First of all, I spoke way too soon: The battery may have been on the charger for a while, but it wouldn’t take a charge. Having the charger attached to the system gave me enough juice to upgrade the firmware on the MS, but nowhere near enough to start. So for the last two days, I used jumper cables to my van. I was able to take the battery back to Bessler’s today to get it swapped out, and I’m planning on testing it out tomorrow.
I tried getting the car started with all the old settings and the older version of firmware. It would start to catch, and if I thumped on the throttle, it would eventually start, but it was barely running and it wouldn’t idle. It sounded a lot like it was only firing on 3 cylinders.
The next day, I went ahead and upgraded the firmware, which erased all the old settings. Working through the Megatune manual, I set up the engine constants, configured the spark output for Neon/420, and fiddled with the cranking pule widths. After some doing, it finally coughed to life and sort of idled, although it would die on its own just about every time. It was getting a bit late, so I had to shut it down to avoid bothering the neighbors too much, but overall, I’m pleased with the progress.
My plan now is to get out there during the day when I can fiddle with the idle more to try to smooth it out. As part of working on the idle, I’m going to take the fuel and spark maps from some existing 2.0 turbocharged Neons and plug the VE and advance tables in. I can’t find any that are exactly the same, so I don’t want to try to just burn the .MSQ file to the ECU, but because the important stuff is basically the same (same turbo, same injectors, same engine), those maps should be very close. Close enough that as long as everything is working mechanically, it should be driveable. We’ll see.
Other than that, there are really only three things outstanding: Tires; Wipers; And a bath. I’ve got the tires from the CRX plus some 700Rs and I can scare up enough Neon rims to make that work. I also have a line on some other used tires that might be a better bet. I’ve been procrastinating on those, however, to try to make sure everything else with the car shapes up, so I may not have time to get those tires before the first event. The wipers are all installed, but I need to get the electrical stuff worked out so that they actually work. And finally, there’s some junk in the car that I’ve been storing there, plus about an inch of dust covering the whole thing. A little hose-down in the driveway should make it more presentable.
I’ll report back after playing with the idle!