Sealed DME's

One of the new rules for 944 Cup for the 2011 season, is the requirement for a sealed DME or electronic brain for the motor. The DME contains a chip which has a program, called mappings, that determine how the motor should work. For example, at a certain RPM, with a certain throttle position, set the fuel mixture to x, the amount of fuel injected to y, and trigger the spark plug at z. These days when you tune cars, you use a computer to program the chip instead of twiddling the carbs as of old. The thing is, the mappings are pretty small, and the chip's storage is pretty large, so there can be multiple maps on one chip. In theory, if you wanted to cheat, there could be one mapping for running on the dyno and putting out legal power and another mapping with greater horsepower when running out on the track.

To make a level playing field for the competitors, and if you want to win points and tires in the series, you need to submit your DME to a service provider, who will burn your single chosen map to a chip and then seal the box. I sent my 2 boxes off to Behe Performance to have this done. John was unable to duplicate my box with the AutoAuthority chip, since they encrypted the mapping, but the stock box was fine. And after a discussion with John, it's likely that the stock box would be making as much if not more power than the chipped one. That is because the AutoAuthority programming was done back in the 90's when gasoline wasn't tainted by ethanol. John told me he's finding levels of up to 16% ethanol in sampled fuel on the east coast. And the stock mapping would be a better fit until I get a custom tune.

Here's the stock DME with the seals.

Origins

So there's probably a whole 2 or 3 people out there in the universe who wondered why this blog and my racing comedies are tagged with 'Alpine'. Well since it's my blog and the cost of reading isn't very high, I'm going to tell you, due to something I found this weekend.

Long ago, in a universe where there was no internet, I was a passionate climber of mountains, cliffs, rocks, ice, boulders and buildings. I still get out occasionally to the crags and ice climbs after all these years. But back then, when a day at the cliffs didn't mean a handful of Ibuprofen along with the beer afterwards, I wanted to climb all the time. One of my passions was a sub-genre of climbing, called alpine climbing. Alpine climbing is the face of climbing where multiple climbing disciplines intersect: Rock; Ice; Snow; Glacier Travel and sometimes all four at once! Usually practiced in the high mountain areas of the world, a typical alpine climb involves hiking into the snow region; traversing over glaciers (watch out for those crevasses!) to the base of a rock wall or ridge; onto the ridge to the summit, climbing rock, ice and occasionally the hanging glacier. Sometimes the route is mainly snow and ice; other times a short walk on snow and the rest is rock. Whatever the combination, its always challenging and fun.


At that time I was also starting my business as a computer consultant. The world of computers was pretty new back then and the opportunities were large. So the plan was made, very simple with just 2 parts: 1) work for 6 months and make large amounts of money, and 2) spend the other six months traveling around the world climbing. Simple yes? So it was a no-brainer to label my company Alpine Enterprise, which begat Alpine Management Services (condo mgmt), Alpine Software (design and consulting) and eventually Alpine Motorsports, the current non-profit endeavor.

And while I didn't quite meet the 6 months on, 6 months off goal, I did get about the world and visit a lot of cool mountain areas. While cleaning my office this weekend, I found this pic from my travels, buried in some old files. This is from 1982, deep in the mountains of Tibet on a glacier at about 18,000 feet. Behind me is one of the sacred mountains of the Buddhist faith, Mt. Amne Machin, kinda like being in Jerusalem at the Wailing Wall for the Jewish faith. Tibet was closed by the Chinese after they invaded it in the 50's and the Dali Lama fled. We were only the 2nd group of Westerners to visit Tibet when it was reopened again in 1981. It was a pretty cool trip.

So that's where the "Alpine" comes from.

What Parts Car?

I've tried to convince Maggie that there's room in the back yard for another Alternative Canine Relaxation Structure, but I'm not sure she's buying it.

A brief interlude

Edward stopped by a few evening back and with his help I was able to achieve a successful docking of the motor with the torque tube. That was the last major mechanical task. I try to spend about a 1/2 hour each night after work on the finishing up tasks. Last week I put in the clutch slave cylinder, starter, radiator and fans. Ran the water hoses and hooked up all the electric connections. One small setup back was I routed the alternator cable to the wrong side of the oil separator when building the motor and the connector wouldn't make it to the matching one on the firewall. This necessitated removing the fuel rail and intake manifold and re-routing it and putting it all back again. A minor bump. A slightly bigger bump was I forgot its always easier to set and adjust the reference sensors before you put the motor in. The bottom bolt is a bitch to get to, and took the whole of one of my evenings to do.

At this point I'm real close to finding out if it will all work, but I had to take short break. An Ebay alert popped into my email inbox on Friday. An 89 944 with a "running" 2.7L engine was being auctioned off. Located in Northern NJ the current bid was $325 with a buy it now for $750.

Car was rear-ended, you can see the broken hatch in the back photo. But I'm thinking, hmmm, only $750, and the engine is working. Let's see from the photos, I can probably sell the wheels, keep the doors, the hood , left side fender and air dam.

It has a new A/C compressor, receipts for $2k of recent engine work - I bet the timing belt went and it had a head job. So after thinking for about 10 minutes, this is what convinced me to pull the trigger.

A 2.7L running motor that's probably in decent shape. Hell, the head alone is worth $1000. I can pull the motor, keep the bits that get used in a race car like doors, fenders, hood, etc. and sell just about everything else and end up with a free (rare as hen's teeth 2.7L) motor. Sounds like a plan!

Hit Buy it Now and sent a note to the seller, that as long as the engine was good we had a deal.  So Sunday pulled the trailer up to Northern NJ and brought it home. Now it's living in the trailer for now - out of (Maggie's) sight, and out of mind. We'll get back to it after the racecar is alive.

And speaking of the race car, another 1/2 hour in the garage tonight.

I have had a set of braided steel fuel lines from Lindsey Racing hanging around in the garage for the last 2 years. Just haven't had the time to install them. Well now's the time I reckon.

Here's the install in progress. One of the fuel lines (the return) has been cut and new line attached. All the other lines are misc ABS brake lines.

Install in progress. Looks pretty sweet.

And even though they look pretty cool as it, functionality is what drives a race car, so they get wrapped with an fiberglass heat sleeve. And I believe those sleeves helped with the car fire last April, keeping the fuel lines cool and keep from creating a bigger inferno.

Next steps are to add spark (battery), oil and water and see the result. Stay tuned.

In with the New

"If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out" or translated in racer talk, if that 2.5 Liter early 944 motor is a turd, pull it and replace with a new (bigger) one. And as the Christmas holidays arrived, I did just that.

Out with the Old! In with the New!

Here's the new 2.7L motor, almost ready for it's new home.

Fuel rail attached, vacuum lines run, just need to pop it off the engine stand and attach the clutch. The clutch on the 2.5 is only a year old so I'm going to just swap it to the 2.7.

I know I said I was going to put the motor in from the bottom after using up my four letter vocabulary pulling the 2.5 from the top. But I woke up in the middle of the night with some ideas and you know, no good deed goes unpunished. Actually that metaphor doesn't apply here, but since the only cost is my time, it's free. So lets see if my ideas work.

What I really need is a load-leveling device for my engine crane. Something to adjust the angle of the suspended motor.While I don't have one of those, I do have plenty of tie downs and straps and an overly active imagination. So let's McGuyer it.

45 minutes later with the help of my shop jack, the lift, multiple straps and my wife at the engine crane controls, we were closing in on the docking. I had to drop the cross member, but generally we had smooth sailing.

Anybody who's attempted to put a 44 motor back knows the torque tube connection aka drivetrain, is the sticking point. The planets need to be aligned, six chickens sacrificed, copious quantities of beer offered to the gods before it will slide in and connect to the torque tube. Any transgressions against the Porsche water-cooled gods, like casting lustful glances at a early 911 will be punished. Well I must have had some impure thoughts because after an hour, I still haven't achieved full bonding. I put out a call to my Porsche buddies and Edward will be by tomorrow evening to lend a hand. Perhaps his karma is better than mine.

But we're close!