Another Mopar Off My Bucket List - Barracuda Fastback
Today we put the Roadrunner in the garage and turned on the space heater to let things warm up & dry off. After several hours we went to work.
Before bringing the car back from Lincoln yesterday we stopped at Speedway Motors to pick up some timing tape for the harmonic balancer. We had been using marks that we'd made with a paint pen when we'd worked on the car before. The new tape wouldn't stick until we scrubbed the balancer down with some paint reducer but stuck great afterwards.
From the time we'd first gotten the FAST system til now there have been a few updates to the instructions. I still believe they could use a new technical writer to make things clearer. Nonetheless, we felt compelled to start the process over of setting the system up. We compared the original instructions with the ones for the XFI Sportsman upgrade. The two wired in exactly the same but there were differences in setting them up.
It's hard not to get frustrated when you've repeated so many of the same steps over and over like we have but without verifying that everything is set correctly we'd only assuming things were right. My son has obviously heard the expression that "doing the same thing over & over and expecting different results is a sign of insanity". He wanted desperately to make changes.
We've got 3 distributors here. Two MSD Pro-billet distributors (one with the timing locked and a phasable rotor & one unmodified) and a distributor from FAST that is factory phased at 30'.
We had unsuccessfully tried the FAST distributor before. When we were running the iron heads we had installed it but couldn't get the car to run. I dreaded the idea of putting it back in. I knew we were going to have to grind the passenger side head for clearance. I'm still pissed that they never bothered to engineer the part to fit on the engine they sell it for.
The unmolested MSD Pro-billet was purchased for the planned 512 build. We'll drop it in if we give up on having the FAST ECU control ignition timing and set things back up with the MSD doing it instead.
The phased MSD distributor is already in the car. I am still hoping that we'll be able to make it work. I talked to FAST's tech support and they reassured that it's fully compatible the way we've set it up and so is our MSD Digital 6 Plus control box.
After attaching the timing tape we went about checking the rotor phasing again. I'm not sure whether or not we had it right to begin with because we had jerked the distributor out when we were in Lincoln to test fit the FAST distributor (and NO, it did not clear the Edelbrock head). Anyway, after we'd gotten everything set we cranked the engine over but it didn't want to run but it seemed to want to fire. It acted as though we had too much advance.
I called FAST and one of the things they asked was what voltage the battery showed while cranking. I wasn't sure so we checked and were reading 9.2 volts. They said it will not start unless we have at least 10 volts. So I figured that either the battery was too low or we were getting a voltage drop through the circuit feeding power to our ECU (or both). I knew we couldn't go any further until we cleared this hurdle so I got off the phone. We put a trickle charge on the battery after disconnecting it from the car. I didn't want to risk frying another control box.
Three hours later we reconnected the battery and cranked the motor over. It started but it ran like crap. The only way to keep it running was to keep feathering the throttle. On previous attempts we had contacted FAST and they had told us to play a bit with the physical rotation of the distributor when at this point, so I tried rotating it back & forth to see if I could get it to smooth out. It didn't seem to make much of a difference. I don't have exhaust ventilation set up in the garage so it was starting to get nasty inside within a few minutes. We went ahead and shut it down. Tomorrow I've got to get some tubing set up so we can let this thing run longer. We're supposed to get the motor up to 170' before adjusting any parameters in the ECU's program.