Peter Carmichael

Is this a new instalment of the dry sump cradle or a new trick played by an existing car? Usually this happens when the engine mount on the other side fails.

Bolt check the suspension. I have had this on my Peugeot (that I work on and have had the engine out more on multiple occasions). Also check the front hubs. With mine, I could get it to do the reverse clunk from heavy braking. Also check the offset bolts that hold the middle bearing into the casting on the long RHS driveshaft. Check all susp bolts.

16 will be fine as long as the wiring is reasonably direct and corrosion free. Just think about it if you are, say, cranking for 20s for oil pressure. 25mm is the next commonly used size up from 16 and covers most eventualities.

The steering arms are "designed to bend" as a sacrificial component to save the upright. This doesn't explain the caliper positioning, but may be contributory to the gap between the steering arm and the disc.

Clicks on Nitrons should be referenced to the fully clockwise position. There is no guarantee you have the same number of clicks for all your dampers, so working with a fixed number of clicks from fully hard is the only way to get a guaranteed consistent setting. If your dampers have the same number of clicks as each other, obviously it makes no difference.

Battery voltage compensation using a customised table was broken on firmware 1.16 and earlier. It wasn't interpolating the values, so I got very weird fuelling behaviour on voltage fluctuations. Firmware 1.16 was installed by Emerald back in April this year. Karl sent me out a 1.17 update that has fixed this. I'm guessing not many people are using the custom voltage compensation table. Unfortunately, I had it enabled when I had my engine mapped, so the map itself contained anomalous values depending on where the voltage was at the time any particular site was being mapped. The voltage was hopping across the 13.9V-14.0V boundary causing an arbitrary 5 unit swing in the fuelling requirement. Hi Bob, No, you're not incorrect. That's exactly what I mean. When I changed my map, I took the existing fuel and ignition maps and interpolated new values for the revised load site boundaries. It was a lot of fuss to try and end up in the same place I started. The main reason I'm calling it a top tip is because the "recalibrate every time you adjust the idle stop" approach gets you chasing your own tail for the closed throttle fuelling. Following that approach is definitely part of the Emerald way of doing things - because I play around with several other manufacturers' ECUs, some of which have no equivalent calibration process, I noticed that it ends up being less work to make the calibration fit the map rather than keep changing the map to fit the calibration, if you see what I mean. BTW, the idle control settings are independent of this and only determine the operation of the idle stabilisation programs (and exit from the fuel cut-off program, as far as I can tell).

I'm on 1.0 rev 0.81.

It may well have been a firmware issue that caused the complete non-functioning of my custom battery compensation settings. I replicated the standard .16ms per volt below 16v values into the custom settings and the engine would barely run. I will retest on the current firmware version.

Not sure I'm understanding what you're saying. Wouldn't you need to set the position lower? In my setup, the TPS lower calibration is set at a reading of 117. Maximum throttle is 880. Idle/closed throttle is at 139. This means that the engine is idling approximately half way between LS0 and LS1 values. It means I can put in low ignition values for the overrun to give a clean return to idle and I can have a nice steep gradient to the LS1 position giving clean pickup and progression. Generally I don't need to tweak fuelling settings down at the closed throttle position as much. If you change/move the throttle pot for any reason, the recalibration is just a little different. You take a reading from the TPS for the wide open throttle position. You then fine adjust the minimum position until the closed throttle/idle fuelling comes back in line. These two figures are entered in the ECU configuration page, not the main map and they don't immediately apply to a running engine when you send the changes. You can work around this with the engine still running by sending the map to the ECU again - this apparently causes the TPS calibration settings to be re-read. Edited by - Peter Carmichael on 12 Aug 2010 23:06:53

Dave, You have my unreserved apology. Bad hair day and a misreading of intentions and wording an internet exchange. I should know better.

A few lines later we read that the coil-on time... A coil bridging two gaps will need more energy than a coil bridging a single gap. That means either more current or more time. In my research there appears to be correlation between wasted spark coil packs being designed to operate on longer coil-on times; as they also enjoy a longer period between spark firing, this doesn't cause any issues with high rev running. Individual coil-on spark plugs have the easiest job of all for high rev running.

Edited by - Peter Carmichael on 12 Aug 2010 22:38:19

The bald confidence of this assertion belies its lack of foundation. Oil specification is ACEA A3 and any XXw40, although a 50 will do. As SM25T should know, synthetic is just marketing bulwarks.

Funny you mention that. I couldn't get a Baro signal to do anything sensible at all, so I implemented it as a MAP signal (same sensor, different hook in the software). I was suspicious that it wasn't doing what I thought it was doing, so I disabled pressure corrections entirely. I also see that there are alleged pressure corrections for coil on-time - I'm tempted to experiment and see how much of a mess I can get myself into.

Just got to the bottom of a long-standing misfire issue. The default coil dwell time loaded for my setup table was for a distributor fed by a single coil. i.e. 1.86ms up to 4500 rpm and 1.49ms for above 4500 rpm. Running wasted spark, the coils are somewhat bigger, but fire half as often. For the Sagem coil pack (Sagem 2 526 055), 3.1ms is recommended. No need to change the dwell at higher rpm because the engine only goes to 7500 rpm where 3.1ms equates to 140 degrees. Each coil only has to fire once every 360 degrees, so there is plenty of time to recover. Going higher than 3.1ms would just heat the coil up unnecessarily.