Accelerator Pedal

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The accelerator pedal was much too close to the brake pedal, so I reversed the arms on the pivot shaft (the pedal arm was to the left of the upper arm). By reversing these, the pedal moves about 1″ to the right. This made the upper arm interfere with the steering shaft, so I put a 15-20º bend in the upper arm to put the upper end in about the same position it was when it was mounted on the other side.

I installed a couple of 1/4-2o rivnuts in the mounting plate so that I didn’t have to try and install a nut on the back side. You can see how much farther the gas pedal is to the right of the brake pedal. It was pretty each to accidentally press the brake pedal and accelerator pedal at the same time before, but now it’s pretty hard. I’m really happy with the pedal spacing now, but it does present another problem. With my foot naturally laying across the accelerator pedal, my shoe goes 2-3″ to the right of the pedal which is well under the left exhaust header.The inner footbox panel on the driver’s side doesn’t have enough room, so I’m going to need to fabricate a new one with a bump out for my shoe.

Pulled Lifters, Raised Pedal Box

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Well, after another week of diagnosing the engine noise, we exhausted all avenues that we could pursue with the engine together. The noise still seems like it’s coming from the valve train, and the next thing to check is the lifters. We pulled them so that we could send them to Crane for evaluation. With the engine open, we had a chance to borescope the cam. We found one tiny pit in the #2 exhaust lobe, but the lifter roller had no damage, so there’s no way the noise is coming from that. We didn’t see any obvious damage to any of the lifters either, so we’re starting to worry that the noise is coming from somewhere other than the valve train.

With nothing more that we can do on the engine, I turned back to adjusting the pedal box. The pedal box normally mounts below the support plate, but that puts the pedals very low. I pulled the support plate and reinstalled it below the pedal box. That helped, but I really want to raise them further.

Since I made my own strut mount spacers, I dug through the spacers that came with the kit and found four that were about 5/8″ long. These are perfect; once we have the carpet installed, the brake and clutch pedals will be virtually exactly the same height off the floor as our 911.

Fabricated Fusible Links

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For the dash buttons and indicators, I’m tapping off the power wires on the load cells and running some 22AWG wire  back to the dash. The power wires on the load cells are all 14AWG though and will use various size fuses (many of which will be too large to protect a 22AWG wire). I need to provide protection for these small wire in case they short to ground. Without separate protection for these wires, they could get hot enough to burn before blowing the fuse in the power cell. I could of course use a bunch of inline fuses, but a more reliable and compact way is to use fusible links. A fusible link is nothing more than a short section of smaller wire that will melt before the larger wire can get hot. Like a fuse, this section of smaller wire needs to be enclosed to prevent the melting wire from catching something nearby on fire.

The general rule is to use a section of wire 4 wire gauges smaller than the wire you want to protect. Since I’m using all 22AWG wires from the load cells to the dash, I spliced in a short section of 26AWG wire.

I slipped a section of silicone impregnated fiberglass sleeve over the 26AWG wire. This won’t burn and will contain the heat if the fusible link ever melts.

To keep everything together and limit flexing of the 26AWG wire, I slipped a section of heat shrink over the whole thing.

I fabricated six of these for the loads at the front of the car that I will tap into: headlights (low and high beams), parking lights, turn signals (left and right), and fan.

Diagnosing Lifter Noise

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I haven’t posted an update in awhile because my dad and I have been diagnosing some noise in the valvetrain. It’s possible that it’s been there all along and that we only noticed it after installing the mufflers, but we don’t really know. The noise sounded like only 1-2 lifters were making noise, but I couldn’t determine which one with as engine stethoscope. The guidance we originally got from Crane was to set a pre-load of 0.060″-0.090″, so we set it right in the middle at 0.075″. This seemed high based on what we were seeing online, so we reset it to about 0.040″ and tried running the engine again. Unfortunately, the noise got louder. We then tried going to the high end of the range at 0.090″, but the engine wouldn’t run smoothly with that much preload.

We began to be concerned that the process we were following wasn’t resulting in consistent preload on the lifters. If any of the pistons were partially depressed, we could have significant variation in preload across the lifters. I pulled the valve train back apart again and used an 8.0mm USB inspection camera to inspect all of the lifters. This was only about $20 on Amazon and has a surprisingly good picture for the money.

The tip has 8 LED lights that can be dimmed. The 3M long cable is flexible but will hold its shape when bent.

That feature turned out to be handy because I was able to put a curve in the cable and go down through the intake pushrod hole to inspect the exhaust lifter (and vice-versa). This let me look at the lifters at an angle instead of straight on which helped make it more visible that the lifter pistons were at the top of their bores.

I was also able to pull back a bit and inspect the link bars. Everything looks good, but there may still be a problem that is internal to the lifters (e.g. bad or clogged check valve) that could be causing the problem.

Electric and Final Fuel Lines

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Jenn and I hooked up a number of the circuits connected to the battery and ignition terminal blocks. The rightmost wire in each terminal block is the feed line. The battery terminal block is wired to the starter terminal with a fairly heavy 10AWG wire with inline 30A fuse. The remaining terminals all have smaller inline fuses protecting the wires connecting them to each battery load.

The ignition terminal block is wired to the ignition output on the front load cell. There are still a couple of additional wires to connect to these terminal blocks, but this is enough to get the gauges working and engine running.

Jenn and I wrapped up the starter wiring with the 30A inline fuse. Normally, the battery feed would be connected directly to the battery to minimize voltage drop during engine cranking, but that is minimal with a 2/0 wire to the starter. I also installed a rivnut to secure the wires to the chassis near the bellhousing.

I installed fuel line armor on both the supply and return fuel lines. This is basically just a stainless steel spring that surrounds the tubing to protect against road debris.

I also fabricated the forward fuel lines that come up through the hole in the floor. It looks like the line is touching the edge of the hole, but that’s just the armor. I may still relieve this a little more when the car comes apart for final assembly.

The lines come up just inside the passenger foot box. I then fabricated the final hoses that connect the fuel lines to the throttle body.

Before firing the engine again, I undid the two fuel fittings at the throttle body and connected them together. I run the fuel pump for a minute or so to flush any debris out of the lines. There shouldn’t have been much since I blew out all of the lines and hoses with compressed air, but I’d rather have any small particles end up back in the fuel tank (upstream of two fuel filters) rather than stuck in the throttle body.

After a final check, we restarted the engine for the first time in about four months. It looks like all of the systems are working well together.

Installed Ignition and Battery Terminal Blocks

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There are a number of circuits that need direct battery connections (inRESERVE button, FiTech EFI, clock, GPS keep-alive in the speedometer, and inDASH MAX). There are also a handful of circuits that need power only when the ignition is turned on (electric power steering, FiTech EFI, and voltage gauge). I installed these terminal blocks on top of the 2″x2″ chassis member behind the dash.

More Dash Wiring

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I continued installing connectors in the dash wiring. There are a number of two-conductor connectors in the dash, so I used some heat-shrink labels to indicate where the connector should attach. All of these are from the inDASH MAX box.

This will flash the security light when the system is armed.

The three indicators above the steering wheel share a power wire that is split inside the solder-sleeve on the left side.

I also shortened the CAN bus cable and tied in the inDASH MAX network wires.

The wiring looks like a bit of a rat’s nest, but that’s because I’m leaving all of the wires to the dash long for now. Once I have all the wires connected, I’ll cut them and install a single, large connector that should make it easy to remove the dash.

Dash Wiring

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I’m putting connectors inline with all dash components to make it easy to remove them. I cut pieces of the same wire to make it clear that the connector is installed to the right component.

I removed the dash and hooked up the power and lighting connectors. I zip-tied the wires to some self-adhesive mounts along the bottom of the dash. The bundle of wires in the upper left are lighting wires for the turn signal and high-beam indicators in the speedometer. We’re not using those since we have dedicated indicators.

I added connectors to the lighting inverted, power steering potentiometer and indicator lights over the steering wheel.

Prototype Dashboard

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We’re still working on our final dash shape and layout, but we need to move forward with wiring. I used a piece of hardboard to make a prototype dash that we can use to do the preliminary wiring and evaluate our initial layout. A single piece of 4×8 hardboard costs about $12 and includes enough material to make about 8 prototype dashes.

I laid out and cut the holes in the dash. We haven’t decided where to put the ignition switch yet and I’m sure some of the other items will move, but this is a good starting point. One issue I noticed right off the bat is that the top center hole is too high. There is a 3/4″ square tubing along the top of the dash and the top of the hole just lines up with the bottom of the tubing. The gauge fits in fine, but there’s not enough room to thread on the ring that secures the gauge in place.

I pulled the dash and then installed most of the components.

Here’s a closeup of the gauge cluster. The empty hole at the lower left of the cluster will be for an oil temperature gauge. This doesn’t come with the gauge set from FFR, but we’ll either buy one to match or will be buying a whole new gauge set to match our interior.

We installed the alarm light in the middle of the gauge cluster. I’m not sure I like it here, but we’ll sit with it for now and see how we feel about it.

Just over the steering wheel are the indicators for the high beams and turn signals.

Just to the left of the steering wheel is the high beam toggle. When the headlights are off, this will function as a flash-to-pass button where the headlights will be on while the button is held down. When the headlights are on, this will toggle between the low and high beams.

To the right of the steering where is the power steering adjustment knob. This will let us adjust the power steering from completely off to maximum assistance.

Primary Power Wires

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Jenn finally had some time to work on the project, so we got started by installing the primary power wires to the two load cells. I cut them to length and then crimped on the terminals. I slipped the heat shrink over the crimps after taking this picture, but I wanted to show how nice the crimps come out from the hydraulic crimper from Harbor Freight.