Marc's Public Blog - Cars

Current Music: Les Misérables - Fantine's Arrest
Current Mood: feeling better yet?

"I will see it done", "but Mr le maire...", "I will see it done", "but Mr le maire...", "I will see it DONE!"

Ok, so first thing, Matt absolutely rocks, when he says "Maniacal Engineer", he isn't kidding :)
So, I was really feeling uneasy about going to thunderhill and driving 320 miles plus racing my car at the track with a possibly flaky crank position sensor.

From what I can tell, my sensor did "see" the teeth in the trigger wheel, but the difference in measured resistance was just not a lot, so I think my Tec-II ECU barely saw the teeths (which gets in the way of knowing when to trigger the spark plugs or send gas and air to each cylinder). My guess is that my recent "breakdown" about a week ago was due to heat expansion causing the sensor to be slightly too far from the teeth and the computer then not being able to see the engine position.

Anyway, the fix was to upgrade the magnetic sensor from the default 3/8" to a bigger half inch. My checked it out before installing it, and indeed my ohmeter was showing that it could "see" the teeth from a much bigger distance, and that the resistance differential in ohms was much larger (i.e. a lot easier for the ECU to pick up).
So, great, it's was "just" a matter of drilling a bigger hole in the sensor holder, and putting the new one in, except... that there wasn't enough spare metal around the hole to safely widen it.


But a puny detail like this is not what's going to stop Matt, we were at OSH in no time, he picked some random metal bits, and before you knew it, the half inch sensor was installed and working

and the best part is that I was able to drive my car home with that :)
The remaining pictures can be found here


The part that wasn't as great is that I found out why I didn't feel too hot when I got home. It's because I was (fever stroke again). I'm still hopeful to be able to drive to TH tonight (160 miles) and be on the track tomorrow though

For that matter Wilwood finally returned my front caliper, and the racing pads I had ordered. Talk about last minute... (their fault, I did ship and order all this two weeks ago, and they kept sitting on it. They then swore I'd get it yesterday, and when I called them today, they couldn't find the tracking number. Tss, how lame...)

How well, I guess I'm going to go to work for a few hours, get home, pack my stuff, install my new pads, and head for TH.