuel lines, exhaust, lots of wiring etc.
But getting it running is great motivation to keep going.

[Holden202T]

sounds like its all down hill from here, gotta love the first start!

[briney]

hooray ! good work on sorting it all out.

[festy]

I fitted a radiator and made up replacement hoses for those that no longer fitted, but as soon as I filled it up, water started dribbling out of the water pump shaft seal (I guess the seal went hard some time during the 5 years since I drove it last) but more concerning was the water leaking out from the inlet manifold. By the time I got the plenum off, it was half full of water

The manifold I'm using was off a variation of my engine (a US '85 L-jet spider) that had reliefs at the top of the head's inlet ports so the injectors could spray onto the backs of the valves. The Alfetta engines were all carb fed over here, so didn't have these.

I added these recesses to my head a few years ago (before I had a mill, so had to use a handheld pneumatic die grinder with a tungsten burr which was a horrible job) and hadn't tested for leaks since reassembling. When it leaked everywhere, I thought I might have stuffed up and cut through a gasket mating surface, or possibly that the water jackets didn't line up as well as I thought they would.

So I pulled the manifold off and measured everything, which seemed to all line up ok so put it back together with a good helping of permatex, and left it overnight.
The next day I refilled the radiator, and no leaks! Well... the water pump still leaks, but that's not going to stop me from running the engine at the moment.
All put back together:

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I looked up the plug gap spec for a VN commodore - 1.5mm? wtf! - my valves would hit the tip of the plug with that gap. I set them to about 1.2mm, put everything back together, but it wouldn't start - just the occasional pop.
I re-checked everything, and swapped the plugs for an old spare set with about .7mm gap and it fired straight up.

I let it warm up for a bit but couldn't get it to idle at all, even with the throttle screw wound right in. And it smelt really rich.
I checked the KINJFLOW and it was set to 0.07 for some reason, so changed to 0.1 and it liked that a lot better. I set the ref angle by ear, just changing a degree or two at a time until I hit a smoothish idle. I'll set it properly later, but at least it runs now.

The engine was really hunting around, I wasn't sure what was going on until I looked at the logs later. It turns out my spark table is trashed for some reason. I should probably start a new cal from scratch, if the KINJFLOW and the spark map are corrupt, there's probably a lot more gone wrong too.

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So it's still slowly progressing, but I need to do something about an exhaust before I go much further.
I got about 10 minutes of logs while I was trying to sort out a decent idle - the fact that it idled for that long without stalling is an improvement over the old carb setup already

[Jayme]

good work. me and my mate were saying the same thing about the datto 1400 yesterday, it may have some flat spots and funny bits in the tune still but the drivability, power and reliability shits alll over the carby setup !

[Holden202T]

yeah i think your idea of a fresh cal is the go, that one sounds dodgy at best!

good news that its running half ok now though!! few days of tinkering and it'll be sweet as im sure!

[festy]

Water pump swapped out with an old but more watertight unit I found in the shed, all reassembled and no major leaks so off to a good start!
I primed the fuel pump, hit the button and it started first go, got to love EFI reliabillity

I saw something strange in the logs though, every 5 seconds like clockwork the injector BPW drops sharply at the same rate, slowly increases for one second then jumps back up. It seems to be time related rather than triggered by a condition.
Any hints which params in the xdf I should start looking at?

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[Holden202T]

that ones got me stumped, i would expect to see the engine rpm change from a drop that sharp!

[antus]

Chart up your other sensors and check for any spikes, presumably the ecu is reacting to an error on one of the other inputs. I had something similar to that, but I could see the glitch on the rpm line that was casing rubbish VE lookups. Also the current VE data in the datastream might provide some clues.