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Well, I couldn’t find my carter fuel pump… thought I’d put it somewhere strange in my room, or in the workshop somewhere. Today I looked through my room, and Bob and I went through EVERYTHING in the workshop and couldn’t find it. Thinking that I had put it somewhere perilous and it’d fallen into the depths of a crap-o-lanche, I decided to clean my room tonight.

So, on went my merry day, getting more bits for the gemini, and doing lots of stuff – working out the standard wiring loom and what we can probably take out, making and installing a new positive wire, negative wire etc. Installed all the fuses and stuff, then plugged the positive onto the battery, and it lit up! Hooray! *dances*

Ok, so when you turn on the hazards extra lights flash on the dash, and the fan blows, and the tail lights will need looking at, but it’s minor stuff at this stage. So, finishing that I looked for more things to do. I knew the clutch cable wasn’t in exactly the right position, and it was buggery tight, so we looked at that.

It seems that it was well and truly beyond buggery tight (probably since the engine was in the right spot now) so we tried and we tried, then I put on some safety goggles and cut it in half. Problem solvered! I’d already bought a replacement one from Rare Spares a few months back in the giant buying spree, so that was all good. Five minutes and the new cable was in, and about half an hour of finding bolts and bits and the bracket was in. All good.

So that was done, and as I was cleaning up, I noticed the sender off one of the two oil pressure gauges was sitting on top of the shelf. I thought I’d grab it and see if I could find the right fitting to make it into a fuel pressure gauge for when the car was setup. Then I noticed that it was sitting by itself on the shelf. Previously there was two oil pressure gauges, a 7″ incar LCD television, AND MY CARTER GOLD FUEL PUMP!

It came flooding back to me, remembering that I wasn’t going to take the TV to positronic, and that I’d put the fuel pump up there because it was up with all the other fuel and electronics gear. Seems that the whole shelf full of stuff has gone missing, some absolute prick has stolen it off me.

That solved the mystery of the missing fuel pump, but it also means that due to the fact that Christmas is so damn close, and money’s so tight, I’m not likely to be able to get the car running until well into the new year. *sigh* more setbacks.

So, with all that we decided to go home and get some food. I went out first and opened the boot of my Dad’s car (which I was driving since the radiator thing yesterday) so I could throw the gauge sender in there so I wouldn’t lose it. In a moment of non-thinkingness as I tend to have, I threw the keys in and slammed the boot.

It didn’t occur to me until Bob walked around the corner and I thought about going to unlock the car that I was holding a round smooth object (the sender) rather than a bunch of pointy keys. It was at THAT point it did, and I burst out laughing, completely losing it in a fit of real laughter. Making a long story short, we got a coathanger and messed with it for ages, then Bob thought about using his keys as a joke, and it opened the boot and the driver’s door. Hooray.

Oh, and we got the Positronic 2005 pictures from Mitchell’s camera. I’ll resize and rename them later and upload them. For now, back to Project Entropia.

So, ages back when the car got broken into, whoever did it must have had a go at the key part of the ignition, the pins got all messed up and it didn’t work properly. I replaced it with a rather dodgy switch and button on the end of a wire run that I had lying around, and most of the time when I indicated, or used too much power the stereo would turn off, the lights would dim and stupid stuff would happen. This got rather annoying, and eventually I worked out that the cause of it was the long wire run itself was causing too much voltage drop in the system itself.

Before I left for positronic I made it so the thin-wired switch that I was using was as close to the original wiring as possible, reducing the voltage loss and hopefully fixing the problem. It fixed the voltage problems, but it was still hanging out in the open and the long wire run to the button and relay that I had setup in the past was still there, dropping out of the little shelf it sat on, and looking rather dodgy. I bought myself another momentary button and some crimp connectors the other day, meaning to fix it all up that day, and as usual the CBF kicked in and I lost interest.

Tonight I was out for a smoke and decided to do it, so I did. Fatter wires for more current flow, soldered connections and the switch + new button are now firmly mounted into the dash. I’ll get a pic later/next time I have the camera out to show what it looks like, but for now just feel safe in knowing that it’s in a position where it can’t be kicked, it’s well wired, and hopefully should work fine from now on… hopefully fixing all the voltage problems in that part of the system on the van.

Next thing to do on the van is hook up some relays for the headlights, it seems that the dodgy standard wiring isn’t allowing enough power to get to the lights, so what I’ll do is use the exisiting wiring that runs to the lights to activate some relays that feed power directly (through a fuse, of course) from the battery through the relay and into the lights. That should correct a few of the “can’t see shit at night” problems, since I think the bulbs are good, but not getting enough power (8-10v most of the time).

So, I stopped in Mooloolooba where my parents were staying for their Christmas holidays, and while I was talking to Dad he mentioned that he’d blown up the radiator on the Camry. It’s about 15 years old, and it’s a cheap japanese car, so these things are bound to happen.

The top tank had split along one of the parts near the filler cap, so to fix it there would have to be a new end tank welded on, and we were quoted $170 for that. Then there was the other option of buying a whole new radiator for $240 – only another $70 more. The fins on the old radiator were flaking off, and there was some nasty corrosion around some of the tubes, so for the difference it wasn’t worth having to replace the radiator in six months when the fins started busting holes in the tubes.

Mum transferred the money into my account, and Bob and I went to the radiator place and bought the replacement radiator today – took me all of about ten minutes to fit it – slide the new radiator into the holes in the rubber boots on the bottom, bolt the little brackets back into the radiator support rail, and hook up the hoses – done. Well, the fans had to go on, but I’d already done that when the radiator was sitting out of the car, seven screws and about two minutes to do that.

Once it was in, Bob and I filled it up, ran the car for about ten minutes to clear the air out of the system, letting it run until it was hot and the thermostat opened up – good as new – if not better!

That’s another thing to put on my “can do to cars” list, hooray for me.

Ok, so since I have this week off, I’m working on the Gemini since it’s such a priority to get it on the road at the moment. Today Bob and I went to a wrecker and found a nice bosch throttle position sensor – three wire, good mounting and D-shaft actuation – the one that Repco had for ~$100 or so. That didn’t come with the plug and wires, nor any idea of how things worked with each other. So, that was free – all I paid for was a bunch of sweat and an energy drink after wandering around in the wreckers for half an hour or so – damn it was hot today.

I did a bit of work on the fuel rail, and the injectors sit nicely in it now, once we have the right o-rings it’ll be sweet. I drilled out the injector bosses to 12.5mm with my handy-dandy drill press, so all is good on that front. I had to sand the plastic on the top part of the injectors (where they sit in the fuel rail) so they would fit, but that was better than taking more metal out of the injector bosses as they are down to about 2mm thick now.

The coolant temperature sensor I’d gotten for the first manifold I was going to use was still in the old manifold, and I hadn’t actually found anywhere to screw it into the new manifold. Luckily enough for me, there’s a threaded hole on one side of the coolant run through the manifold that fits the sensor perfectly – doesn’t even need the adaptor I had gotten to fit the sensor originally. Bonus for me!

Once that was done, we worked out how many of the “Bosch Style” plugs we needed, and hooray, I hadn’t lost enough to mean we were short – one for each injector, one for coolant temp, and one for the Bosch Idle Air Controller, which I may hook up later.

So the fuelling’s going to be all good soon (hopefully) and the ECU will know how things are going, so where next did we go? Big Dad’s Pies for some snackage. Hey, we needed food! All that work had left us hungry

After scoffing some pies and being thoroughly happy with that, we were back into it – I got the bolts in for the starter motor, and I think we’ve got all the right bolts in the right spots for the gearbox now, nothing more to do on that front.

So, that was the end of the day – by that point it was about 1600 hours, and time to go home to beat the traffic (we didn’t).

So the next step is to get the injection manifold bolted on – that’s going to be interesting, since bolts won’t work because of how close the head is to the brake booster, and for the same reason longer threaded studs won’t either. I think what we are going to have to do is use LONG studs, square off the ends of them and have them sitting in the manifold so that some bolts can be put into the bottom, then the studs worked into the head, then nuts over the ends of them to tighten the manifold to the head.

Once that’s done, I’ll make a little plate to hold the throttle position sensor in the right spot, since the holes on the throttle body don’t match the ones in the sensor – that should be just a case of a few well-placed screws and washers, and a 3mm thick plate of aluminium.

After that, making the engine bay loom for the wiring – I want to keep it relatively nice. Two circuits for the injectors, a run for coolant and throttle position sensors, a signal wire for RPM, I’ll have to work out how the air box is going to work, then the wiring should basically be done for the engine bay. Things like the dual fuel pump relays – two pumps, a relay for each – and the priming setup for the low-pressure system will be done as soon as I gt the wiring in order for them too. Then it’ll be time to work out how the Gem’s wiring works as far as things go with power for the ECU and re-wiring the ignition setup.

I guess I should explain the priming system on the low-pressure side. When you turn on the MegaSquirt, it gives a ~2 second pulse to the fuel pump and stops if it’s not seeing sufficient RPM by then. If it does, then it’ll continue to supply power to the pump relay – if not, it’ll shut off. This is fine to prime the high-pressure system, and prime the injectors ready to go and have proper pressure for starting.

Since I’m running a low pressure pump to a surge tank, then a high pressure system only in the engine bay, there may be a condition where the surge tank has drained itself sufficiently (say if I leave it for a week or so without running it) that the high pressure system won’t be able to fill itself and have full pressure by the time you go from off to on to start. What I’m going to do to stop this sort of thing happening is to have a button – either in the engine bay or in the cabin – that will allow me to manually activate the low pressure fuel pump only. This will mean that it’ll prime itself, then push fuel through to the surge tank to fill it, thus pushing any and all air out of the lines – at least on the low pressure side. Hopefully this will allow the high pressure system to only have fuel to pull through, and no issues with cold starting will happen. Hooray!

Anyway, nothing to do, too much time to do it in, or something – I’m off for now!