Engine Mounted, Engine Management Wiring Started

I felt I got a lot done this weekend. Firstly I got the engine mounted up and loosely fitted in place. I say “loosely” because none of the mounting bolts is yet fitted with a nut and tightened up. Nonetheless the engine feels rock solid in the chassis. Which is very pleasing.

So with the engine position finalized I could now start working on the major connections to it. First on this list was the gearshift.

The Gearshift on the CBR 1000 RR is on the same side of the engine as that on the Kwaka, but that is where the similarity between the two ends. Not only is the CRB shift lever at the top of the gearbox, but it also shifts in opposite directions to the Kwaka. The upshot of this is that I need to put a bell at the rear end of the gearshift connection rod, to change the direction of the shift action and ensure that I keep the current action of “pull the lever to shift up and push to shift down”. Nova have kindly supplied a neat little bell and so I spent a good couple of hours building and welding in this little tower to support its pivot point and a short extension bolt for the existing connection rod.

This worked really nicely and I ended up with a nice short throw on the shift lever at the front of the car. Currently it feels a bit stiff, but I was pulling it from outside the car with my arm at the wrong angle and it is likely to become more free moving when the engine has hot oil flowing around it’s insides.

With the engine and gear lever in place, I could now move onto the engine management and wiring. This is a major piece of work as reworking the engine management loom to fit the new orientation is always time consuming, but basically the process is to fit all the sensors and connect the loom to them. Then decide how the loom should run back to the car to reach the ignition switches, instruments, battery etc. Then you unwrap and dissemble the loom and move wires around to their new positions. Invariably there are wires that need to be shortened or lengthened to handle the new orientation. Then you rebind the loom. The process always involves staring at fuzzy wiring diagrams for a couple of hours and always remember to check twice before cutting out cables. It is also a prime opportunity to add any additional circuits that need to be run for such things as oil and water temperature sensing, tacho feed and anything else that you might want to feed to the data logger.

At this stage it is also time to identify the ignition interlocks cables. Interlocks usually eventually switch an ECU Pin to earth via the side stand, clutch and neutral gear indicator switches, usually via a diode cluster in the fusebox. They can all be defeated by identifying the ECU pin affected and permanently connecting it to earth. On the CBR1000RR the affected ECU Pin is pin22.

So before I could actually do all the wiring detailed above, I had to build up the top engine of the engine, including the TBs and airbox. So at the conclusion of the weekend I had achieved a lot ,I had an engine in the bay, with most of it’s induction system fitted, a “work in progress” engine management loom and a working gearshift. There is still much to do but for once this is good progress.

At the end of the day the wiring loom looked like this… Sorry about the crappy quality of the picture but it appears my camera didn’t know quite where to focus… currently I know just how it feels ! It’s a bit of a rat’s nest of cable at the moment.