Anglin's Road Car Projects and History

[anglin]

The only thing I would add about the gillis is isn't it supposed to stand straight up? Its a ball and a spring, the ball sits on the spring. If you have it laying flat, then when you brake and accelerate you'll have momentary increase or decrease in spring pressure

Very interesting. I never heard that before. Given the tiny mass of the check ball I don't know that I'd be concerned with the effects of forces on it. We mount the VAM in various orientations and don't seem to have any ill effects. FWIW, two weeks and the car hasn't had any weird boosting events.

We'll see if the combination of the Gillis valve and the J3 adapter chip does anything to improve gas mileage. If not and gas mileage doesn't improve, I have a PE chip, big VAM and an intercooler waiting to go into the car.

I suppose it is also time for a gas mileage report. I've filled it up twice since the installation. The car had consistently been around 19 mpg. With the first tank I got a whopping 20.22 mpg. I wasn't impressed with the improvement, but it was an improvement and the computer spent some of the week doing the adaptive learning thing. This fill up returned 21.63 mpg, which is a much more notable increase. It's still not amazing, but if I maintain that average, it results in a saving of $2.69 per week for my back-and-forth to school driving alone (based on 19.75 mpg previously). The J3 adapter chip will pay for itself in 23 weeks. Try a cost analysis on a new hybrid to see how long it will take the hybrid's gas savings to pay that car off!

Admittedly, my driving habits have changed a little, but this is mostly due to the more stable boost behavior with the Gillis valve in the car. I cruise at the same speeds and have the same highway behavior, but I am more inclined to floor the car since I don't get a boost spike to 18 psi accompanied with a couple detonation rattles. I'm sure I'll settle back down to normal in another week or two.

[MerkXRTurbo]

Very interesting. I never heard that before. Given the tiny mass of the check ball I don't know that I'd be concerned with the effects of forces on it. We mount the VAM in various orientations and don't seem to have any ill effects. FWIW, two weeks and the car hasn't had any weird boosting events.

Ditto! The mass of the ball is not enough to overcome the spring just with the amount of force that exerted upon it in even the most extreme driving situations.

[Ed Lijewski]

Chris: Who sells that J3 adapter chip?

YMMV

[anglin]

It's time for another update on the J3 chip since I have more mileage data. This last tank was 20.67 mpg, so it's still staying comfortably above 20. I'm planning on taking it out while I use a tank of gas to see if the gas mileage does indeed drop back to previous levels.

Ed, shoot me an email at [email protected] and I'll see if I can dig up the info on the J3 chip.

[Rooster]

great thread lots of info.... nice to see you also have the dealer tag still on the trunk

[anglin]

great thread lots of info....

Thanks. It's getting so long that I'm worried people aren't going to take the time to read it. There's good stuff buried in the thread. Hopefully my thread summary at the beginning will make it valueable.

nice to see you also have the dealer tag still on the trunk

Word. That's a feature I like too! I've got invoices from service done to the car at that dealership.

[anglin]

Another quick gas mileage update for those who are interested in the J3 adapter chip for improving mileage. The last tank of gas was consumed at a rate of 22.19 mpg. That's the best rate so far. Here's the summary to date:

19.75 - average previous mpg

20.22 - 1st sample
21.63 - 2nd sample
20.67 - 3rd sample
22.19 - 4th sample

The average for these 4 samples is 21.17 mpg for a savings of a little bit more than $2.00 per week with my 155 mile weekly driving.

[anglin]

Here's the summary to date:

19.75 - average previous mpg

20.22 - 1st sample
21.63 - 2nd sample
20.67 - 3rd sample
22.19 - 4th sample

Just to keep the data flowing, the last tank was 21.23 mpg. I'll be pulling the chip soon to see how much of it was the J3 chip and what impact the other changes I did at the time have had. It's worth noting that I still drive the car to enjoy it.

[Ed Lijewski]

What tires are you running?

Given that you are in (scientifically serious, objectively verifiable) test mode, comparing mpg data running, say, Michelin MXV4 Energy tires or other manufacturer's equivalent would be of interest. I have four sets of wheels/tires (2 are all weather tread design) but prefer to run with the Michelins as they score higher against criteria important to me (comfort, noise, weight, wear-ability, longevity, etc.). While I haven't tried an MPG comparison between the all weather and the Michelins, my sense is--from just way the Michelins feel lighter through the steering column and the way they respond to road irregularities--that they could deliver a modest mpg improvement, at least on the highway.

Any chance you could swap wheels/tires and compare mpg results?

YMMV

[anglin]

Any chance you could swap wheels/tires and compare mpg results?

Not directly. I've got some big, sticky monster meats on the car. (Yes, I left that open for jokes intentionally). The tires are 225 40 17s with the stickiest compound Kumho makes in a strictly-street tire. I'm sure that's munching some mileage. My other tires are some 195 60 14 snow tires that make the speedo read high and therefore odometer read high (not to mention the fact that they are a softer "ice" compound anyway).

BTW, I checked the 225 tires against my GPS to be sure I was in a reasonable range of accuracy for the speedo and odo and confirmed that I was. I still trust the XR's speedometer about as much as I trust the tachometer. Maybe one of these day's I'll muster up the discipline to use the GPS on an entire tank of gas to make comparisons (though the last time I checked it, my odo was off by less than 1/2 a mile over 100 miles).

[Ray]

I'm not sure the Kumho MX's (i assume that's what you're running) can be described as a big sticky monster meat that might affect roll resistance in any real significant way... but what do i know?

Now, if you were running 315/35/18 in a hoosier A6 or V710 Kumho...

That'd be a BIG STICKY MONSTER MEAT

[anglin]

Now, if you were running 315/35/18 in a hoosier A6 or V710 Kumho...

It's all relative, I suppose. I really don't know the increase in rolling resistance of tires based on size, compound, construction, etc. I can't imagine the modeling that the tire engineers have to go through to solve that stuff before a tire is manufactured and can be tested. Based on my knowledge of other hard-to-model topics (fluid dynamics, heat transfer, etc. - they don't have computational and finite/numerical methods for nuthin'), it seems like it would be easier to just make the tire and conduct tests on it!

With regard to the increased grip of my tires. I hate it when I have to switch back over to the smaller tires for the winter. You know what they say - once you go with big, sticky monster meat...

... it sucks to put on the winter tires.

[anglin]

More exciting gas mileage data.

19.75 - previous average mpg

20.22 - 1st sample
21.63 - 2nd sample
20.67 - 3rd sample
22.19 - 4th sample
21.23 - 5th sample
22.07 - 6th sample
22.33 - 7th sample (01 Aug 2008)
21.38 - 8th sample (12 Aug 2008, ECU was reset at the beginning of this tank)
21.57 - 9th sample (23 Aug 2008)
21.45 - 10th sample (08 Sep 2008)
21.82 - 11th sample (15 Sep 2008)
20.59 - 12th sample (25 Sep 2008)

21.43 - current average mpg

With the cost of fuel being a little lower (paid $3.80 last evening - the local news has the gall to call it 'relief at the pump'), that stretches the time to recover the investment out to about 27 weeks. Still, that is very reasonable!

Edit: Instead of adding a new post every week when I stop at the gas pump, I'm just going to edit the most recent post about the mileage (currently this one).

[anglin]

I've made my final gas mileage update to this thread for the time being. Over 12 samples the car got about 21.5 mpg which is nearly a 2 mpg improvement with the installation of the J3 chip that had the higher cruise rpm open loop cutoff switch over point. You'll notice the last data point (#12) is one of the lowest; I was having more fun than I normally do when driving it around. Still, I didn't once baby the car. I just drove it like normal.

The J3 chip seems to be slightly quirky, though. Every once in a while the rpm will hang up around 1500 after starting and driving around for a minute or two. I also sometimes felt like it wasn't cutting out fuel above 2000 rpm with the throttle closed (coast down), but I don't have a narrowband air-fuel ratio gauge to confirm this.

With premium fuel at the current price of $3.799 per gallon and a current average fuel mileage of 21.5 mpg, the time to pay off the J3 chip with my weekly drive is about 25 weeks. I'm about halfway there!

[anglin]

You may have noticed my addition of two new topics to the MerkurTech.com Picture Page (MTPP - http://www.merkurtech.com/merkurtech/picturepages/ ) this evening. I've been too busy to sit at a computer for more than about 20 minutes at a time lately, so this evening's illness is making it difficult for me to do anything else, so ironically, I'm able to get stuff done on the internet.

In the break between summer and fall quarter I got several "legacy" projects done. (You know... those projects that sit around forever and ever and seem to never get completed.) One of the most minor things I got completed was polishing the headlamps of my road car. The whole project took me less than an hour from beginning to end.

The nuts holding the headlamps in had 12 mm heads, IIRC, which has got to be the only use of such a head size anywhere on the XR. There are three per side. Removing the air box on the passenger side makes the task a little easier. I did the work by simply taking the air cleaner lid off, removing the air filter and loosening the screw that holds the VAM bracket to the wheel house. This gave me enough freedom to access the nuts holding the headlamp.

First I removed the aiming nubs on the lamps with a dremel. Then I sanded the whole assembly with 400 grit on a orbital palm sander. I then used a cloth wheel on a bench grinder with the brown compound. That's it.

I wasn't being excessively careful with the work; I just used what I had a moved quickly through the task. Here are some pictures:

before


half-polished headlamp


better angle of the half-polished headlamp showing the difference in clarity


clarity comparison


comparison with lamps installed


I am very pleased with the difference in brightness/light output. Since I'll be driving in the dark nearly every day from now until spring, this was definitely worth an hour of my time.