Hi guys. I finally brought my DMC back home on Sunday (3.0L with EDIS and MegaSquirt). It's been about five years and four months since I started this conversion, which began with water destroying my fuel system leading to the discovery of a hole in the engine block. Thanks to all of you, it's now running pretty well, but there are a few things to tweak still:
- Cold starts take a few tries. After 3-5 cranks it starts, then dies. Another couple of cranks and it either starts and runs, or starts and dies. The third one usually sticks. Warm starts aren't a problem. It's hard to figure out how to tweak this since I can do it only once or twice a day.
- When I tap on the gas or switch from stopped to accelerating somewhat quickly, there's a momentary loss of power -- you can hear the engine basically stop for an instant and then start again. I don't stall -- I just lose power for a moment. I have set up basic MAP-based acceleration enrichment (I'm not running TPS at all now, since the sensor keeps breaking on me), and in general it feels fairly good, but I haven't figured out what to do about this problem just yet.
- I have a weird vibration when at idle, especially loaded idle (transmission in Drive or Reverse). It's not always there -- on the way out today it was strong, but on the way home it was completely gone when I stopped at home. When at cruising speed the effect is greatly diminished or disappears entirely. The effect is that when in the cabin you can hear the driver's side door rattles (need to adjust the striker pin a little, I guess), something near the glove box is rattling, and I can hear the engine cover rattle a bit (I think that's what's making that noise). This isn't really an EFI thing, but I'm not sure how what it is. From outside the car things feel fine. The engine isn't as smooth as my 2015 Subaru Outback, but that's a very apples-to-oranges comparison. My wife's new (to us) 1972 Dodge Charger with a carbonated 440 six pack is smoother too, though. And by "smoother" I mean I don't feel like the engine's shaking around as much. My engine isn't shaking a lot, but it's hard for me to quantify without really knowing what "normal" is. It's been so long since I've driven the DMC I don't remember what it was like, although my wife says it's definitely vibrating more. I put in new engine mounts, and the transmission mounts are "new" (well, about 7-8 years old, but not many miles on them). The muffler is fairly close to the rear subframe, but it's not actually touching it, so I don't think it's that, but I'll have to take another look in daylight to be sure. The cold weather is making it hard to want to spend a lot of time outside looking in the engine bay vs. just driving.
I'm still tinkering with various settings. I have my idle set to 850 at the moment, which was an attempt to reduce the vibration and keep the car from dropping to 650 when loaded, but adjusting the Closed Loop Gain and playing with Idle Advance Adaptive Timing seems to have fixed the idle drop, so I'll likely bring it back to 790 again. While I have basic acceleration enrichment set up, it's very hand-wavey, and more of a "this seems to work fine" kind of thing than anything empirical (I noticed Owen's setup looks quite a lot different from mine, although he's on a 2.8 and I'm on a 3.0, but I might try settings closer to his to see if they help with my brief power loss issue).
Anyway, I've attached a log from today and my latest tune. Thanks!
-- Joe
2019-01-11_11.00.40.msl
CurrentTune.msq