After many many months, and all sorts of trials, we were finally ready to fire the Pinto up this weekend. We'd fixed the fuel leaks which we found (Dowty washers at each end of the fuel rail, and then new injector 'o' rings). Then wired up the megasquirt, made sure it could talk to the laptop, downloaded the MSnS Extra firmware to it, wired in the JAW, made sure that could talk to the laptop. Calibrated the temp sensors for the megasquirt with Easytherm (at the 3rd attempt!)...
Yesterday, with Ron's help, we made sure we had sparks - we weren't getting any to start with! after testing everything we could think of, Ron went back to the manual, and suggested we try and swap the VR sensor wires over - easy enough as all the cables are just (temporarily) connected through terminal blocks for just this eventuality!
that did the trick, and we had plenty of sparks - unfortunately we'd run the battery down quite a bit with all the cranking, so we put it on charge overnight (with an old one as spare), and set out again this morning....
After some more tinkering with the megasquirt settings (I had to re-download the firmware after I bugg3red up the Easytherm changes), we added the fuse for the injectors, primed the pump and turned the key......
And it went! First time... We hadn't changed the ignition map, fuelling map or anything - which is quite amazing as we're running a big-valve head, 285 cam and throttle bodies...
To start with, only 1 cylinder seemed to be running properly, so Ron reckoned the valve clearances were off... and they were, by quite a bit. We adjusted them and set off again... One of the cylinders still wasn't quite behaving itself, we think there's a sticky injector in there, we'll give them a good clean and try again... the VR sensor was slightly too close to the trigger wheel, and the thermostat housing is leaking like a goodun, but we're happy that there are no major problems with it so far... Now we just have to learn to tune it!
Enjoy the video - we've left the bit where the exhaust falls off out, that's going to you've been framed....
The ignition timing is well out, and we haven;t done anything to the fuel map yet, so plenty of work still ahead of us, but we're happy that we know it runs!
Thanks to Ron (swmbo's dad) for helping out for the weekend
