Uncategorized – Chamber of Understanding

Upgrading a SIP Migmate 130 Turbo welder

The story of this upgrade starts with a friend of mine acquiring it about 15 years ago (at which point it was already quite old) and after some use real life got in the way and it was abandoned in a barn for about a decade. At this point I needed a welder for a project and asked to borrow it. Now when I got my hands on it and started trying to use it it became immediately obvious these welders were amazingly basic and poorly constructed and so immediately I started modifying it to make it work a little better.

Factory Wire Feed

First off the standard wire feed is terrible, it’s made of plastic and if you put enough pressure on to push the wire the mounting for the drive (being plastic) actually bends away and just won’t consistently grip. This situation can be improved by changing the plastic torch liner out for a steel one to reduce friction but it’s still dodgy. Bracing the wire feed on the outside helps as well.

Here you can see the feed modification. It is simply a bit of scrap metal with a slight bend in it and two holes. The two screws are already in the feed system and hold the parts from the factory so it just picks up on them. This simple mod helps the two feed rollers from deflecting away from each other.

The next issue with the wire feed is the motor is driven off the main transformer output with half wave rectified DC which causes a one main problem, the supply to it isn’t consistent. When the arc is struck the voltage at the motor will drop due to the load change on the transformer which tends to make the motor constantly pulse in operation rather than give a consistent feed so it’ll join metal but not in a particularly convincing way.

To get round this I added a small regulated 24VDC supply for the motor with the help of information I found on the internet such as the wiring diagram for the welder. The was this works is the control board gets its 24V supply from the black wire on the 4 pin connector. If we disconnect this and instead feed it our own 24VDC the supply shouldn’t fluctuate any more. I used the existing supply (the black wire we just intercepted) via a relay (24VAC coil) to turn on the wire feed when the output energises. You should end up with something like this

I’ve not checked the rating on the factory feed motor but I would guess 10W at most. I used a 24VDC 15W PSU module (specifically a Tracopower 15124C that I found on ebay) and it worked well. I managed to fit it behind the main transformer bolted to the outer casing.

Further to this the motor speed circuit is actually very poorly designed and after a little use can get twitchy and change during use. I didn’t get as far as modifying this but further information can be found here :

Wire speed mod

Or if that should ever go offline also in this PDF :

Migmate Wire Feed Download

Earth Lead

Another key usability thing is that these welders have very short leads and the clamp was poor from new and appeared to be a similar thickness to tinfoil and added to that was badly damaged and even rusty and since poor contact causes many issues with consistent welding so I decided to upgrade the cable and clamp to help the situation. For a welder this size you need to be looking at a minimum of 10mm2 cable but this will not allow you to operate at full power consistently (not that this welder is actually capable of that anyway!) 16mm2 would give you plenty of spare capacity.

The clamp itself was just bought off ebay again, they’re about £4 each so difficult to go far wrong. You could go for a different style to the normal clamp if you prefer such as a magnetic one. To connect the cable to the stud on the clamp I used a reusable cable lug which uses two small bolts to tighten to the cable, you could buy crimp lugs but crimping them without the correct tools can be hit and miss. I’ve heard a cold chisel will work but your mileage may vary. I actually used a second reusable cable lug to clamp the new cable onto the transformer outlet inside the welder – not the neatest solution but it worked.

Gas Supply

The standard shielding gas supply on these welders is via a small plastic tube which is intended to be connected to a mini-bottle which sits in two brackets on the back. The brackets aren’t actually fixed to the welder so can be easily knocked off. The standard regulator is rubbish and the one I got with the welder was totally seized shut. I bought a like for like replacement initially and this highlighted the limitation here. The bottle is so small and the regulators so poor that the gas flow actually changes during use and rapidly empties entirely. They have no gauge and so the first you know of having no gas is when your welds go horrible. I looked into it and found a good solution – you can buy regulators that adapt a normal gas bottle to this type of hard line.

I looked into getting gas and found that the time of massive rents on bottles is over. In the UK there are a couple networks of suppliers who will give you weld gas with only a bottle deposit (currently £65 for mine) and no ongoing rental charge. Once the bottle is empty you take the bottle back and get a full one and just pay the gas fill cost (about £30 for the bottle I have) I found a supplier of Hobbyweld gas (Noz-Alls Cheltenham – www.weldingdirect.co.uk) and got their 10L bottle, these are pressurised to 137 Bar giving a total of 1370L of gas. This lasts drastically longer. The shop I went to also sold a standard regulator but with a crimped hose and a push fit to suit this welder off the shelf making this very easy for about £20.

Roll Drag

One other problem I had was the tension spring which is supposed to hold the roll under a little tension to prevent overrunning was actually sharp and biting into the reel. I added a large flat washer under the spring to stop this then added a small washer as a shim to prevent it being over-tightened. This provides friction over a large area to avoid this problem and it seems to work well.

So once I’d done all of this it worked significantly better and we used it for a few projects to good effect right up until we tried to repair and refit the load bed of a pickup truck which involved welding plates onto chassis rails and various other extensive welding work. After burning through multiple contact tips and a couple shrouds we got to the point where the torch died entirely with the wire welding into the inner workings of it and came to the conclusion it was done for. The torch on these being hard wired into the unit finding a replacement wasn’t as simple as a standard euro torch and at this point I wasn’t sure it was worth replacing until we actually needed it again. Some time later I bought a new compact R-Tech MIG which by comparison is a revelation and so the old Migmate got thrown into a cupboard for storage with the expectation it would eventually probably be scrapped.

Though that’s not exactly how the story ends…

RX8 Project – Part 14, Engine Strip #1

After deciding to turbo the engine (see earlier posts) is became apparent I would have to upgrade the piston rods to make sure the engine wasn’t in danger of these failing and ruining the engine. This meant I needed to extract these from the engine Now bear in mind that this was the first time I’d ever taken the head off and engine before let alone removed a crank so it was likely to be quite a long and delicate process! Also accept that I was making this up as I went along, things may be in a strange order but it seemed to work!

First things first mount the engine to a suitable stand:

Here it is, it’s already upside down but that doesn’t matter! First off I took off the sump. On this engine it’s a cast alloy unit with a large front bulge which makes working around the front of the engine more awkward so I got it out the way early on.

Take off the oil pick up pipe (2xM6 bolts) to get room for the windage tray. The tray is held on by 5 nuts on some special studs on this engine, these are M10 one side to hold the lower block to the upper block but i think M5 on the top just to hold the windage tray.

Now we have exposed the moving parts of the engine and get the first look at the bits we are replacing but there’s a lot more before we get them all out. An interesting thing to note here is the absence of crank bearing caps. On this engine the block is formed in two cast pieces which joint along the crank centre line so the crank bearings are held in place by the substantial cast ribs you can see in the picture and each bearing has four M10 bolts to keep it in place with additional bolts around the outside of the casting.

Next move to the front of the engine and disconnect the hose from the block to the water pump then unbolt the water pump. On the Ford version of this engine the water pump is driven directly off one of the cams but on this Jaguar one it is a separate unit driven from the back side of the accessory belt and is held on by three small M6 bolts. Next up remove the crank bolt, there are a variety of ways to do this (the easiest probably being a decent impact gun but at this point in the project I’d not yet bought it) but the method I chose was to block the rotation of the crank using a block of wood. This is done by finding a suitable block that fits between the crank and the housing such that as the crank counterweight rotates round it is stopped by the wood. Just remember that the crank bolt undoes anticlockwise so make sure you put the block on the correct side(the bottom in the above image)!

Now you can flip the engine back up the correct way because we’re moving on to the heads This is because the cam covers need removing to take off the front engine cover.

This bit is again very simple, remove the bolts holding each coil unit in place. Again this being the Jaguar version of the engine is came from the factory with coil on plug. Next remove all the bolts around the cam cover and lift the cover away. Sometimes these get refitted with instant gasket to fix a failed cover gasket cheaply and quickly and so it may require some persuasion, I usually use a putty knife or a wallpaper scraper for this job but it can be easy to damage the faces if you’re not very careful. Alternatively plastic trim removal tools can work well. Obviously repeat the process for the other cover.

Next up we need to remove the front engine cover. This involves removing the bolts all the way round the edge, you can’t miss them, there’s loads and they’re all the same! Make sure you get them all, I think there’s 17 of them but don’t quote me on that, one is under the belt tensioner by the crank! This cover again might require a little help coming away due to the gasket but should be relatively easy. If it isn’t then you’ve missed a bolt so stop prying it!

It should look something like this! Now you can see the other feature these jag engines have – variable valve timing on the intake cams. An important point here is the crank timing wheel (the notched wheel on the crank). These have two key positions but only one is correct so carefully mark which position lines up with the key on the crank when you take it off. I recommend something permanent so when you clean all the oil residue off the mark is still visible, a centre punch mark should do it.

Next you need to remove the timing chain tensioners. These are small hydraulic cylinders that use engine oil pressure to maintain tension in the timing chain. They are held on by two bolts each. Just undo the bolts and carefully remove the tensioners from the tension arms.

Once the tension cylinders have been removed the tension arms can be lifted off their dowels and removed as well and then the chains can be lifted off and you should have something that looks a bit like this:

Now all that is clear the chain runners can be removed. These also hold the VVT solenoids and so are quite a complex bit of metal but are easily removed. I also took of the water hoses at this point just to simplicity.

Now you should be at this stage:

In the next part the engine strip will continue…

RX8 Project – Part 13, Canbus #3, Labview!

If you just want the CANbus ID for the RX8 PS light and not all the background work just skip to the end!

So it’s been quite a long time since I had chance to have another go at getting the CANbus on the cluster working and while previously I manged to get everything apart from the power steering warning light working I decided I really should find out why not. This is a simple lesson in why getting sufficient sleep is really important!

I was contacted a while ago buy a guy doing a similar conversion to mine who happened to have a second complete RX8 and a variety of diagnostic equipment that can talk CANbus who had send me a block of CANbus log data that I’ve done nothing like enough work on since I’ve had it! Anyway the key here is I knew that the car some of the logs had come from had the factory PCM (ECU) working as intended and as such the power steering light doesn’t illuminate. This meant that somewhere in that log file was the data that turned off the light, I just had to work out where it was!

Now first off I took the approach of taking the two sets of data logs I had, one from a car with a functioning PCM and one from a car that doesn’t. Then list out all the ID’s that occurred in each set of data. I’m going to assume for my purposes that any that occur in both sets are not required. The logic being that the data that turns off the light must be present in one set and not the other. I admit that this might not be the case if there’s something more complex going on like if with the PCM removed the power steering computer doesn’t get the required data and sends a different value on the same ID. But for now it’s a starting point!

The ID’s that remain are as follows:

201, 203, 215, 231, 240, 250, 420, 620, 630, 650

A couple of these we’ve already seen elsewhere, specifically 201, which is the RPM and speed to the dash, and 420 which control the cluster warning lights. So after setting up the arduino and canbus data to strobe all these remaining address and nothing happening I gave up!

Many weeks went by and I it was nagging at me why I couldn’t find the right code. Eventually I decided to try a different tack so I ordered a USBtin which is a really neat little USB to CAN adapter which appears as a virtual COM device in windows and can be controlled using a series of commands known as the LAWCIEL protocol (details of which can be found here). The kit version is really quite cheap and would probably be a good option for the budget conscious but on this occasion I just decided to be lazy and buy the prebuilt one.

Clearly I’ve decided to PC control it at this point! Next up I needed a way to stop it when the warning light went off. I ordered a very cheap optical detector off ebay which can be wired into an Arduino or something similar. These are the ones that vary around £1-2 so difficult to argue with. They offer a potentiometer to adjust the switching brightness so I can tune it to what I need and a digital output so I don’t need to mess about doing analog reads or calibrating things on a microcontroller. Yes i know it’s not the neatest or most efficient way of doing it but for my purposes it’s so cheap and easy it really doesn’t matter! So I need to make that talk to a PC in a way I can use and that’s where this whole thing starts to get more interesting.

I’d pondered ways of interfacing a microcontroller to a PC easily and while it’s not terribly hard to make it shout over serial when an input goes high I came across something much more interesting. There’s a company called National Instruments who make lots of very expensive software and equipment for recording data from experiments but fairly recently they started supporting hobbyists by producing the Labview Makerhub, and more specifically a package called LINX. LINX includes a series of drivers and firmwares to allow things like Arduinos, Beaglebones and even Raspberry Pi’s to be used as IO devices (the Raspberry Pi can actually have programs loaded to them as a full remote node). This is quite a major step because it suddenly allows hobbyists to use really good professional software without having the problem of only being able to use NI’s extremely expensive hardware! This gave me and idea – use labview as the core software then I can use the supplied LINX firmware to set up an arduino as IO. To make this deal even sweeter you can also download Labview for free from NI for home use. Take a look here

So after a quick bit of following the instructions we have a basic labview program that will read the arduino IO via serial:

Basically what this does is it starts by opening a serial connection via the LINX toolkit, this returns a device name to an on screen string display and passes a reference which identifies the connection to the read stage. The next bit the larger grey rectangle is how Labview handles a while loop so it’ll keep performing the enclosed functions constantly from left to right until the conditional term in the bottom right goes high – in this case it’s a stop button. So basically the loop just calls a LINX channel read of channel 2 where I connected the light sensor to the Arduino. The inner rectangle only executes when the read value is false (i.e. when the light goes off) and while there’s a lot of information recorded here from elsewhere in the program basically if it sees the light go off it records the current ID being tested, the time that has elapsed since the test started. This means we know when it’s right!

Labview is designed to capture data from lab instruments and so there’s a really handy thing called the VISA toolkit that allows blocks of data read and write via the serial port and basically you can just open a port with specified settings then make read and write requests and do things like crop the incoming data at a predefined character. In this case that character needed to be CR (Carriage Return) this is ASCIIcharacter 13 because LAWCIEL terminates everything with one.

For the USBtin we open the correct COM port at 115200,8 Data bits, No parity, 1 stop bit and no flow control. The other thing to note is at the top right, this sets the termination character to the numeric value of CR, the benefit here is you can perform a read of any length and it will automatically break up the data in the buffer so a single read can vary in length but the start will always synchronise with the read call. Opening the connection in a terminal program for the first time and you’ll see nothing actually happens as such, an OK is signified by a CR so all you see is the cursor move. At this stage we are only connected to the USBtin, not the CANbus. So next, configure the CAN connection, send a value of “S6\r” . The code is S6, this will set the USBtin to 500kbit correct for the dash, the \r is how you indicate a CR in a Labview string. Next I chose to send “v\r” which requests the version from the USBtin, we don’t need this but it gives a solid confirmation it’s talking to us. Next up Z1\r tells the USBtin to timestamp the incoming data, I thought this might be useful but never actually implemented it.

With the setup complete we can start reading data by opening the CAN connection by sending O\r. On a terminal program (assuming you have the CANbus wired up) doing this would result in packets of can data from the cluster appearing. The initial read of length 1 byte reads just the confirmation from the USBtin that it has received the open request. Next is the main read, it’s worth noting the read length is set at 50 bytes but this will be cut short by the termination character set earlier so we can accept varying length CAN data. C\r closes the CAN connection and again another read 1 byte clears the acknowledge. Tacked on the end is a section to read the controller status looking for error states etc. The keen eyed amongst you will notice the majority of this code is conditional, this is because the code needs to insert send requests among the stream of reads. This is because if the data is not read from the USBtin constantly a buffer somewhere fills (I imagine on the USBtin itself but can’t confirm this) and the port crashes. I spent a lot of time finding this out the hard way!

This is the write data code, again very similar but it just opens the port, writes whatever string is in the buffer and closes the connection. Once the connection is confirmed closed it resets the Boolean that causes the ‘write’ condition so on the next loop it goes back to reading again to keep the buffer clear. The read loop runs at the maximum possible speed but it is slowed down because it waits for either a termination character or 50 characters to be received before it completes and loops again.

Beyond that the only other bits of code just generate the data for the write buffer using an increment counter for the ID field and toggling between either 8 bytes of FFFF or 0000 every 100ms for 20 cycles and setting the write flag high to send the data..

So after letting this run for a fair while it started spitting out values, specifically the ID 300 for the power steering light. Wait a minute that wasn’t in the list earlier. Yes I know that, that’s where getting enough sleep comes in. Originally I split the data based on whether or not the PCM was fitted and ignored the ones that occurred in both sets, the obvious mistake here is that of course the power steering light isn’t controlled by the PCM, quite logically it’s controlled by the power steering controller!

So there we go, ID 300, the first byte (leading) controls the light, values below 80 turn the light off. Unplugging the PCM causes the controller to send 80 on loop hence the the warning light.

Get data from ID: 4B1
0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 81
43	6F	1	4B	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 300
80	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 231
F	0	FF	FF	0	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 430
95	5F	83	0	0	0	60	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 81
25	6F	1	4B	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 81
16	6F	1	4B	
-----------------------------
Get data from ID: 630
8	0	0	0	0	0	6A	6A

Looking at the log data again we see that ID 300 is getting a value of 80 – this is during the self test before the engine is started. I previously tried sending this data on the original Arduino CAN setup and go no result so what did I do wrong. Again this is based on another assumption, I though the logger was ignoring high order bytes with zero value (ie this value if could be 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-80) well it turns out that was totally wrong, it actually ignores trailing zeros, the value of the can data here should be 80-00-00-00-00-00-00-00.

So while all these hours of work told me one thing I should have already known it’s actually worked out Ok because it highlighted this other problem (read ‘incorrect assumption’ !). This means The odds of me working out all the other data from the logs (that I’d previously written off as not usable) is actually much higher!

RX8 Project – Part 11, Turbo’s #2 – Wastegates

So now the project is going in the turbo direction I need to be a bit wary with how I do it. The GT1549 turbo’s I chose had positives and negatives. They looked to be exactly the right size for the engine I had, they were fairly common in one form or another and importantly the price was spot on! I still don’t understand quite how but I managed to find someone on eBay with a matching pair of these turbos fully cleaned and rebuilt for £65 each delivered! So that’s the positives, now the negatives, firstly rather than the normal bracket bolted to rear of the compressor housing to hold the wastegate actuator. On these turbos it is actually cast into the housing and so it would make rotating the housing to fit the application considerably more difficult. The second problem is they have a factory fitted actuator which isn’t adjustable more than a small amount and I really didn’t want to start tweaking a completely untested engine with no idea what was going to happen with no way of keeping the boost below the 18 psi wastegate pressure!

So getting over these problems. Having looked at the rotation problem I came to the conclusion I should be able to make them both fit with no rotation changes needed. The backup plan here was to grind off the cast in mount and custom make a bracket using a bit of steel plate if it turned out I needed to later on. This takes us to the wastegate problem. I looked at a number of ways of providing a reduction in the actuator pressure including adding springs to the rod side of the actuator and even bolting the internal wastegate solid and fitting external wastegates to the manifolds I came to the conclusion the only real way of giving a wide but reliable range of adjustment while keeping the package as small as possible would be to replace the stock actuator with an aftermarket adjustable one.

Now this is where the plan goes a bit wrong about – after looking about for ages to find a sensible option at a half sensible price the best I could come up with was this : Kinugawa Actuator

I’m under no illusions here, this is a a cheapo unit! But I strongly object to spending the cost of the car on each wastegate. The problem is even though I got these for £68 each which really is very cheap they actually cost more then the pair of turbos! Considering all this it’s still a pretty good option because it is a ‘universal’ version. It comes with a range of springs for different pressures so I can start at just a few psi and swap the springs out as needed and also comes supplied with four different actuator rods.

So here we are – actuators!

So at first glance they look ideal, but don’t let that fool you! There’s a couple engineering problems to overcome.

The first problem is this; the hole in the supplied rod end isn’t large enough for the flap actuator on the turbo. The solution is simply to drill this out to fit. I didn’t note the sizes, but it was a standard drill size.

Next up was that this ‘universal’ actuator was never really intended for a turbo this small and as such the shortest actuator rod is too long to allow the wastegate flapper to close so I had to modify that as well. The rods are nominally 6mm diameter but the end the rod end has a fine pitch thread meaning modifying that would need me to buy a fine pitch die to extend the thread. Luckily the end that goes into the actuator is a standard M6x1mm metric thread so that was the easier option.

I measured how much I needed to shorten the rod to allow the flapper to just close at one end of the rod ends adjustment. The opening pressure of the actuator is set by preload so the more it is tightened greater the boost pressure. I then simply cut the thread down to the required point and then trimmed off the excess. The good news is if I made the rod too short I three more tries for each one!

And here is the difference – it’s actually about 25mm less than it started out! Reassemble the whole thing and magically it now fits where it needs to!

The other thing you will need to do potentially at this point is change the spring. Once the actuator rod is in the actuator this is actually not too bad but be a bit fiddly. First of position the actuator so the rod is sticking downward between the jaws of a vice. Tighened the vice to hold the rod in place then undo all the housing screws. Lift off the top housing and carefully remove the diaphragm underneath. Next you need to carefully release the rod to take the load off the spring. then you just unscrew the rod and take the aluminium piston and the spring underneath out the housing. Reassembly is just the reverse but the key is to put tension on the rod again and clamp it in place again before refitting the diaphragm and cap otherwise it’s very difficult to get the diaphragm correctly positioned without any wrinkles that could cause damage or leakage.

So now we have two turbos with adjustable wastegate actuators with a potential working range covering something like 3-30psi!

RX8 Project – Part 9, Flywheels Part 3

So just to finish of the flywheel section here are the the finished custom parts :

Flywheel spacer on the crank, you can see the black dust seal in the centre covering the new pilot bearing underneath.

A wider shot showing the spacer in position among the currently disassembled state of the engine.

And finally the flywheel itself.

In this photo the ring gear and location dowels for the clutch basket have been fitted.

The ring gear was actually a lot easier to fit than it was to remove because you can just put the ring gear in the oven (at maximum, in my case 250°C+ off the end of the scale!) and put the flywheel in the freezer for an hour or so as well – this may not actually be necessary but you want the most possible room between the parts when you fit them together. If the ring gear snags on the way down it because there isn’t quite enough space it can be a real pain to get it off again. Before installing the ring make sure it is the correct way round – all the teeth should have a bevel on one side to help the starter engage cleanly this goes towards the position of the starter motor! Take the hot ring out the oven, check it and drop it into place as quickly as possible but make sure it’s right and fully seated to the shoulder of the flywheel. Once touching the flywheel the ring will cool rapidly and lock in place.

The dowels in question turned out to be the wrong size, I specified them as 1/4″ diameter (6.35mm) and this is what is still shown on the drawing but it turns out the ones I measured had more rust than I thought and the holes in the clutch basket are actually designed to locate on ~~6mm dowels – something I really should have checked!~~ From what I have since found out this is likely one of the many Ford engines which have special dowels ~~which are (from what I can find out) 8mm on the flywheel side but only 6mm on the clutch side.~~ The correct dowels are actually 6.30mm on the smaller diameter so my original measurement wasn’t actually too far off, I just shouldn’t make daft assumptions! Larger end is 7.97mm diameter by 6.5mm long on the ones I have, overall length is 18mm. Tolerances and fits are not my strong point but I’ll probably start with a 7.9mm drill and hope to press fit them.

For simplicity I recommend buying something like this available via eBay as Cosworth clutch dowels by x-power engines:

I’m planning to modify the appropriate holes on the flywheel to use the correct dowels I just haven’t quite got round to it yet!

I should probably also take a moment here to mention flywheel bolts. The Duratec crank has a slightly unusual thread which is M10x1.0mm (M10 Extra fine). This is as it happens the same thread commonly used on brake hydraulic components like bleed screws. Needless to say the stock bolts are far too short as the engine originally just had a thin flex plate so longer bolts were needed. Now various companies will sell flywheel bolts for almost any engine but not for something like this and they rarely specify the actual sizes of the bolts in a kit so I can’t just buy one for something else that will fit very easily. My solution was find the best standard bolt I could and so I am using some 12.9 high tensile socket cap bolts which I managed to find from a bolt supplier on eBay with the right thread. For anyone who doesn’t know 12.9 rated bolts are the highest rating before getting into one off special items (usually using exotic materials) and they really are very strong. As a comparison ARP gives their flywheel bolts as having a tensile strength of 180,000 PSI. The 12.9 bolts are rated to have a minimum tensile strength of 176,900 PSI – a number close enough it makes me think they are likely the same material! The strength figures for these bolts mean at the size I will be using each bolt can be safely loaded to in excess of 7000kg of tensile load indefinitely with no deformation. Their failure point being somewhere north of 9500kg each! Some time in the future I will do a full write up of nuts bolts and other fixtures it’s worth knowing about.

So that’s my shiny custom flywheel, next time you see it it should be bolted to a rebuild engine with a whole host of custom or cobbled bits on it!

RX8 Project – Part 8, Flywheels Part 2

Apologies for the long delay since my last post (more than a month!), life has been getting in the way of having time to do anything on blog of late. The good news is that the RX8 project has made some progress and this blog is still no-where near the current status so there’s still plenty to come!

In flywheels part one I mentioned how I ended up in a situation where I didn’t really think the cast flywheel was save to modify and how a chance encounter led me to a solution. The problem it presented is I’m primarily an electrical/electronic engineer, while I dabble fairly extensively in mechanical things designing a flywheel isn’t exactly something that comes up every day and the precision was critical so I spent a lot of time making sure I got it right!

Critical aspects as I saw them were the bolt pattern to match the crank, bolt points for a suitable clutch and and very accurate outer diameter to allow fitment of the RX8 starter ring gear.

Looking at these criteria one at a time the bolt pattern is an interesting one. At first glance all the 8 bolts appear to be evenly spaced around the crank on a PCD (Pitch Circle Diameter – this means the centre of each of the holes is placed on a circle). After checking my early flywheel model drawings against the real flywheel I noticed that all the bolts lined up except one which was just slightly wrong; ok, approximately 2mm, enough to be considered very wrong!

This suggested the pattern wasn’t exactly what I thought so I started checking exactly what the error was in different directions to figure out what was going on. After extensive measurement I managed to work out what was wrong, the bolts were indeed on a PCD they just weren’t evenly spaced. For even spacing the bolts would be at 45° intervals but one hole was shifted 4° round the PCD so it was 41° and 49° to the two nearest holes. Combined with a 76mm PCD this made the bolt pattern line up perfectly. This is actually quite useful because it means when the crank/flywheel are balanced they cannot be reassembled in the wrong alignment.

The crank also features a location register to make sure the centre of the flywheel is perfectly centred on the crank. The register is a raised lip accurately machined to a specific outer diameter so there is no lateral slop between the parts, in this case I measured this to be 44.40mm in diameter. when I trial fitted this it needed some emery on the crank to fit but this seemed due to surface rust where the engine had been stored in a damp room for a long time. Your mileage may vary!

Next up we had the clutch, I initially planned on using the RX8 clutch as I thought it would be stronger and have more options later but on further research it turned out RX8 clutches are very expensive indeed and anything other than a stock one gets very expensive very quickly and largely need to be imported so I started looking at other options. This took me back to the idea of using a Mondeo 240mm clutch, they’re cheap, readily available and the stock ones will handle a fair amount of power. Admittedly a stock kit is highly unlikely to last long with the amount of power this project could get to but there are readily available uprated covers and plates that could be used. Plus £50 on a project that may never really work isn’t too bad, £300 for a new RX8 stock clutch is more than the car cost! I also already head the factory Mondeo flywheel to take all the appropriate dimensions from which kept the process fairly simple.

The last issue was the ring gear, this is critical because the RX8 has its starter motor on the gearbox side and when because of this the options are either re-use the RX8 starter or butcher the RX8 bellhousing to allow an engine side starter to fit. For simplicity I figured I’d go with the RX8 starter since I was getting the flywheel made anyway. Starter ring gears are whats called an interference fit on the flywheel. In essence the ring gear is intentionally slightly smaller than the flywheel it is designed to fit onto and when the two parts are either pressed or heat fitted (heating up the ring so it expands and can be slipped into place) together. It is a tiny change in size when fitted and just the friction between the two parts that prevents the ring gear slipping when the engine is started hence why this is rather critical. To simplify this I modelled a nominal 290mm for the diameter of the lip this mounts on but supplied the ring gear to the machine shop and asked them to machine to an interference fit. This led to the following design:

RX8 Flywheel V6 – Machining Drawing

After a lot of double checking with these base measurements I needed to get the correct offset from the crank to make sure the clutch plate is in the correct position to be fully engaged with the gearbox splines. This led to me modelling everything to make sure it would all fit where it needed to:

Here you can see how everything stacks up. Between the bell housing and engine there is a 10mm spacer (grey) this represents the adaptor plate thickness. Clearly the bell housing has been simplified but the overall length is correct and the position of the splines (a little hard to see in the picture) and pilot bearing diameter (the reduced diameter) on the gearbox input shaft are correct.

Unfortunately having got all of this looking right and sent it over to the machinist and work starting on it I realised a couple minor mistakes, one was that I’d not offset the flywheel to match the spacing of the bell housing caused by the adaptor plate (shown above but this picture is from a later version) but related to that I hadn’t checked the offset to make sure the starter ring gear was actually in the right position to engage with the starter!

Turned out it was a little off and actually needed more offset but unfortunately the raw material for the flywheel had been delivered and machining had already begun and sadly it wasn’t big enough to allow for this extra thickness so I needed a new plan. The best I could come up with was to add a small spacer to correct this. Luckily this also allowed an opportunity to include a new pilot bearing location. This is a bearing that locates into the end of the crank to support the engine side of the gearbox input shaft and due to the gearbox adaptor plate thickness and the fact of it being a mismatched engine and gearbox the standard bearing was now too far away to support the shaft.

RX8 V6 Crank Spacer V1

This spacer corrects the problems above and still includes the correct bolt pattern, location diameters to keep everything centred. The 35mm internal diameter is the exact size of the bearing I used. This allowed a suitable bearing and a dust seal to be pressed into place and likely stay there, that said there’s a lip in the spacer to hold the bearing up and once the gearbox shaft is in place it physically can’t fall out. It’s probably worth pointing out here that this bearing only actually moves in use when the clutch is pressed, when driving along in a gear the clutch locks the crank and input shaft together and so the bearing is rotating overall but the inside and outside are rotating at the same speed so the vast majority of the time it shouldn’t experience any wear.

The final product to be coming in part 3!

RX8 Project – Part 6, Canbus #2

So now we have a powered up RX8 cluster and some Canbus hardware that we can talk to we can start doing a few interesting things with our new setup.

Fire up the Arduino IDE and we can start writing our basic controller code. Canbus devices have a device address and a memory location for all the required data so we need to work all of these out. This is a lot easier for digital IO than the more complicated analog values because digital IO are just either set bit on or off whereas analog values can have funny scaling and things going on. I initially used a canbus demo program which worked because I basically cloned the Arduino Canbus shield. Plenty of starter guides and information can be found here : https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/can-bus-shield-hookup-guide

My initial approach involved setting the target address for the Canbus transmission and sending patterns of bits high and low and see what happens. Google told me that the cluster Canbus interface operates on 500 kHz clock so with that information we should get a connection.

#include <Arduino.h>
#include <mcp_can.h>
#include <mcp_can_dfs.h>

#define CANint 2
#define LED2 8
#define LED3 7

MCP_CAN CAN0(10); // Set CS to pin 10

void setup() {
 // put your setup code here, to run once:
 Serial.begin(115200);
 Serial.println("Init…");

Serial.println("Setup pins");
 pinMode(LED2, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(LED3, OUTPUT);
 pinMode(CANint, INPUT);

Serial.println("Enable pullups");
 digitalWrite(LED2, LOW);
 Serial.println("CAN init:");
 
 if (CAN0.begin(CAN_500KBPS) == CAN_OK) 
 {
 Serial.println("OK!");
 } 
 else 
 {
 Serial.println("fail :-(");
 while (1) 
 {
 Serial.print("Zzz… ");
 delay(1000);
 }
 }

Serial.println("Good to go!");
}

unsigned char offarray[8] = {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0}; // Always Off Array
unsigned char onarray[8] = {255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255}; // Always On Array

void loop() {
 // put your main code here, to run repeatedly:

for (int i=0; i <= 512; i++){ 
  for (int l=0; l <= 10; l++){  
    for (int j=0; j <= 100; j++){
       CAN0.sendMsgBuf(i, 0, 8,offarray);
       delay(10);
     }

     for (int k=0; k <= 100; k++){
     CAN0.sendMsgBuf(i, 0, 8,onarray);
     delay(10);
     }
   }
  }
}

So this loop will iterate through 512 addresses strobing all 8 bytes high and low on 1 second intervals. The trick here is that canbus needs regular packets to stay active, so we can’t just send a value once. In this case each value (high or low) is send 100 times at 10ms intervals so the cluster should stay active long enough to see if anything is happening. Each address will get 10 cycles of high and low before moving onto the next address. In concept this would work and provided ‘i’ is set to increment high enough you would cover all the addresses. Bear in mind at this rate you’d have to watch it for about 90 mins…

Thankfully around the time I started running though this trying to find any useful addresses I came across this :

https://www.cantanko.com/rx-8/reverse-engineering-the-rx-8s-instrument-cluster-part-one/

This nicely tied in with the hardware I was working on and so the code and information is all exceedingly useful and saved me a lot of time. Specifically it gives the address locations for most of the indicators on the cluster which is what we really need.

After lots of trial and error I managed to come up with a block of code that can control the cluster but easily allow me to set any warning light I need on the dash, or more accurately also to turn off all the warning lights. Something that will be essential come MOT time as a warning light that stays on is an MOT fail and since most of the systems that control them will no longer be in the car (primarily the original ECU).

#include <Arduino.h>
#include <mcp_can.h>
#include <mcp_can_dfs.h>


#define COMMAND 0xFE
#define CLEAR 0x01
#define LINE0 0x80
#define LINE1 0xC0

#define CANint 2
#define LED2 8
#define LED3 7

#define NOP __asm__ ("nop\n\t")

// Variables for StatusMIL
bool checkEngineMIL;
bool checkEngineBL;
byte engTemp;
byte odo;
bool oilPressure;
bool lowWaterMIL;
bool batChargeMIL;
bool oilPressureMIL;

// Variables for PCM
byte engRPM;
byte vehicleSpeed;

// Variables for DSC
bool dscOff;
bool absMIL;
bool brakeFailMIL;
bool etcActiveBL;
bool etcDisabled;


MCP_CAN CAN0(10); // Set CS to pin 10

void setup() 
{
    
    //Serial.begin(115200);
    //Serial.println("Init…");
    //Serial.println("Setup pins");
    
    pinMode(LED2, OUTPUT);
    pinMode(LED3, OUTPUT);
    pinMode(CANint, INPUT);

    //Serial.println("Enable pullups");
    digitalWrite(LED2, LOW);
    //Serial.println("CAN init:");
    
    if (CAN0.begin(CAN_500KBPS) == CAN_OK) 
    {
        //Serial.println("OK!");
    } 
    else 
    {
        //Serial.println("fail :-(");
        while (1) 
        {
            //Serial.print("Zzz… ");
            delay(1000);
        }
     }

Serial.println("Good to go!");
}

unsigned char stmp[8]       = {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0};                         // Always Off Array
unsigned char otmp[8]       = {255,255,255,255,255,255,255,255};                // Always On Array

unsigned char statusPCM[8]  = {125,0,0,0,156,0,0,0};                            // Write to 201
unsigned char statusMIL[8]  = {140,0,0,0,0,0,0,0};                              // Write to 420
unsigned char statusDSC[8]  = {0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0};                                // Write to 212

unsigned char statusEPS1[8] = {0x00,0x00,0xFF,0xFF,0x00,0x32,0x06,0x81};        // Write to 200 0x00 00 FF FF 00 32 06 81
unsigned char statusEPS2[8] = {0x89,0x89,0x89,0x19,0x34,0x1F,0xC8,0xFF};        // Write to 202 0x89 89 89 19 34 1F C8 FF

unsigned char statusECU1[8] = {0x02,0x2D,0x02,0x2D,0x02,0x2A,0x06,0x81};        // Write to 215 - Unknown
unsigned char statusECU2[8] = {0x0F,0x00,0xFF,0xFF,0x02,0x2D,0x06,0x81};        // Write to 231 - Unknown
unsigned char statusECU3[8] = {0x04,0x00,0x28,0x00,0x02,0x37,0x06,0x81};        // Write to 240 - Unknown
unsigned char statusECU4[8] = {0x00,0x00,0xCF,0x87,0x7F,0x83,0x00,0x00};        // Write to 250 - Unknown


/*

215 02 2D 02 2D 02 2A 06 81 // Some ECU status

231 0F 00 FF FF 02 2D 06 81 // Some ECU status

240 04 00 28 00 02 37 06 81 // Some ECU status

250 00 00 CF 87 7F 83 00 00 // Some ECU status

*/


void updateMIL()
{
    statusMIL[0] = engTemp;
    statusMIL[1] = odo;
    statusMIL[4] = oilPressure;
    
  if (checkEngineMIL == 1)
  {
    statusMIL[5] = statusMIL[5] | 0b01000000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusMIL[5] = statusMIL[5] & 0b10111111;
  }
   
    if (checkEngineBL == 1)
  {
    statusMIL[5] = statusMIL[5] | 0b10000000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusMIL[5] = statusMIL[5] & 0b01111111;
  }

   if (lowWaterMIL == 1)
  {
    statusMIL[6] = statusMIL[6] | 0b00000010;
  }
  else
  {
    statusMIL[6] = statusMIL[6] & 0b11111101;
  }

     if (batChargeMIL == 1)
  {
    statusMIL[6] = statusMIL[6] | 0b01000000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusMIL[6] = statusMIL[6] & 0b10111111;
  }

       if (oilPressureMIL == 1)
  {
    statusMIL[6] = statusMIL[6] | 0b10000000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusMIL[6] = statusMIL[6] & 0b01111111;
  }
}

void updatePCM()
{
    statusPCM[0] = engRPM;
    statusPCM[4] = vehicleSpeed;
}

void updateDSC()
{       
  if (dscOff == 1)
  {
    statusDSC[3] = statusDSC[3] | 0b00000100;
  }
  else
  {
    statusDSC[3] = statusDSC[3] & 0b01111011;
  }

    if (absMIL == 1)
  {
    statusDSC[4] = statusDSC[4] | 0b00001000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusDSC[4] = statusDSC[4] & 0b11110111;
  }

      if (brakeFailMIL == 1)
  {
    statusDSC[4] = statusDSC[4] | 0b01000000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusDSC[4] = statusDSC[4] & 0b10111111;
  }

     if (etcActiveBL == 1)
  {
     statusDSC[5] = statusDSC[5] | 0b00100000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusDSC[5] = statusDSC[5] & 0b11011111;
  }

    if (etcDisabled == 1)
  {
    statusDSC[5] = statusDSC[5] | 0b00010000;
  }
  else
  {
    statusDSC[5] = statusDSC[5] & 0b11101111;
  }
 

}

void loop() 
{
    // StatusMIL
    engTemp         = 145;
    odo             = 0;
    oilPressure     = 1;    // Either 0 (fault) or >=1 (Ok)
    checkEngineMIL  = 0;
    checkEngineBL   = 0;
    lowWaterMIL     = 0;
    batChargeMIL    = 0;
    oilPressureMIL  = 0;

    updateMIL();
    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x420, 0, 8, statusMIL);
    delay(10);


    // StatusPCM
    engRPM          = 60;    // RPM  Value*67 gives 8500 RPM Reading Redline is 127
    vehicleSpeed    = 93;    // Speed  Value=0.63*(Speed)+38.5

    updatePCM();
    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x201, 0, 8, statusPCM);          //CAN0.sendMsgBuf(CAN_ID, Data Type (normally 0), length of data, Data
    delay(10);

    // StatusDSC
    dscOff          = 0;
    absMIL          = 0;
    brakeFailMIL    = 0;
    etcActiveBL     = 0;    // Only works with dscOff set
    etcDisabled     = 0;    // Only works with dscOff set

    updateDSC();
    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x212, 0, 8, statusDSC);
    delay(10);

/*
    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x200, 0, 8, statusEPS1);
    delay(10);            

    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x202, 0, 8, statusEPS2);
    delay(10);    
           
    
    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x215, 0, 8, statusECU1);
    delay(10);  

    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x231, 0, 8, statusECU2);
    delay(10);  

    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x240, 0, 8, statusECU3);
    delay(10);  
    CAN0.sendMsgBuf(0x250, 0, 8, statusECU4);
    delay(10);  

*/
            
 }

This is the current latest version of the code I have, the serial comms section at the start is handy for checking you have a working connection but if you don’t have the serial monitor open it will cause the Arduino to hang at the transmit instruction and not get as far as updating the canbus so I recommend enabling these initially but once you get a working connection comment them back out as above. There are also sections above taken directly from the Cantanko page to deal with the power steering controller and some other bits, I haven’t tried these yes as the cluster isn’t in a car but I plan do so at some stage.

This code has some limitations in this form, basically the warning lights etc are set in the code as static values so this code will just set everything normal and all the lights I have addresses for to off. One particular curiosity is the way the cluster treats the oil pressure value. The data space actually has a whole byte for a value here but the cluster only only has two values despite having an actual gauge, a value of 0 drops the needle to the bottom, a value of 1 or more sets the gauge to normal. My feeling on this is the car was originally intended to have a proper oil pressure transmitter but someone decided it was too expensive and a normal pressure switch was used instead and rather than redesign the cluster they just changed the scaling in the on board microcontroller to behave as described. long term I’d love to mod the cluster to add the analog functionality back in but without the code for the controller this would probably involve disconnecting the original drive to that gauge and adding another Arduino inside the cluster just for driving that gauge. It seems like a lot of work to know oil pressure on a scale of low to high!

The code also sets a speed and RPM however the ODO and trip meters will not increment as it stands – I purposefully left this bit of code out because it’s only really applicable if you’re on an actual car otherwise your cluster will just keep clocking up. The ODO and trips seemed to be the one bit no-one else had managed to do or identify but after quite a few hours of testing random blocks will various combinations of high and low as well as sending incrementing / decrementing values I noticed my trip meter had actually moved up by 0.1 miles which meant something was working. I eventually managed to trace it to the address listed above. The trick to actually making it work is that the value in the byte is irrelevant to what the cluster displays, so no this doesn’t let you clock it back! What it appears to do is counts the changes to the value so I made it work by setting up a loop of code that keeps changing this value up to a certain number to give a specific distance. Turns out the cluster needs to see 4140 changes per mile. Eventually I plan to tie this in to the speedometer value so only one value needs to be set, by knowing the pulses per mile and the speed we can work out the time delay between each change. As an example at 100mph we need to send 115 changes per second, this is one every 8.7ms which is obviously faster than the loops above and so for speed and accuracy would have to be hardware timed with an interrupt to do the update at the right speed. I’ll probably do an updated version at a later date.

There’s a couple other things I need to sort out, the airbag warning light being the prime one because this is an outright MOT fail. Now in theory when it’s back on the car it should work just fine as the airbag wiring is all there but I figured it was worth working out anyway. So after working through all of the RX8 cluster wiring diagrams (1)(2)(3)(4) I pieced this together :

This covers the majority of everything someone might need to use the cluster on a simulator apart from the fuel gauge. The RX8 fuel gauge is a bit of an oddity because the car uses a saddle shaped fuel tank to allow it to clear the driveshaft and so it has two senders denoted as ‘main’ and ‘sub’.

Each of these apparently has a resistance value of between about 325Ω at the bottom and 10Ω at the top. There seems to be some questions about how this system works out what to display based on the two sender values and whether it expects to see one remain full while the other empties or something similar. Unfortunately I’ve not played with it much because I’ve don’t actually need to make this work off the car (since the car will have the senders but I can say putting 100Ω a resistor between both 2R-2P and 2R-2T gives a value of about 1/3 of a tank and 9Ω (because I just added a 10Ω on along side the existing 100Ω) across these connections gives a full tank reading (actually a little above full) so as long as you move both together it works fine, this is ok if all you want to do is get the fuel warning light off for a driving simulator but not that helpful for a single fuel sender conversion which is why most people are interested. If I get chance I’ll investigate further. Also for some reason it takes an absolute age to move up the scale which is a bit unfortunate but I suspect is as intended. At least it should be stable!

All of that leaved us with just one light I can’t get to turn of, the warning light for the electronic power steering. This is controlled via canbus by the look of the circuit diagram but as yet I’ve not found the address for it. If anyone knows the address please leave a comment! Else I will have to go back to either trial and error or the really dodgy backup plan which involves cutting the tracks in the cluster and doubling up on another warning light which isn’t used much! Maybe I should just add another controller in the cluster!

So hopefully that gives you (almost) everything you need to know about making the cluster work! We might get back to mechanical things in the next update…

Old Houses!

So having started putting information on here there has been something of a gap in progress to to various other projects getting in the way, a problem I’m sure others will sympathise with!

On thing that’s been keeping us all busy of late is our house (which is a very old ex pub) appeared to have something of a woodworm, nothing too serious but a problem we wanted to rectify while we still had as little stuff as possible to do any harm to! Anyway the outcome of this was we needed to treat the entire attic and first floor meaning we had to remove all of the floorboards on the first floor and clear all the attic space, in total something like 200m², so let the chaos begin!

So the story begins with dust, not just any dust but the sort of residue you get after a building has been left for upwards of 200 years, this stuff is awful, if you have have to deal with it you’ll understand what I mean! It WILL get everywhere, I’ve previously used those cheapo disposable masks and have found that while they more or less work as soon as you start moving about a bit they either fall off or lift away from your face enough to leak and not do anything. My feeling on this is if you ever have to do anything like this it’s worth splashing the cash a bit on a half decent one. Personally I bought 3 of these : http://www.screwfix.com/p/site-reliance-28-day-half-mask-respirator-ffp2/1232j
They seemed to fit well as they are flexible rubber and have replaceable filter elements. There are plenty of other options that should also be fine, out of preference I would just avoid the cheapo ones. This was around the time we realised the better masks were a good idea.

Adding to the above, safety goggles! When you start ripping apart a building things will start flying, be they intentional or not! In our case we had to add a new loft hatch to one end of the building to allow access. the building being rather old and actually still has old style plaster and lath. This is where lots of small sticks are nailed onto the beams and the plaster would be pressed through between the sticks where it will curl round the back of them and set holding the plaster in place. This works very well if left untouched but sadly it’s rather fragile if it is ever disturbed the back half separates from the front and the plaster peels off the ceiling! The problem here being if you start cutting through it you will get covered in an torrent of plaster, horrible black dust, splinters, nails and anything else that’s previously been left all over the attic. We had big lumps plaster, concrete and even daub (as in wattle and daub)! Goggles are not just a good idea in this case, I rank them as essential! This is a chunk of daub we found in the attic, it’s about a foot wide…Admittedly if this fell on you goggles would only help to a limited degree!

So now next up we had two old galvanised steel water tanks up there that were long since taken out of use. Somehow, I’m not sure how, the tanks were about double the size of the hatch we had to get them through. The obvious answer to this was to make the tanks half the size! So knowing this I got tooled up and got to it. First off I tried a 4.5″ angle grinder, while it kind of worked sparks flew everywhere as expected and after cutting 6 inches or so the first cutting disk was gone. If you ever try this I recommend having a second person to hand with a fire extinguisher. you will also need plenty of cutting disks, or ideally a larger diameter grinder may work better! After my first disk I abandoned the grinder and went for a reciprocating saw, specifically this one. These are a very aggressive tool but highly effective. To be honest on these it was like a (very noisy!) hot knife through butter. In total for the two tanks I wore out one already part used blade, bent a second one that it turned out I had previously ruined and had to do the last couple inches with a new one – In hindsight I should’ve just started with the new blade!

So back to ripping up the floor, just as a quick example of what chaos we’re talking about here, so this is the master bedroom as :

Is it still the first floor if it doesn't actually have a floor? — Floor-less bedroom

And here’s another bedroom, after insulation was installed in the floor. In most houses this really isn’t necessary but in this case it has quite a few benefits. Firstly being an old building it has a lot of drafts from pretty well everywhere, there are large gaps around sections of the floor allowing all the warm air from the ground floor to escape upstairs, plus any noise passes right through.

Hopefully that will solve a lot of these problems, we also packed felt sleeving (I bought some of this, it comes as a tube which isn’t ideal but it can be cut open or if the pipes are really close just wedged between them pressed flat as a double layer between to stop them clanking as they change temperature.

Anyone looking at this and thinking there’s a lot of pipes and cables in there, you’re right! Being an ex-pub everything is wired separately so we have quite a lot of individual sockets which have their own circuit breakers and other related things which would be excessive in a house but in a business where you don’t want one faulty appliance to trip out all the power it becomes worth the additional cost and effort!

The other thing we’re working on is adding a networking cupboard to tidy up all of our wiring and to add a number of wireless access points to have internet all over the building. Being old and stone construction wifi doesn’t exactly travel far so we need to do something a little more serious than the average wifi router! I suspect that’ll be another blog another day!

Hello world!

Welcome to my blog, this is where I plan to record all the projects I do primarily for my own benefit but also with the home that someone else might find some aspect of it useful.

Projects will cover a huge range things, from quite simple to very involved and technical and will cover electrical. mechnical, DIY and anything else that comes along.

I don’t try to claim the way I do everything is necessarily the right way to do things but where there’s failure I plan to record that as well – failure is just another way to learn!