90 Talladega SPG

[hutch]

Figured it was time to start a thread on this car, bought a year ago from Luke. A day before Hurricane Sandy last year so I'm sure thats a great sign

I think I've shared most of these pictures before but here goes:



I know some people hate red cars but there's something about red SPGs that has always stuck with me. This is my first bright colored car so it takes some getting used to but I love it.

I threw that set of Aero's on and an SAS Whale Tail to see what they would look like. I put the stock stuff back on a month ago or so to refinish the wheels back to stock color and because I've always disliked how poorly my SAS tails fit. I also need to refinish the SPG kit, I have a kit that I had redone in flat black that I'm about halfway through installing. Most of the grey kit is in great shape so I'm going to refinish it over winter and probably put it back on if I get bored of the black trim.





Also as you can see it is running T5 from a flywheel kit from eeuro. For the most part the car is running well on Trionic but there are some nagging issues that I'm hoping to deal with here soon. I bought a laptop from a guy that used it for all his tuning stuff so its all set up already so I'm starting this thread with the intention of getting some pointers on the finer points in T5Suite as I come across them. I have a CANUSB setup so I'm hoping to do some tune monitoring and logging to see whats going on.

The CEL is on for the 02 sensor so I want to see what faults are being found and what to do to fix it. The car also has been cranky starting as the weather is cooling down so I will probably have to play with the cold start settings. Not that I plan on driving this car in anything resembling salt this winter, but with Al Gore and everything happening I might have some time to mess with it.

Winter Plans
-Get car connected to laptop and see whats going on
-Refinish Aero wheels in stock silver color
-Refinish SPG kit
-Finish OEM whale tail, I'll have to take pics of this one, I've had decent luck restoring a stock whale tail that you all may be interested in
-Install Bilstein shocks

Down the Road Plans
-Remove a/c
-Install bigger intercooler
-Install exhaust
-Maybe install te05-16g though I may keep it for later
-Get jack point fixed. For the most part the car is very clean but I was jacking it up with that crappy stock jack and it punched right through the floor. I was quite upset with that one but it should be a pretty easy fix for someone knowing what they're doing (not me)
-In a perfect world the car would get a repaint at some point in it's 270k mile life but that will require selling my 85 so that won't be for a while

Anyway thats about it, like I said I am going to be playing with the laptop in the next few days to week so I'm sure I will be picking everyone's collective on tuning cars and running Trionic on a c900.

[DeLorean]

Nice, I look forward to updates. Very strangely, my 88 SPG is an absolute 100% confident starter. Starts on the second rotation of the engine every time, and revs up to 1500, and then settles down to idle speed in about 3 seconds.

The 92 2.1 liter is not as confident at all. It takes 4 rotations at least and then when it fires it starts up unlike my SPG, it only revs up to idle speed and stays there. sometimes it takes about 2-3 seconds of cranking before it will "catch" - I feel like something is different with this car related to the CPS. With this car when we initially installed T5, it did not want to rev past about 4000 RPM's - it felt like it was hitting a rev limiter. although the sensor air gap was in spec and the exact same as it is in my SPG, playing around with various things, I gave the sensor more air gap, and well... that fixed it. I think also the variation in starting quality might have something to do with this, but I'm not sure. Both cars have brand new BOSCH CPS's. I might try reducing the air gap just a tad, and see if that clears it up - it may.

Oh, and both are T5 and have basically the same tune.

[hutch]

Interesting, it seems CPS gap can be pretty critical to get it running right. Right now I have mine gapped at .84mm and it seemed to get a fine signal but I think the gap tolerances may be different when reading from a small trigger wheel versus a big flywheel with the pattern cut out. I have no idea if thats true or not, just an idea. If anything I was going to try to bring mine down a bit but since it didn't seem to be a problem I didn't feel like experimenting until down the road.

The problem I'm having when its cold out is that it will 'start' and immediately die. Second time cranking and it starts and idles just fine. The car will also bog down when I'm pulling away in second gear if the rpm's go below about 1500 if I don't slip the clutch a little to keep the revs up. It ran just fine in the summer months and once the engine has some heat in it it will drive just fine its just the first 1/2 mile or so if its day that it has the problem. This was a tune from Jordan's race car so probably not a lot of time spent driving in the cold so, assuming I get a feel of T5suite, I'm going to flash a stock tune onto my spare ECU and see if it drives any better in the cold.

[Saabina]

Cool car!
Interested in learning more about your OEM whaletail restoration. Mine's nice but not perfect with a few small problems in the rubber trim. Also, what shocks are you running now and why Bilsteins instead of Konis or something else? Do you think 16" aeros with lower profile tires require a particular shock? Thinking about shocks for our c900 mixed fleet ('90 SPG, '91 tvert, '93 thatch.) Thanks!

[Jordan]

Yeah, the CPS gap is very critical. I'm currently testing different sensors and positions to see if I get a stronger signal out of the oscilloscope. I've had cars not rev past 3000rpm because the sensor is too close and cars not start because it was set incorrectly. I think it also has to do with the dissimilar metals used as plugs in the flywheels.

[hutch]

Cool car!
Interested in learning more about your OEM whaletail restoration. Mine's nice but not perfect with a few small problems in the rubber trim. Also, what shocks are you running now and why Bilsteins instead of Konis or something else? Do you think 16" aeros with lower profile tires require a particular shock? Thinking about shocks for our c900 mixed fleet ('90 SPG, '91 tvert, '93 thatch.) Thanks!

I'll post some pics of the whale tail restoration when I get home from work tonight, I'm about 60% done I'd say. The rubber is about as good as I feel it will be without professional help and considering how relatively little money I have into it at this point. The guy I bought it from did all the dirty work of removing the metal band and the studs that connect it to the fiberglass part. I do need to decide if I'm going to put SS bolts in the rubber part so I can connect it to the fiberglass part or just epoxy it together. I've heard good things about both methods so I just need to figure out what will work best. The fiberglass portion is pretty simple to fix, I just got some fiberglass epoxy and filler from a marine store, some of the contours are difficult to get a clamp on but other than that its pretty straight forward. I do need to paint it but I doubt I'll get to that while its still warm enough to paint outside so I may put that off till spring.

As for the shocks, I chose the Bilsteins because thats what I have already

I have a set of adjustable koni's on my 9-3 and I think I've adjusted them about three times in their life so I honestly don't see the point of adjustable ones on the c900, especially given the price difference. WIth the 16" Aero's I do get some nasty rubbing in the back when going over bumps even with a pretty low profile tire. I have a set of DIY extended trailing arms from an old car that readjust the axle so it doesn't rub, I'm going to swap those over when I do the shocks but with the stock wheels its fine again so its another job that I won't rush to do when its cold outside.

As for what to put on your fleet thats tough to say without knowing what sort of driving they see and what springs they have on them. With stock SPG springs and the HD's I feel its about a perfect daily driver ride, with lowering springs it can be a little annoying if the roads around you are as crappy as they are here in PA. I've never had one myself but I've heard some people complain about having too harsh a ride with the vert's, but thats probably more to do with the sort of driving they expect with the vert since I can only imagine they ride pretty similar to a hatchback with the same setup. Hope that helps.

[hutch]

Whale Tail Restoration
First let me start off recommending this stuff for all your rubber needs. You can spread it on and sand it down like body filler and it has a very similar texture to the stock stuff. It isn't quite as squishy as the OEM rubber but from a foot away you can't tell the difference.


Anyway, I don't have a ton of pictures of what it looked like before I started this but the rubber had big cuts at the points on the side and various chunks missing. The fiberglass portion had a crack running about an inch or two from where it sits under the glass. I used a dremel and removed material around the crack and made a slight groove so the epoxy had something to grab a hold of. I need to get the fiberglass portion with filler and paint it but like I said I may wait till spring to do this as I am in no rush with winter coming. I will clean the rubber up just a bit more and then I plan on spraying it with Plasti-Dip to give it a more uniform texture after all the sanding and a color match.

When I first got it I applied the first layer of the Sikaflex and a few shots of what the underside looked like before I got to work on it:








You can see that someone had previously attempted a fix on the underside.

A month or so ago I pulled this out to work on it and got the rubber pretty close to completion, like I said I'll probably coat this with plasti-dip when its completely finished. The light of the camera really brings out the rough finish, in real life its not that bad, its by no means like a brand new OEM one but considering its age its not too bad. I may do another round of Sikaflex on the underside but I just need it to be flat so I can fit it on the fiberglass portion and its pretty close.




Like I said I need to decide on if I'm going to use hardware or Sikaflex to bond the rubber to the fiberglass. From seeing these online they rarely seem to fit 100% so I am going to be realistic in how close of a gap I can get between the rubber and fiberglass. As long as it looks good from a few feet away I'll be happy with it.

[DeLorean]

Yeah, the CPS gap is very critical. I'm currently testing different sensors and positions to see if I get a stronger signal out of the oscilloscope. I've had cars not rev past 3000rpm because the sensor is too close and cars not start because it was set incorrectly. I think it also has to do with the dissimilar metals used as plugs in the flywheels.

Too close seems to make it not be able to read signal properly after a certain RPM range and cause a rev limiter effect. Too much air gap means???? maybe hard starting? I have no data on that yet...


Strangely, the same exact air gap worked on one car, and didn't work properly on another one... so, explain that one? I have yet to even use one of the eeuro flywheels, these are both with the squab CPS kits w/ OE crank sensor wheels. Not that I don't think T5 is the way to go, but a little more consistency in the starting reliability would be nice.


Hutch, the starting difficulty you describe is not like what I have experienced. I think you may have some issue with your start up enrichment settings. Contact Paul H, he might be able get you cranking over a little better if it's not a hardware issue.

[Jordan]

The reality is that the sensors and air gap are somewhat 'tuned' to the reluctor ring. Squabb's setup works well when you maintain the stock airgap, but often time the sensor or wheel has to be shimmed in order to get it to work. I was reading a lot about this from the Megasquirt guys who actually have hardware/software tools that can tune the signal coming off of the CPS when using different setups.

I think Hutch's problem is software. If he is using the racecar tune, none of them run particularly good cold dead cold, or use idle control (although we switched his back on for him).


Anyway... looks good Phil!

In the next week or two I'm planning to convert my Airflow car, so I can do a full writeup and install guide as well as get a good c900 baseline tune. Currently, after the LeMons aftermath, I'm stripping down Norman for parts and getting the shell of of there so we can move on w/ the rest of the projects.

[hutch]

Yeah the car started fine up until the temps dipped into the 50's so I'm sure it just needs a little playing around with to get running right again, not that I plan on driving this car a ton this winter save for the odd nice sunny day perhaps.

The 02 sensor CEL may be a bit more difficult to figure out but we'll see once I'm able to see whats actually going on with T5suite.

[Jordan]

02 Should be pretty easy to figure out. Checking that pin 47 at the ECM is connected to ground is the first step. Next , once the car is warmed up, the O2 sensor should have a voltage reading in the 0.5V range, you can unplug the sensor at the connector to test, and then make sure its getting to pin 23 on the ECM connector.... That is pretty much it.

[hutch]

Cool thanks for the pin references, I agree its gotta be something easy. I had already seen the 6 flashes of the CEL but I thought T5suite had a longer list of error codes but I suppose that still won't really tell me precisely whats going on. Its doing pretty much exactly what you described in this thread:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2570

Which you said ended up being a bad ground so I was gonna look into that further, now I know what pins to look for. Maybe it has to do with that bundle of wires you find at the end of the harness or something. At the same time I got 2 new T5 harnesses from a local guy so I'm going to steal that little red sliding clip from one so I can make sure the harness is connected to the ECU properly even though I'm pretty confidant it is already.

[Jordan]

Yeah look at pin 47, o2 sensor reference ground... Depending on what that harness started out as, it may have been connected to the original o2 sensor or the engine block.

[Saabina]

Hi Hutch;
Thanks for the whaletail restoration pics! Not yet there condition-wise but maybe in the future. Regarding shocks, run what you have is cool. Have to say our '91 tVert rides plenty rough. The day we first drove it, I was shocked by the chassis flex (after many years in 900 hatch.) Not looking to do anything with springs or HD shocks there but always wondering. Stock SPG rims and 60 series tires is all she gets and cool good to go for groceries and the beach. More interested in the '90 SPG and '93 tHatch (dark green/tan leather cloned SPG) both with 16" Aeros. Looking for a sport ride but less than track stiff and comfortable enough for long trips - we still make plenty out here in the wild west. T5 maybe ahead but not yet, er, well, hmmm...
Thanks for sharing your project!

[Jordan]

Yeah, the CPS gap is very critical. I'm currently testing different sensors and positions to see if I get a stronger signal out of the oscilloscope. I've had cars not rev past 3000rpm because the sensor is too close and cars not start because it was set incorrectly. I think it also has to do with the dissimilar metals used as plugs in the flywheels.

Too close seems to make it not be able to read signal properly after a certain RPM range and cause a rev limiter effect. Too much air gap means???? maybe hard starting? I have no data on that yet...


Strangely, the same exact air gap worked on one car, and didn't work properly on another one... so, explain that one? I have yet to even use one of the eeuro flywheels, these are both with the squab CPS kits w/ OE crank sensor wheels. Not that I don't think T5 is the way to go, but a little more consistency in the starting reliability would be nice.


Hutch, the starting difficulty you describe is not like what I have experienced. I think you may have some issue with your start up enrichment settings. Contact Paul H, he might be able get you cranking over a little better if it's not a hardware issue.

The car that was having problem revving, I moved the sensor out to 2mm and it cleared up all the issues. Revs nicely up to 7k now. I still want to to do some investigative testing to see if I can get a better/cheaper sensor combo for rev2 of the flywheels (if there needs to be a rev 2).