I had some stimulating conversations with my buddy Noah about some Volvo performance ideas. And it got me thinking up some more things I should probably be doing to my car soon.

Here is some discussion about oil coolers on Turbobricks.

http://turbobricks.com/forums/showthread.php?t=109143

It made me think that I really need to figure out how to mount an oil temp gauge in my car so I can monitor the oil temps on the track, and see how effective the oem volvo oil cooler is.

Megaquirt is really exploding lately. There is now a really cool LCD dashboard that is being developed. Its a little expensive, but way cooler than the old megaview display. They are selling it at DIYAUTOTUNE.com

I just got home from a pretty fantastic weekend vacation. It was one of the rare types of vacations for me where everything goes perfect, the phone never rings, and there are no family or other responsibilites to worry about. It was all about relaxation and playing in the mountains for a few days. And a big part of that was taking my time getting places and enjoying the 1978 Volvo. In some ways I’m pretty happy that this car is almost entirely stock still. It just has that indestructable reliability and spirit that so many of my old Volvos have had. Unlike my 740 wagon, which is currently a Garage queen, this old car is out on the road and gettin it done. Albeit, quite slowly. But it gets so many interested looks and comments at gas stations. Its the strangest thing for me with a Volvo. I’m not used to driving a 240 that anyone actually cares to comment about. And it isn’t even really nice. But lots of people honk and throw thumbs up, and like to tell you how their family had one just like it back in the 70s, 80s, etc… Its good inspiration to keep it around and fix it up, totally stock and restored looking would be my flavor.
 
So, here is a little photo journal of the voyage.
 

That not green my puddle by the way. But most cars were spewing a little coolant after the climb to 10,500′ at Wolf Creek Pass. It is not as high as some of the passes in Colorado, but this has to be close to the steepest and most beautiful. I was using 2nd gear alot on the climb. Turbos rulez at altitude, but there is something fun and cool about tooling around the country in an old NA volvo.

The river near the summit. . .

You can see for so many miles up here.
 

Yep, I did ride the bike too. This is from the Colorado Trail near Durango.
 

Above, an unsuspecting tourist shows how to negotiate the Colorado singletrack. . .

And then a quick stop at the local mountain hot dog stand on the way home, turned into a long long break. I guess this place made the food netork’s best hot dog stand episode. So, now it takes an hour to get a darned hot dog. It was SOOOO busy.
 
I think I put about 800 miles on the old dog over the weekend. No problems at all. 250,000 miles and the motor is still tickin just fine.

I’m currently adding more features to my megasquirt EFI controller. I sure hope this works. I’m really anxious to drive the car with the new turbo and all this electronics booollsheet is slowing me down. Here are the circuits I have added, most through the daughtercard.

1. Coil on plug ignition using Honda CBR coil sticks
2. Crank trigger for ECU and ignition
3. Boost Control Solenoid
4. Electric Fan Control
5. Idle control valve
6. Shift Lights
7. Launch Control
8. Knock Sensing
9. EGT logging
10. Throttle Position Sensor
11. Water or nitrous Injection
12. A second barometric pressure sensor

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COP ignition notes.

I have a set of really cool coils from  a honda motorcycle.They have 2 pins on each coil. I had them wired into the car with a VB921 driving each coil stick. I could not get the car to run with these. I’m still working on it because it would be super cool and very neat and tity without the spark plug wires.

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wiring notes on LEDs for shift lights and knock..

These wires come out of the case and go into a 15pin serial cable type plug in the following order.
1. +5v
2. shift 1 (-)
3. shift 2 (-)
4. shift 3 (-)
7. knock (+)
8. knock (-)
I’ll wire shift 1 green, shift 2 yellow, shift 3 blue, and knock red

Part numbers for LEDs and resistors from Digi-Key
6 x 680R resistor = 680QBK-ND
2 x 5mm Orange LED’s = 511-1260-ND
2 x 5mm Yellow LED’s = 511-1265-ND
2 x 5mm Red LED’s = 511-1263-ND

put a 680 ohm resistor in the positive power feed and connect to the long leg of the LED. the other leg goes to the megasquirt which will pull the current to ground to turn on the LED. The long leg will go to either a 12v source outside the MS box, or the 5v lead from the shift light harness.
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Other output notes.
x2 to fan, ms-green-green-relay by headlights
x3 to water, ms-blue-(–) not used yet
x4 to boost ctl. ms-red-yellow-solenoid. other solenoid wire gets 12v from engine harness
x5 tach out ms-yellow-(–)not used yet
Fidle to the Bosch PWM idle control valve, through the factory harness. I upgraded the transistor to handle the higher current for this one.

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Volvo 850 Throttle Position Sensor wiring.

I installed a Volvo 850 throttle position sensor in my 740. There are 3 pins on this TPS, and the Volvo harness only has 2 wires in it. The plug is the same, made for a 3 pin socket. So, I added a third wire and ran it into the passenger area to the MS. The other 5v feed comes from the megasquirt, and into the factory harness. So there is only one new wire added, since the other 2 wires could be accessed at the factory harness plug.

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Error* Daughterboard

I built up a daughter card kit that I bought from Glens Garage. This extra circuit board fits inside of the Megasquirt case also. It has many common circuits pre-built on it. You just have to wire them to the correct places on the megasquirt and then out to the sensor/solenoid/whatever. It also has another map sensor to be used for barometric correction.

I had one problem with one of the output circuits on the board that I used to drive my car’s electric fan. I built the board according to the directions supplied. But when I first powered everything up, my electric fan would run constantly with the key in the “off” position. The megasquirt was also getting power and the LED’s would light up. This power was feeding through the fan relay, which is wired directly to the battery. Power was coming into the MS through the fan trigger lead, and through the “protection diode” in the transistor circuit. To solve the problem, removed the diode from the circuit board and installed it out near the relay. This diode is meant to bleed off a voltage spike that can continue to flow from the relay coil when the transistor opens the circuit. So it really needs to be near the relay coil anyway.

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Thats about all for now. That should complicate things enough for now.

My little sister got married this weekend. It was a great family and friend gathering. The celebration was really first class. I was in the wedding party with many of my sisters closest friends and relatives. Since I live far away in another state now, It was really neat to meet these people I have only heard about in stories.

I did manage to use my super spy techniques to snap a few photographs. The gallery is here:

Wedding Pictures

Here is a little preview, this is a shot of some of my favorite relatives. Navigate inside to the gallery for more pictures.

 What an amazing airline flight I had today. I was traveling from Denver to Los Angeles today for my little sister’s wedding this weekend. I let work around 4pm and fought the traffic on the freeways a bit. Thats always a little frustrating, but I had plenty of time to spare. I got through the airport and onto the plane without any hiccups. Once in the plane, I settled down and we pushed back from the terminal in Denver at 7:25. We were right on time, everything was going just the way it is supposed to. Outside, the afternoon thunderstorms that were predicted by the weatherman had come, but there were only a couple drizzles. It was nothing fierce and powerful like we can sometimes get in August. As the plane took off, we climbed immediately into some clouds, and the visibility was almost zero. After about 15 minutes of climbing the plane popped out above the clouds, to a beautiful scene with blue skies above and the most amazing storm cloud formations below. The sun was low in the sky to the west, which made for some amazing back lighting for these mountains of clouds.  Lucky for me, I had a window seat right above the wing, and I was able to find my camera for a few quick photographs.

Here are a couple pictures of the progress as of July 30th.
 

The turbo is in, and the exhaust is all plumbed up. It looks ready, but there are still alot of subtle details to work out. The second picture above shows the coil on plug ignition system that I am trying to sort out right now. The coils are from a Honda CBR600RR. The will be run in a wasted spark configuration for now, meaning that coils 1 & 4 fire together, and 2 & 3 fire together. One of the sparks is at the top of the exhaust stroke, so it is “wasted”, with nothing to ignite. This should be a huge improvement over the Volvo based ignition I was running before. Not seen here, there is also a crankshaft mounted trigger with a VR sensor that provides the timing signals to the megasquirt box.In addition to the fancy ignition system, Megasquirt is also going to control a boost regulating solenoid and the electric cooling fan. So, the Megasquirt responsibility is really increasing now. I sure hope it is up to the task. Its really getting pretty complicated now.
I need to document this carefully. I had a hard time remembering what goes where, and hopefully this can serve as a guide to those setting up wasted spark ignition on their Volvo.