After battling some cooling issues, and ignition problems with the coil on plug setup, Im finally able to drive the wagon again. Its not exactly the engine management setup I wanted, but I’m getting there. I traded the coil sticks for an EDIS 4 post coil pack.Its running in wasted spark mode, the same as the coil sticks were.
Even though its running again, there hasn’t been any fun yet. I still have some ECU problems. The motor won’t rev past 3500 rpm. It begins misfiring badly and pops out the exhaust. it feels like a rev limiter is cutting the spark. You can see the spike in the rpm line on the right of this chart. Its where the ignition system went crazy, and the car doesn’t rev past this point.

Here is a shot showing what the triggers are doing. They should be smooth up and down with rpm changes. You can see where the lines become random length right in the middle as I brought the rpms up to about 3500.

I have a few ideas to try. I am adding a capacitor to the VR circuit on the megasquirt board to filter some noise hopefully. I’m also  making my  vr sensor bracket more sturdy to keep it from flexing.

I’ll post back with results from this weekends testing, hopefully with a happier and better running Volvo.

I’m nearing the end of a very long round of improvements I started in May. At some point in the last few months, I decided to pull out the flood gates and go really wild on making this station wagon something special. I never bought this car with the intention of making it a hot rod. It was just a great all around car. It was just my daily driving, get me around town cheap transportation lumber hauler, with a turbo. But after blowing up the original motor, I soaked tons of hours into the engine transplant last summer, and spent a few days racing on the track, I was feeling really connected with this car. Its really fun to drive. Somehow along the way, I ended up with a huuge part of my life poured into this car. For example, in the last couple weeks I spend the entire weekend working on the megasquirt installation. I estimate that I probaly spent 40 hours on the car in that time. And I have a normal job too. All the effort has been put into the car, but I was really just using cheap junkyard parts, or things I had in the shed. Well, that changed over the last few months. There are alot of really cool expensive parts bolted onto the car now.Here are some photos and comments about the engine control improvements.

First up is this 36-1 Ford trigger wheel mounted to the front of the crankshaft with an Avalanche Performance Technologies pulley adapter. Thanks a million to Dale and Matt for making this happen. You can see the VR sensor from a 1.9L Ford Escort too. I fabbed the aluminum bracket, it mounts to the air conditioning bracket.

- The VR sensor feeds into the VR conditioning circuit that is on the Error* Daughter Board you can buy from Glen’s Garage. There are some dashpots in the circuit, that I have no idea how to adjust. But I have an rpm signal, so I’m leaving them alone for now. Here is the card installed in the megasquirt case, and the few circuits that I wanted wired up. There are quite a more available if I want them.
- Also i this picture, you can see the 4 VB921 ignition drivers mounted to the MS case roof for cooling. They are wired for running wasted spark. 2 of them are on LED 17, the other 2 are on LED19 circuit.

- Also i this picture, you can see the 4 VB921 ignition drivers mounted to the MS case roof for cooling. They are wired for running wasted spark. 2 of them are on LED 17, the other 2 are on LED19 circuit.
- The coils are from a Honda motorcycle, CBR600RR coil sticks. They need dwell controlled for them from what I understand.

Here is how the MS box looks now. Things are a bit hectic with all the extra circuits. IT was so much cleaner when everything ran therough the 37pin connector. Now I have several connectors for different sets of things. There is a coil connection plug, an input connection, other output connection, and an LED plug for shift and knock lights.

There are many more pictures in the photo gallery here: http://www.denverspeed.com/gallery2/v/cars/irene/