Today was a good day!

This morning I woke up with a little hope in my eye, hope that I would make some good progress today.

After doing some reading online about the Megasquirt and EDIS, I headed out to the garage. The first thing I noticed was that the coil pack wasn’t plugged into the EDIS module. I’m not sure if I had unplugged it last night when trying to figure out why we didn’t have any spark, or if I hadn’t plugged it in at all last night.

I then hooked up the laptop and tried to start the car, to see if anything changed. At first, nothing was different than last night, no spark and no RPM signal on the squirt. But a few tries later, I noticed the RPM on the laptop jumped up. Sporadically I was able to get RPM but nothing consistent or worth a darn from a starting perspective.

I decided from there I would need to mount the coil pack and the EDIS module as I hadn’t mounted them yet, they were just laying in the car. To do that I needed to pick up some metal as I didn’t have enough to fabricate much.

I headed out around noon to the DMV, it was time to get the trailer registered, and then head to Illinois to pick up the trailer, fix the wiring on the trailer, and then hit Home Depot on the way home to pick up the metal. The trailer pickup took far longer than I expected, but with the help of Andy and Chris Hohl, I was able to get the wiring on the trailer fixed!

When I got home I backed the trailer into the driveway and got to work on the car again. Before I went ahead and started building brackets for the EDIS setup, I decided to try and rewire the VR sensor on the car, to see if that might fix my problems. I checked a few things I had lying around. I had a VR sensor for a V6 Ford Explorer, but I was using the VR sensor that matched the 36-1 wheel off a 4Cylinder Escort that I had mounted to the car. I checked the wiring on both sensors and noticed that the colors were opposite on the Explorer plug.

After swapping out the VR sensor wires, I went to fire the car up, sure enough, I had a full RPM signal on the laptop! Score! I then started checking to see if I had any spark. Eric showed up and we weren’t getting any spark. To try something out, we plugged in the other coil pack and hooked up one wire/plug sitting on top of the valve cover. Once we did this, we immediately noticed spark! Score again! Just to see if we had something else wrong, we plugged back into the original coil pack, and sure enough, this one also sparked. One thing we did to the original coil pack was to run a wire from one of the mounting points to the shock tower on the passenger side.

I’m not exactly sure what changed to cause us to start getting a spark, but I think it most likely related to this ground, perhaps, I’ll test it out again tomorrow without the ground and see what happens.

Once we had spark, we hooked the fuel pump back up and tried to get her to fire. First thing we started getting was a few pops and then lots of smoke! Score again! After a few attempts, we decided we’d tried enough for the time being. Eric headed out and I decided I needed to try something else. I remembered reading today that the EDIS coil pack should run 132, and we had plugged in the wires for 123, so I swapped this around.

As soon as I attempted to start it was a totally different sound, it was beautiful! I’ve not yet gotten it to start, but it sure sounds like it’s trying to. I had Andy Whittle on the phone throughout the night and I sent him a few log files from the data I recorded while trying to start the motor.

Around 10pm I figured it was probably a little too late to try to keep starting the car with all the noise it was creating. I got under the car and hooked up the speedometer cable, put the missing bushings into the transmission crossmember, and tightened that up as well as the clutch slave cylinder.

I’ve got a few things to try in the morning before I head off to the muffler shop to see if I can’t get an exhaust put on the car.

Here’s some video from tonight, trying to start the car.