The last 48 hours is just a blur. Wednesday evening it had seemed that things just screamed along, but Thursday evening things went a lot slower; the jobs seemed to take longer, and we ran into various problems. By the end of the night Thursday, we had the Shelby clone ready to fire but had not yet started it up. Four or five of us worked until about 11:00 PM; here's a photo of the pizza break we took around 8:00:
Friday afternoon around 5:30 I got home from work to start the final work on getting the cars ready for the event. Steve S had been there earlier in the day, painting the flat black on the Mach 1 fiberglass hood scoop; it was drying upstairs in the paint booth. When I got there he had already left, and was sheeting the second Drag Week trailer with aluminum (I can't recall mentioning this before, but of course with two cars we needed two trailers. I have an old model airplane trailer that needed a revamp, and Joel and Steve had been working on this on and off for a while). Steve had called just before I got home and was going to bring the trailer over so that someone else could finish sheeting it while he finished up with the hood. BradFORD had been able to leave work early and was at the shop with the Mach 1 gears and driveshaft installed. I'd been at the DMV over my lunch hour, picking up license tabs for the Mach 1, which I had neglected to do earlier in the week. Steve P was also there when I arrived, finishing the air cleaner tops for the Mach 1, and ready to jump on the trailer work when Steve S arrived with it.
I quickly changed clothes and got to work. I wanted to get the four link mount extensions welded into place under the car, so that the front of the bottom four link bar on each side could be lowered a couple inches for better suspension geometry. Joel had previously machined the pieces that were needed, and I was going to TIG weld them in place. Unfortunately, space was pretty limited under the car, and it took me an hour just to get the first side done. Steve had arrived by then and he is a much better welder than I am, so I asked him if he could do the second set on the driver's side. He was at a stopping point with the paint work so he agreed. I pitched in with some last minute items on the Mach 1, while BradFORD and Steve P were out in the driveway working on the trailer. Here's a picture of the trailer in the driveway:
With Steve under the Shelby clone doing the welding I started to get the efi system set up, checking all the software parameters and making sure that the efi system was seeing inputs like the throttle position sensors and temperature sensors. I started with the same program I ran at Drag Week last year, and made some minor modifications based on the position of the crank sensor and the throttle position sensor readings, but pretty quickly this was ready to go. Joel had arrived by then and was helping with the Mach 1; the hood was on, and the air cleaners were in place. Here's a couple of photos of the front of the car at this point:
Steve had also modified a hood scoop for the Shelby clone, and painted and installed it on the hood. It looked really cool, sitting in the shop waiting for installation on the car:
Finally after another hour Steve climbed out from under the Shelby clone and the suspension work was now done. We put the exhaust system and the rear tires on the car in preparation for firing it. But first we decided to fire up the Mach 1. I had previously adjusted the idle to a minimum level, and wanted to set it up some so that the car would stay running when the transmission went into gear. We also needed to break in the new rear end gears. With the car up in the air a little on the hoist, I fired it and warmed it up. It was already 10:00 PM, but hearing the car start easily and run well gave me a boost of confidence. After it was warmed I set the idle in park up to around 1100 RPM, and tested it by putting the car in gear with the brakes on. The idle dropped to about 900 RPM, and stayed for quite a while. No problems with the idle anymore, that's for sure. Next I released the brake and let the rear end spin for five minutes in first gear, then five in second, and five in third, and finally in overdrive. No surprises, and everything seemed to be fine with the car. I shut it off and went over to work on the Shelby clone, while the other guys dropped the Mach 1 down to get it ready for a test drive. First thing they did was install the shaker hood scoop that Steve had fabricated, and after they did that I added the Cobra Jet script to the side of the scoop. It looked awesome:
At about 11:00 PM, just as I was starting to get ready to fire the Shelby clone, everything went straight to hell. On the Shelby clone, I had not yet filled the engine with water. I had wanted to wait in case there was any seeping in the copper head gaskets, so that I could add some ceramic sealer to the cooling system if necessary once the engine was fired. So, now I added the water. I didn't even get the first gallon in before water started dripping on the floor. It was coming from the weep hole in the water pump. This is a converted Edelbrock pump that I got many years ago, and had run fine on the engine last summer. Apparently between now and then it had decided to lose the seal, and the water I had put into the engine was rapidly dripping out onto the floor. This wasn't a showstopper, but it was sure going to take me at least an hour to change to a different water pump. While I was deciding how best to proceed, the next crisis erupted. The Mach 1 was on the floor, and it was in park, but it was rolling backwards, with a loud crack each time the parking pawl in the transmission went by a tooth. It occurred to me for the first time that locking the rear end up at the track last weekend may have also damaged the transmission. I went over to the Mach 1 to help out. We got the car back up on the lift, and with the transmission in park we were able to turn the rear wheels by hand, watch the driveshaft spin, and hear this loud clanking sound from the transmission. It did not sound good. We all conferenced together on this, and we all agreed that with this behavior it would be very risky to take the Mach 1 on the event. No firm decision was reached, but nobody was feeling very good about it.
We decided to concentrate for a while on the Shelby clone. I wanted to get the engine fired up without water in it, just to make sure that the engine would start and run properly before I started working on replacing the water pump. Last year I had run this same efi setup, and had had a lot of trouble starting the car with it. The problem seemed to be the efi box reading the crankshaft sensor. The box has some LEDs that indicate when the injectors are firing and the coils are working, and they should flash when the engine is cranking. Last year the flashing of these LEDs was intermittent when I was starting the car, and it would start hard, sometimes popping and backfiring, and would often not start at all. Over the winter Scott Clark figured out that this may have had to do with the "crank to run" setting in the software. This is an RPM parameter that tells the ems-pro when the engine has started, so that it can begin providing different fuel and timing parameters. Mine was set to 300 RPM which was pretty standard; cranking RPM is about 100. Scott had learned that sometimes noise on the input signal from the crank sensor could cause the ems-pro to momentarily see 300 RPM even when the engine was still cranking; then the fuel and timing would no longer be right, and the engine wouldn't start. At least that was the theory. One of the things I had done in the software earlier was to set the crank to run RPM up from 300 to 700 to avoid this problem. Unfortunately, when I tried to start the engine on Friday night it went right back to the same old behavior; intermittent RPM signals from the ems-pro, and the engine refused to start. After working on this for 15 minutes or so, we decided to try to put fuel down the injector tubes. When we did this the engine would start for a moment, but it did not run smoothly; it was certainly still getting intermittent signals to fire the coils because it was not reading the crank sensor. On this particular installation BradFORD had put some short pigtails on the wires for the crank sensor so that we could monitor the signals from the crank sensor. After experimenting for a while with the fuel, I got my oscilloscope out and hooked it up to the crank sensor wires. When I cranked the engine I had a beautiful square wave output from the sensor; the ems-pro was just not reading it for some reason.
We continued to work on this problem for well over an hour. By 1:00 AM Saturday morning, we had exhausted all the options that I could think of for starting the engine. Steve had pulled the water pump off the Galaxie, and it was ready for installation on the Shelby clone, but what was the point if the engine wouldn't run? With the Mach 1 showing a transmission problem, and the Shelby clone not able to start, we all agreed that leaving for Drag Week at 9:00 AM the next morning was an impossibility. Everyone was exhausted from the previous 2-3 weeks of work to get the cars ready, and we basically threw in the towel on the event right there. The guys headed for home, and I went to bed without setting my alarm clock.
This morning (Saturday) I slept late and didn't get out to the garage until around 9:30. First thing I did was give Scott Clark a call, and he gave me a whole bunch more things to try on the Shelby clone to try to get it running. I tried different software settings, adjusting some potentiometers on the ems-pro board, switching to the VR sensor input circuit, etc. I went back and forth with Scott on the phone a half dozen times, but could not get the engine to fire. Scott is going to make a trip up here next weekend to try to help debug this thing, because he is as confused and frustrated as I am with it. Once the car starts, it runs just fine, but the starting issues are a killer, and with a new engine that has not been tuned on the dyno, starting the engine was the roadblock that kept me from making it to Drag Week with the car.
Around noon I called the local guy who did the C-4 in the Mach 1, and explained the problem. Suddenly there was hope again; he thought that the problem was minor, and that I could probably live with it. He said just bring a block to put in front of the tire when you park the car LOL! At that point I was thinking that we could make a run with the Mach 1 to KC by midnight if we left by 5:00 PM, and then get an early start to Tulsa Sunday morning, and make it to the track for Drag Week registration on Sunday (registration ends at 2:00 PM Sunday; if you are not there by then, you do not get to participate in the event). I called the other guys and told them about this new turn of events. Not surprisingly, BradFORD and Steve had already made other plans. So had Joel, but he wasn't real firm on them yet, and it sounded like he could go. I also called Steve P and Kevin, who was planning to bring his Lincoln, and they were both up for the trip down, so it looked like getting the Mach 1 to the event was a go. However, I had not yet driven the car on the street, and I wanted to do a test drive after the transmission scare just to make sure everything was OK. Also, my transmission guy was concerned about the fluid in the transmission. I was using Mercon 5, which I guess is a semi-synthetic fluid, on the recommendation of some other people I know who run C-4s. My transmission guy said that the Mercon 5 fluid was too slippery and would inhibit the workings of the bands and clutches in the C-4; he thought it might be OK on a lower horsepower motor, but on mine he was very concerned that it would cause slippage and wear out parts quickly. He had recommended draining it and looking inside the pan to be safe.
Back up on the lift went the Mach 1. The pan didn't show any evidence of carnage; no chunks or excessive wear material in the bottom. I didn't have any type FA fluid on hand, so I ran off to NAPA to pick some up, then re-installed the pan on the Mach 1 and filled it with fluid. By this time it was 1:30. I dropped the car off the hoist and tried to start it and - what? The electric fuel pump was not working. After checking some fuses I opened the trunk and wiggled the wires connected to the Aeromotive fuel pump controller, and the pump would turn on and off when I did so. But it would not stay running. Great, back to the donor car (Galaxie), where I took its Aeromotive fuel pump controller and installed it in the Mach 1. The Galaxie had the newer style, and it took me a while to make the conversion on the Mach1. When I did, the fuel pump controller worked, but the pump override didn't work. It was working on the Galaxie, but not on the Mach 1. I need the pump override to start the car, because when cranking the pump controller doesn't deliver full pressure. The override is a simple circuit to wire; you just have to ground one terminal on the Aeromotive unit and the fuel pump should come on. The switch on the Mach 1's console didn't work, and I tried to jumper a ground wire to the terminal on the fuel pump controller in the trunk, but that didn't work either. This car sure seemed to be trying to tell me something. Finally I just directly wired the fuel pump to the battery, so that when I pulled the main battery switch the fuel pump came on. Exasperated, I started the car, and took it out on the road for a test drive.
The first 1-2 shift told the story. There was a big flare between first and second; not a nice crisp shift like it should be. I went for about a five mile ride, trying the shift pattern multiple times, but it was always the same. No way this car was going to go down the drag strip. I don't know whether this was damage caused by the rear end locking up last weekend, or something else; my transmission guy thought that at the track last weekend we probably burned up the second gear band, because the Mercon 5 fluid was too slippery to let it grab the drum, and so the lining burned off the band. There is some evidence to support this theory; last Saturday on his last pass, Joel hit the rev limiter on the 1-2 shift, and he swears he shifted the instant that the shift light came on. BradFORD thought he heard a flare in the engine too. I don't know what happened, but I do know that the transmission needs to be gone through at this point. So that was that; I gave up all hope of making Drag Week at about 3:00 PM today. The Mach 1 sat in the driveway
Despite not making the event, the amount of work that got done on the two cars and trailer over the last few weeks is awesome. My friends came together and we really worked like a solid team to get as far as we did. This was in spite of the various problems that cropped up along the way, causing delay after delay. Late pistons, porous cylinder heads, broken rear end gears, a broken motor in the Galaxie, and many other problems combined to steal the time I needed to get the cars ready for the event. I'm making plans already to fix the problems that we've identified. I'm ready to throw the ems-pro in the trash, and go with the Megasquirt MS3X like the one I now have in the Mach 1. That thing has been super-reliable, and the Mach 1 starts every time. The Peterson pump on the high riser is also a problem spot, continually dragging oil out of the motor despite the presence of baffles in the valve covers. Plus it doesn't pull the vacuum level I want. I may go back to a stock type oil pump and an external vacuum pump to resolve those problems. Also I really don't want to run the Hilborn setup on the Shelby clone, so I may replace it with the sheet metal intake I made last year. That intake would work perfectly with the hood scoop that Steve made for the Shelby clone. Lots more stuff to think about, too...
I hope the guys who make it to Drag Week this year have a great time, and I sure wish I'd been able to go there with them. I'm going to spend some of my time over the next year ironing out the bugs in the cars that I've got, and maybe next year I'll make it to the event. My friends deserve my best effort on this, after all the work they've put in on the cars this year, and I sure hope next year we make it!
