Test Drive Update and Booger's Green Grill

Today's blog post is brought to you by Special K from WA!!

Damian took Booger Mobile out for a longer test drive on Sunday, and found that the engine pinging and detonation under load was still pretty bad...  It was good at gentle throttle, and good at full throttle, but anything mid-range caused it to play up...

Having emptied the tank of the 95 octane, Damian filled up with 98 octane fuel on Monday morning to take it for another run... while this did make the pinging slightly better, it still was enough to cause him grave concern.  Time for a trip back to the dyno mob!!

At the dyno place, the mechanic drew pretty pictures for Damian outlining the timing curve of the distributor both with and without the vacuum advance, and what the original timing curve was (hence the reason it ran so poorly before the dyno).  The advice was to try removing the vacuum advance and just use the mechanical advance for the timing curve...

Damian tried this on a short test drive, and found the pinging issue to apparently be gone!!  He's not going to make any judgement calls on that topic until he's had a chance to go on a longer test drive, but for the time being, things are looking promising.

Back into the shed went Booger Mobile, where Damian decided to continue with the installation of the green LED light for the front grill.

First, some painted cable ties!!  Chrome in a can is a wonderful thing...

Next the strip LED - don't worry about the colour - it's definitely green!!

And hidden under the lip of the grill, with nice silver cable ties holding it on...

Here's a slightly blurry photo showing the green strip LED and the headlight LED's on at the same time...

And with the lights off...

Slowly but surely things seem to be coming together.  With the stress of the engine rebuild slowly fading, Damian will have more time to work on the important things, like installing more LED's!!

Stay tuned...