Thanks to Jay/MR2QIK for more great photos taken at this month's MR2 club event:
 

 

 

 

 

 

Your car always looks fantastic!

Damn that's nice. Always an inspiration seeing your car.

Thanks!

Toymods recently hosted a dyno day at MRC, so I decided to attend and put my car back on the MRC dyno, mainly just for fun.
 
I still had some 98 premium fuel left in the tank before filling up with E85, so the actual ethanol concentration in my fuel tank ended up being about 60% for the dyno day. My car put down 337kw which I was very pleased with (because it's exactly what it should be, given that it makes 301kw at 0% ethanol and 353kw at 85% ethanol). It's very reassuring to know that the engine is still performing exactly as it should :-)
 
What I was most happy to see was the AFR reading. This dyno day was the first time my car had been back on the dyno since I upgraded the fuel pump wiring last year after the E85 tune. When it was originally tuned on E85 we couldn't get it to go any richer than about 0.85 lambda, but we were able to proceed because E85 can handle leaner mixtures. Anyway, with the upgraded fuel pump wiring and no changes to the tune, it was great to see that it had richened significantly to about 0.78 lambda instead of 0.85 lambda!

I've decided that I will soon add a drain from my oil catch can back to the sump, because it fills up faster than I realised when I'm at the track. I could also modify the cam cover to reduce the amount of oil coming out of the breather, but I'll definitely add a drain from the catch can to the sump first anyway and see how it goes. I'll also improve the baffling and mesh setup inside the oil catch can.
 
Also, after almost 2 years of annoyance I finally fixed an alternator whine through my speakers. It had always been intermittent and it varied when I wiggled the RCA connections at the amp. Until recently I had always assumed that the whine was coming out of every speaker. I re-routed some cables in an attempt to improve grounding and minimise interference, and I even pulled out my head unit and disassembled it, thinking that the infamous 'pico fuse' in my Pioneer head unit had probably died as they often do, but it turns out that the equivalent fuse in my head unit is a self-resetting fuse which is still OK. It was only last week that I noticed that the whine was only ever coming out of one speaker, and this was a major discovery! After many nights of troubleshooting, I finally found out that the problem was in the RCA cable for that speaker only. I cut open the plug at the amp end of the RCA cable, and I found that the ground wire had snapped off where it was soldered to the ground ring of the plug! The 2 sides of the broken solder joint were still lined up, which is why it would intermittently make contact. I'm so happy to have this fixed because it was the one and only thing that was wrong on the interior of my car.

Always good to sort out those irritating things

Hi RobK, forget abt all the sweet talk, bt Ur car engine bay is music to my ears.... Do u mind I ask how time n mulah have u spent to get that sort of music? N did u build it urself? Ed

Haha thanks!
I've done heaps of work on the car myself, but most of the tricky engine work was done by MRC in Castle Hill. They also did the tuning. All of the work has happened while I've owned the car, if that's what you mean.
It has taken many years, and much more mulah than you would probably guess! I regret nothing though, because it has resulted in (relatively) good reliability considering the power it's making.

As I mentioned a while ago, I implemented some custom functionality for my check-engine light (CEL), because the CEL is connected to an aux output on my Adaptronic e1280s ECU, and the configurability of the ECU is virtually limitless. I recently improved and expanded on that functionality, by adding custom functionality for my tachometer which is controlled by the ECU. The CEL is still involved, but now I can use the tacho to see the values of many different ECU parameters, not just RPM. Here's a video:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCIn27qR6XU
 
Enjoy!