Author: Boyd Ingram

Worked on finishing up the turn signals yesterday.  Got the SD Turn signal controller installed behind my switch panel and wired it into the new spring-loaded switch. I have lights! But when I tried the hazards, things went very sideways. The hazards were not flashing at all…. just staying on as long as I held the switch.

The hazards don’t have to go through the SD unit, so I decided to return them to standard using the LED flasher and regular switch. Somehow, I was now powering into the keyed ignition system so that all the gauges were bouncing and even the fuel injection system was priming. But it was doing it at the tempo of the flashing hazards! And the key was off.

After sitting down and drawing things out in schematic, I figured that I had installed the TS controller between the TS switch and the hazard circuit connection… The hazards were attached to the controllers output. The hazards were powering  through the TS controller outputs and probably the unit’s ground, back feeding everything on the car that has a ground.

So I removed the original wiring coming out of the hazard switch and installed it directly to the output terminals of the TS switch. This puts them before the controller, and attached to the controllers inputs. Success!!

I now have TS’s that only require a 2-4 second engagement of a spring loaded switch and turn off automatically. I have hazards that work from a momentary switch and will stay on until cancelled.

And those LEDS are nice and bright!

More on the Tangent lights.

I’ll be tearing this nice piece down this weekend and painting all the parts I dont want to see. I also took one of the lights apart and noted the bulb types. Placing an order with Superbright LEDs tonight for LED replacements to keep with my “All LED Lighting” theme. When those come in, we’ll get em installed and hook em up and see how they look. These are not your average 35 watt fog or driving lights… these are equivalent to 55 watt low beam headlights. Gonna light up the night!

Dec 25 was 11 months on the body at Whitby’s.  They said 6-9 months. They will barely even talk to me. Who knows when it will be done or if they even still know I exist. May have to go buy another one.

In the meantime, I’ve been bored, haven’t touched the car in months. Decided to update / fix a few things that have kind of bothered me.

One is my turn signals. I’m using a switch with On-Off-On clicking and I have to manually turn the signals on before a turn or lane change and then turn them off after. No auto-off. I KNOW I will be leaving them on and I’ll be THAT GUY running down the road with his nice bright LEDs flashing away. This I didn’t like, so I bought a turn signal controller from Signal Dynamics. Read here for details.

Auto turn signal shutoff! Yay!! This will require a few mods to accommodate the unit. First is my turn signal switch. I replaced the hard-click type switch to a momentary, still On-Off-On.  Then, since the SD unit is now taking care of the flashing, I removed the turn signal and hazard flasher units from the fuse box and installed 2 jumper wires. Maybe later I will drop the fuse box down and remove the wires from the box and splice them together.

I also replaced the Hazard light switch with a momentary On-Off that will act like pressing both L&R switches at the same time… this engages the hazard function of the SD unit until you hit the momentary again to switch them off.

While I had the switch panel removed, I also replaced the Headlight Hi / Lo beam switch. I had mistakenly installed a On-Off-On switch for the Hi / Lo… this means if I stopped in the middle, I didn’t have any headlights at all. No good. Now its just one way or the other… no more Off position.

I’ll finish it up this weekend and maybe try a video of how it works. No pictures to show since the switch panel still looks the same.

Sure do hope to hear from Whitby’s soon…

Part of my plan has always been to install Tangent’s driving / fog light kit, which installs in the oil cooler scoop.

An oil cooler is really not needed with todays oils on the street, even with some occasional racing. When I last contacted Tangent, they said the lights were no longer available, but they were looking at some new lights and showed me a pic. I didnt like them. Way too small and alien looking.

So I started looking around and thinking about what I would do with the cooler scoop. Cant just leave it empty, as anyone who looks can see right through to the ground.

I recently found some lights that I thought may work… Hella FF50’s.

Although they dont have the 5 watt running light of the original Tangent lights, and a plastic housing now vs the metal… I thought it would work.

I contacted Tangent once again and asked if they would sell a kit with no lights… and he responded that yes, he would, OR he would sell me the prototype kit with the original lights, although they may now be a bit hazy. He made me an offer I couldnt refuse… so I have what may be the first and last set of Tangent lights available on their way to me.

And if the original lights dont appear or function good enough, I can still try to fit the Hellas and of course upgrade to LED’s.

Score!!

Still getting ready for the call to bring the Boss 427 Go-Cart south…

The top of the drivers footbox has an access hole to be able to do some small maintenance in the future. However, the top part of the panel will be covered by the body, so no screws can be used there. I made some small slip-clips with a spacer the same thickness as the footbox aluminum and siliconed them together…

You can see I gave the edge a small bend to enable these to slide on better. Then I riveted them to the access panel…

I ended up only using 2, and it holds quite well. Now you can see how the smaller spacer gives enough room for the access panel to slide over the footbox panel. And here it is all installed with a few screws just along the bottom to hold it in place.

I’ll figure out what to do with those 3 empty, useless screw holes along the top edge. Not sure you’ll see em, but I know they are there.

Finishing up the footbox this afternoon…

So here’s the finished, painted panel with the grommets installed. The purpose of the plate is to block off a larger hole in the drivers footbox where the 3 hydraulic hoses come through.

Another item I wanted to tackle was these bolts on the front of the drivers footbox that retain the Wilwood pedal box.. These are the bolts as supplied, and I wasn’t happy with them rusting. Remember, this thing hasn’t even been out in the rain yet.

So I replaced them with some high strength stainless, and installed the hose panel. Yes, I got some brake fluid on my hands while installing the panel… I’ll clean that up and repaint it soon.

Since the go-cart has been sitting for so long, my thoughts have been wandering and there’s a few things that have bugged me a bit. Figured I’d take this time to fix those things while I’m waiting for Whitby’s.

Bought a 12″ marine stainless steel grab bar from West Marine in Annapolis. Cost less than $25. I like that it takes up some of that blank real estate on the right side of the dash, and gives the passenger some reassurance… even tho they wont need the bar with the belts and seat, but maybe it will keep their arms from flailing about. 🙂

The camera angle makes it look un-level… I promise it’s not. Installed with 5/16″ stainless hardware and a 1/8 x 1 x 12 aluminum bar behind the dash to reinforce. Its nice n strong.

Also made a 3.25″ plate and drilled 3ea 5/8″ holes in it. Gave it a first coat of paint till tomorrow. Anyone thats ever worked with the triple hydraulic reservoirs should know what it is… I’ll finish and show ya tomorrow.

Well. Its been almost 2.5 months since I posted in here. Why? Because I have nothing to tell you. I’m waiting on the bodywork and painting to be done before I take the go cart to Whitby’s to have the body installed. They told me 6-9 months, and this Thursday, Oct 25, will be 9 months.  They have yet to reach out to contact me even once. They dont return calls or emails, but do answer FB Messengers. Every time I ask about time frames, they go silent.

I was at a car show about 2 weeks ago. An F5 friend showed up with his car. The bodywork and paint were done by Whitby’s, same way mine is being done. He told me his took 16 months. Which means I’m halfway there. If that 16 months applies to me, I’ll get to drive down in June of 2019. Maybe have the car ready for next fall.

It’s taken so long, the excitement of being able to drive this machine has worn off. Its become just another project to finish up, like building a deck or repairing a fence.  There will be no fanfare, no grand rollout… just a job to finish. I havent even visited it in weeks… not to look at it or think about what it will be like.  Its just something to walk around when I go looking for a tape measure for that fence…

I’ll post back when there’s something worthy of posting… perhaps next year. Until then, thanks for reading, stay safe and be sure to love your pets every day.

I’ve been doing some fuel injection adjustments on the FiTech, more about that later. I’ve been interested in the PWM, or Pulse Width Modulation, feature available in the FiTech. What it does is instead of running the fuel pump 100% all of the time, it will run the pump at slower speeds during periods of lower fuel consumption, like idle or steady cruise. It does this not by altering the voltage… that stays the same… but by pulsing the power many times per second. This effectively turns the pump on and off very rapidly instead of always just being full on.

As I was researching and learning about this, I discovered that the fuel pump I have is not good for this. Matter of fact, from Walbro’s website, if their pumps are run in a PWM configuration, they will fail very quickly.

I had installed a Walbro 194 liter/hour pump during the build, so that had to go. I bought an Aeromotive 340 liter/hour pump that works very well with PWM.  Now understand that the 340 # is at 40 psi. As the psi goes up, the flow comes down. Aeromotive supplies a chart that shows at 58 psi, where the FiTech runs, it will still maintain 300 LPH and only pull a spike of 13 amps. This gives me plenty of overhead for fuel availability, as my engine should only use about 150 liter/hour at max power and rpm.

Removed the fuel pump hanger from the tank. This is the Pro-M hanger that uses 3/8″ in and out lines and has a return tube down in the bottom of the tank for less aeration and slosh. The stock Fox Mustang hanger (this car does use a Mustang fuel tank) has 5/16″ pressure and 1/4″ return lines, and the return tube is way up high in the tank. This is Hi-Po stuff right here. 😉

And here it all disassembledOld pump and hanger disassembled

Here’s the parts and pieces included with the Aeromotive kit. A few nice things to point out… The electrical connection supplied is the sealed type, with seals between the connectors and around the wires. And the rubber foam insulator that fits around the pump. Hopefully this will make the pump quieter with less vibration.

New Aeromotive 340 pump installation kit

And after getting the pump installed in the hanger and doing a little wiring work, here’s the new assembly all ready to go back into the tank.

Got it installed, hooked the battery back up, turned on the key and thought the pump had failed. I couldn’t hear it. The old Walbro was loud and I could hear it run to prime the fuel injection system for start. This one is silent.

Hit the starter and she fired right up. After letting it warm up, I looked at the PWM settings and it said it was running at 75% of full power. I think I can peel it back some from there, but I’ll work on the other settings first to get it running very, very nicely.

Thanks for following along…

Havent done much lately.

Got the CNC hydraulic reservoirs installed filled and bled.  I used some different fittings on the bottom so I could align them where I wanted them to go, then tighten them down. Quite better than using a 90* pipe fitting, then having to sacrifice tightness for direction.

Had a beautiful weekend about 2 weeks ago, met my local Capital Area Cobra Club for breakfast, then went for a nice ride. I rode first with Gary in his Coyote powered MkIV Factory 5, then took a ride with Alan in his 12 yr old 351 powered Coupe. Yeah, it was a good day.

Since then, I replaced the power steering reservoir due to a pinhole leak in the bottom.  Also replaced the -10 feed hose from the tank to the pump. The hose I was using wasn’t real good for making the tight U-bend, so I replaced it with a more flexible, corrugated teflon lined hose. Called a neighborhood friend and asked if I could stop by, she was like “Sure!” So that made for a nice test drive to bleed the steering. She was good enough to take a pic for me…

I did get on it pretty hard for the first time when I was on my way home. Couple of things… It surprised me how well these tires stick. It surprised me how aggressive it was when it did break loose. It surprised me how quick and aggressively it wanted to kick out and lastly, it surprised me at how quickly  and aggressively it snatched back in line when I let off it. 200 treadwear tires made the difference… they are about as close to race tires as you can get on the street. Its gonna take me some time to learn this beast, and I will always respect her… she can kill me. Got to feel a little bit of that.

Last weekend, I met friend Gary at an autocross down in Waldorf. We hung out for a while and explained to me how it all works. Then he said it was his turn… “C’Mon!”.

I rode along with him for his 3 afternoon runs. One run was way slower than his norm as his tires were a bit cold and we were sliding all around. By the time we got to the last run, it was his fastest ever. He said having me in the car made it faster because it gave him extra traction… desperately needed in these cars that already have plenty of horsepower.

Here’s a video of his first 2 runs before I got there. Good times, and the best way in the world to learn your car.  See his youtube video here. 

Yesterday, I did some small work and made a new punch list. It really is small, non-glorious items. I’m making some pull straps for my seatbelts to be able to loosen them easier. I chose a blue nylon / polypropylene that I think will work very well for my accent pinstripes on the body. Adjusted my mechanical throttle linkage to be a little less sensitive and added a dual return spring to the fuel injection. Installed the 2 heater eyeball vents and the heater hoses. Replaced the way-too-long-with-a-stack-of-washers power steering pump bolts with proper pieces. Pulled the passenger seat and did some adjusting on the belts. Need to work on getting these set for they will be good for most anyone that rides with me.

Got to chat a bit with Jeff at Whitby’s on Messenger… still no time line and it’s been 7 months. Looking forward to something good soon…