Just to be clear, does Nathan have to be the one doing the moaning and gesticulating while wearing a grass skirt?
If so, then remember that the ceremony must be done in the strictest privacy and NOT posted on the internet.......Please..... :lol:
Yes, spandex is optional. If he throws in a few yoga moves, GNAT is pretty much guaranteed to fire up on the first try.
We are so much help maybe we should take a road trip to Detroit Tuned!!! The wast cost and Denver bunch can meet me in Memphis. Everyone els head to Ohio were we will meet up with you guys then one big caravan north. It will be fun. I know Chad would be happy to see us. Kind of like a pulley party of old(for you non R53 boys and girls that was when we would get together to put smaller pulleys on our SC!). Hay Chad can we sleep on the shop floor? I promise we won't scare your costumers. :lol::lol::lol:
To reiterate the amount of time we have into Nates car. 1: Car was trailered back to our shop following Dragon this year. 2: Head was pulled to find that a chunk of cast was missing from the valve seat/combustion chamber of cylinder 2. 3: After the head was pulled the head and injectors were sent to RMW for repair, rebuilding and injector flow testing. 4: While the car was waiting on the return of the head and injectors we repaired multiple broken harness connectors, whether it was as simple as the red retention clip missing, or the connector itself not being able to clip onto sensors. We ran a new boost reference line, as well as tucked the wiring to multiple components to be more appealing on the eyes. 5: We at one point had to pull the rear brakes apart to clean and lube them, as the TyrolSport pins had become sticky and caused the rear calipers to hang, causing the simple task of pushing the car from one end of the shop to the other to be a 2 person job with a wheel dolly. 6: The RMW components were returned to us and Nates car was promptly scheduled to be put back together. 7: We assembled the car to find out that compression was low across the board, and turns out there was a mishap while the head was being refinished and the valves were not sealing properly. The head came back off, went to a local shop where the valves were fixed and the head was reinstalled. At which point the car had not had any tuning work done to it, the car was started for a few seconds to verify that it would start. 8: Somewhere between us getting the car running and now an electronic gremlin decided to rear its head. We began the tuning process with Jan and the car was hit and miss. It went for days starting fine, no issues then the following day it wasn't even getting spark. We would get it started, proceed to tune the car, all the while the car ran fine, but the final tune we did with Jan he verified that the car was safe to drive and may require marginal changes as things break in and the car is driven more regularly. 9: Gnats delivery.. The car was running strong the day before with zero issues being present, I even had a joking demeanor when I went to start the car and pull it out. It started and ran on 2 cylinders, so I shut it off and proceeded to attempt to restart it only to find out that it was back to a state of not getting a trigger signal. 10: We then spent the rest of the day that Thursday trying to diagnose why the car wasn't getting a trigger voltage to either the injectors or coil. 10a: We began backprobing the crank sensor and cam sensors to analyze if we were getting proper voltages from them, as they are where the car gets trigger signals from to collapse the coil and fire the cylinder. Voltages checked out. The EWS was providing 12V at pin 10 on the 40 pin DME connector, but Jan also said that the ViPec nullifies the EWS immobilizer feature, so essentially it takes the cars anti theft to that of a late 90's Chrysler. 10b: The car still didn't want to start; fuel pressure checked out at over 55 PSI cranking pressure. We had intermittent spark, with no fuel being injected. We tried to trial substitute a factory DME and start the car to still see we had no trigger voltage, so we then replaced the harness with a known working harness. To no avail. 10c: We made sure all the major grounds were making contact with the chassis in order to provide proper ground. Today: 9/14/15 10d: I again trial substituted a factory DME into the car, but this time with the intentions of using it as a diagnostic port. I cleared the codes and cranked the car for 15 seconds, at which point I rechecked the fault codes and came back with a P0340 cam code. I cleared it and retried the cranking sequence and again got the P0340 cam code, so I replaced the cam sensor with another known working sensor. Retried the crank sequence with no recurring cam code. 10e: With the reasonable things checked and easy bases covered, injector #3 was unplugged first (no real reason why) and a 194 bulb was made to work as a makeshift noid light. THE CAR STARTED. Cylinder 3 injector was unplugged, the car fired right up and ran on 3 cylinders. The injector pigtails were checked for shorts and continuity and seemed to check out. I left the pigtails connected to the injectors and tested resistance on all 4, all of which came out to approximately .011K Ohms. I left the shop at just before 8 PM EST tonight and the car physically started and ran on its own. What the reason was, I don't know truthfully. I intend on doing some more testing tomorrow, which may include doing some temperature dependent testing on injectors, there may be a temperature based short in one or more injectors causing starting issues. Nate: We appreciate your standing up and understanding the massive amount of work and man hours that have gone into trying to deliver a reliably running car. We are as disappointed as you were to make the long drive home and it not be in Gnat, every spare second we have is dedicated to finding a solution to the ongoing wait you're enduring. This has been a long drawn out unfortunate turn of events, and when we are able to finally deliver your car it will be the utmost of quality that we strive to deliver to each and every one of our customers. The scale of this job has grown to levels that nobody expected, we have consulted multiple entities from friends that work in the automotive field to competing vendor techs, as well as multiple phone conversations with Jan, and everyone we've talked to has agreed with the trajectory we took, even shocked to find out the depths we've gone to to make this car run.
Wow! Nothing harder to fix than an intermittent fault....hope you guys find something you can point at as the real issue once and for all. Does anyone think this could have been the root cause of the engine failure - injector not working or working intermittently? Seems like Nathan would have felt the power loss....
Nice job NKFRY and Chad.... I want you guys on my team when my MINI becomes an unreliable racekor FrankinMINI, used as a daily driver... Nathan.... On the good side, the Gnatster has been garaged parked in "The House Of MINI Love" and out of the crosshairs of the Short North drunk drivers joy riding on a Friday night or the evil doings of that parkour guy..... https://youtu.be/ZEs9zmF-Fwk