Coolant System Completed

Posted on February 12, 2007 by admin
Time is rapidly running out now. So it is imperative I crack on with the car. So this weekend I got the entire cooling system completed. As part of this process I cut the center out of the thermostat. I couldn’t remove it completely as it has the rubber sealing ring that stops the thermostat housting leaking around its circumference. Cutting just the center out also leaves a slighly restricted hole which Andy Bates at AB Performance assures me is required to ensure that the water doesn’t flow too quickly through the head. If the flow rate is too high not enough heat is transferred to the water as it passes though the head and overheating can be a problem.

As part of this process I also removed the old electric coolant pump (another Kilo out of the car )and directly connected the coolant lines to water pump on the side of the engine . Here I managed to use the stock aluminium pipes and hoses from the original engine, this is always a good idea because it is then easy to get replacements (although at a cost) from Mr Honda.
I also re mounted the coolant header tank, to this I fitted a splash guard to ensure that any over flow water does not hit the ECU which is now mounted directly behind it due to cabling limitations. While in the engine bay I also tidied up and bound up the engine bay wiring, and found a permanent site for the exhaust control valve which cannot be removed if the ECU is not to throw a warning code.
I’m really starting to get worried that I will not make my booked appointement on Monday 19th Feb at Tony Law exhausts. I need the diff & dry shafts and engine bay pretty much completed before I can take it to Tony as the exhaust must be routed around all these possible obstructions. At the moment the driveshafts do not look like they’ll arrive in time.
Posted in Cooling, Thermostat | Leave a comment

New Shear Plate for the Rear of the Car…

Posted on February 3, 2007 by admin

The new shear plate turned up from Peterborugh LaserCut who did a great job, except that between us we managed to miss the fact that the drawing I sent them was not at a 1:1 scale . Therefore what they sent me was a perfect 75% scale model of the shear plate I actually needed. In fairness to them they corrected the mistake at no extra charge but I couldn’t collect it for a few days, so it effectively cost me a week of time. However I can’t fault them for thier service and will be using them to make up some ultra light 8mm mounting plates for the diff.

So a week later, with the correct plate collected I could finally weld it in place and stabilise the rear frame of the car. The plate fitted pretty well and only needed a small amount of fettling around the edges before I could weld it in place. The bolt holes all lined up nicely too… all very pleasing really.

So with the shear plate in place I cracked on and got all the rear brake lines replaced and clipped into place. The panal is all nicely painted up and pretty much finished except for the mounting required for the push -pull cable that will work the reverse control lever on the diff.

Posted in Lasercut, shearplate | Leave a comment

More Wiring, Fuel And Clutch

Posted on January 21, 2007 by admin

This weekend I did still more dull dull wiring but I think that I’m pretty much there now. I managed to complete the following.

  • Signal wiring to the bike clocks for the main beam and indicators , plus oil pressure and coolant temp warning LEDs.
    Wiring for throttle pot, coolant temp, oil pressure and oil temp to the DL1
  • Removed the remnants of the old ZX12 management loom and ECU.
  • Connect the Tacho feed to the DL1, and shift lights.
  • Made up an auxillery spiral cable to connect the steering mounted dash to the rest of the loom.

Pretty much all that is left now is to bind up the looms and clip them into place, a job that I hate because it makes my RSI damaged wrists hurt. Actually Mrs M is really good at this, I think I may have to ask her very nicely.

I also removed the old oil cooler tubes from the side of the car. My plan is to control the coolant temp using a large radiator and leave the oil temp to sort itself out. As a result the left side of the car is much much “cleaner”. It’s rather nice to be removing stuff from the car… hopefully this will all add up to a significant weight reduction.

I also spent some time reoruting the clutch hydraulic line, as the clutch slave cylinder is on the opposite side of the car on the CBR 1000. And lastly I connected the main fuel feed and removed the now defunct Injector fuel return line.

So now we have fuel, clutch, wiring & diff done. That leaves throttle cable, coolant and exhausts. Finally it seems like I’m getting close to finishing this engine installation.

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Much Progress- Still Much to Do

Posted on January 14, 2007 by admin

Well, its now mid January, and the racing season is rapidly advancing towards me.
In the last two or three weeks I’ve made a significant amount of progress in lots of areas, but there is still much to do if I’m going to make the first race in early March. The major achievement of the last couple of weeks is that I’ve completed the initial mouting of the new differential. Unfortunately I’ve had to construct the mounting from heavy old steel. Hopefully in the longer term I can replace the steel bits that I’ve fabricated with some nice light alloy plates.

Mounting the diff was a key step on the critical path to getting this beast back to the track. With the Diff mounted I spent a long time trying to get the drive shafts sorted out. Of course with the new diff my old shafts dont fit and so I needed to get some new ones made up. It turns out that my outer CV joints are Escort based and the driveshaft cups on the new diff are Fiesta ones, true to form nothing is ever easy and Mr H. Ford seems to have used a myriad array of different splines to join the wheels to the engine on his various models, this is not helped as on a typical car there will be 4 different sets of splines (diff, each end of the DS and then in the hub.) All of which makes matching a non standard DS to inner CV joint, outer CV joint and the hub a bit of a challenge.

After bemoaning this situation to Aiden he mentioned that he has a couple of Sierra 4×4 front driveshafts left over from the Tiger he is building and that I was welcome to them.

Miraculously they had the correct splines on each end, but were too short. This turned out to be a blessing as I was able to cut them in half and fit them to the diff and hub respectively. I could then link the two with a tube and move the suspension through it’s full range of movement. This gave me the total lengths of the shafts (54 qand 56 cms so I guess the diff is off center) So now with the lengths and samples of the correct splines I can get some bespoke shafts made up by GB engineering of Natwich.

With the major headache of driveshafts out of the way I was then able to move on to the next item that had been dependant upon the diff being in its final position; the rear shear plate. You may recall that I had to cut some of the structural bracing out of the rear of the car to get the new diff in. This needs to be replaced and so I’m going to get a rear bulkhead cut out of some 3mm steel and weld it to the remaining tubes. With the diff in it’s final place I could now get the dimensions I needed to draw it out in a CAD package. The drawing is now with Peterborough Laser Cut and hopefully I’ll get the plate back later this week for welding to the chassis. The large hole on the right is for the exhaust and the larger one in the centre is where the diff pokes through. The indent on the right hand side is to mount the push pull cable that I’ll be using to control the reverse mechanism.

Next on the list was a handbrake mechanism. As my old diff also had the handbrake mechanism I need a replacement system. Rather than faffing around making something I decided to take the easy option. Wilwood do some new Powerlight 4 pot alloy callipers with an integral handbrake mechanism. These seem a good place to start, and a careful trial fit of somes seems to indicate that they are an almost direct replacement for my existing Hi Spec units so I need to order some of these and feed the Hi Specs to the ebay vultures.

The last major job that is sitting out on my activity horizon is fitting the new engine to the existing anteater airbox. This is more complicated that for the ZX12R as the CBR1000 has a secondary set of injectors that sit in the airbox, which need to be positioned at exactly the right distance above the intake trumpets. I had planned to use the existing airbox and convert it but Andy Bates of ABPerformance produces a bespoke airbox for the CBR100RR, and a quick chat and visit to seeh him indicates that the CNC milled Ally plates that he uses for the top and bottom of the box can be used to mount it to my airbox, so I’ve got a pair of them on order as well.
Posted in Diff mounting, driveshafts, handbrake calliper, injectors | Leave a comment

Engine Management Splicing Completed

Posted on December 30, 2006 by admin

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, as I’ve been away trying to do myself in by strapping a couple of planks to my feet and chucking myself down a french Alp. However, we’re back home now and I’ve been able to make a bit of progress on the car in the Christmas-New Year Lull.

Basically today I’ve just about finished splicing the engine management loom into the beastie. I think you’ll agree it’s looking a whole lot neater.

In no particular order I have

  • Removed the existing starter solenoid and main fuseways (these are already on the car and not needed from the bike loom)

  • Identified and spliced the switched and unswitched power supplies from the switchgear in the car to engine management loom.

  • Identified the interlock cables (Pin 22) and tied these to permananetly to earth.

  • Lenghtened and reorientated a few cables.

  • Identified and removed all the wiring, relays and fuses in the bike loom that correspond to existing car systems such as lights, indicators etc.

  • Fitted and spliced the alternator\rectifier circuits into the battery after the EFI switch.

  • Identified and routed the engine kill circuits to the EFI cut off switch.

  • Identified the Oil Pressure, Neutral, L & R indicators and main beam cables for the indicator lights in the clocks and got these ready ot be spliced into the car circuits.

  • Removed the Fan power feed. The fan is controlled by the ecu via a relay as the ECU knows the coolant temp. As I already have a water pump\fan circuit in the racer I didn’t want to power the fan from the ECU power supply (as it was in the original bike loom) so I looped my fan power supply over to the bike looms relay so that it can still be ECU controlled, but is actually powered by a seperate circuit.

  • I looped the Fuel pump power supply from the bike loom relays via my seperate dashboard switch to ensure I meet the blue book requirements for a seperate switch.

  • I spent at least 5 hours (on and off) staring at curcuit diagrams

  • Fitted the high current circuit from the existing solenoid to the starter motor.

  • Connected the clocks.

So after all that I was ready to to power it up and see if I had fried the ECU.

Ok! Kill switch on …. mmm no smell of burning. So ignition on and it runs the fuel pump for about 5 seconds and then it stops which is normal, plus the tacho does a full sweep to indicate that it is working properly too. Graeat Stuff!

Then I hit the start button, I think I can hear the injectors firing and the fuel pump runs continuously… so it looks like I’ve defeated the interlocks correctly. Huzzah!

I did have one problem. The CBR1000RR has a thing called a steering damper or HESD which is under ECU control. This I don’t have and it’s causing the ECU to display it’s Malfunction Indicator light in the clocks and giving me a flash code of 51… “Steering Damper Open Circuit”.

As the MIL light is bright red and also turned on by things like the low oil P switch I’d quite like to kill the damper based error so that I can see “real” engine based errors as they occur.

Now the ecu controls the damper using a two wire solenoid to open and close a restrictor valve (not unlike a normal ISCV in an ignition circuit I suspect) both cables connect to the ECU. According to the manual the damper test procedure is to measure the resistance of the solenoid. It should be between 6 & 8 ohms. so after a quick chat with my electron herder friends on CAM7 I cross connect the appropriate two wires with a 68 ohm resister and bingo the warning is gone. It seems that the diagnostic circuit is none to clever and anything other than an open circuit in roughly the right range will be fine.

Now when I short the low oil pressure line to earth the light comes on and I get the appropriate warnings, fab!

So now all that remains electrically is to

  1. Identify and connect the tacho feed to the DL1

  2. Ditto the coolant and oil temp feeds

  3. Connect the throttle position sensor to the DL1

  4. Connect the light circuits for indicators, main beam to the clocks so that the appropriate warning lights work.

  5. Fit the new Palm pilot display for lap timing and temp displays

  6. Bind everthing up and clip it into place.

After a day doing nothing but wiring I decided to do something mechanical and made up a little bracket to mount the clocks. I’d been pondering how to mount them for a while as they need to be a fairly long way from the plane of the old dashboard! In the end I decided to mount them on the steering column itself so that they rotate with the wheel, mainly because it was the simplest thing to do!

While playing with the clocks I also found that the CBR1000RR appears to have a configurable shift light. If you pwer them up holding the select button it seems you can set the rev limit\shift light point to be anywhere between 4500 and 12500 rpm… cool I wander what other tricks this thing has up it’s sleeve.

Posted in Engine, engine fitting, engine management, wiring | Leave a comment

Engine Build Up, Ready for Mounting

Posted on December 29, 2006 by admin

So it’s been a few days since my last update and in this time I’ve made significant progress in fitting the new engine. The mounts have been finalized, trimmed down and fully braced up with strengthening gussets. This may seem a bit of overkill, but experience has shown that the high frequency vibration from the bike engine can the welds. Lastly they were painted up. They are fairly sturdy and probably wildely over engineered, but they do hold the engine nicely rigid.

I’ve also completed the floor mounts, in the engine bay, and painted up the tubes. It is all nice and clean now waiting for the engine’s installation

I’ve collected the new sumps internals from Nova. Here you can see it’s component parts including the sealing O ring, swinging arm and bearing and internal gauze debris filter.
So I bolted it together and got it already for fitting to the lump. As part of this process I drilled and tapped the sump to take an NPTF oil temperature sensor. Unfortunately I had to use a NPTF converter to step the oil pressure sensor out a bit, as it initially stuck to far into the sump and stop the swinging arm from rotating which would have been a bit of an own goal!

Lastly I drilled the sump plug so that I can lock wire it into place and fitted this to the sump. After which the engine was ready for fitting.

Another good piece of news was that I discovered that those nice Chaps at the Kit Car Workshop can cut down and customize my drive shafts to make them fit the new Diff. Although I will be facing a challenge of linking Fiesta inner CV joints to my existing Escort outers

nts

Posted in Engine, engine fitting, engine mounts, swinging sump | Leave a comment

Engine Mounted, Engine Management Wiring Started

Posted on December 14, 2006 by admin
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.
Posted in engine fitting, engine management, gear shift, wiring | Leave a comment

More Engine Mounts – 90% there now

Posted on November 26, 2006 by admin

Well a day spent in the garage has resulted in the engine mounts being almost completed. I’ve fabbed up the right hand mount. This one I decided to make in a single piece, without the necessity for a central bolt as it doesn’t have the nearby waterpipe obstruction that hampered the left hand mount.

Here it is in it’s 95 % complete form. I just need to trim off the excess material and fit a strenghthening gusset.

With the second mount in place, even with the bolts not tightened up the engine is pleasingly “solid” with no play or movement, careful measurement between the bulkhead and the markers for the centre point of the exhaust camshaft indicates that my fabrication is within 1mm on each side. Fab.

So now I could move onto making up the mounts for the gearbox. These will be located onto a chassis cross member. This I also had to cut out, trim down and move further forward in the chassis, in fact you can see the stubs of the old fitting that I still need to grind off the tube. These mounts are made from 1″x”2 rectangular section with some bracing tubes welded in. The plan is that these will be welded to the cross member, allowing sufficeint space for the diff mounting plates between them on both sides of the gearbox. Again I’ll fit a strengthening web, as the diff is a faily hefty piece of kit and I want it very solidly mounted to the chassis.

Lastly I positioned the diff in its probable final position in the chassis. It all looks like it will line up nicely along the longitudinal axis so thankfully it looks like all my careful measuring may well have paid dividends. Once I’ve welded the lower mounts in place I’ll be in a position to take a whole load of more measurements to finalise the rear shear plate for the chassis and the diff mounting plates that Graeme at Nova will make up for me.

So Now I need to weld these mounts in, then remove the engine and finish welding various bits that are just tacked in at the moment. Then I can clean up and paint the engine bay, and finish paint the mounting hardware. Once that is all done the engine can be permananently fitted.

Posted in Diff, engine fitting, engine mounts | Leave a comment