metaruss

Another awesome time at SDAC has come and gone.  The performance driving school was a blast as always.  The Daytona did great overall, but the stress did highlight some issues.  The intercooler definitely needs to be kicked-out at the bottom to allow some air to get around it.  The loss in cooling capacity was very obvious after a few laps, though it will happen on the street in traffic with the A/C on as well.  I’m thinking of buying a new fan as well.  The other issue was oil pressure.  I know the pump has issues and when the oil temps got high, I was seeing only about 30psi of pressure at 5000rpm.  Not good, so I think it’s time for a new pump.

I made 14 passes at the drag strip.  Times weren’t what I had hoped (was shooting for 13s), but I didn’t break the car.  I couldn’t get the car to hook nor could I get it to make more than 18-19psi of boost…even with the wastegate unplugged.  I also trashed 3rd gear by the end and it seems that it will need a new syncro.  Did a bit of tuning, but most of the effort was spent trying to learn how to launch the car.  Best time was 14.269sec @ 98.87mph.

So I’m going to SDAC-18 and have been doing a mad-dash to get the car ready.  The axle boot was the wrong one and tore itself up on the trans case.  I put an old stocker in there from the Shadow while I worked on other things.  Later I got the correct boots from JT and completely went though the axles.  Only the short axle has the tripod welded to it and it looks like they did it while the bearings were on.  They must have slipped and tagged one of them with the welder.  The tulip race is chewed-up pretty good there.  The outer joints have a lot of hammer blows on them and long axle’s has a lot of play and binds much beyond the center.  I put them back together anyway and they seem to be holding up so far.  I don’t expect to get a whole lot of miles out of them.

Trying to address the somewhat-weak oil pressure issues, I pulled the pan and removed the pickup.  My thought was that it may have been leaking at the o-ring since I had to bend the tube a bit when putting the motor together.  I took the pump apart as well to check the clearances.  It had a lot of scoring in it for some reason, but the clearances were all well within spec.  I also plastiguaged the rods bearings, which looked great and were nice and tight.

I’m going to be running the road course, so I put new pads and rotors in the front and bled the brakes.  Also replaced the front swaybar bushings with new ones from Johnny.  The radiator was throughly flushed, since I had some oil in there.

The ends on the CS Racer panhard bar were shot, so I modified a stocker to make it adjustable.  One end was cut off and a grade 10.9 M16 bolt welded to it.  Some of the bar was removed and an M16 coupler nut was welded to that end and the whole bar was boxed-in.  It warped a bit after all the welding, so I lowered on car on it to bend it straight again.  It was installed with new poly bushings from Johnny Spiva.

I DA’ed and rattle-canned the roof and mounted the side door mouldings.  Painted those as well as some missing paint on the nose.  Also painted the exposed bumper support since the grill is missing there.  Did lots of touch-ups and also tried to deal with the worst of the rust on the hood.  Didn’t have enough time to finish sanding and rubbing-out the patches, but it looks better than it did before.

To use any of these calibrations, you will need to get the necessary equipment and modify your Engine Control Unit (ECU).  There are basically two ways to go about putting a calibration onto an ECU.  You can either use a socketed EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read-only memory), which must be removed and programmed outside the ECU, or you can modify the ECU so that the EEPROM can be erased and programed remotely (“flashed”), which requires the necessary software and cables.  The ECUs actually come from the factory with EPROMs, which must be erased with ultraviolet light.  The ability to flash the ECU is especially useful if your ECU is a SMEC (single module engine controller) or SBEC (single board engine controller), which are located behind the battery and have electronics that are buried is potting material.  If you have a logic module (1987 and earlier), it is located in the passenger compartment behind the passenger-side kick-panel and is not potted.

Hardware

If you intend to use removeable EEPROMs, you will need an EEPROM programmer.  If you intend to use EPROMs (which I sometimes do), you will need an EPROM eraser.  I own a Needham’s Electronics EMP-10 programmer and a Datarase II EPROM eraser.  If you plan to flash your ECU, then you will need a cable and interface, as well as somewhat more extensive modifications to the ECU.  The interface is available as a kit from Chad Clendening.  The modifications needed to flash a SMEC were documented by Graem Schmidt in his very useful document.

Software

There is a nice variety of software forming around this effort. They are listed below:

• D-Cal – a very nice graphical calibration utility by Derek Beland
• ChEM – the original graphical calibration utility by Geoff Allan
• SMECFlash – utility by Chad Clendening needed to flash a SMEC via his serial interface

ECU Modifications

Obviously, some modifications are needed to your ECU to facilitate installing custom calibrations.  If you plan to use the removeable EEPROM method, you will only need a 28-pin socket and some extra EEPROMs (or you can just reuse the EPROM you already have if you have an eraser).  You will then need to desolder the EPROM from the ECU board and solder in the socket.  If you are not skilled with a soldering iron, then I would recommend finding someone who is.  The boards are double-sided and can be tricky to work on without damaging the traces.  If you are planning to flash the ECU, then you don’t necessarily need a socket, but I would recommend one just in case the EEPROM gets fried.  See Graem Schmidt’s document for additional details about the modifications needed to flash a SMEC.

For the socket, you should at minimum get a low-profile, machined pin socket such as Digikey ED3628-ND or A409-ND.  Preferably, you should get a low-profile ZIF (zero-insertion force) socket, such as Digikey 3M2803-ND or A347-ND.  The ZIF socket makes extraction and insertion much easier and safer for the chip and the ECU board, though probably isn’t necessary if you plan to flash.  If you have one of the Mopar Performance ECUs, then you might get lucky as they are sometimes already socketed.

The EEPROM you need depends on the model year ECU that you have.  The 1984 electronics are probably not suitable for custom calibrations.  They apparently use bipolar PROMs (similar to PALs) and little has been done to understand them at this point (though that doesn’t mean it is not possible).  The 1985-1986 electronics use a pair of 16kx8 EPROMs (one for the code and one for the calibration tables), but they do not have a hardware timer and it doesn’t take much to upgrade to the 1987 electronics, which were the best from the Logic Module era.  These are the devices used on the various modules:

• 1985-1986 Logic Module: pair of 8kx8 EPROMs (27C64)
• 1987 Logic Module: 16kx8 EPROM (27C128)
• 1988-1989 SMEC: 16kx8 EPROM (27C128)
• 1990-1993 SBEC: 32kx8 EPROM (87C257)

The 27C/87C series EPROMs require an ultraviolet eraser to clear them.  The 28C series EEPROMs are erased by the programmer itself.  The 128 kilobit size has been obsoleted by most manufacturers but it can be replaced by the 256 kilobit parts, which have the same number of pins.  Therefore, the part you want to get for 1987-1989 electronics is the 28C256, 150ns, industrial temperature (-40 to 85^C) EEPROM, Digikey AT28C256-15PI-ND.  If you don’t plan to flash your ECU and have an ultraviolet EPROM eraser, you can get the 27C256 EPROM equivalent for about one third of the price (Digikey FM27C256QE150-ND).  Since the 1987 logic module only uses half of the 256 kilobit part, you can connect the A14 pin (pin 1 on 28C256 or pin 27 on 27C256) to a switch that either grounds or raises it to 5V and program two, seperate calibrations in (i.e. street vs race or new vs previous cal).