Chris Hammond
Saturday, October 24, 2009 7:15:52 PM
So I will start this post off staying this: I know nothing, I am a noob when it comes to the megasquirt, and tuning a fuel injection car (or a carb’d car for that matter).
That being said, I think my megasquirt is giving the car too much fuel when it’s trying to start. I don’t know how to prove this, other than to learn how to mess with the fuel map for the megasquirt and see if I can’t back off the fuel a big when trying to start the car. The car doesn’t like to start, it’s very hesitant to do so, and to me it just sounds like it’s flooded and can’t ignite because of this. I’ll have to do some reading here over the next week or so to see if I can’t figure it out and get the car to reliably start.
I did start to adjust the fuel map a bit this afternoon but ended up not getting enough juice from the battery to power the starter and the fuel pump at the same time, so I’ve got the battery on the charge. The charger has been getting a workout today as it was plugged into an 89 RX-7 for a few hours while I charged the battery on that ride up so it can be loaded on the transport truck later today (if the guy ever shows up).
Earlier this week I did manage to get the datsun started, and even backed it out of the garage, but I couldn’t keep it running enough to drive it back in so I had to push it. I moved it over into the third bay so that I could make room for the F250 to park inside for the winter. That truck is huge, barely fits into our 24ft garage (we also have 18” shelves in front of it), but it does fit, so that made the wife exceptionally happy!
I’ll try to get some new photos of the Datsun later this week. I may start doing some body work prep on it, I have a coupon for a maaco paint job for $275, so I think I’ll get some bondo out to smooth out some rough spots and get it ready for paint. Bondo? Maaco? I don’t see any value in putting a lot of money into the exterior of this Datsun at this point. I just need it to run, and not be 5 different colors, so I’ll take it to Maaco for a flat black paint job and be done with it!
Views: 2604
Chris Hammond
Sunday, July 05, 2009 11:52:31 PM
So I finally got some more time on the Datsun over the past few days. Friday I went down to my boss’ house and used his bead blaster to clean up some of the suspension pieces (photos of those later this week).
Today I needed to relax a bit (for the reason read this blog post) so I went into the garage and decided to pull the rear hatch off the car. I’m going to try to get rid of all the extra parts I have in the next week or two, and a hatch is one of the extras so I wanted to get the one off the car. That process went pretty quickly, and here are the results:

The blue one being the one I will be getting rid of, and the brown one being the one I want to put on the car.
After that I started playing around with some paint stripper.Here’s the result of that.

I don’t think I want to buy enough stripper to spray down the whole car! That’ll be a lot of chemicals, though it does end up cleaner than if I went to completely sand the whole car down.
More work later this week.
Views: 1396
Chris Hammond
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 1:36:38 AM
We got back from Colorado on Saturday night. Sunday afternoon I was out in the driveway power washing the extra suspension for the 240z. I got quite a bit done, it looks a lot better than before, and I also managed to get most of the disassembled so that I could get it sand blasted. I did manage to get grease all over the driveway though, which then go on the dogs when Natalie decided to try to wash the dogs in the driveway while I was out there. Whoops! Lesson learned, grease gets everywhere.
I’ll hopefully have some time this weekend to get down to Egypt (my boss, with the sandblaster, lives way down in the sticks of MO) to work on sandblasting some of the parts so they can be painted and then reassembled. I’ll take pictures if any of that happens!
Views: 1076
Chris Hammond
Sunday, April 19, 2009 1:40:36 AM
So I had hoped to get the engine installed into the car today but got sidetracked trying to get a final few items finished up before doing so.
First things first I wanted to try and get some of the new bushings I purchased off Ebay back in December into the car, so I attempted to get the old bushings out of the rear motor mount, not having much luck I went to Carquest. They also didn’t have any luck but sent me on to Terry’s Machine Shop in Bridgeton. 25 minutes or so later (which was 20 minutes after they closed) the old bushings were free and room for the new urethane bushings available. I then ran back to Carquest and picked up some lithium grease and headed home.
I painted the rear motor mount one last time, as playing around with the bushings had removed some paint, and then I started on other items. I changed the bushing in the steering coupler to use the new urethane bushing, I also spent some time cleaning up some of the dust, and crap in the engine back from 2yrs ago when the car last ran. After doing this I drained the transmission and checked to see if I had any fluid to put back in it before installing it in the car tomorrow, I didn’t so I picked some up tonight.
I assembled the new bushings in the rear mount and then test fitted it under the car to make sure it would work, success, so hopefully it goes in smoothly tomorrow.
So I didn’t get a whole lot of progress made today, but I hope to tomorrow as Terec will be coming over in the morning and helping me with the big task, getting the motor up and into the car, 6 bolts should be all it takes! Then it’ll probably take me all week to hook up all the wires and lines to it, hopefully I’ll be able to try and crank it over next week.
Here’s the video from today, not much
Views: 3170