DarkLighter Tuning Kamei Wabbit build! by T3Bunny

6 minute(s) of a 391 minute read

Thanks Jeremy! Hey I wanna give a shout out to this guy for being a damn good seller and person. Other than stealing some early strut tops off my poor car... And then posting the pictures to prove he had them... As for the pile of parts you still have, lemme know and I come by sometime to get them. I have had NO LUCK finding a short shifter surround so I really could use that. I have a piece to run in there that means I can't use the long one...

Lol my buddy Ed and I ended up buying BOTH cars in those pictures. The corrado is sitting in an undisclosed location. I will have a new harness in her in the next week or so...

The VW community out here kicks @$$!

Anyways so onto some more pictures I promised.

I got a really nice hook up from "My Old Roc" a few weeks ago. He had a much needed tachometer and 100mph speedo, along with a cluster surround that was in much better shape than the one I had. And he had a broken speedometer. We had a deal!

So I rebuilt his speedometer and went through mine while I was at it. I have rebuilt countless VW speedometers, but this was a nice pleasant change as these are the first early speedos I have gotten to play with. I learned some really interesting things about them in the process.

Just like the newer speedos, these gears are prone to cracking. But fortunately they are the same as the later style gears so getting replacement pars isn't hard. I happened to have a few new ones in my stockpiles. 

The interesting surprise is that the early speedometers are basically identical to the later style. Okay they are in a different case with a different face, but most of the internal parts are identical. This means the parts that break are swappable. It also has me wanting to swap in a MFA setup... but thats slightly more complicated as I need to sort out how to get the VSS assembly onto the back. Its worth doing though to get the newer style speedo cable in there as well. 

So here we are reassembled into the cluster. 

I took videos of rebuilding the speedometers and finally got my laptop fixed so I can actual watch them... I will try and get those posted up shortly.

And here you can see how clean the woodgrain on this thing is! He even had a heater controls bezel in matching woodgrain for me. Thanks Andy!

Oh and got the check engine light installed in there. That was a HUGE pain to make up. The early plastic is super hard and rubbery at the same time. It was not easy to work with and shape/file into submission. But I finally got it to where I am happy with it and it looks like it belongs there. 

And check out the fioglight switch! I wish I remembered whee I found that gem. Probably out of an old Porsche. Yeah I know the headlight switch is goofy... I had to disassemble it again and put it back together correctly. In playing with my piles of old switches I discovered that some of them actually light up like on the later style. I guess these are fairly rare though. I want a full set really badly...

I did a power up test of the cluster and I am not very happy with either the amount of backlighting, or the very small amount of adjustment range on the headlight switch. For the backlighting issue I am planning some really cool LED mods to get it a lot brighter. For the switch, I think I might modify a newer one to get a larger range of adjustment.

Finally I just finished building this:

Almost had to get the light box out to get a good picture of that, I am hating my camera right now. Anyways its a very versatile PIC burner. It will burn just about any type of PIC out there and apparently a pile of other processors too. Why?

Well there are a few projects in the works. First off I am building an intelligent turbo timer to get a feel for working with PICs. Then comes the fun application. I can use the MegaSquirt as is to operate the CEL when a couple events occur, but all it will be capable of doing is turning the light on. I want a little more intelligence to it than that. A PIC can be programed to interface with the MS ADC lines to create a much more intelligant CEL.

I want it to set the light if the sensor parameters go low, or too high. I want it to blink if the IAT goes high, yet go out as soon as its cooled off. The other sensors can also be monitored and have certain conditions set the light. Codes I want to see:

1)Battery voltage too low

2)Battery voltage too high

3)Coolant -40, or too low. -40 means open circuit

4)Coolant too high, probably 230

5)Intake temperature too low, again -40 means open circuit

6)Intake temputure above 150 sets blinking until it drops. This will likely be a different color LED inside the CEL.

7)MAP reading flat lined to atmosphere pressure during running

8)AFR lean out triggered while under load, this will be hooked up to a buzzer too

9)Knock detected for more than x-seconds

I am sure I will think of a few more. The setup I envision will have a plug to access the codes. A simple switch will tell it to go into blink codes. Another will clear them out. Its a pretty ambitious little project, but something I have wanted to do for a long time. For years now I have heard this feature will be added to MS, but never seen any progress on this.

So after about 5hrs of cleaning, most of the sand is out of the car now. Got a little more to do today. We are expecting rain tomorrow, so I have to get it finished and tarped up. Maybe even get a little painting done and get the heaterbox back into her....