Yesterday morning I drove Midlana to a “secret” car show, held in a well-off part of town. Not realizing that it was by invitation, I just showed up and parked – it’s on public streets after all. They were very welcoming and there was a little bit of everything; check out more pictures on my Instagram page (#midlana). I finally got an up-close look at an Ariel Atom 3S and while I’m well aware of Ariel, I don’t keep up with their product line, so it was surprising to see a turbo Honda K24 in it. The driver was very friendly and explained that he brought the car while in England. He had a slight accent, which oddly always seems to go together with being able to afford nice things – the 3S starts at $89,750.
That afternoon the boost controller duty cycle map was tuned, so with that working well, closed-loop boost control was reenabled. Next on the list was to better tune the Volumetric Efficiency (VE) table. The tuner was supposed to have done this, but with air/fuel feedback disabled, it showed that the VE values were off. A few runs provided data points for correcting the table, so the new values were entered and the table smoothed. The plan was to load up the new VET table Sunday morning and see how close I was. Alas…
Sunday morning – the car started making a new noise… sigh… Really? What now? The alternator belt started squealing and it turns out that I underestimated the forces on the alternator bracket, which looked as though it fatigue-failed. In hindsight it really needed a stiffener, so one was added, the car reassembled, but by then my car time was up and it was time to visit mom.