Installing a XFI Sportsman Throttle Body EFI System in a 1965 Buick.

[telriv]

Elagache,

   How about mounting that XFI box on the other side of the cowl??? The eyesore would be out of the way, hidden & since you live where you do have little to worry about via rain or driving in the rain. It would ALSO stay cooler in that location. Saves you from painting & trying to make it look good/blend into the surrounding area.
Just a thought.


Tom T.

[elagache]

Dear Tom and mid-60s Buick fans of a clean engine bay.

How about mounting that XFI box on the other side of the cowl???

I haven't looked carefully, but this car has a Vintage Air system and a lot of the spaces that would be available are already - occupied!  The guys at Orinda Motors routed the A/C lines in the heater housing to save the passenger side vent and leave room for the kick-panel speaker.

I haven't had time to look into this one yet.  There seems to be one more tweak needed in the fuel injection system itself.  I need to figure out how to collect the log data and see if this can be adjusted.

Stay tuned! 

Cheers, Edouard 

[schlepcar]

I still want to see a nailhead green Star Wars air cleaner on this wagon just to confuse everyone.

[elagache]

Dear Dan and fans of mid-60s Buicks that bring smiles to people's faces,

I still want to see a nailhead green Star Wars air cleaner on this wagon just to confuse everyone.

Well, . . . . I'm not sure I want to go that far, but my wagon had a busy day between bringing home the groceries and an afternoon run to pickup a family member dropping off another car at Orinda Motors.  Not everybody "got the message" about what the throaty exhaust really was all about, but those who did definitely had a big smile on their faces!

I hate to admit how many electric cars we have around here, but no matter how green those cars might be, they ain't got nothing on my wagon as far as "announcing her presence!"

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high-tech,

So sorry to have not kept you'all up to date on this project.  I had started to collect a lot of material to explain how the turning process is done - only to realize what I was going to explain was completely wrong!

In the end, I had the good fortune of having Richard Nedbal come by and work his tuning magic while he was on a tour of the Bay Area for other customers.  It took him about 2 hours and he was nice enough to explain what he was doing.  I was extremely impressed by his expertise and how much he improved the quality of the tune!  It wasn't free, but it definitely was worth it!

I'll try to recall what Rich taught me and try to explain in detail how this sort of electronic fuel injection really works.  However, in a nutshell it frees you from the burden of having to have the car transported to a dynamometer and have it tuned there.  The XFI Sportsman is sophisticated enough in its self-tuning that you can get the car running on your own.  If you are willing to sweat the details, you can learn how to get a quality tune.  Alternatively, you could drive your car to a professional like Rich.  That would greatly reduce the expense of getting professional tune.

I'm extremely pleased with this system.  It avoids the limitations of self-tuning systems, and avoids the full expenses of professional tune at a dynamometer.  It does leverage the advantages of each alternative while avoiding their respective weaknesses.

Stay tuned!

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high-tech,

Sorry, I haven't kept this thread up mainly because I haven't made a progress on the last lingering issue: some hesitation when starting cold.  When the car got tuned up by Rich who clearly is pro, he tried to dial in the cold start by starting the engine a few times from cold and stopping it immediately.  The trouble with that is that a big-block . . . . well, they do produce a lot of heat!  So I think by the third or fourth start - it wasn't a cold start anymore.  So I need to run some tests where my wagon really sits overnight and I just haven't had the time.

Still I have a buddy who built his own sleeper muscle car by putting a Chevy ZZ383 crate engine into a 1971 Chevelle Malibu.  It has some sort of an Edelbrock carburetor on it.  As he describes it:

You probably have not heard my car start from cold. She starts right up and then howls and vibrates (minorly) for about 30 seconds before settling into a smooth bellow. It has the high idle set at around 2200 RPM, which seems a little much to me, so I kick her down to around 1600 for the rest of her warm-up. The only problem with this is occasional Sunday mornings when I take her out for an early drive. I like to get going around 6:00 which must be a little hard on the sleeping neighbors. I keep the garage door shut until the 1600 RPM kick-down, but there is still plenty of sound after that. So far I have had no complaints. Both garages have small continuously running exhaust fans so the fume build-up does get extracted.

2200 RPM for the high idle!!! Indeed that must be quite a roar!

In contrast, here is what my trusty wagon sounds like when starting from cold (another video on You Tube:)

https://youtu.be/bVoqF1zhAHQ

The problem I'm struggling with is the long period of cranking before the engine finally starts.  Even so, once the engine starts it runs and runs very smoothly even from cold.  Here is a graph showing the RPM:



The FAST Sportsman system is able to get the engine to run in a very stable way from cold at about 1000 RPM.  The RPM then drifts down to the target idle RPM of 850.  That's a whole lot more comfortable than 2200 RPM!

The FAST C-ComWP Sportsman software allows you to log the engine's parameters so that you can look over a start and see how the engine was performing.  You can even "play back" that log as a movie of those parameters changing over time.  Here is the first 30 seconds of the engine starting as a movie of those graphs:

https://youtu.be/0mnxXdwtmxQ

I'm displaying only two items on the graph: the RPM and the actual fuel-air ratio.  The RPM is like the graph above, but the fuel-air ratio gives some idea of how well the engine will perform.  Because of the chemistry of gasoline, engines perform best at a ratio of 14 parts air to 1 part fuel.  If you look at that graph, it starts by going rich immediately after the engine starts.  I'm guessing that's a result of the engine taking too long to start and all that fuel getting into the intake manifold while the engine cranked.  After that it goes a bit lean with not enough fuel for the available air.  I'm guessing that makes the engine a bit rougher than it has to be.  I'm hoping to adjust the cold start parameters to get the start to remain closer to 14-1 during that process.

This clip doesn't go on that far, but the original movie of the engine eventually shows how much quieter the engine gets once it has warmed up.  If you watch the movie to about a minute and a half, the sound level will drop noticeably even on this movie.  So you can see for yourself the effect of this fuel injection system.

This still isn't an explanation, but perhaps an illustration of what laptop tuning can do for you if you put the effort into it.

Cheers, Edouard 

[WkillGS]

  If you look at that graph, it starts by going rich immediately after the engine starts. 

Normal....A cold engine needs a richer mixture.  An older carb equipped engine uses the choke for that purpose. Choke the air= more gas.

As for the excessive cranking, you can try turning the key on, wait a few seconds, then crank. That may help pressurize the injectors with gas. May or may not help.
Your system is a TBI, not port injection, so it won't fire until gas actually makes it's way through the manifold and into the cylinders. Will take some cranking.

[elagache]

Dear Walt and mid-60s Buick tinkerers,

If you look at that graph, it starts by going rich immediately after the engine starts. 

Normal....A cold engine needs a richer mixture.  An older carb equipped engine uses the choke for that purpose. Choke the air= more gas.

Yes, the Sportsman has an equivalent mechanism to a choke.  I'm just not sure sure it should go that rich.  The old fuel injection system would start the the engine right up without that immediate hesitation, so I think I might want to tweak something so the mixture doesn't go quite that rich at first.

As for the excessive cranking, you can try turning the key on, wait a few seconds, then crank. That may help pressurize the injectors with gas. May or may not help.
Your system is a TBI, not port injection, so it won't fire until gas actually makes it's way through the manifold and into the cylinders. Will take some cranking.

The old fuel injection system was also a throttle body and it didn't take that long to start, so I'm fairly sure this system isn't giving the engine enough cracking fuel.  This is the table I need to tweak to give the engine a bit more fuel:



As you can see the adjustment is based on coolant temperature.  I think what happened is that when Rich set the cold start, he did it by starting the engine and immediately cutting it off as soon as I could see something in the data.  Unfortunately, it took me a few tries and by then the engine had warmed up some.  As a result, it is a bit too lean when the engine is really cold.  However, it is rather close because my first attempts to nudge up the values made things much worse!  So I need to very cautiously nudge these values up a bit to see if I can get a more responsive start.  It should be possible.  The problem isn't a lack of adjustments but - too many!

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high-tech,

I’m still fiddling with the tune on my trusty wagon to improve the cold start.  I realized that if I’m going make any progress on this problem I’m going to have to be more systematic.  So to help myself, I created some tables with the various fuel injection parameters I’ve tried so that I could compare the videos and logs in some meaningful way.  For example here is the table I made listing the parameters I can adjust for the so-called after start correction:

   

Temperature	4-15-2016 tune	Rich's final tune	5-11-2016 tune	6-8-2016 Target
0	57.6	29.4	33.3	31.5
36	52.2	23.1	30.2	26.6
73	43.5	15.3	25.5	20.4
109	31.8	9.0	16.9	13.0

This fuel injection parameter is adjusted by the coolant temperature which is the first column of the table.  Each of the success columns was an attempt I had made to adjust these values.  In the middle is the setting that Rich chose when he came over and tuned the engine.

At the moment, these numbers are nothing more than mumbo-jumbo.  However, I also have been very diligent about taking videos and data logs of the engine starting.  So for example, here is a video corresponding to the engine starting after Rich completed the tune:

https://youtu.be/bVoqF1zhAHQ

Here is my failed attempt to improve the cold start on May 11, 2016:

https://youtu.be/NVTdMcGCmXs

In this case I overdid the correction and the engine ended up running rich for several minutes.  Here is the latest video where I think I’ve finally got the after start correction where it needs to be:

https://youtu.be/a8ZWDjcpqx8

Because this is a software driven tune, you can also look at the logs to understand why the engine is so much more stable after starting.  As you can see below, I tweaked the after start correction so that now the air fuel mixture is much closer to the actual targets:



However, you don’t need the log to see that the engine is running a whole lot better with these settings than the previous two attempts.

It occurred to me that this is a perfectly good strategy to adjust the cold start on any car, even one with a carburetor.  The problem with cold starts is that you wait a few hours at least before being able to change the adjustments - so you can easily forget how the engine ran the previous start.  Most of us now are saddled with a smart phone so we have the video camera already.  Even on a car with carburetor, you might have some setting that you adjust using an ignition analyzer (such as the fast idle speed.)  So that’s a number you could store in a table. 

As to those fickle screw adjustments, well you can keep track of those as well.  You could simply keep track of the relative changes to the settings - for example: clockwise 1 quarter turn.  Alternatively, you could move the screw to a known stop and count the turns to current location.

While I used a computer, a piece of paper is all that you need to keep track of your previous settings and some place to store the videos.

Videotaping could be specially handy for a car that is completely stock and continues to use mechanical points.  Once you get the car tuned as you like it, videotaping your success will give you a reference point to achieve for the next time you replace the points.  A quick review of the video will allow you to decide if the car is idling as it has in the past.

So any car guy can use a bit of high-tech even if that high-tech isn’t actually part of the car.

Some more food for thought!

Cheers, Edouard

P.S. As you can see, the engine still isn't starting as nicely as I think it should.  So that's the next area I'm going to focus on.

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high-tech,

Well believe it or not I'm still fussing with this fuel injection system and . . . . it still isn't behaving exactly as I want it to.  I've been noticing something puzzling.  About 3 minutes or after a cold start, the engine would labor a bit.  Checking the logs this was the time when the fuel mixture was really rich - something like 12:1 when it should be closer to 14:1.

This was a problem because manipulating all the startup settings that could get my hands on wasn't helping at all.  After exploring the situation a bit further, I realized something even more disturbing.  All the tables related to starting rapidly take their effect.  In a minute, all the settings I was tweaking were already disabled.

This was a serious problem.  On the one hand, when the engine was really warmed up this problem didn't occur.  On the other hand, I couldn't find anything else that could be causing this - or so I thought!

Finally I did some more digging and discovered yet another tuning table and this table adjusted the fuel based on the . . . . coolant temperature!  Of course at 3 minutes into the engine's start the coolant was still relatively cool.  BINGO!  This table was set too rich.  My suspicion is that for an engine with the normal mechanical components of the 1960s this extra fuel is needed to overcome the extra friction that remains while the oil warms up.  However, the "super-deluxe" engine in my trusty wagon has a hydraulic roller cam, roller rockers, and other modern technology.  As a result, it simply doesn't need this extra fuel and rumbles a bit as a result.

Of course it - should be - easy enough to adjust this table, but alas tweaking this table will throw out of whack all the other startup adjustments I've made.  So it is sort of a throw back to square one.

So this is a very long way of saying sadly . . . . stay tuned! 

This twisted tale is most definitely still not over!

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high-tech,

I haven’t updated this thread in a while, so here is the latest puzzling developments.  For a few months now, I’ve occasionally had the engine stall after a hot start.  This has always happened after I returned from a trip and had stopped the engine so I could unload the car.  When I would start her up, the engine would mysteriously die.  Trying to restart the engine it wouldn’t even turn over.

It didn’t happen very often and I discovered that simply allowing the engine to cool allowed me to restart the engine and finally get her in the garage.  With so many other things to troubleshoot I put it on the back burner at first.  My initial suspicion was that the problem was the E6 Ignition controller box was overheating.

Of course any sort of overheating issue would get worse as the temperature increased in the summertime.  So it isn’t surprising that now I have to deal with this problem.  I managed to log the problem occurring and sent the log to the fellow who sold me the system: Richard Nedbal.  He spotted that the fuel pressure was dropping just before the engine died.

With this information, I decided to run another test.  I hadn’t tried to restart the engine after it had stalled while logging the data.  Yesterday I was able to run this experiment and here are the results:



You can view this graph as a movie with the actual values of the various engine parameters changing in real time:

https://youtu.be/Z1cRiMDGbeM

Instead of failing to start after the stall, the engine does restart, runs for a brief period and then the fuel pressure starts to drop and the engine dies a second time.

You can see how the engine is starved until it stalls on this video of the engine itself.

https://youtu.be/7FDDNpJ9FbM

Looking carefully at the log, you will notice that the fuel pressure starts dropping before the voltage, so this isn’t an electrical problem.  So the obvious explanation is either the fuel pump or the pressure regulator are malfunctioning.  However, that doesn’t explain the role of the hot engine bay.  Shortly before those videos were taken, I started the engine from cold and as you can see in this video the engine runs fine for 5 minutes:

https://youtu.be/4YmaTgmCMz4

I still need to adjust the fuel enrichment vs. coolant temperature table, but other than that the engine is doing just fine.  After this video was taken, I took my wagon out for a 5 mile run to complete warming up the engine - no problems.

It is extremely unlikely that the fuel pump is at fault.  My wagon has a modern EFI fuel system with a Spectra Premium gas tank and built-in fuel pump:

http://ecat.spectrapremium.com/prod/GM37EFI

So the pump isn’t effected at all by the engine bay heat.  That leaves the pressure regulator, but it is a straightforward mechanical regulator that came with the first EZ-EFI fuel injection system of 2013.  It is not impossible that it is failing from excessive heat, but it would be rather strange.

As in previous cases, allowing the engine to cool down for about 40 minutes allowed me to start the car once more and put her back in the garage.  Once more the engine was behaving as normal.

At this point I don’t think I have much of a choice but to bring her over to Orinda Motors and see if they can troubleshoot this problem but clearly it is a very strange one.

Stay tuned!

Cheers, Edouard 

P.S. Something that may surprise you’all is the air intake temperature (top row, second from the right in the log data movie.)  It starts out a 120? F and almost reaches 130? F - with the hood wide open!  The ambient air temperature at the time was the mid-80s so the engine was using air ~ 40? hotter than was available outside of the engine bay.  So if you ever were considering some sort of a cold air intake, here is more incentive to actually install one!

[Dr Frankenbuick]

Ed, Does your system include a return line for unused fuel from the regulator to the tank? 

[WkillGS]

Sounds like vapor lock, but is that possible with a hi-pressure fuel pump?
The return line Dr F mentioned should ensure the fuel stays a liquid.

Doesn't explain the 'engine wouldn't even turn over' aspect. Maybe that's a different problem. An overheated starter or solenoid can cause that.
A fix for the solenoid is to install a remote Ford-type solenoid.

[elagache]

Dear Good Dr., Walt, and mid-60s Buick fans of high tech.

Ed, Does your system include a return line for unused fuel from the regulator to the tank?

Yes it does.  I was concerned about the reliability of taking short cuts with the fuel system, so my wagon has a fully modern fuel delivery system with a return line.

Doesn't explain the 'engine wouldn't even turn over' aspect. Maybe that's a different problem. An overheated starter or solenoid can cause that.
A fix for the solenoid is to install a remote Ford-type solenoid.

I haven't been able to reproduce that aspect of the problem.  One of the reasons for my tests was to see if indeed the starter or solenoid was at fault.  I do remember the engine stalling and being unable to get it to even turn over, but it isn't do this at the moment.  Yes this too is a bit odd.  I'll keep an eye out for it.

Thanks for the suggestions! 

Cheers, Edouard 

[elagache]

Dear mid-60s Buick fans of high-tech, . . .

Here is a quick update on my trusty wagon's hot start problems.  I made some additional adjustments to the cold start parameters and logged another sequence of hot starts.  The logs very clearly show that the fuel pressure drops dramatically when the engine is warm:



The white line almost in the middle of the graph is what is being displayed in the data below.  At the moment, the fuel pressure (lower left corner of the data boxes) was 20.6 PSI.  The regulator is supposed to keep the fuel pressure at 43 PSI!  With only 1/2 the required pressure, it is no surprise that the engine is starved of sufficient fuel and quits.

I bought this graph over to Orinda Motors and asked their ace classic car mechanic Greg about it.  Without a doubt he concluded that the fuel pressure regulator was defective and was failing to keep the fuel pressure at 43 PSI.  Greg didn't explain, but apparently pressure regulators can have difficulty holding pressure when the fuel is extremely warm.  That pressure is supposed to keep the gasoline liquid even with an engine bay at 150? F.

Yesterday I ordered a new fuel pressure regulator from - where else? - Summit Racing.

Alas, . . .Bummer dude!! . . The regulator already cleared the free shipping limit, so I had no excuse to buy "toys" . . . .

The part should arrive tomorrow and Orinda Motors is scheduled to replace it on Tuesday . . . . . so

We shall see . . . . .

Cheers, Edouard