The Silver Buick's well Silver Buick!

[68scott385]

About a year ago I noticed the price of tires had doubled or more since I had bought them last. BFG T/A Radials used to be ~$100 from Jeg's. I could get four shipped then mounted & balanced for half what purchasing two locally would cost. Now Tire Rack has the best prices I've seen. Be glad you aren't buying 17s for the truck.

I think TSB looks very good with the factory wheels & those tires, fwiw.

[mrocketscience]

Ah, yes, BFGs... very nice!

[silver_bullet]

Try discount tire direct... best prices i've found!

[TheSilverBuick]

I checked Tire Rack, google, and the local tire store and they were all within five or ten bucks of each other, so I just had the tire shop order them since I didn't have to worry about shipping costs and if there is a problem they are locally here to deal with.

[TheSilverBuick]

Since this thread was bumped. Tomorrow I'm hoping to install my "points" cam sensor and wire in the vehicle speed sensor off the transmission. Hopefully it works and doesn't take too long to do.

[TheSilverBuick]

Two wins today! I finally got the vehicle speed sensor reading in the MegaSquirt, which I had been trying on and off for a while to do but couldn't seem to get a signal through/interpreted. It's a variable reluctor sensor built into the TKO-600, and I bought a signal processor to convert it to a square wave but couldn't get it to work, so today I re-wired some stuff to use the MegaSquirt 3's on-board cam sensor VR filter to process the signal and it worked like a champ! At first glance the calibration appears to be in the ballpark but I need to calibrate it to GPS speed. It probably is off a bit because my calculated gear indicator is off, but the gear ratio's programmed in are correct for the TKO-600 spec's.

The above change of course then meant that I had disabled the normal cam sensor input so needed to wire in a new one to a different input. To wire in the points as a cam sensor I needed to do some minor rewiring and add a pull up circuit so the simple ground signal would work. It turned out I had an old wire in the MegaSquirt harness next to the distributor from when I ran a standard distributor with timing control. So I popped open the MegaSquirt 3 case and added a few jumper wires and an internal +5v pull up circuit. Turns out, it all worked!

Here it is. Sorry for the close up picture, but it was dark when I took the picture.


Here is a quick video of it running

Now for some time driving to make sure it's reliable, as well as starting a minor re-vamp of the digital dash cluster to include a read out of the speed, and start delving into MegaSquirt's features that tie to the vehicle speed sensor, including an MPG gauge, HP gauge, and things like that.

[hauen]

Nice! I love it when a plan comes together.

[TheSilverBuick]

Me too!

Lame, the cheapest I can find a clear distributor cap is $35, so I'll pick up a stock $10 after work today.

[tedly]

That just looks wrong to see it running with no distributor cap, like some kind of freakish witchcraft is going on or something.

[Stewzer55]

Dummy wires or are you going to leave no wires like with the HEI?

[TheSilverBuick]

No wires normally. I've contemplated having wires coming off the cap and laying all over the engine bay if I take it to a car show, lol. No reason to have them on daily though, probably get caught in the radiator fan or such knowing my luck =P

The only reason I want a clear cap is so I can put a light bulb in it to satisfy my humor. Pop the hood and there be a giant ball of light in the cap, or maybe a red glow or something. I tried with the HEI cap, drilled a hole in it before DW 2013, but where I put the light bulb socket hole made the light bulb hit the mechanical advance plate, so it needed more work. If I use LED's I could probably make it blink with every rotation, or every other rotation

[STINEY]

Hook the dummy wires to a flux-capacitor....and make it blink.

[TheSilverBuick]

Exactly!

Actually! Now that I got the vehicle speed sensor hooked up, I can legitimately make things happen at 88mph!! I wonder if I can make Tuner Studio pop up an animated GIF of the flux capacitor on my dash? Hmm, you bet I'm going to try, lol!

[Scott Liggett]

It needs lights on top of the spinning capless distributor.

[TheSilverBuick]

I was putting the front tire back on the Firebird after having a tire shop replace the valve stem (the tire looses 5psi per week...), and looked over and decided to snap a picture. I do like the look of fresh tires on a car. I also stuck a cap on the distributor today.