WEEK 8: Ignition success! Plywood test rotor end cap, Battery Design

On the weekend of week 8, I spent the whole of Saturday (again) trying to figure out the wiring for the igniter. I looked up the wiring diagrams in the online service manuals and watched a couple videos to trace them all back.

I managed to trace all the 5 wires to the igniter and found several things that might be causing the issue. The 3rd pin 12V supply had no pin connector power source, which meant the igniter could not operate at all. The wiring under the fuse box had 3 or 4 wires difference, which need to be copied of the layout of mine, and possibly the ECU signal wires were not going.

After hooking up a couple jumper wires and ground connection to how I thought the wiring should go, I then gave the engine a crank, which after a second or so it backfired which it hadn't done before. This gave me a lot of hope as I figured their couldn't be any ignition without some sort of spark, especially when the engine is cold. I cranked it several more times and kept getting a kick back or bang every so often, which I knew must be close to the problem, the RPM tachometer was also going all over the place and managed to throw itself off, which will need to be calibrated.

Anyway, the next morning, I then had another go at cranking it over with the same occasional backfires. After doing lots of research and having a chat to the guy who I was doing the engine swap for, I kept working at the wiring, which I then managed to trace the signal wires back to the ECU, which was good.

I then tested continuity of all my ground connections which I found that the igniter was now not grounded properly, so I hooked up a ground lead to it, cranked the engine over and bang it fired up to several thousand RPM's as noisy as a plane with no muffler on it.
This was truly amazing hearing all my work going to plan and now I needed to get the rest of the car back together.

On Sunday, I then got the muffler sealed and bolted back in which drastically reduced the noise, and then I took it out for a test drive and it felt great, I adjusted the idle revs down and the engine was running just like how it was in my MR2.

Anyway, on Monday of Week 9 I then did a fresh oil change and also refilled the transmission with oil as it had gone quite low. On Tuesday I gave it a good blast around town and it is running very nicely with all its power and high revs. I will be continuing to get it ready for the owner to pick it up.
The funds from doing the job will help me a lot to support my electric conversion project.\

Also in week 8, I worked on CNC milling a test plywood rotor end cap, which I was very happy with. I used the plastic spline attachment piece to simulate the coupling. After talking to one of my stakeholders Mr Smith, we agreed on using a solid welded coupling to the motor as it will probably be the most reliable and strong.

I also wanted to get the design sorted for my battery pack. I have decided on getting a proper battery management system from Aliexpress which will balance and protect the batteries in many ways to extend their cell life. I want to use the Arduino microcontroller to build a monitoring system with temperature control, which I have trialled and tested all ready with good results (using thermistors).
I will buy these parts over the next few weeks to get onto building the battery pack.

My stakeholder Jared Cochrane also agreed with the idea to split the battery into 27 different modules which will each be wired in series to produce the desired 99.9V nominal volage up to 113.4V fully charged. This will make each module lighter and more portable, safer, and makes the maintenance easier. But will be slightly more complex and will require more production of battery holders. But the benefits of doing the design like this compared to as one big unit is the sizing is more flexible also and the packs could also be expandable later on if needed.