Subtitle: The Check Engine Light Comes On Again
Monday afternoon I backed the Emperor underneath the metal awning in the driveway and raised up the driver’s side of the car as high as my compact aluminum jack could go, propping it up with jack stands. The goal was to change out the mid-pipe and muffler with the OEM pieces borrowed from John. Listing from front to back there was one butterfly shaped brace with six 21mm nuts holding it on, then 4 more cross braces at various intervals with two 21mm nuts apiece and one cross brace with, for whatever reason, four 19mm nuts.
It looked like I could remove a couple of the regular cross braces and leave a couple on, but that big 6 bolt brace was definitely going to come off. Because of my limited clearance under the car for hammer swinging and my wimpy foot long 3/8″ breaker bar I managed to get only one of the six to loosen any after 10 minutes of struggle. So doing what any non-mechanically inclined individual would do, I gave that task up. I knew I could change mufflers, so I did take off the Racing Beat and put the stock one on.
Dropped the car back onto the ground and took a drive around the neighborhood. Quieter for sure, so I took it out a bit further and stomped on it. And while it was quieter overall than the Racing Beat, once over 4000 RPM it had still had that ugly undertone.
When I got back home I went and got the Kindle with the Torque app installed on it. Turns out after monkeying with around with the app for a while I had discovered it can log real time data, so I got back in the car and took it back out for a ride. Around to the first spot I can get on it and I do a rolling start in second gear. Run it up to almost redline before shifting into 3rd and keeping on it until near redline again before having to coast to the stop sign ahead.
Turn right readying to make another run through the gears and I notice my old friend the Master Caution1 light has illuminated. Hmmmm, I figure what the heck, I’m logging the drive and I’m less than a mile from home – I mash the gas pedal and go. High speed through 2nd and 3rd, u-turn, repeat the pattern and return to the hanger2.
After a couple tries I figured out the right way to transfer the log to the PC. It is comma separated value format so I open it up in Excel. Blank column, Time, Blank, Blank, Blank, G(x), G(y), G(z), some more blank columns and some more random parameters. Turns out that even though I had a “dashboard” set up with dials of the parameters I wanted to record you have to actually add what you want to the list of PIDs to be measured, what I got the first time are some sort of default measurements.
I select Time, Engine Temperature, Engine RPM, Vehicle Speed and Timing Advance to be logged. CEL be damned I go for a little longer drive running it through the gears to redline six to eight times before returning home. I dumped the log file to the PC and attached to an email to Steve at Panic. We’ll see what he has to say.
2. Continuing the aircraft analogy.