JohnK

Wouldn't it be nice if we could just get rid of stupid, lazy people? Come to think of it, people have been proposing selection criteria for such folk for quite some time now, but they seem to get into wars over whose criteria are the right ones to apply.

I bought this on sale at Sears (Craftsman club, special offer) for $150 probably 6 years ago and have found it really valuable. Capacity is 1,500 lbs so you can pick up all of most Se7ens (as well as the rear end of a Civic). As shown in FullUp.jpg: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tx60yuviij5uwqn/FullUp.JPG?dl=0 -The jack has a wide base and doesn't tend to tip sideways at full extension like some regular pattern floor jacks I've used; it's very stable in this regard. Its frame is aluminum so the jack is reasonably easy to maneuver. -Max height is 19” with the supplied accessory pads, -Among other things, the pads are handy for putting on wheels when car is on jack stands since the height and spacing of the pads stabilize the wheel when the wheel's put on the jack cross-ways. -Those white pegs are scrap pieces of 1/2” PVC that I've found useful for aligning the jack when for e.g., lifting the front of the car, reaching under the nose to catch a cross member. With the pegs placed in the front holes where the accessory pads fit, it leaves the right amount of underhang to fully catch square frame tube. The pegs allow you to square the jack to the tube as well as not go so far under the car that you risk lifting on something you didn't intend to, and the width of the lifting surface when squared this way allows lifting on a wider section of frame, which is probably a good thing when the frame's only 1” sq. tube. Again, the width and design of the jack make it very stable when doing such lifting. Lowered.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/qa8vjd9xn408jfe/Lowered.JPG?dl=0 Height is 3 1/2” to the top of the padded surface. This shows the pegs in position and the lifting area they provide at the front of the jack. PlanView.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/s/vpe1b8mxw1rdmn3/PlanView.JPG?dl=0 Small handle pointing toward the jack handle is a safety catch – it engages automatically once or twice as you lift. You flip it back when lowering. The only complaint I have is that the release isn't as progressive as I'd like. When lowering, I have to take care to twist the handle just enough to get it just started lowering and then re-tighten as soon as it starts to move, otherwise it can drop faster than I want.

Thanks. Haven't run into this group before and I will check it out. I ran into the Council for Secular Humanism http://www.secularhumanism.org/ years ago. Their publication Free Inquiry is always pretty engaging reading, and a lot of Free Thinker type activities can be found in association with it. I find lots of things in the pub that challenge me to keep my head on straight, and there's lots of good data, historical and other, to answer extremist positions (like that the U.S. / Constitution was intended to and in fact created a Christian nation, and such).

My first ride in, what I'll call a classic Se7en, was in Kitcat's old Crossflow-engined Caterham. As we accelerated up a steep hill near my house I was assaulted by the induction noise from the Webers - and said out loud "Oh! That's the 'blat'!" So now I know! My question then is "What do you call going 'Out for a blat' when your Se7en doesn't 'blat'? My car has a Honda S2000 engine and while it makes some really fine music, there's not even a hint of a characteristic Se7en sound to it. So what do I call going out to enjoy the twisties, or how do I get it to sound like it's supposed to?

Do "realists" count? I figured out a while back that what I "wanted" to be true had no basis in reality; i.e. since a ' belief' isn't based on fact, you could 'believe' in ANYTHING. And so constructing my approach to life based on getting the best facts I can and reasoning through them rationally finds me being entirely too logical for damn near everyone. But still, I understand that there's a sign on the wall at CNN that says "If you care who wins, you don't belong here." - so maybe I'm not completely alone.

See the Aug Car & Driver. Comparison of 9 of the latest crop of high performance tires. I'm looking at the Hankook Ventus R-S3 and the Yokohama ADVAN Neova AD08 for my Ultralite. Kibitzing about these welcome :-)

A reasonable guess, given that it happened all of a sudden, is that something jamed or managed to build up enough rust to affect it. WD-40 and judicious jiggling and light tapping along the path of the line of parts that make up the system - look for something to adjust itself as you do so for the specific site of the binding.

I'm amazed that The Prisoner managed to create such a lasting impression, and after all these years find myself with a Se7en.

Spoke with a cardiac surgeon who was head of a cardiac unit at a local hospital in the area. He had a GT-40 kit/clone with an ordinary V8 in it. Told me that getting the timing (just a distributor and coil system) right when he had to get everything lined up properly (he had to understand the relationships of all the pieces and how they conversed) was the most complicated and frustrating thing he'd ever faced. This stuff takes some study and getting your head in the right place.

And I thought that figuring out how to tune an engine with an ECU was a challenge. http://phys.org/news/2012-08-shelley-stanford-robotic-racecar-track.html

Jim, Thx, but you have to give Brian credit for the good looks- I had asked for something else (light weight) and got them instead. Best I can do on the brand is MSR, which is what's on the axle cover. Using that as a search I found someone selling them a while back when I was looking for the mfg's specs but never got a source that was their origination. The wheels are all identical, 17x7.5 with a 1 11/16" (45 mm) offset and are 5x100 bolt pattern. This is the bolt pattern of the Subaru WRX axles but the front hubs are Wilwood Pinto, drilled for 5x100. The hubs I got were junk (way off center and hacked machining, came with an assortment of 1/2"-20 and 12-0.5mm studs) and I threw the hubs away and started over with a new pair. I expect that they were a good deal at the time and the mktplace has moved on. I seem to remember Chad saying that the bolt pattern and offset are the same as one of the popular Audi models, so that should open up sources a bit. Anyway, glad you like them and I hope this helps if you'd like to source a set for yourself.

Very nice job, Chuck! Engine bay looks especially clean. How difficult was it to figure out the Wankel re tuning it?

I think you're making the right decision to go to EFI, but there are just a ton of watch-outs, and it can be a difficult thing to achieve. My experience makes me echo Skip's advice. While there must be people out there who can do a good job, I haven't seen any myself, and I've seen an awful lot of unhappy customers and lousy running cars that were supposed to have been handled by a 'competent' tuner. What's really insidious is that it's difficult to impossible for the customer (you) to make an accurate assessment of good performance and a 'good' tune. I have two really dramatic and unbiased examples in my experience where the owner was convinced that his car was running perfectly well and found that the calibration they'd been driving was either ho-hum or poor. One was an older dirt track racer who'd not only had years of experience racing cars, but did the engine building himself. The other was S1Steve - I believe his comment, after I'd gotten him to try out what I knew from improving my testing protocol would be better for his car was, "John, I feel like I have an new car!" Steve's right in that the WebCon system is really out of date re its hardware (having to burn the calibration into the chip requiring a separate piece of equipment and non-trivial electronics knowledge to do so). Looking back there were a number of problems with the software that cost me more than a bit of time. Again in agreement with Skip, since programming ecus involves software, all ecu systems have bugs - some much worse than others. You (the tuner) learn about how to deal with these things in the school of hard knocks, and the more time you've spent with one brand the less time you'll spend on peripheral issues and more time on getting the car to run well. Another issue is that starting with an engine you're unfamiliar with, unless and even if you have a really well developed testing protocol, you can spend an awful lot of time getting it right. Most shops can't afford that or don't have the nerve to charge a customer for the hours or time it takes to get it right so they pass off really poor work. Re using the calibration from another engine setup that's "just like yours"; Edelbrock sells a well developed EFI bolt-on kit for several popular V8s (and happens to use the same ecu as the Webcon). A conversation with them made it clear that "identical" engines can be different enough to need significantly different calibrations, as well as that the more highly tuned the engine (cam, compression, intake/exhaust, ...) the more time it takes to dial it in. Yes, it's a mine field, and all of this lead me to buy a Se7en that used an absolutely stock engine - I got the factory manual from Helms and duplicated the electronics EXACTLY as per the manufacturer. So I get great performance and don't haven't had to touch it. One of the lessons I learned was about "drivability". If making lots of power comes at the cost of touchy throttle response, flat spots in the power curve, ..., the car becomes a lot of work to drive. It got to the point where people I gave calibrations to didn't care about how much power their engines were putting out or where their DynoJet printout had gotten to. Having response every time you touched the throttle, no backfiring at trailing throttle, really amazing early and mid-range torque (which is the whole reason for going to EFI as far as I'm concerned) make max HP academic. And one key answer a prospective tuner should be able to make clear is how he/?she tunes mid-range. If they can't give you a clear and enthusiastic answer to that question, look elsewhere. Johnty Lyons included in one of his posts on the usa@se7ens.net list written by Dave Andrews titled "Premature Injectulation" that you might find informative about the process of getting a good tune. (Re: {USA}RE:Tuning and ECUs, Dec 21, 2011 ) Whew! Hope this helps.

This is a great discussion. Sorting out my car, so far, has shown me that it wants a stiffer front to avoid oversteer. The target/ideal behavior I'm aiming for is understeer through most of the range with final oversteer. To limit camber change problems I'm running front and rear ARBars, and finding that it wants way more front than rear. Unequal parallel links on the rear (all s2ks that I know of have this) put the roll center on the ground which gives low weight xfer giving great traction. So there's gotta be some strange geometry going on as things work to generate the oversteer that everyone sees. The rear setup has very little camber change in ride (i.e. bump/droop) but camber can equal roll giving awful changes in camber (which is why I'm running ARBs). And ride steer at the rear can cause behavior that you dont want. With 50/50 weight distribution, oversteer shouldn't be a problem, but of course then there's the fact that it is.

... also, your fuel consumption and performance will suffer 'cause the computer won't be able to dial in the best mix.

Recently finished fabricating a sump to prevent fuel starvation when cornering and found this http://www.autoperformanceengineering.com/html/pickups.html while I was in the process of finding a replacement for the "new" Denso in-tank fuel pump that came with my "kit" and lasted all of 500 miles. This "sounds" pretty good, and is well documented Does anyone have any experience?

A study done of college students at a major university looked at those who held conspiracy views. It was found that, in the case of princess Diana's death a significant percentage believed that she had faked her death to escape the public AND was killed by gvt agents. The same for Osama re his actual capture (it was a conspiracy that he was actually killed when he wasn't and it was a conspiracy that he was already dead) - i.e. they believed she/he was both dead and alive at the same time because there were two different conspiracies. Seems to be a property of humans' thinking, if you can call that ' thinking ', that people don't see that there's a serious contradiction when they believe someone's both alive and dead at the same time. Look for the study on PhysOrg.com (http://phys.org/news/2012-01-believing-impossible-conspiracy-theories.html).

Slomove, I like the cable through the spokes and suspension - kind of like an inexpensive boot. DB9 plug is really elegant: simple and not intuitive to most.

And be thankful we don't own Ferraris.

That's where the math comes in - it's not as simple as a regular curve of some sort, it's a mathematically generated surface that has unique and useful properties that you can't get from what's available today. "Hicks's driver's side mirror has a field of view of about 45 degrees.... Unlike in simple curved mirrors that can squash the perceived shape of objects and make straight lines appear curved, in Hicks's mirror the visual distortions of shapes and straight lines are barely detectable. Hicks, a professor in Drexel's College of Arts and Sciences, designed his mirror using a mathematical algorithm that precisely controls the angle of light bouncing off of the curving mirror. . . . " Read on for an understandable explanation.

This looks like a winner (and the concept is pretty neat if you're into the science). http://phys.org/news/2012-06-math-professor-side-mirror-patent.html#firstCmt

While im not familiar with this particular ecu, i think that the engine system can be considered as a free-standing piece, so the only difference between it and a std install is its harness. This simplifies thinking about it. Re 'it was running fine before' I had a system change one of its parameters on me when I attached a laptop to do some other work. Turned out it was getting hit by noise, probably aided by a less than good ground somewhere. This was insidious since the ecu checked by the mfg tested fine. The key here was that the head tech said "it's ok, but you might try setting #ofCylinders to 8 instead of 4." I HAD set that to the correct parm and the MSD noise changed it, i later confirmed. Take-home: make a map of the system inputs and outputs, verify each trace ( pull/jiggle each as you test), and be really obsessive about grounds and shielding. Crank and cam positions sensors may send small strength signals. For e.g. a Ford Zetec shields these traces well on their production harnesses. Also, make a list of each and every parm that your ecu uses, be sure you understand what each one means, and verify it as a matter of practice whenever you do anything to the system.

Roman, Things like this can be "death by a thousand cuts" (just ask Kitcat). An approach that may sound extreme, but in my experience winds up taking the least time overall, is to get a complete working system that's one-for-one identical to yours. Then swap parts one at a time and test each change rigorously. Or, perhaps and better still, re-spec your system to one that is an exact copy of an existing system that has been well-developed - stressing "well developed" here. If you're working with an existing tested reference system you'll have higher chances of success searching for whatever thing or combination of things trouble your car. My experience, which was by all accounts successful of over a year's work doing ECM tuning on several different systems, made choosing to buy my S2K a no-brainer: it used an absolutely stock engine and engine management system with very few missing parts (e.g., smog pump, evap-management, ...). When I got it I bought a Helms manual and spent weeks pouring over the specs, schematics, ... and did the implementation ensuring that I replicated exactly what Honda had developed. It has paid off handsomely - I have had no issues of any kind with the engine/engine system. When I modify the car in the future, I'll start with a system I understand, have excellent references for, and have experience with. It would be nice to be able to provide a straightforward fix, but my experience has been that the S2K is no more a "kit" than is a pile of two-by-fours and a bucket of nails a pre-fab house. And engine systems are subtle when they've been tinkered with - my 18-year-old Honda Civic has been delivering amazing power without as much as a hick-up for years and years - and with a 1500 cc engine! Wonderful, reliable performance is quite possible, but it doesn't "just happen". Since your system has not been run much, consider using Sea Foam in the gas - my experience and other references suggest it's valuable for keeping things from gumming up or corroding over time. I would like to pass on thanks for the note you published on Rod Ends a while back. The first time I took my S2K out I thought the rear end and then the front end were about to fall off - due to the crap rod ends that came with the "kit". Your reference of Fastener Specialties and Gary for these parts not only got me even better information about this technology than I had sorted out on my own, but saved me nearly $80 over the going price for a set of very good and suitable pieces for my car (now to the work or swapping them out in an aready-aligned car :-( ). You might look at the books by Carroll Smith, Preparing/Tuning/Engineering To Win. With careful reading you'll find he provides very good sketches of the different systems that constitute a race car (which is what an S2K is) and gain insight into what each is supposed to do and how it's supposed to work. Best of luck in sorting things out.

From what i remember, max torque is found at 11:1. But a nice flat A/F curve means you've got good cooling. Power comes from spark. Diddling that delivers max torque is what you're after here. Once spark is done, you go back to do fuel. A load-bearing dyno and lots of patience will give you optimum in both across your power band (and wonderful drivability).

Mondo, Really depressing abstract in PHYSorg.com 27 May 2012. Search on "Yale study concludes..." These folk were trying to see if there was a connection between the level of peoples' knowledge of science and mathematical competence, and their attitudes regarding climate science. I.e., trying to see if better understanding of the subject matter and its technical foundations lead to people to more accurate conclusions. They instead found that peoples' priority was to support the attitudes of the GROUP they identified with irrespective of what the data said - so if they were, say Rastafarian, they'd select out the bits of the data that supported their group-think. Those with better competence in science and math used their advantage to even further distort the picture toward their particular bias. So it appears that people pick and choose just what they want from all the facts, selecting those things that support what they want to be true, and ignore anything that indicates it might be false. So much for what The Enlightenment was supposed to have taught us.