Roman

Hey, I've been interested in learning some techniques to produce some parts with composite materials. I had a look at some existing threads but there were just scattered snippets of stuff here and there... So here we are! If nothing else, this will serve as my soapbox for blathering about various experiments and results I've had trying different techniques. But I'd love to hear about other peoples projects and experiences and so on. So dont be shy, tell us all about some cool stuff that you've made, or otherwise varying degrees of success... good or bad.

I agree 100% Especially at track days, I could happily replace all of my instrumentation with just a single "idiot light" that flashes in my face if there's a reason I need to stop or slow down. My daily driver doesnt even have a tacho and only has a light that comes on if coolant gets too hot. Not even a gauge. And it's fine.

Yes but its a lot nicer to tune when your fuel pressure differential is stable (As in, your FPR is manifold pressure referenced) As it keeps your injector characterization more stable. In which case you obviously need your regulator near your manifold. Admittedly I'm fussy but I'd only run returnless if I had 3d deadtime data from the injector manufacturer. (And the ECU capability to use this)

Haha yeah this article? Cracked me up, so good http://www.rcramer.com/fun/econobox/

To be honest Carbon Fibre material itself is neither here nor there, as its the expoxy and time making molds that is the true "cost" of the process. I was not expecting the dry appearance either, I think it's because I had a shitload of wax on the mold as I was expecting it all to permanently sandwich together and be a disaster. But I can assure you that each layer got an exceptionally liberal application of epoxy as I did a wet layup like you'd do with fibreglass (partially because I mixed hilariously way too much) and as best I can tell there are no issues with layer adhesion on this test piece at least. Heaps of the epoxy squished out the sides. I wasnt even clamping the mold together particularly well, I just put it under the leg of my table haha. For the next thing I'll try, I'll use massively less wax and see how it goes as I think that will affect the outer coating a fair bit. Yes, Carbon does indeed conduct electricity but so does the steel that my entire car is made from. My process will work for fibreglass as well though, so whatever's best tool for the job. I have been reading about how it can cause galvanic corrosion with aluminium though so I guess I'll need to be mindful of that.

Welcome to... The Age of Enlightenment One of my favourite things about... stuff... Isnt just making something but also optimizing it however possible. Kerbal Space Program is a good example, of the benefits of optimizing things. (You build space ships) You can have a ship that works well, but then doing things like reducing the amount of fuel in each container to just how much you need for that particular stage of your rocket, reducing thruster power to the optimal speed to minimise drag, and so on. Can make a ship that looks the same massively faster and go massively further. In terms of how this relates to my car, currently its at the point where I've just slapped some shit together and seen that it works, which it does. But some things suck for a variety of reasons, or are okay but could be better. It could benefit from some time spent optimizing stuff. For example, I have these fucken massive vented rear brakes, which I then need to use a bias valve to turn them almost completely off in order to not lock up the rear. Do I really need a 5kg vented disc on each side of my live axle, and a big steel caliper that's probably about the same? Probably not. Switching to an aluminium MX5 caliper and a non vented disc, I can drop a fair chunk of unsprung weight annndddd my brake bias will actually work better. Cool. My goal is to lighten the car in a way that doesnt make it any less useful as a street car, or any less useful on the track. I want to try and get somewhere into the 6 litres per 100km mark, do a 13 second quarter and do a sub 1:20 laptime at Hampton. Making the car lighter helps work towards all of these goals. So essentially my plan is to just make a lot of tiny iterative improvements everywhere, (Which may seem like a waste of effort when viewed in isolation) that will add up to a bigger picture change. (Maybe). And learn some some new stuff to stave off insanity a little longer and keep my brain ticking over. Before I started doing anything I weighed the car with approximately a quarter of a tank of gas, full interior, all of the seats, etc. Came in at 1020kg without driver. So it will be super easy to get it under 1000 and I think closer to 950 or 900 will be achievable. So here are a few things on the to do list: -Swap in dual VVTI engine, (for better fuel economy thanks to exhaust side VVTI, and more power thanks to slightly higher CR) -Swap to the 2NZ Alternator which saves ~4kg for same amperage. -Cast some aluminium engine mounts instead of the steel ones with sloppy old rubbers. -Downsize rear brakes. -Remove blower assembly, heater core etc from under the dash as none of it works particularly well and it's quite heavy. (done) -Depending on how engine mounts go, possibly cast an aluminium gearbox xmember as well. (I will 3d print a shape for the local foundry to do these) -When I had an oil cooler, when I had the oil cooler fan going the radiator fan NEVER needed to come on. Even on a hot day. Since there's a water to oil cooler on the engine, I've removed my oil cooler and my large radiator fan. I have put the oil cooler fan on the part of the radiator with the highest temperature differential (Right by the top hose) and surprisingly enough the car doesnt overheat with this tiny fan. Even on a hot day. Which leads me to... -Remove the radiator fan entirely and use a radiator sprayer bar. Since I need a washer bottle to spritz the window for WOF, I can have a valve on it which uses the water to mist the radiator instead when needed. Currently its only in stop start traffic or moments below 35-40kph where needs the fan at all. Also, at high speeds where a fan cant actually assist to cool your car, evaporative cooling can. (Still tossing up this idea but it sounds fun to experiment with. Will leave fan in place as a backup while testing) -Remove rose jointed t3 Castor arms, and go back to standard ones with stiff poly bushings. The weight difference is ridiculous and I'm not convinced they're particularly better than standard configuration. -Remove the rear muffler and cast an aluminium rear part of the exhaust pipe that has a butterfly in it which I can control with the ECU. This has the benefit of making the car a lot quieter when cruising along, annnddd, I can introduce pressure to the exhaust system in order to increase EGR effect of VVTI at cruising conditions. Which I believe may help improve fuel economy, as counter intuitive as it may sound. -Reduce idle speed as low as possible to save fuel (Already done) With MAF based tune I can now get a stable ~670-700rpm idle, but I've used a few tricks to make it more drivable and not stall. Such as increasing goal idle speed above 5kph and when the engine is cold. -Find a way to optimize cam timing at cruising conditions for best economy. This one has been on my mind for a long time, it seems very difficult to quantify how to best set the cam angle. So I have been working on an arduino based canbus project which can communicate to the ECU and show a live fuel economy value. I can turn knobs on the box to increase or decrease a trim table that affects cam timing, fuel, ign, or injector timing, or whatever else and get within ballpark this way. For version 2.0 of this, I am planning on having a closed loop ignition timing control that turns on when cruise control is active. It will float the ignition timing a few degrees eithe way, find the most economical value and then update a trim table in the arduino. Work in progress... I'm also considering having an overlay trim table in the ECU that changes ign timing based on current AFR seen at the oxy sensor - A leaner mixture needs significantly more timing. So it can do this dynamically. -3D print all the things! Lately I have jumped on the 3D printer bandwagon, and this will be an elemental part of the process for some of the stuff above. Not only can I print PLA prototypes, or ABS/Nylon functional parts. But I can also make molds for making other parts out of fun stuff like Polyurethane or Carbon Fibre. I made a test mold to see how Carbon Fibre would work and it turned out friggen awesome: So I'm going to make some more carbon parts, it's such a fun process and seeing the results is exciting. Stuff is so strong and so light, cant wait to make some more stuff out of it. -Digi Dash Tying into some of the above (3d printing a new dash housing, and using ARduino knowledge to build the screens) I will put together a canbus based digidash that will be cool. Will try and make it look like an 80s spec digidash as much as possible, but also have some context sensitive functions in it. (So screen will show different values when cruise control is on, or if you are at a trackday, or whatever) This isnt strictly something that makes the car better, but I'm already 90% of the way there by building my fuel tuning box thingy anyway so why not. -Get rid of heavy battery and move it closer to the engine bay. It's currently in an annoying spot in the boot space, so going to a gel cell battery or similar and moving it closer will save a non insignificant amount on battery weight and thick cables that run the length of the car currently. (ha) -Rear seats? I can only name 2 or 3 occasions on which anyone has ever sat in the back seats of this car. The seats, belts, and rear parcel tray arrangement are over 40kg worth of stuff. So I'd like to ditch them completely but dont want an ugly looking bare rear half of the car. For privacy reasons I want to keep the rear parcel tray so I'll remake something from maybe carbon fibre or aluminium. If the seats go too then I'll make some sort of firewall type thing and try figure out a non ugly way to cover up where the bottom half of the seats went. -Front seats Currently each front seat is over 20kg (including rails) So will get some lighter ones, maybe with fixed rails if I ditch the rear seats. -Radiator Support crossmember Currently I am using an oversized piece of a 2nd crossmember that I chopped out of another carina, so I can unbolt this to take the engine out. Since its an easy shape I'm going to 3d print a mold to make a carbon fibre replacement for this, and the bonnet stand. -Get rid of the glass and replace with Lexan This is something I'm not interested in doing. It's good weight savings but it's a ball ache because you need an authority card or whatever, I can barely deal with trying to get WOFs on this bloody thing as it is haha. -Other stuff I'll learn new things as I go, doing the above. So I might come up with some new ideas or decide to ditch some of the above. But it feels like there are some exciting new things to learn, which I'm happy about. A lot of these things only save 1kg here or 2kg there etc... But they all add up. Since my gearbox is toastedd and trackdays are starting to become significantly less affordable or accessable. I'm happy to just have the car off the road again for a while, while I geek out a bit. The only thing I can say for sure, is that fun times are ahead and I'm excited to learn some new stuff, especially regarding Arduino programming, 3d printing and some carbon fibre stuff.

+1 to North Shore Toyota being GCs

There's an offset in the ECU, and you set it up with a timing light. You dont need to have the angle exactly right.

Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR6_engine Well it makes sense for when: You want more displacement than the NVH etc of a 4 cylinder that big will allow. A straight 5 would be good, but then need it to be shorter to fit in the engine bay of a FWD. You dont quite need the capacity of a V6 and want to save on the casting of a seperate head. It's certainly odd, but I can see how it has its place in the world.

Internal gillies

Every time I add a text box in the GUI editor its called something in the program like GenieString55, GenieString66, and so on sequentially. So in the Arduino, to update a value. I want to write to two places, once to the array and secondly to the screen. So if GenieString55 was Row 1 Column 1 and I wanted to write VAL to it. I would need to write something like genie.writestring(55 "VAL"); But instead it can just write genie.writestring(CurrentStringVal "VAL"); Where it finds CurrentStringVal from the 2nd array which is a lookup table with all of the string numbers in it. So it updates the correct text field. Sorry if this doesnt make sense, one of those things that is easier to explain seeing it in person. I think I'll try move my array(s) to eeprom tonight.

Because I want the values to all be zero initially, and for troubleshooting the screen I wanted them to all show VAL for starters to make sure it works (I found one or two cells out of order) Is using eeprom a ball ache to store bytes in? Like do I have to write each bit? EDIT: Aahhh nevermind I see I can write bytes. easy! Might be easiest to make my table values 0-255 and store them as a byte position that matches the String number on the lookup table for the screen.

Okay sooooooo I have been scope creeping the shit out of this project before finishing the basic task I want it to do haha. fail. But it was super easy to setup some 3d arrays to write some values to. Currently have one pot that can scroll up or down, one goes left or right, and a 3rd pot can adjust the value in the cell. But the idea is that my arduino will lookup rpm and load from the ECU, which will be the axes on the table. Which is where I will store ignition trim values for my closed loop ignition trim cruise control mode. In the GUI for the screen each of the cells is an individual string with an ID. So I have setup a second array that stores all of the values of the stringIDs. So when it needs to write to the current cell, it just looks up that same value in the second table so it knows which string to write to. Time consuming to enter all of the data but will be cool to see what it does. Really need a rotary encoder instead of a pot though so I'm not changing cell values the instant it reaches that cell value. (Can use the button on rotary encoder to tell it to store the value) Hard part from here is that I want to store these table values somewhere apart from ram so the values are persistent after the screen turns off. Any ideas on best way to acheive this? Thinking a txt or csv file on SD card somehow. I'm not sure if eeprom will be too much of a ball ache to try store things into. I guess a file on SD card is nice because it persists after I update arduino code.

Thank you! I'm definitely going to add a glut of extra code for a V2.0 of this project now haha.

Thanks Ned, Are you able to tell from this datasheet whether the shield for the screen will cause problems with 3.3v board? http://www.4dsystems.com.au/productpages/4D-Arduino-Adaptor-Shield-II/downloads/4D-Arduino-Adaptor-REV2.xx_datasheet_R_1_3.pdf From my understanding it just has 5v and ground for the screen power (I can power it externally isntead if needed) and uses a digital pin to reset the screen (Would this be 5v currently and needs to be 3.3?) and then uses serial to communicate data to the screen (Would this need adjusting as well?) Either way, I've ordered one. Even if the only thing it acheives is being a 2nd canbus device to simulate my ECU so I can bench test my canbus instead of going down to the car, to plug into ECU. Then its worth its weight in gold already.

Aahhhh its got a can interface built in! Lush. Would only need to run my shield for the screen which I can power externally if needed.

Ahhhh maybe I wouldnt be able to run my shields with only 3.3v though. pooz.

Oh snap! That sounds awesome. As I'd been considering making next project on a Rasberry Pi instead. But that sounds ideal as I can use my existing shields. I thought the Arduino Mega was the big boss.

I just found a cool piece of code for optimising how long your loop takes. unsigned long start_time = 0; unsigned long end_time = 0; void loop() { start_time = micros(); (code goes here in the middle) end_time = micros(); Serial.println(end_time - start_time); } So whatever is inbetween start_time and end_time it will tell you how many microseconds it runs for. Currently my loop when not going through any of the IF commands because canbus isnt connected. Takes 13,000 microseconds so full loop run time is about 75hz. So there's no point trying to log anything at 200hz or send canbus commands at 200hz. Good to know! Will be interesting to see how/if that drops when the code is tidied up. Also you could partition this out to smaller segments of code to see how long each of them take. After all, what use is an economy based tool that doesnt have economical code EDIT: With some liberal application of IF commands, got it running at over 150hz now. woot

For version 2.0 I will switch the pots for rotary encoders and then have some arrays that work as load vs rpm tables in the arduino. So when I turn the dial it only affects the rpm/load area that you are currently in, rather than changes across everything. And once I have my cam angle / inj timing / goal AFR sorted I think I will try an automated ignition trim method that floats the timing by a few degrees either way and see what gives the best economy value. And then hone in by a smaller margin for a few iterations. I think this might help cover situations like where air temp etc vary away from the conditions in which you initially optimized the ignition timing. So might be a good way to either setup a 4d ignition table orrrr just leave it running all of the time when the car is in cruise conditions. Maybe when cruise control is turned on. It's pretty sweet to be able to add some experimental functions to the ECU this way!

Woops have been lazy. But did a bit more on this today. Had some garbage values coming through so thought I'd better have a single place to check them all: Found a few problems in the code or arrangement of canbus frames and now most things are working. So now I can try make some more useful screens and know the values are as expected. Still need to get all of the pots working but my soldering sucks on things that small and fiddly. Bah. But you can see when each of the values updates and the refresh rate is reasonable, that's with canbus running at 500kbps, can go up to 1000kbps so might try that too. But it might not be the canbus itself that is the bottleneck to values refreshing. My code can definitely be optimized a bit by putting more of the tasks into the "if" structures I have in place but for starters its been good to just group all of the commands together and run them all through each loop, just for sake of easy troubleshooting. (Like when you copy pasted a piece of code 20 times and forgot the ; each time)

Ugh yeah i pulled hilux engine out when i was down at HPA, not sure if it was a 1kd? Cant remember. Was running a prototype diesel ECU from motec. With too much boost towing the race car back to HQ from highlands it split a piston. The oil coming tgrough the split kept combusting and nanged the engine at max revs haha. Intake looked amazingly disgusting.

Yeah thats why some Toyota DI engines still have an injector in the port as well. Ive seen some gdi engines that blew my mind with how fucked they looked!

Interesting! I've seen that electric VVTI on the 1UR (?) V8. Oh yeah so that leads me to another thought. People say that you can reduce pumping losses (and so improve economy) by reducing vaccum amount. But, you also have compression losses as well. If you have more vaccum, you have less air to compress when the piston comes back up. I wonder what the balance is here? Looking at BSFC maps it seems like you can very quickly move up a few isobars by staying away from that very low load area. But then very diminishing gains towards that 80%ish throttle peak. But also, by changing AFR or cam timing etc you are changing the shape of the BSFC map as you go. Hmm.

I think MAF is the answer - if you can quantify the amount of air coming in then you can quantify the fuel, even if its not a traditional ratio I guess. But yeah god knows how you'd tell anything from a wideband. Maybe EGT would earn its keep here.