Turdbo Neon

With DiRTy’s battery, I was able to get Stinky started quite easily.  It bogs out when you hit the gas, and there’s something clunking around in there somewhere.  But it does seem to start up and idle very nicely.

I moved the battery back to DiRTy and suddenly the car wouldn’t start.  I put the battery on the charger for a couple hours and still nothing.  I’m not sure what the deal is with Stinky, but I think it killed the battery.  I got my revenge by starting the dis-assembly process.  The battery tray is toast, the left side headlight is busted up a bit, and I think the cruise module is a bit suspect, as the cruise cable to disconnected from the throttle body.  I was able to get the right headlight and turn signal off as well as the grill piece.  Both of those seemed fine.

First the good news:

So, it looks like it’s not an issue with engine internals at this point.

I also put my spark tester on each coil output and cranked the engine, getting good spark on each cylinder.  I was considering 5 different causes, and this has ruled out two of them (blown coil, blown head gasket).  The other three are less likely (loose wiring, blown ignition transistor, something blown in megasquirt), however, it could just be that they’re jiggled together right now and a good hard shove will break it loose again.

The plugs are shot, so I’m going to get new ones, put the old ones in to see how it runs, then put the new ones in to see if that makes the difference.  If not, I’m going to look at injectors, fuel filter, and fuel pump.

In other good-ish news, it looks like Stinky may not have a blown head gasket.  One of the cylinders reads slightly lower compression than the other three, but it’s within 10% of the highest compression.

Compression is good and well within 20% of each other.  Incidentally, Stinky is the same way

I’m also getting decent spark.

I unplugged the breather on the left side of the car and fashioned an air filter by stuffing half of a lawnmower filter into a pill bottle and drilling a bunch of holes in it. That seems to be pretty solid.The car ran perfectly on Friday night, got up the hill to the rallycross site fine, and did a perfect parade lap. About 1/4 of the way through my first run, though, it just crapped out. Seems like its not running on all 4, but more diagnostics are needed at this point.

After doing some research on neons.org, I think I need to change up the way the PCV is working right now.  The output is fine, I think, but I want to tie the breather into the air pipe before the turbo.  I may try to do that tonight.

I haven’t added to this notebook in a while, however, there has been quite a large amount of work done this year.  Most recently, I went with Tim to the Grassroots Motorsports $2011 Challenge and, despite the poor performance of the Firebird we took down, got very inspired to bring back the Turdbo Neon for $2012.  And, for bonus points, I’m seriously considering driving it down, instead of towing it.

I’ve pulled as many of the receipts as I can find for the work that I’ve done on it in the last 5 years, and I”ll have to FMV the rest.  As far as updates are concerned, I’m going to parcel those out, instead of trying to put all of them under a single header.  Those updates should be below this one, just to keep things straight.

There is a Rallycross event on this coming Saturday, and it appears that the car is basically good to go for that.  I know that the tune is still somewhat flat, but it seems to be running better right now, and should be “good enough”.  I’ve taken all the baffles and the endplate off the Supertrapp muffler, so it’s louder and hopefully going to run better.  The window nets are still broken, but that can wait.  I’m praying for rain, but I don’t think any is in the forecast…

I’ve been fighting this thing ever since Florida, 2006, and I have finally defeated it.

I pulled the oil pan off the car again (front (of car) motor mount must be removed to do that, btw) and that showed me the cause of the leak:  I used JB Weld to seal the oil return line bung, and I manged to miss a huge spot.  So I mixed up some more JB and sealed it up.  The car ran for 20 minutes and then sat for four days and no more oil leaking.  Or, at least, if there is, it’s a very minimal amount like a quarter-sized spot after four days.  I may have boogered up the return hose trying to get it off the oilpan…

I also discovered that the oil smelled like gas and there was some grey sludge in the oil pan.  I cleaned all that out, and I suspect that the gas is from either blow-by or the no-start conditions, and the sludge is from not running enough to reach normal temp.  I’ll keep a close watch on that.

One of the biggest things that is wrong with the car is that it’s automatic.  I’ve decided to fix that problem by purchasing a donor car with a 5-speed so that I can bring over everything I need.  The general plan is to put both of them in the garage at home (and move the RX-7 and the motorcycles to the storage lot) and pull the motor/tranny from the donor (Stinky), then pull the motor/tranny from the turbo car (Dirty), separate the motors from the trannys, attach the manual gearbox to the turbo motor, and re-install it.  This will give me a chance to clean up the motor and the engine bay, and maybe even do a little painting.

I found a four-door, red Expresso SOHC car for sale about an hour north of Columbus.  Since I had to go up there for work anyway, I arranged to buy it for $400, and brought it home.  This car is the stinkiest car that I’ve ever been around.  The seals must be leaking around the doors or something, since it’s damp all over and it just smells awful.  The good news, though, is that I’ll be able to get the headlights and radiator, to do the original crash repairs for free.  I might be able to get the fender and hood on Dirty, as well, if I can find a good match for the black paint that’s already on the car.  The transmission shifts fine, and I should be able to clean up the interior parts enough to be able to sell them off.

http://www.putrescence.org/gallery/var/thumbs/Automotive/Turbo-Neon/IMG_20111022_141050.jpg?m=1320682023

http://www.putrescence.org/gallery/var/thumbs/Automotive/Turbo-Neon/IMG_20111022_141138.jpg?m=1320682063

More pictures at http://www.putrescence.org/gallery/Automotive/Turbo-Neon

At a rallyx event in June (maybe July?), the car suffered a couple catastrophic failures, one of which was a no-start condition in the afternoon.  Initially, I thought the problem was the ignition module, however, a closer inspection back in the garage showed that I was getting spark, but there was no fuel.  After some hunting around, I discovered that the injector driver on my Megasquirt 2.2 board was known to be somewhat weak, and I found a replacement for the deprecated replacement for the original.  After ordering it from Digikey for a couple bucks and soldering it in, the cart started running again.

At another event in August (or September?), the car suffered from another no-start condition, but there was definitely gas getting to the cylinders this time.  I assumed that I had fried another ignition module, so I towed it back home.  I lost the Glenn’s Garage ignition module that I had built (again!), so I sort of sat on the car for a while, since there weren’t any event scheduled again until November.  On a lark, when I needed the trailer for the $2011 Challenge, I tried starting the Neon, and it fired right up.  My guess is that the module had simply overheated and gone into a thermal shutdown mode.

After hunting around for a bit, I tripped across that module again, and went ahead and put it in a project box and got it ready to install.  I also decided that replacing the wiring for Megasquirt would help out, from a troubleshooting and reliability perspective, so I ordered several different colors of wire and got to ripping out all the old wiring and putting new stuff in.  I was actually able to cut each wire to exact fit, and use plenty of heat shrink wrap to ensure that all the connections are secure and the wire runs are out of the way.

Initially, the car would not start with the new ignition module, even after I re-soldered the Megasquirt board for the VB921s (I’m not using VB921s, but the Fairchild transistors that I have are a direct fit) instead of the 420a Power Transistor Module.  Turns out that the heatsink thermal paste that I had was electrically conductive, so after I wiped off all that grease with carb cleaner, it stopped grounding out and the car started right up.

I played with the dwell settings a bit, and have it where the idle is smoother than it had been previously, and overall, things seem to be running much better now.

Over the 2010 RallyX season, I had multiple problems with car, primarily around building boost. There are a few smaller problems that need to be addressed, but they can all wait until the car is building and holding boost reliably. The good news in that front is that when the car is actually able to hold boost, it pulls very hard, so the tune is pretty close, I feel.

Issues to address