June 26, 2006 - It lives

With the gasket in hand we headed out to my uncle's after work on Monday, June 26.  Finally I was sure that I'd get to start the car.  We got there, installed the gasket between the fuel pressure regulator and the fuel rail, and crossed our fingers.  I jumped in the driver seat, put the key in the ignition and turned the key to the accessory on position and stared at the fuel pressure gauge with mounting anticipation.  To my delightful surprise the needle climbed to 30 psi.  Finally all of the hard work and crawling around on the ground was about to payoff.  I checked with Dad to make sure there weren't any other leaks and then ran to grab my laptop.  I still needed to upload the base tune that I received from LaSota Racing.  In order to do so we had to remove the fan fuse and the fuel pump fuse which is why the fuse box cover is off in the picture below.  I used my SCT Xcal 2 to load the base tune.  Don LaSota gave me 3 tunes: a base tune, 15% leaner and 20% leaner.  With the SCT BA2800 MAF sometimes the SCT base MAF transfer function value files are a little bit off on the rich side so Don wanted to make sure I'd at least have some wiggle room.

With the new tune in the car I once again sat in the driver seat with the keys in my hand and a rising sense of anticipation.  I turned the key and all of my worries were washed away as I heard the engine turn over and fire.  It actually started, half of me couldn't believe it.  I got out and let the car idle while we checked for exhaust leaks.  We found a few that we easily closed up by tightening clamps here and there.  Within a few seconds though both of us here coughing and our eyes were burning.  I shut the car off, obviously it was way too rich.  The garage reeked of unburnt, uncatalyzed fuel.  I loaded the second, 15% leaner, tune and started the car again.  This time we had our datalogging setup connected because I wanted to see exactly what the air to fuel ratio was.  I let the car idle for a few seconds and then hit the go button on my SCT LiveLink.  It logged for about 10 seconds and then shut down.  I shut the car down and tried to figure what why LiveLink shut down, but I couldn't figure it out.  It didn't matter though, the car fired up and we still had a little bit of work to do so I was hopeful that the little things we had left, like mounting the IAT sensor, would help the situation.  One thing we noticed when we started the car was that the boost gauge didn't work.  We tied the gauge into a questionable location and now realized that we'd have to take the boost signal from the intake. FIND OUT IF THIS IS TRUE.