Before Xmas I swapped my old brake booster back in. I decided that the Girling booster I’d put in early this year in the hopes that it would be more rigid, had a leak or something because I was losing brake boost vacuum. So the Girling booster came out and my old ATE went back in. The clip that fastens booster to brake pedal arm is a helova lot easier the 2nd time. It confused the crap out of me the first time.
I also sent off the latest oil sample and it confirmed that I’ve got bearing problems and fuel getting into my oil. Nice. Both are a little hard to understand. This is one of my Metric Mechanic bottom ends and the injectors are newish pricey OEM. Irksome. Not irksome enough to do anything about it tho. I want to let the bottom end go a couple more oil changes and see if a miracle occurs. Figuring out which injector is leaking is a huge pita so I’m going to try to solve the problem with optimism and charisma.
The bearing issue, per oil analysis got me to thinking about oil pressure while away with the family over Xmas. I have big 20psi OP warning lights and I’ve not seen them illuminate when they shouldn’t, but Old #6 used to have OP logged to the Traqmate and now I’m wishing I had that data to review as I ponder wtf us bearing material doing in my oil. So I resolved to connect my gauges back to the Traqmate. Oil and fuel pressure, oil and coolant temp. Getting OP to the Traqmate had been tricky because I had a mechanical oil pressure gauge that I really liked. So in order to get OP to the data logger I’d had to put in a separate OP sensor, then after struggling with calibration for months, I’d finally McGuyvered a precision 18v power source so I could get reliable OP data out of the sensor and into the Traqmate.
As I pondered connecting gauges to the Traqmate once again, the thought of revisiting the hassle associated with getting that OP data logged made groan wearily.
So I decided to lose my much loved mechanical OP gauge and get a Stack gauge to match the others. The charm of Stack gauges is that in they have a data out for the Traqmate, will change color at a programmed threshold, and will also trigger external alarms (or whatever).
Just after that effort Kish pointed me towards some outfit called Race Capture who’ve put together a programmable datalogger that can talk to an Android device via Bluetooth. It has a bezillion inputs and outputs, and you could make a cheap tablet show any kind of display you wanted. If I had all my gauges to do over again, I’d do that Race Capture thing.
I spent much of today in the back seat working to seal up the rear firewall. The PO’s cage builder had cut two 12 x 14" holes in the rear firewall, the gaping holes looked awful and there was some question re. those holes being a problem at NASA Nationals next year. After spending some weeks deciding whether or not to dig into my precious supply of sheet plastic or sheet AL, I ended up using a thin formica-like laminate from Home Depot. Just getting into and out of the back seat is non-trivial. It took prob an hour of hard work to cut the laminate to shape, laying on my back, arms and legs wrapped around cage bars, using heavy duty scissors that would only barely cut the stiff and brittle laminate. Drilling holes for the sheetmetal screws was also tricky because the firewall is a convoluted surface, and of course I was practically upside down trying to do it.
Now that it’s done the only holes on the firewall are the two 4 x 5" holes necessary for the cage bars and helmet cooler air hoses. It also looks a lot better. Tonight I’ll put the driver’s seat back in because all winter projects that required that seat out are now complete.