So close, yet so far on my La Bala middy project. Mechanically speaking the car is completely ready to roll. I have been set back by a number of glitches in the electrical systems that have conspired to keep the car in the garage. Isn't that how it goes sometimes...

I have a 1985 4AGE that was running fine on the original factory ECU and wiring harness. But not being one to ever leave well enough alone I now have a turbo on the exhaust and a wideband o2 to monitor the A/F ratios, and a megasquirt and an Edis4 ignition... (Yes, a lot of changes at once)

I spent a fair time inside the Megatune software making sure that my settings were right. Except when I try to connect via the serial cable to the car and switch on the ignition to the 'run' position, the megasquirt is not responding, the o2 sensor is not heating up, cooling fan is running real slow... Battery? Yup. The battery gone bad... lost a cell and delivering only 6v. It's a racing battery so you can't just run down to pep-boys and buy one. I finally took the battery out of my wifes mini-van and jumpered it across. Still no starter action, but at least the o2 sensor and megasquirt came online. However, car won't crank. Troubleshoot the big red S2000 start engine button and discover I mis-wired it. Fixed that and the car cranks but theres no spark. Check the VR Sensor wiring and discover that it's wired backwards. I have a blue wire and green wire on the Edis box and a blue wire and a grey wire at the VR sensor. So naturally I have gone blue to blue and green to grey. WRONG! Can someone explain why in the hell does the blue wire go to grey and the grey wire go to green!??? It's not logical. Most of the scattered information on the Net about wiring the vr sensor simply says if there is no spark just reverse the polarity of the wires. Well guess what, if your coil is not delivering any spark on the #1 wire, and you don't know you have a bad coil, then you're going to spend hours re-doing all of your wiring trying to figure out why the VR sensor or the EDIS box are not working! (Because I was trying to get a spark off the #1 cylinder) Finally I decide to check for spark on some of the other plug wires and I have solid spark on 2,3 and 4 wires but #1 plug is dead. I spent a good 8 hours on this debacle just to find out that the problem is a dead #1 tower on my coil pack! That's some shit.

The good news is that once I put everything back together and cranked the car (even with just 3 firing plugs) it really, REALLY wanted to start! You know the sound a car makes when the engine is running just a bit faster than the starter? then it falls back on the starter for a second or two and then the engine fires again and just about starts? It is soooo close to running. The laptop shows all of the sensors are online, the wideband is reading a pig-rich condition under cranking, the map sensor is good, coolant temp is showing ambient temperature of 105f as is the Air Intake Temp Sensor. Car shows revs of 260RPM when cranking and jumps up to 700rpm when it tries to outrun the starter, injectors are showing a pulse width... It's all there!

In any case, now I am looking for a battery AND a coil pack to get the car running.

Close, so very close!