hi,

on with the story.....

When it came to choosing the injectors I toured the local scrapyards. This is one of my favorite things to do!
As my engine is a flat 4, the fuel rail ( the solid pipe which the injectors fit into which supplies them with fuel ) needed to be split into two.  This meant that I needed to find one that was made from steel so that I could cut and weld it. Most fuel rails are made from either plastic or cast aluminium, and therefor no good for me.

  After much bonnet opening I found a suitable rail fitted to a Mazda MX5. I removed the rail and injectors and handed over £5 to the scrapyard owner. You are probably thinking that £5 isn't much, well it's not! When I walked in to the yard I had a chat to the owner about my plans for converting my 45 year old Beetle into a fuel injected, turbo charged monster. Once he stopped laughing, which took a while, he said that as long as I showed him the Beetle when I had finished, I could help myself! He also sold me a turbo off a Ford Escort for £10 and gave me a lambda sensor, various temperature sensors and a crank position sensor.

Back home I cut and shut the fuel rail to make two, TIG welding the outlets for the injectors so that they line up with the inlets in the manifold. It took a while to figure out how to mount the rails on the manifold, and the end result isn't very pretty, but it is very solid. However, while messing with this I dropped one of the injectors on the floor and broke the tip off. Bugger! Back to the scrapyards, but I couldn't find another MX5, so instead I took some out of a Mazda 626 2lt. Not only do these fit, they also have 4 spray outlets for better atomization of the fuel and they flow more ( 215cc per minute. God bless the internet! )

The next step was to fit the various sensors. The original engine does not use any sensors, so every one had to be custom mounted. I fitted the air temperature sensor inside the air filter and made a mounting bracket for the crank sensor. This was mounted above the crank pulley wheel. I have had to buy a toothed wheel ( 36 teeth with 1 missing ) to fit to the pulley ( cheers E-Bay! )

The ECU needs to know the coolant temperature of the engine. My engine is air cooled. However I have previously fitted a remote oil filter, so I decided to fit the coolant sensor into this pipeline.

A boss for the lambda sensor was welded into the exhaust at the point where the 4 collectors merge and the sensor fitted.

So to recap, I have:

A throttle body with a position sensor,
4 injectors,
an air intake temp sensor,
an oil ( coolant ) temp sensor,
a crank position sensor,
and a lambda sensor

Time to connect the ECU, switch it on and see what happens!.....

Ok, stage one is to convert to fuel injection

As I said earlier, I bought a second hand Megasquirt ECU off Ebay.  At the time I really knew very little about fuel injection and even less about Megasqirt.

Megasquirt is a brand of ECU's aimed at people building projects. They sell it as a kit that you solder together yourself, then use the free software to program it. They sell various models of ECU, depending on what you want to control.  What I actually bought was a Megasquirt 1 with a v3.0 board with an output for an ignition coil already fitted. It had previously been used on a 106 gti circuit racer.

One of the many great things about the Megasquirt company is the level of support they offer on-line. This helped me understand what i needed to complete my idea. However, the more I learnt, the more I realised how much more I had to learn.

Just how many milli-seconds do you open an injector for?
What percentage enrichment do you add to the fuel as the engine warms up?
And what the hell is a Pulse Width?

Fortunately the answers were much easier to find as I will explain later.

So next on my shopping list was a throttle body. This is the device that controls how much air is let into the engine. This is what the accelerator pedal is connected to. It looks a bit like a carburetor, with a butterfly valve mounted inside a tubular body. But that is about it, just the butterfly valve inside a tube.  The ECU needs to know the amount that the throttle is open. On one end of the shaft that the butterfly valve is mounted is a Throttle Position Sensor. This is basically just a variable resister which feeds a signal back to the ECU.

I decided on a single throttle body rather than 4 bodies, one for each cylinder. This was due to the ease of fitting the turbo later. The one I bought was off a Renault 25 turbo, for 99p.

The throttle body needs to be mounted on a manifold, as do the actual fuel injectors. As I am using a single throttle body, I have located it in the same position as the original carb.  The injectors, just a solenoid, need to be mounted as close to the inlet valve as possible. So I fabricated a center manifold out of 316 stainless steel tubing, TIG welding the mounting flange for the throttle body on the top, and a narrow bore tube coming off it for the vacuum pipe. I will explain the need for the vacuum pipe later.

This manifold fits into two cast aluminum ends which bolt to the heads, one each side. ( The Beetle uses a flat four configuration ) These manifold ends had short aluminium tubes welded to them, aiming at the inlet valve. This is where the injectors fit.

I had this idea, why not turbo charge the engine?

Well for a start the Webers don't like being presurised so a blow through turbo system was out. A draw through system would also require a change of carbs. I decided to sell the Webers.

After quite a lot of web research I decided on a fuel injection system to replace the carbs. Just to see if I could!

I bought a second hand Megasquirt ECU off Ebay for £200 for the heart of the system. I started to gather together various sensors from scrap yards and Ebay, limiting my budget to no ore than 99p for each!

The idea was to fit a fuel injection system using scrapyard parts. If that worked, fit a distributor-less ignition system. If that worked, fit a turbo. Then, when I blow the engine up, fit an electric motor......

So we move on several years and I now have welded the car up, sprayed her red with cream side panels and there is a 1600cc engine in the back. I'm using her every day, but dream of having more horsepower.

By 1999 I have had enough of the slow lane and decide to build the engine that I have always wanted. So i take £4500 to my local VW parts shop, Kingfisher Kustoms, and come out with a very comprehensive box of engine parts. I wanted a fast but reliable engine.

I put together a 1776cc engine with a new crankcase, new heads, high lift cam, counterweight crank, twin Weber IDF 40.s. I had the bottom end balanced to 0.5gr and flowed the heads myself.

This combination was good enough to beat any boy racer who came up against me at the traffic lights. A Corsa? Saxo? Don't make me laugh! BMW? you cant get the traction! Scooby? That's more interesting!

I remember sitting at the lights on a dual carriageway in Birmingham when two lads in a Scooby WRX pulled along side. The passenger looked down at me, laughed and the driver revved his engine. I stayed staring ahead, at the lights in front of me and at the set 1/8 mile up the road. As the lights changed to green I gunned the engine and dumped the clutch. The back end squatted down, tyres gripped and I shot forward in a well practiced launch. As I reached the second set of lights I stamped on the brakes to stop at the red light. The two lads in the Scooby were a second or two behind me and jumped the lights in front of me with a nice "bird" hand gesture from the passenger! I guess they didn't like to be beaten by a 40 year old VDub!

I had a lot of fun with "Daisy", but by this time I had 2 children and an ex-wife. I have my kids every weekend, Tuesday and Wednesday so there is a lot of picking up and dropping off of children. A 2 door car    with no heater and a very loud exhaust is not the best for this so I had to buy a more sensible car. This meant I could take "Daisy" off the road and spend some time on her.

More play time!

hi, thank you for looking at this!

This blog is all about the 22 years that I have owned my 1966 VW Beetlle called "Daisy". How, over the years she has been updated and modernised to go faster and faster. She has appeared at Santa Pod Drag Raceway, feared by the local "boy racers" in street racing and regularly seen going sideways, drifting round the corners of Shropshire!

She now sports a home made multi-point fuel injection engine, disc brakes, lowered suspension and, well, all sorts of upgrades. The journey to this point has been interesting and challenging.

Yes I could have just bought a sports car, but I would not have learnt anything about how a car works.

I enjoy making stuff myself, challenging myself to new limits.

First a bit of history.

Back in 1990 I was in a car club in Somerset called "Avalon VW Club". As the name suggests, we were a club for VW's, mainly air cooled ones, Beetles, Campers, Type 3's etc.. I was on the lookout for a Beetle to do up for my sister to drive. One of the club members found an old 1966 Beetle behind a garage in a local village. After a bit of research I found the owner. He had taken it into the garage 8 years previously for a new clutch but couldn't pay for it so the garage kept the car until he could. I paid the £300 the garage wanted for the clutch and the owner gave me the car!

My sister wanted me to paint the car yellow with white daisy's down the side. I refused, but the name "Daisy" stuck!

I learnt to weld on this car. Good job too! It took me 2 and a half years to fix it up enough to pass a MOT. By this time my sister had moved to the USA and I was left with "Daisy".

TIME TO PLAY!!