[mmc757]

Making progress, if even only in our heads.
While I've been exiled to England for the winter I've been combing through the wiring manual and building composite wiring diagrams and troubleshooting guides. Dad has been checking circuits one by one.
He has discovered a broken connector inside the battery junction box associated with the starter relay diode.
We were lucky enough to find a new old-stock BJB on Ebay so thats on the way. Hopefully its the miracle we've been looking for.

 

[mmc757]

I came really close to buying an SVT yesterday just to use as a side by side comparison with this car for troubleshooting circuits.
I got over-ruled by my smarter half...for now...

Progress on this car is basically stalled out right now until I can go to Arizona again to try to troubleshoot it. Dad is sick of looking at it and anxious to move on with his own projects. I don't blame him for that, this car should have been out of his way six months ago.
I think if my next trip to AZ doesn't result in success, I may have no choice but to get another car to compare it to. I'm running out of ideas. In fact, I might even look for a car I can buy when I fly out there instead of renting one.

 

[Joeyisamadman]

That car? Cursed. CURSED. I respect the **** out of you for the amount of diligence you're sinking into this.

Sent from my SM-A530W using Tapatalk

 

[jaged]

i dont know if he has scrapped them yet or not but Pole120 was getting rid of BOXES of wiring harnesses of all kinds. might shoot him a message on FB

 

[mmc757]

That's good to know...Maybe I just start replacing entire harnesses? Whats his real name? (PM me)

 

[LostRacer]

😲 Holy cow! What a ride. Just got caught up. Did you get your OBD2 port to register yet? What is the current status?

 

[mmc757]

Currently on a road trip to go get this monster running. Sunday will be a dedicated garage day, and we've called in an extra uncle who is pretty good with electronics to try to help us out. With any luck, this beast will at least turnover on demand in the next few days.

 

[B3NN3TT]

Fingers crossed for ya!

 

[wadespencer99]

I'll be hoping for a good update! I feel like it has to be something so simple....but beat that LostRacer curse!

 

[mmc757]

I seem to have found someone new who can build a remote tune for me...I'll let the community know if it works out. Its a legitimate business...they normally work with Focus's but he's willing to give it a shot and his terms are reasonable so...
Assuming I actually get this thing figured out this week, I should have a path ahead on tuning.
I did pay Joey at NPG for this service before he stopped doing it, but that was like a year and a half ago, and my own delays aren't his fault so I don't think I can hold him too accountable anymore at this point.

 

[mmc757]

Welp. I'm back to a PATS issue. I think.
We removed the main harness and continuity checked every circuit that inputs to PCM. There were a couple of wires that got some love, but overall, no smoking guns.
Then we jumpered the fuel pump relay to prove the pump works and set the fuel pressure regulator. I set the pressure at 40 PSI to hopefully compensate for the oversized injectors until I can get a proper tune.
After the fuel pump was set, we tried to start the car and...Nothing. PATS failure. Again. The only good news is the OBD port now works, so I can actually communicate with the car, which I couldn't do before.
This PCM and chip should have worked so I'm pretty pissed about that. I really don't understand why its not working.
So this time instead of buying a third PCM, I'm going to try Forscan. I ordered a dongle and it should be here tomorrow. If that doesnt work, than I guess I'll need to try yet another PCM, because we have a high degree of confidence in our wiring at this point.
So I spent yesterday tidying up vacuum lines and wires, and fixing miscellaneous issues that we skipped over because they were low priority, and hopefully by Thursday night I'll have a car that starts.

 

[mmc757]

While waiting for the Forscan dongle, we did a little housekeeping yesterday.
We had originally tried putting the coil pack on the IMRC mounts but its just too tall so we built a bracket to put it over by the coolant tank. I will need to pick up a second set of wires, but I probably should have just planned to put it there in the first place.
Also spent a lot of time building vacuum, IACV, and PCV lines. I dont have a PCV valve installed anywhere, so instead of running it to the IM, I connected the crankcase vent to the valve cover vents with an orifice connecting at the accordion tube. I think my logic is sound here and I shouldnt blow anything up or suck my oil pan dry. I would love to have an oil drain-back line in this system too, but not right now. I will probably rebuild my whole intake as soon as the car is running right anyway.
I dont have a vacuum line running to the external FPR right now, but I think its only needed for FI applications.

 

[mmc757]

 

[jaged]

at one point with the 3L i had the coil pack mounted on the studs of the valve cover near the coolant tank. i just swapped the wires from front to back for the correct lengths. NAPA has lifetime warranty wires BTW

 

[crewchiefpro]

You will want pcv valve routed to the underside of the intake where the factory engineers designed it. It needs to remove gas vapors during high vacuum situations to properly work.

If you burn up another PCM then it is time to switch the entire wiring harness in the engine bay.

Unless I missed something this is a non return system, it must be tuned as a return system first. Setting the fuel pressure at 40 psi will make the car unable to start, and if it does start, it won't stay running. These non return systems vary fuel pressure drastically for load, I have seen fuel pressure jump from 8 lbs up to 55 on my turbo setup.

 

[mmc757]

Its a return system

 

[mmc757]

Well, Forscan is a PITA.
Spent all evening last night troubleshooting software install and setup issues one after another. Finally got to the point where I was communicating with the car and ready to erase the existing keys from memory and relearn the keys, but couldnt get the program to do its thing.
I have a trouble ticket in with Forscan after fighting with it for a couple hours, hopefully they come through for me today.

 

[mmc757]

On the positive side, I made a nice looking EGR plug:

Its brown instead of black, because that's what we had laying around, but it looks better than the plumbers plug I had in there before.

Also got the plug wires and coil sorted out.

 

[mmc757]

Had a pretty successful week. Would have liked to make it further, but that's the way these things go.
The car STARTS! it will even run by itself for a while. Its not charging the battery, the cooling fans are in question right now, and there's a whole list of other issues, but it at least works well enough that we can drive it in and out of the garage and start chasing down these issues one by one, so that's a big win. The guy I had trying to build a tune didn't get very far, we had some unbalanced loading issues that stopped him from building the baseline tune, so its still running on the stock SVT PCM. It's got some detonation in the exhaust and the whole exhaust from the cat back is getting SUPER hot.
-Not charging the battery
-Cooling fans status in question
-Instrument cluster doesn't work
-Clutch switch is removed and jumpered
-Connector C120 (one of the big three next to the timing cover) is unreliable
-Need to get a second set of Motorcraft plug wires (Ive got half Motorcraft and half Duralast and the datalogging shows that they arent equal)
-Need to go through everything electrical on the car systematically and find what works and what doesn't.
-Need to extend the cruise control cable
-yadda yadda yadda

I've run into a hard stop on this trip so unfortunately the bulk of this work will have to be delayed for a while longer, but I'm pretty happy with the overall progress. It feels like its actually within reach now whereas it was feeling really hopeless before.

 

[mmc757]

I did end up running the crankcase vent through a PCV valve to the Intake manifold.