yaleman.org

So, I stopped procrastinating and ordered my pistons and the gasket set today. Buying them from GimmeCarParts.com.au seems to have saved me a bit - Repco wanted to charge me 300+ for the pistons, where the GCP price was $287.82. This includes Chrome-Moly rings, a higher quality ring that’ll give better sealing and compression. Hopefully I should have them by the end of the week or so, then I can take the pistons and the clutch (which I’ll probably buy tomorrow from repco) to Bryant Engineering so they can do the machining.

Working in the call center industry, and learning about how to manage calls, customers and the staff that handle them is quite and experience. There are many Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) that can be used when gauging the success of a call center environment, but when it comes down to it, business is about profit. Cash flow in a call center environment is based around the amount of staff being paid to take calls, and the volume of calls that the center can charge the client for. If the company is paying agents to be ready to take calls when there are no calls to take, that is a wasteful expenditure, and needs to be managed. This is where E-Time and E-Blocks come in.

Davyd Madeley has completed a preview of Gnome 2.12. I can’t wait for this release to come out - there’s been some great improvements in gnome in the past two versions, but this one looks like it’ll blow them away. A decent-looking pdf viewer including text search and page previews (and integration of it’s services into nautilus) is great to see. Hopefully it’s not just for locking down the menu, but there’s also a Gnome menu editor! I’ve never worked out how to edit menus in Gnome, and it’s something I’ve been looking for since I started using it as a desktop environment. Sure, some people like the default menu layouts, but they drive me nuts!

Well, that was a new experience tonight - my first night as floor manager. There weren’t too many people on, being a saturday, but there was some fun to be had. There were call queues up the wazoo, and then times when there were no calls at all, I got to give some E-Time (where you can have the rest of the night off - you don’t get paid, but you get to go home) and did some manager-style stuff. New experience and all, means I’ve got another skill.

So, the parts were taken to Bryant Engineering today. Block, crank, flywheel, rods (with old pistons still attached) and the timing cover (with bolts attached) were all dropped off, ready for them to do the work.

Here’s a list of what’s getting done:

• Block - hot tanked, crack tested, decked, bored, honed.
• Crank - hot tanked, crack tested, ground, polished, balanced.
• Rods - crack tested and checked for straightness and shaped, then shot peened and balanced.
• Flywheel - machined for flatness and balanced.

I’m going to call them on Monday to see if I can go and check the flywheel for size, to make sure the clutch that I’m planning on buying is the right one - stupid me, I forgot to measure up the flywheel to make sure it’s the right size. I’m going to be sending an email off in the next little while to the guys at gimmecarparts.com.au to see if I can get a price on an ACL rebuild kit, so that when the crank sizing is found, I can order a whole kit and hopefully drop the price a little. That’ll incorporate a full set of gaskets, bearings (big end, rods and cam bearings) and piston assemblies. Assuming the bores aren’t terribly bad, I should be able to get one size over standard and be right, going with chrome moly rings to give a little bit more reliability.

Called three places today, all reccommendations from friends and on the hotgemini forums - Bryant Engineering (Brisbane), Donnelly Engineering(Gold coast) and Precise Engine Rebuilds(Gold coast).

I was looking to get the engine bored, hot tanked and crack tested and decked. The crank needs to be ground to the next bearing size, crack tested and cleaned up, the rods checked for cracks, straightness and then resized if need be. After all that was done, I wanted the entire engine balanced as a unit, to make sure I’m not going to have issues on that front.

Well, I finished the first stage of the build of the megasquirt yesterday - soldering up the main PCB. I’d finished the relay board the day before, but that was only a minor achievement, since it’s basically a big group of connectors. The megasquirt itself seems to be working fine - tests ok on the PC hookup and so forth. I guess the test will be when I actually get the proper stimulator - the one I made ended up being a piece of junk and not work, so I gave up, because it’s only a few days until the person that has the real stim comes back and we can use that to test the ECU properly. I’m rather proud of myself - it’s a rather complex little pcb, with a LOT of parts to solder on, and for it to work seemingly fine first go is quite an achievement for me. Normally complex things that I make/solder/otherwise have a tendency to blow up. More information soon - I’m going to be pulling the crank out of the engine, and taking the block somewhere to be bored out a little so the piston packages can be sourced, the crank reinstalled with new bearings, and then the engine can be put back together. I’m quite excited!

Ok, so there are some modifications that I want to make to my MegaSquirt - it’s pretty cool to start with - but I want injection control and a few other goodies.

The first one I want is “switchable tables” which means I can choose between two boost/fuel/spark maps by flicking a switch. Another option is single or sequential shift lights - either a single “set off when at this rpm” or sequential ones, hitting green at mid-normal rpm, orange/yellow at shift, and red at over-rev. This is all user-selectable and so forth, and I’ll probably hide it somewhere in a modified section of my dash, with a switch to turn it off when I’m not using it. Using the extra outputs, I’ll also be able to setup an automatic switch based on engine parameters for the thermofans I want to use, and possibly some other things.

The Internet is for porn.

Oh, and send some free operator logos on behalf of Mazda!

Finally, I received my package from the United States! Purchasing things over the internet is always a worry, but even more so when it’s ~700USD and you don’t know the people you’re buying from. But never fear, the package arrived! Bought from DIYAutoTune, my two Innovate Motorsports LC-1 Wideband Oxygen sensors, my MegaSquirt Kit and Relay Board kits arrived today, in a big box that had been opened by customs already (stickers saying “ooh, we ruined your fun and had a look inside” included!) I just got home, and pulled all the stuff out - looking at how the pcb’s are laid out, and how everything seems to fit together. I don’t have a soldering iron here or a stimulator (borrowing one off a friend, since it’s basically a while-you’re-building-only sort of thing) so I was just test fitting things that I can (no components, things like the relay board’s big connectors and fuse holders etc) and generally marvelling at what came in the package.