EFl - THE CONTINUING SAGA

It is some time since I reported on the electronic fuel injection and ignition system I have been developing for Mini Spares. Unfortunately I suffered a very stagnant period of too many months whilst a great deal of time was wasted by what I can only describe as the "holier than thou's" in the automotive electronics world. What a bunch of self-opinionated *ssh*l*s!! Far too many empty promises. and attempts to stripe Mini Spares up. I then went to the general electronics companies. solved some problems. but not all. The missing link was actually applying the electronic hardware to the real world application - or in this case an A series engine. I I seemed to have got into the doldrums - and consequently was very frustrated. Time was slipping away, and other companies were coming up with their own EFl for the Mini. The main saving grace was that they are all adaptations from something else. This makes them expensive, and not 100% efficient.

I was talking to some good friends of mine in the race engine preparations world. and they recommended a company with whom they had been dealing with. So I contacted him. Enter Jeff Moore stage right. Now this man is a genious. Not only is he a whiz with automotive electronics, he can speak English too!

Being a bit of a pleb as far as exact electronics goes, previous boffins I had spoken to had either tried to baffle me with science on purpose, or did so because they didn't know any other way and couldn't appreciate I didn't know what they were talking about. After three hours with Jeff, I learn't and understood more than I had for the previous two years. It makes the whole deal of designing a system from scratch a great deal easier when you can understand all the parameters that need to be met. My friend Dave Mountain of Mountune Race Engines (once A series engine demon, now Ford Cosworth mainstay) set up the meeting, and allowed me to use his Superflow dyno to instigate programming at his Maldon vyorkshop. As he mainly does Ford engines, another pal was called on to lend a hand (and his dyno adaptors) - Glyn Swift of Swiftune, rounded off by the attendance of Andy Kidby (ex Engine Sport BTCC BMW engines, now working with Dave). So there we all were - if the devil could have cast his net!! The engine grafted onto the dyno, bearing the fabricated prototype plenum I had made. ready for running, complete with the first generation electronics.

The engine was spun over, oil pressure there, all systems go. Hit the button, it sparked into life immediately. Everybody looked around, I was grinning from ear to ear, as was Jeff and Dave. An hour was agreed upon as running time. Then it cut out. Frowns all round. Hit the button, started first time. Ran for half a minute, stopped. Jeff looked perplexed. The "brain" had performed perfectly all the way from Gloucester, where he lives, on his Astra GTE. Still, electronics can be fickle. A further couple of hours of this went past, during which time I quizzed Jeff a fair bit about how it all works. He was astonishingly patient and explained everything I asked.

Then, for some reason the engine decided to play ball - or so it seemed. After 15 minutes it stopped again. Definitely electronics - so then my Metro was robbed of its HT leads, then starter motor as the other had cried enough. Did the loom need shielding? Jeff doubted it, - but stranger things had happened - so how do we shield it? Tin foil eh? Got any in your pocket? Andy and I tried the local sell everything petrol station, but no foil insight. What do you do in these situations? Buy 8 kit-kats of course. Got a bit bloatey in the eating - but this is all in the name of development, right!

Jeff played around with the chip, we strobed the timing, re-checked the Chip. Still the problem persisted. All kinds of extra earth wires were added as apparently electronic management systems need a very efficient earth. Light then dawned - the coil must be incompatible. A coil from a Cosworth was tried. Wonderful, we had lift off. The engine was left to run in whilst we all grabbed a butty, albeit late in the day.

We were just about ready to start programming when Andy shouted and hit the cut out switch. Oil was all over the floor - he'd seen something come out of the gearbox. Oh no! I thought of all the worst problems - broken crank, thrown rod (this had a set of specially modified A + rods on an A + crank instead of the usual'S' rods as used with eight ports - more later), who knows what. As it turned out, my trusty dyno gearbox casing had decided after some four years to drop the selector boss out of the bottom. Being a rod-change case, the selector boss is a steel post on a steel bung pushed in from the outside. It had shaken loose and fallen out, dumping the entire contents of the sump all over the dyno and cell floor. Still, could have been worse. I cleaned it up and stuck it back in with some bearing-fit gunge, and Andy fabricated a support bracket from an exhaust clamp. All was well again. Andy was so quick on the kill button, the engine suffered no bearing damage whatsoever.

Then the programming was started. Amazing this was to watch. I imagined programming was a real time consuming affair, and chip-burning even more so. Wrong. Seconds. With Jeff's burner (the size of a large hand - held calculator) it took about 20 seconds to remove the chip from the ECU, burn a new programme, and refit it. Despite this a misfire at around 5000 rpm persisted. The injectors were changed, but still it persisted. Then the sillies started, culminating in one of the funniest things I've seen for sometime.

Dave decided to check that the injectors were functioning properly. Now I expected them to be pointed into a bucket, and the system turned on. Not Dave. He volunteered to hold the fuel rail complete with injectors just out of the injector bosses whilst Andy flicked the engine over. With 45 psi of fuel pressure I thought this would prove interesting. I was right. Andy hit the starter button - and as soon as the bendix hit the ring gear - WHOOF! FIRE. Under 45 psi there was no shortage of combustible liquid - the engine was engulfed in flames. Dave rushed out of the cell, but stood frozen, mouth and eyes wide open in disbelief, at the cell door as the cell was engulfed in smoke. Andy was desperately trying to find the extinguisher systems trigger switch, I was wildly looking around for it.

Dave was still at the cell door agape! It was like a scene from Faulty Towers. Then I started laughing, Glyn started laughing, Andy was all action - eventually grabbing an extinguisher, shoving Dave aside, and quenched the flames manually. Once they were out, Andy came out and shut the cell door - which uncovered the whereabouts of the all important extinguisher system button. By now, we were all laughing -Andy and I nearly at convulsion level. More because of the look on Dave's face than anything else. You had to have been there! The start of a trend? External combustion A Series engines? The smoke subsided, and it was deemed safe to re-enter the cell. What a mess. My nicely painted engine was scorched and sooty black. Most of the loom was burnt and melted. What a mess. The injectors were refitted. Wires separated and taped. Some left bare. Would the ultimate test of Jeff's electronics prove too much? Not on your life. The engine burst into life - albeit with the same misfire.· It was now pretty late, so more testing was abandoned. Jeff took the electronics away with him, including the crispy loom, and left promising to check the programme thoroughly. I helped Andy remove the engine from the dyno and mop-up the spilt oil, ready for the next barrage of Cosworth engine testing.All in all, a pretty eventful day - does all development work go like this? I doubt it.

Jeff phoned a few days later. He'd found a bug in the programme that was causing the misfire. He swore a little, all that mucking about at Dave's and he found it in 10 minutes. Still, that's the way it goes. Andy told me it once took them two weeks just to get an engine to start at Brian Hart's. Andy used to do the dyno work for Brian Hart on their Formula One Turbo BMW engines. Anyway, back down to Dave's. Fit the engine, enter Jeff, fit new loom without the cripsy bits, plug in new ECU, hit the button - blast off! This time no hitches. Engine ran all day without missing a beat. The programme set, and then the power runs were taken. To say we were all impressed is an understatement. Bearing in mind that the plenum, injector type, fuel pressure, and throttle body were just a starting point on an engine that was basically a race engine (1293cc, 12-1 CR, Supersprint cam) the readings were impressive:-

As I was essentially developing this for road use, this was more or less what I was looking for as a start - in fact better, and shows just what is available when using a proper fuel injection system. The horse power takes up at just the right place as the torque falls away. But 82 Ib ft at 3000rpm!! The engine was taking full throttle under load at 2000rpm, just registering 70 Ib ft.

When you seriously consider what makes a car feel "fast", it is usually in conjunction with the way it accelerates. This acceleration is caused by torque, not horse power, which is why the bigger the engine, the faster it feels as it develops more torque than smaller engines.

Dismantling the engine before its next dyno run showed no problems anywhere. The next step was to examine the head and plenum for any tell-tale signs of how well/badly the system was working - and check out the flow capabilities of the whole unit. The inlet ports and plenum displayed much of what I expected - cam incompatibility. Sure it gave reasonable results, but what would it give a more suitable cam? Then the flow tests were done - once again by Mike Parry at Race Techniques. Firstly, the head was flowed, the results slightly disappointing - but when compared to the dyno results, expected. The plenum was reasonably good, but the throttle butterfly was too small. Again, this was more or less suspected - but I had to start somewhere. I'd had everything from 38mm to 65mm recommended. I ended up with 50mm. Mike advised 56mm would be good, I checked out some current production systems and have now decided on 55mm. That, with a new plenum, and more suitable cams will give even better results I am certain. Remember, I'm going for optimum road performance, NOT maximum horsepower.

The complete system should be available by the end of February. Read more about this development in the next issue.

Keith Calver