Roman

So I've just got my intake pipe with MAF in it, attached to throttle body, attached to intake manifold. Then everything on the manifold blocked off. Then printed an adapter so I can shove a vac hose into an intake runner. To test two, or more, I unblocked off the other runners and jammed more vacs in. But also tested them one by one in a single port. The worst had about half the flow capability of the industrial one. The other two somehwere in between. @h4nd do you have any good thoughts about wiring up 4x 240v motors? I've been looking at some 240v speed controllers, one I saw had 4000w capability. So could potentially run 2 motors full blast (or just on/off) then vary the other two at the same time to reach a goal flow amount 240v wiring makes me nervous!

This has been slow going, waiting for parts to turn up / other shit going on. But I managed to get my MAF in a pipe hooked up to my arduino nano. So I could quantify how good/shit each of my vac cleaners are as a vac source. I've already got a MAF scaling for this pipe size, from my engine tune. So I can just refer to this for voltage to airflow conversion: So with my big industrial shop vac, it reached 2.68 volts on the MAF. so this is about 40 grams/sec of airflow. Which is about 60hp worth of air. I tested the other vacs that I've got, and they were worse than this. Using the best two running at once, I could get the MAF up to 3.0 volts. So around 70 grams per sec / 84 horsepower worth of air. So is that enough to simulate a single runner? 84hp x 4 runners = 336hp Which sounds good but unless you have a 720 deg intake cam, this is not representing anything close to the peak or average airspeed at all. 268 deg cams out of a 720 deg stroke = 37% of the time it's breathing in air. And then much of this time is spent at less than full lift obviously. So to truly simulate the airfow through a single port on a 4 cyl 150hp motor I'm thinking I'll need at least 100-120 grams per second capability. So I will look at getting some vac motors all of the same and wiring them up. Maybe 4 to start with. It's a better situation if all of the motors are identical rather than mix and match. But I can rule out the idea of running just a single vac to get meaningful results anyway, even if its a grunty one. On my previous search I only found more expensive ones, but 2kw vac motors are $50ish each delivered from aliexpress so might start wth 4 of these, and hope that it's overkill! https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32966020456.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.7e675d6fuVKTf7&algo_pvid=8dca2d00-4acb-4a6d-b88a-a9401a618dcd&algo_exp_id=8dca2d00-4acb-4a6d-b88a-a9401a618dcd-3

You need to run any ECU controlled relays via ignition switched power. Or via some wizardry it ends up back feeding voltage into your ECU and it slowly drains your battery, or gives other weird symptoms. This might vary depending on ECU but it's probably best practice regardless.

It's still not 100% but I'm not gonna lie I'm stoked with how this is going to end up looking (Wont be white for final version)

It depends on the shape of your car, some cars dont actually have moving airflow at the base of the windscreen / most of the windscreen at high speed anyway. MR2s have a wind deflector thing on one of the wipers, because otherwise they start lifting up at speed.

I've been printing some proper trumpets from HIPS material but they take about a day each. Currently two done, two to go. So no more glow in the dark PLA... Since I'm definitely not ever going to use the standard ECU anymore I've also been tidying up the loom a bit on both sides of the firewall. Chopped out a whole bunch of crap that doesnt need to be there anymore. Also put in my EarthX battery so thats about 8kg lighter from memory. On the whole I think I'm gonna try make the engine bay look tidy as best I can, and hopefully the lessons from this will flow on to future projects. I bought some Rays Engineering GR-N wheels which look beaten up to shit. But should come up alright and were a good price. Theyre still cast wheels but even so, are a little over half the weight of the ROH wheels haha. Currently in Carterton so if anyone's down that way and coming up to Waikato, let me know if you are keen on some $$$ to deliver some wheels! I've decided that even if I try do a fancy loom it's still going to look very busy with shit draped everywhere. Because there's just a lot going on. So a much easier solution that suits my lack of wiring skills is to make some cable trays that hid everything. This way it's easy to modify later if I want to add extra wiring, and still gives some good mechanical protection etc. So starting on the injector area and will run the VVTI solenoid wires through here too. It will have a top cover piece. But you get the idea. Will do the same for the other main wiring paths along the engine. I want it to hug the contours of the head as best possible, and be as slim/short as possible so it's still a few iterations from finished. Also at some point I will print another manifold that flips the throttles the other way up, so it hides the throttle cable arrangement a bit better.

Oh yeah! I should chuck the EarthX battery in it.

I took it for a trundle this morning, nothing crazy on RPM because I didnt want to stuff another pulley straight away if it was going to. But I figure while the gas level was low I'd go weigh it again at the dump. I've taken a few extra bits out, but then also changed the wheels/tyres. I'd like to get a more accurate idea of current power figure as I've only been guessing what to input into virtual dyno, based on last time I weighed it. I figured it was probably around 830kg now. However without driver, low tank of gas it's 870. Which is about same as last time, even though I've taken more stuff out and there's less gas. So these wheels and tyres must have added a bunch of weight back. Maybe the 1500 motor is a smidge heavier too. I cant remember if I was still on the factory steel wheels when I took it there the first time. But the 13" steels are massively lighter. I will do some checks to see how heavy Reflexes are to the 14" china wheels. Definitely feel a lot heavier. But semi slicks are pretty heavy too compared to a normal tyre. So that's stink news because it means with 32 litres of gas to fill it back up, it's 894kg which is way over what I need/want it to be. However the good news is this means my actual engine power figures are better than expected. Updating the weight and virtual dyno figure now shows it is somewhere closer to 135-140hp at the wheels. Which I think makes sense given it's up to 66% duty cycle on 2ZZ injectors at 55psi. So good news in the motor department but bad news overall. Because it would have been easier to keep improving the motor than it is to lose the weight needed to get the power/weight to where I would like it to be. EDIT: 13x5.5" steel wheels with 155s are ~12kg each 14x6.5" china wheels with direzzas are ~15kg each 14x6.5" Reflex with R888R are ~17kg each R888R are 8.1kg each in that size. Direzza are 7.7kg each in same size. So this means China wheels are 7.3 kg each Reflex are 8.9kg each. So can potentially ditch 6.4kg worth of wheel weight for "free" by putting R888 on my other wheels. Neither of the sets of 14" wheels are particularly light.

So stoked to see this coming together!

Yes! That could be relevant. The power steer ran on its own belt, so removing it didnt make a difference. But this motor never had an alternator, or any other accessories. so its got a custom bracket for an alternator only. The non hybrid motors go crank > alternator > waterpump > aircon pump. So a lot more belt wrap and belt length. The alternator bracket that @Stu made for me is nice and sturdy (thanks again) however my tensioner arrangement is really crap currently. I've just fitted a fresh pulley and bolt, lots of loctite that I'll let sit for 24+ hours. Have also hopefully done up a bit tighter than last time, with an extension bar on. If this keeps happening it might be a reason why I need to consider going to the earlier motor sooner than later. (As it will need belt for waterpump > alternator > idler)

Possibly relevant

VVTI is technically working now, it was just a jammed locking pin in the pulley that was stopping it from working. But I'm leaving it disabled because otherwise I'll hit valves into pistons again... I will build a V2.0 motor on the side using the earlier engine that bolts to the gearbox correctly, and has the correct valve cutouts. Then swap it in with the LSD gearbox I'll put together on the side as well. I've still got the notchy gearbox in it, so I can work on my (hopefully) good one separately and get LSD fitted. If it was a RWD car I'd be more inclined to just lock it, but since you have to pull the whole box apart anyway, may as well jam an LSD in there. Yeah it's only at low speed where wheel spin is an issue, so really needs mechanical fixes not aero. There's not much weight that can be moved around. If I can fit some shims under/over the right rear spring, it will shift the weight forward onto the front left. Or maybe preload the front swaybar with some shims on one side.

I printed some prototype long trumpets that fit under the bonnet / dont hit anything. Because I'm lazy and I figured they might not work too well. They are currently made from glow in the dark PLA haha. However, they worked a treat! Fuel table now needed around 11% more fuel at 4000-6000ish range, and then about 5% more fuel towards redline. Nowhere did it need fuel taken out. cool. So I'll remake them out of something better, maybe try a little shorter and see if I can push that big bump of gains a little higher in the rpm range. The shape of the fuel table tells a bit of a story. about 4k onwards is where it starts ramping up This is with no VVTI so once that's going I'd expect to reclaim a bunch of midrange as well, maybe a little more up top. Current problem is that it keeps spitting the front engine pulley off. It unwinds the bolt any time I rev it to the moon a few times. So maybe there's some weird harmonics going on. Tried some loctite and tightening it as tight as I could, but still happens. So will try a fresh bolt and pulley, hopefully that fixes it somehow. Maybe this motor doesnt enjoy being revved to nearly twice its intended rpm. Who can say? Also, my plan to use good tyres as a poor mans LSD hasnt worked too well. There isnt much weight over the front left so it spins it up real easy which is annoying. So will have to make a start on getting that other box sorted.

Good stuff Sheepers, I fucking love scope creep

+1 to knock sensor overrated. One thing is that you can set it up perfectly on a dyno to detect knock in a really non noisy environment (car sitting on rollers) But then you go somewhere with real life vibrations (ripple strips, gravel, whatever) and you get lots of false triggers because the noise floor has raised. Then sometimes in real situations the signal/noise ratio of actual knock is really marginal. Personally I have it setup for observational purposes but could happily take it or leave it.

Yeah same as a BB. Dont get me wrong the supercharger is a good easy solution for these cars to get a bit more power out of them. Certainly better than a 6000rpm limited NA motor with factory ECU. The gains from water meth injection to cool the air charge are incredible! But then it's annoying to have to keep a tank topped up. @87creepin 205hp is a big number! Hopefully I can make 3/4 of that.

There's a few different aftermarket supercharger kits! Since you need to replace the rods at around 160hp on the standard motor, a supercharger can nicely reach that for a minimal effort bolt on kit. So it's a cheap kit compared to a turbo swap or whatever else. But they run like a god damn furnace as they're non intercooled, so often make crappy power unless you add water/meth injection. In other news, I've got my motor all back together and have fired it up. Unfortunately though my car's trapped in the garage for a few more days as there's freshly laid concrete at the entrance. Have swapped the china recycled beer can wheels for some Australian recycled beer can wheels. Classy. Hopefully gets off the line a little better with R888R though. We've had some decently cold weather here lately, dipping below freezing at night. So I've spent some time dialing in the cold start settings. It runs surprisingly decent while cold, considering it's Alpha N with no IACV. I've also been playing with waterpump speed a bit as it heats up, but I'm not yet convinced there's much benefit to slowing the pump speed. I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes on some better tyres.

What's funny about all this is that people will instantly go "yeeeee" at one motor and "pffffft" at the other, yet you could have a redtop smallport with absolute garbage hanging off it, or a perfectly sorted bigtop and they would be completely different engines in the opposite way of what people expect.

I've been thinking about this, and yeah servos could be a really good option. Only thought about not running a valve spring is that at low lift there can be a fairly grunty pressure differential on either side of the valve, trying to pull them open. So having a valve spring seems useful to make sure there arent tiny oscillations or whatever.

I've written some stuff before, for logging to my digidash. But it depends on what board you're using. If using Teensy 3 or 4 then its easy as you've got onboard eeprom or flash memory. But if using an arduino mega or something, need to write to SD. Which isnt too hard there's code for it. It becomes harder when you want to transfer the data to anything else though.

Haha, that would be a laugh. Nah ive actually got 4-5 1500w vacuum cleaners here so theres room to upgrade if needed. Thanks for your feedback @Stroker thats all very good to know. its handy to know right from the start that I will need multiple motors. Ive been having some thoughts about just getting my ECU to log the data, and use megalog viewer to interpret and compare results. As I can send all of the flowbench data from the arduino to ecu over canbus. I just have to park the car near it and plug a cable in haha. So the arduino would still control valve distance etc but just saves reinventing the wheel a bit with logging etc. It also means I will have before/after engine logs in a compatible format with the bench data. So I can directly see how its changed things in real life (if at all)

Good point. This vac has quite a large internal chamber and a big grunty motor so I'm hoping it'll be fairly steady in that regard. Hopefully I will be able to pick that up with sensors if it's happening.

Airflow The next issue is being able to pull enough air through a system in order to create a big enough pressure drop that it actually simulates the properties of a port/valve. What I mean by this is that if you are at max valve lift but you are only flowing a tiny trickle of air through, it's not going to illustrate differences in flow because nothing's a bottleneck. Generally flow benches that use manometers (water tubes) for measuring inches of water as a pressure drop, run at 28 inches of water which is something like 7kpa below atmospheric pressure. Any less than this, and it's not really going to be illustrative of the shape of a port etc. I think basically it's a case of higher vac the better, but it just becomes impractical. So 28" has become the happy medium that's adopted as industry standard. Another reason for standardizing the vacuum level is that it makes the maths much easier to work out CFM from manual calculations. As flow benches have existed long before computers have. So the less restrictive your head is, the more air you need to flow in order to make 7kpa of pressure drop. What I'm wanting to test for starters is a garbage spec 1NZFE head so I'm hoping I might get away with a single motor setup. However some use multiple vacuum motors in order to get enough flow. In this case I've got a fairly decent sized motor in a commercial vacuum cleaner that I'm hoping will do the trick. Since its not 1947 and I am not planning on doing any manual calculations for airflow. I have no intentions of sticking to a fixed pressure drop for sake of easy maths. I am thinking that if the valves are only partially open, and this creates a higher pressure drop than when they are fully open, this is fine! It will be a closer approximation to real life situation inside the engine at low valve lift. I will still have an accurate mass airflow number, and the higher vac level should show any changes with better "resolution". My thoughts on this may change once I get it working though. The sensors I am going to use for airflow are... -Normal Toyota 1 bar map sensor -Diesel particulate filter sensor (which is a cheap differential pressure sensor) -Toyota MAF sensor (For mass airflow results, and temp sensor) I'm thinking that the MAF sensor will do most of the work, but I'm not betting the house on it. Since a normal map sensor reads 0-5v from say 0kpa to 150kpa, it doesnt have a huge resolution in the relevant range if we're only going to something like 7kpa below atmospheric pressure. So a differential pressure sensor can be useful for measuring vac chamber vs atmospheric with good resolution, as they are 0-5v output but over something like +- 10kpa range. However before you turn on the vac source, the regular MAP sensor can also earn its keep as a barometric pressure sensor. Also, I think its incredibly important to have as fewer variables as possible away from your actual motor as it sits in the car. One of the "gotchas" of porting a bare head, is that your car never drives with a bare head. So it's kinda pointless knowing how a bare head flows. The sharp corners at the entrance of the port can bias the flow away from areas which are more important in real life when the flow into it has been straightened by an intake runner. So what is common is to build up a bellmouth entrance onto the head using putty or something, like this Which I think is a bit silly, because with a normal manifold on you're likely gettting a much straighter shot of air into the port than an aggressive turn in, right at the head. You could be introducing weird swirling or turbulence or whatever else that isnt accurate to normal operation. Also, the repeatability of making a shitty bellmouth entry like this is debatable. You might see changes simply from how much you've smooshed it in place, or how tall it is each time. So I'm planning to run it with a complete intake manifold on, as it would run in the car. Because ultimately that's what is going to be correct. If your test shows that the head flows way better than your manifold does. Then there's hardly any point being a fuss pot over the state of the head.

For ages I've wanted to dip a toe into the world of porting heads, which of course means you need some way to measure results. So a flowbench is needed. There are lots of plans online, however most of them use water filled tubes and other completely valid forms of measurement which arent any good for drawing graphs on the internet with. I've now got an okay handle on programming arduinos and touchscreens and understand sensors well enough that I'm gonna try put something together that's fairly well automated. It will probably start out simple and then I will get bored and not finish it I will add more bits to it So the first part of the problem. Valve actuation The results of a flowbench usually show a graph that demonstrates airflow from the valves being mostly closed, through to right open. Something like this: So you can see that this particular test opens the valves and tests in 0.05" increments. I thought it would be nice to be able to both measure how far the valve has gone down, and also have a mechanism for pushing the valve down, automatically so it can just take measurements at set intervals. So this way there's good repeatability without human error but also it helps automate the testing to be less laborious. Even with soft-ish valve springs fitted it's still a reasonably strong force to push the valves down. Speed isnt important but high torque and being able to hold in place is. So a stepdown geared worm drive motor should be good for this. Not a stepper motor, just DC but doesnt matter as the worm drive gearing holds everything in place (hopefully) For measuring how far the valves are depressed, I found out that some dial indicators have a data port on them, so they can spit out measurements over serial. sweet. In order to get the USB connection into an arduino, need a USB to serial converter like so. So the idea is that the dial gauge will sit on one of the valve buckets, then the stepper motor will be a fork shape that can push down on both of the buckets separately. So you can find "zero" position by reversing the motor until the value on the dial indicator stops changing. Then you know you're at home position. So I'm going to try make an assembly that holds all of the above that can easily be moved from cyl to cyl. So it will likely attach to something that can bolt in place of the regular cams, or use the cam cap bolts. It's important to note at this point that I've ordered all of the parts, but not actually done any of the work apart from percolate ideas in my head for a long time.

I managed to find out a while back, that the drivetrain is the same as the 4wd starlet of the previous model. Which isnt exactly common either, but at least if you blew up a transfer case or something, there's some chance of finding another one. Not sure on the rear diff. could probably find out on toyodiy.com or similar though.