Your lack of foresight in tackling the BABE is truly inspiring. If only more of us were willing to just give it a go and sort it out along the way, the world would be a better, more exciting, place.
Your lack of foresight in tackling the BABE is truly inspiring. If only more of us were willing to just give it a go and sort it out along the way, the world would be a better, more exciting, place.
sporqster wrote: Hey ya'll, yeah, we're on the BABE with this beast currently. V8 is having a trigger wheel sensor keeping it from running. By the way, little word of wisdom here: if you're going to build a radical, experimental, what-the-hell-were-you thinking monstrosity of a car, consider driving it around the block MORE than one time before attempting to go 3000 miles with it! I have discovered at LEAST one bad idea or totally worn out parts car component per 100 miles so far, and we're in just over 1000 miles so far. I was up for about 40 hours straight fixing, driving, checking, driving some more, before the handling was more excitement than I could take and I gave up 200 miles shy of day 1 finish checkpoint. The car was getting progressively scarier to drive - like I mean I nearly wet myself at 60 on a straight piece of reasonably dry highway. As I type the car is on a lift at the Allentown PA STS Auto Repair, getting a whole assortment of totally broken suspension parts replaced, repaired, or rigged up hopefully good enough not to kill me and my lovely and understanding wife who was just crazy enough to take the navigator's seat. Picture updates at www.littlelamborghini.com
You should get some stickers or some more shirts or something made to support this mess. I wanna give you money for some swag.
Best.
Escort.
Evar!
Sorry 92C, but this thread is on a whole other plane!!!
sporqster wrote: Hey ya'll, yeah, we're on the BABE with this beast currently. V8 is having a trigger wheel sensor keeping it from running. By the way, little word of wisdom here: if you're going to build a radical, experimental, what-the-hell-were-you thinking monstrosity of a car, consider driving it around the block MORE than one time before attempting to go 3000 miles with it!
The hell you say! Finally there is another person in the world that understands what the 2010 BABE was like for me.
Wish I could have been more help on monday for ya.
We are 10-15 mins from being en route for Newport. CV joint still complaining, but rear suspension repaired.
Completed BABE day 03, currently in Robinsville, NC. Will post additional details when better internet connection is available.
Completed BABE 2012! Pics when I get to it.
Not just an Escort, an Escort L!
i have officially abandoned all further car projects forever. i am selling my tools. good day sir.
-J0N
BABE 2012 photo dump: EDIT rather than dumping all the photos here, click: http://www.littlelamborghini.com/?p=395
If you want to see a gazillion BABE rally vacation photos with commentary
Normally I'd want to chastise you for the pictures that are blurry, but in this case the blurry pictures seem to help capture the emotion of the adventure. That looks like so much fun. I need to figure out if next years BABE is happening after my kids school gets out. If so, then I need to figure out how approprate it would be to have four underage "mechanics" along and a pissed off wife at home. Might just work.
mazdeuce wrote: Normally I'd want to chastise you for the pictures that are blurry, but in this case the blurry pictures seem to help capture the emotion of the adventure. That looks like so much fun. I need to figure out if next years BABE is happening after my kids school gets out. If so, then I need to figure out how approprate it would be to have four underage "mechanics" along and a pissed off wife at home. Might just work.
[threadjack] BABE is usually the first week of June, although it may well be the 2nd week of June next year, details usually come out in October. There have been underage mechanics on previous events and while some of the nightly activities can get PG-13 its amazing how fast this group will straighten up in the presence of a child [/threadjack]
Somehow we kept missing each other and I never had the chance to stop and talk to you about the car. It was truly awesome seeing the Little Lamborghini in person. I did stop for a quick picture before leaving the hotel in New Orleans.
I can't wait to see this monstrosity of awesome in Gainesville! 
AT LAST! V8 RUNS! See me carefully back the car out of the driveway and drive slowly down an alley. It's like the most awesomest video evar!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr0tVX7oqXQ&feature=youtu.be
or on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/v/3726026562640
So no damage done to the auto trans by dragging it around in neutral for 3000 miles. Excellent.
I may need to pick your brain on megasquirt soon. Electronics are not my favorite area, I can't seem to fix them with a hammer.
Jim, my solution is to keep putting in bigger fuses until something catches on fire. Then I know where the problem is.
I don't know if the trans was spared yet or not - but I do at least know that 1st gear and the torque converter work. Will find out if anything else is broken when we get the MegaShift(TM) working.
sporqster wrote: Jim, my solution is to keep putting in bigger fuses until something catches on fire. Then I know where the problem is. I don't know if the trans was spared yet or not - but I do at least know that 1st gear and the torque converter work. Will find out if anything else is broken when we get the MegaShift(TM) working.
I'm a bit more rudimentary than that. At one time I researched MS for this project and at that time I understood it. Now 10 years later that knowledge has been replaced by obscure Wartburg trivia, things I dont care about for work and alcohol induced blank spots. I need to start from scratch :) Paul mentioned he ran into an injector impedance issue (high vs low) when trying to do the conversion which already exceeds the scope of my knowledge, but I'm basically going to be starting from scratch on it. Probably going with MS-n-S since the 1300 Yugo motor has an electronic distributor with a nice trigger wheel on the crank, although I can swap back to the manual dizzy since the blocks came with provisions for them. Looks like that's where Paul was headed since the car has 2 dizzys right now :)
In reply to JThw8:
My recommendations:
1) Get a smart guy. My smart guy is Paul Blaylock. He looks at schematics and sees useful information, whereas I see an unsolvable maze.
2) Don't do anything crazy or particularly clever at first. Make it as basic as possible to begin with. No canbus. No fancy 'advanced' features. Just get the thing to run in open loop speed density mode and go from there, one feature at a time. It's enough of a challenge just getting the thing to work the first time.
3) Use a factory crank sensor if at all possible. My experience is that rigging up a hall effect on a bracket seems brilliant until you try to actually use it. No bracket I could fab primarily using tools available to a medieval blacksmith could hold a hall effect in such a way that it would provide usable signals thoughout the RPM range (which will likely include the resonate vibration frequency of your bracket). This becomes especially painful when you're paying $100+/hr for dyno time and your car bucks and backfires every time it gets to 4250 RPM. Guess how I know.
Here for you if there's anything I can help you figure out!
Did I hear something about Gateway? Is that pertaining to the chump car event? I am in central MO and may have to venture over to see the Lamb in action.
I don't think the Lamb-orghini is quite road race ready (though I had earlier hoped that it would be by now), but it will be there at the track as a support vehicle.
Neat, I am considering venturing over to check out the action.
15 minutes of fame starts... NOW:
http://jalopnik.com/5927172/this-twin+engined-escort-is-a-little-lamborghini
Cool!
a simply amazing effort. Enjoy the drive!
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