Third time's the charm [Jezebel Log]

Welp, I've head enough waiting for the supercharger so I decided to put the factory injectors & ECU back in. The good news is I can change the ECU with my eyes closed now, mainly because your eyes don't help one bit with the plugs. and that's the hard part.

I also got my replacement-replacement injector oring retainers today. I contacted support for the injector shop about the package not moving for a month so they sent me new ones. The new ones actually arrived this time.

I only replaced them on the two injectors that had the broken retainers, but I did order 6 just in case I run into this in the future. I would do all six, but they are not easy to remove when they're in tact so I'm deciding to let the sleeping dog lie. I found the easiest way to install the replacement retainers was to put the retainer on a 12 point 10mm socket & push the injector into it until you hear it snap into place.

good as new-ish.

I'm also going to try something that's a probably a bad idea, but it'll be pretty cool if it works. I always liked the F/L2 cluster but don't like the blue. I bought a mangled cluster years ago to play around with & see if I could convert, or remove, the blue to orange. I didn't have any luck, I mostly just further destroyed the cluster. But, I had an idea today, it might even be a good one!

If I can't convert the F/L2 cluster to be red, why don't I just move the gauge faces to an F/L1 cluster? that's the only part I like anyway & all the indicators line up with the F/L1 clusters, so it might just work. I know the F/L2 cluster uses white backlight LEDS where the F/L1 cluster uses orange, it'll just depend on if the orange LEDS are orange enough on their own.

I was able to find a F/L2 cluster for cheap, so I'll see how well that works when I get it.

Welp, I fucked up.

I swapped the gauge faces over & honestly, I wasn't a huge fan. the blue still was showing a little bit and it was a little spotty, so I was going to swap the old faces back in. I was trying to wipe off some fingerprints off the faces before I installed them & wasn't getting anywhere with water. So, I decided to try a bit if isopropyl alcohol, huge mistake. It just took the print right off the face, more or less destroying the area I wiped it on. so, for the time being, I'm now stuck with the F/L2 gauge faces.

I didn't get much else done, but that supercharger is finally finished being rebuilt & scheduled to be delivered Monday. So in prep of that I swapped my tuned ECU back in & I'll take the Subaru Monday so I don't need to work on a hot ass car when I get home from work. I'm super excited to have it back so I want to install that ASAP once it's here. I'm very excited.

I got the blower installed, took me two days as I ran into some issues at the end of the day yesterday & didn't have enough time to sort them out.

The blower is definitely in better shape than before, you can tell just by turning it that it's quiet now. You used to be able to hear a little bearing noise turning it by hand before, but now it's nice & quiet. I wish they smoothed out the edges more on the port job, not sure why they left such harsh edges on it. I had some really bad issues with the TPS, finally got it happy today but man I just gotta replace that thing already. I also had to remove my extension bracket for the throttle cables now that I have the throttle bump stop installed again. I seriously need to get a better system for the cruise control, but it'll work for the time being. I just hope it doesn't jump out of the roller again, nothing is less fun than unintended acceleration.

One thing I did not expect is the blower pulley actually lines up with the rest of the accessory belts now. it was pretty far off before, but now it's spot on, I'll take the win though.

Took it for a test drive, everything seems to be working so far. I'm probably driving a little to hard for someone who has a full tank of regular still, but it's going well so far. I removed the insert motor mounts in favor of running just an engine damper in hopes that will stop the engine from hitting the firewall without all the vibration you get from stiff motor mounts.

Lastly, I decided to **** around with one of my auto clusters & found the duty cycles it takes to activate the gear display:
1: 10-19%
2: 20-34%
3: 35-49%
4: 50-100%(ish)
The cluster expects a 50Hz PWM signal.

So, with an Arduino, I can easily make a program to run that display. Unfortunetly, 4 is the highest you'll get out of it. My plan is to use that as an indicator of which tune I'm running on when I get my programmable ECU. I also found that sending a 20KHz signal down the PWM pin makes the cluster reset constantly like when you turn on HID lights. Weird.

I still need to clean up a lot of stuff in the engine bay, but it's good enough to drive for the time being.