VR6 Running in the GT6!!!

 This week we put together the oil system. A custom adapter plate to the engine to some AN lines to a remote oil filter. It ended up in the wheel well as it's tight inside the engine compartment. I think that it won't get in the way of the front wheel. If it does it can be moved.

Also found that the oil dipstick wasn't in an ideal location now. Changing how the coolant pipes run made it in a less desirable location. So bent that up and welded on a new holding bracket. Also cobbled up some temporary set up for the fuel pump and piping to the engine.

Then it was a new set of spark plugs and connect up all the electrical fittings. Friday night it was all together but it wouldn't start. Was giving a bunch of errors codes for stuff on the motor. Time to call it a night.

Saturday morning we went out and pulled a spark plug. The plug was wet, so we were getting gas. Checked and no spark. Humm. More looking and there was no power getting to the coils at all. No power to the coils and the other errors were probably all from the same issue. After looking at some wiring information It had to be the power source to the coils (and other stuff ) wasn't working but how was the power run to the coils. Long story short the connector that brought in coil power and a few other wires that didn't go to or through the ECU had the wrong thing plugged into it. Simple fix and voilà it started the next try.

Here is a very short video of it starting and running:

Car On The Wall

 The weather has improved so there was some time spent in the garage. One thing that needed to be done is to sort out the wiring harness. I pulled the harness, nearly complete, from the donor car. along with most of the computers, switches, fuse boxes etc.. To make it easy to sort out I pinned the wiring up on the wall and then plugged in all the computers and switches. This made it much easier to find the wires I need to keep and what I need to ditch.

While it is there I also plan to use it to test run the motor. With the wiring and computers on the wall I ran the cable for the engine ECU to the car and plugged it in. Also ran some grounding straps to connect the critical items. Put the key in and it lights up and unlocks the steering column and shifter. It looks like every error light still lights though, oh well, I won't be using that cluster anyway so no worries there.

The oil filter and dipstick need to be fitted to the engine before I can even see if it turns over. That's next on the "to do" list.

Tach And Speedometer Converted To Electrical

 Since the last entry I've converted the Tach to be driven by a stepper motor. The Tach was much easier as expected. The plate that holds the needle etc. on the Tach is the same as the speedometer but is just missing the Odometer parts. What wasn't expected is that that tach plate from my GT6 was more like the TR7 speedometer insides than the GT6 speedometer insides (or the other GT6 Tach I have). Probably this Tach was replaced at some point and the internals are the newer design. Funny though as now both the speedo and tach have matching insides.

When mounting the stepper motor in the tach, this time, I printed a template on the 3D printer to help mark the holes that I needed to drill. This worked perfectly. Should have thought to use the printer for this type of work sooner.

After calibrating the tach I edited my program to drive both the tach and the speedo at the same time. Been a pretty fun project. Still need to make a bracket to hold the tiny computer onto the backside of the speedo (that computer will drive the tach as well). Now the car can have its new engine while keeping the original, yet altered, gauges