Another Chapter in the roller coaster ride here! Beware of a long post ahead
(I guess its not really a "dyno-fail", its more of a "pre-dyno failure")!!
With hopes of a few dragstrip days this upcoming fall I wanted to do everything I could to try to get the car dialed in as best as possible, especially the nitrous. For years, I wanted to put it on a dyno and see what could be gained from live-tuning it instead of datalogs and seat-of-the-pants observations. Scheduled an appointment a few weeks ahead of time to give me some time to prepare and street drive the car. Flashing back...The car had acted great after sorting out the ignition and datalogging issues from May/June (see post #565 on the previous page for a recap) and it drove freakin perfect both to-and-from Carlisle even in bad rainy weather. I also took the car out this past Tuesday and put an hour of driving on it, including 4 brief nitrous hits on a local highway. I wanted to check that all the systems were turning on and simply run the car through it's paces while logging and later looking at the tune. Came home from Tuesdays drive ready to freakin hit the roller for sure. Did a nut and bolt check, checked critical areas, belts, wiring, fluids, and so forth. Everything was great.
Friday morning, after packing some remaining gear in the car I let it warm up and started to drive over to Blue Sky Performance and Restoration who's new shop is in Andover, only 15 minutes away. However, not even before I got out of my neighborhood, I felt the car stutter, backfire and saw the tach needles jump intermittently. I instantly knew that the ignition problem from May had returned. Freakin devastated. I decided to see if it would clear up if I drove gently and it didn't, but I was hawk-eyeing everything the whole time. There were times that the engine would not have an "event" for almost a minute or more, and sometimes where it would pop and buck within a few seconds of eachtoher. Nothing was making sense, but before you know it I was at Blue Sky. I spoke with Jeff, one hell of an awesome guy, and also one of the owners. I told him the car was actualyl ready to go until the suprise issue this morning and it was unlikely we would make any power pulls. He said he wouldnt mind using some of the time I reserved to investigate what might be going on. So, he pulled the car inside and while he was driving it though the shop and loading it onto the machine, it did NOT pop or bang one single time in the course of several minutes. Hmm, maybe it was a fluke, but I was real skeptical. We go on strapping the car down knowing this was now most likely going to be a troubleshooting session. We go over all my GCF settings in each page of the Holley software and then get the roller spinning under a very light load. It is a DynoCom dyno unit and I was able to learn about it a bit from him, but during this first roll of the wheels, he did not have any load applied to the rollers. Engine ran smooth just coasting from 1st to 2nd and into3rd. Ok cool; maybe we are in luck!
We then agree to run the car gently with the brake applied to the dyno rollers and within just the first few seconds I heard it backfire and begin to act stupid. Since we had a live-datalog running directly from the holley to this laptop via the can-bus, he let the engine run a little bit. We also had the live-timing cursor active to possibly see if any cells in any of the tune parameters are hitting erroneously. Shut the car down after about a minute of low-mid rpm throttle filled with plenty of pops and backfires. See the datalog (screenshot of datalog). I start checking wires, specifically at the area where I had found the slice in the insulation back in May. I peel the loom off and the wire repair is still intact, no issues there. What I do notice, is that the rubberized/plastic grommet that these 3 wires pass through while entering the bottom of the distributor housing, well that "grommet" has now come out and is free-floating with the wire loom. Eh, whatever, its just a grommet right? We all have a plentiful amount of grommets in our vehicles and sometimes they slip out of place right; sometimes they have no negative effects ever, and probably sometimes we never notice they are compromised. Anyways, I move on and we check a bunch of other things. After checking a bunch of pins with a meter, using a timing light we go to crank the car again. Now it will crank, but has no spark! and narrowing our findings to the Hyperspark distributor, I partially lift up the distributor cap to just simply check that the wheel of the hall-effect sensor is turning and it is. I was out of ideas and I was not wanting to waste any more of their time, so we agree to reschedule because I am hopeful to figure out the issue and resolve it by then. We get the car unstrapped and pushed outside where I had called a local tow truck drive to scoop me up. Damn, that sucked; the very last time this car was on a tow truck was back in 2017 when I roasted the old transmission to death while driving up to the Chatterbox a few weeks after competing in that Optima Batteries USCA shootout at the track in Millville. So, having the car towed is certainly a bad moment, but thankfully it is a rare one.
One the car is unloaded back at my house I had some other important stuff to tend to and was finally able to revisit the issue later on. Did some research first and found a post on the Holley forums from just a few weeks ago that intrigues me. link:
https://forums.holley.com/forum/holl...-failure-parts
Also in that post is a link to a youtube video with another guy with the same problem. I then head on out to the garage, turn on the go-pro and take the cap/wires off of the distributor. THE SENSOR IS COMPLETLY LOOSE AND FREE TO SWING AROUND A SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT which right then and there pinpoints my problem. These Holley Hyperspark distributors might look flashy and cool but the parts in it are apparently plastic garbage. WTF. I have had this hyperspark for less than 3 years and only about 4,000 miles but the internals are loose! Wow, I was pist; I am still pist. If you examine how the hall-effect wheel and sensor is setup on these units, it looks like one side of the black plastic sensor is mounted with a dowel or pin and the other side is kept in place... by... the...freakin...stuipd...plastic...grommet....that ....the ...freakin...wires...pass..through!!!!! With my grommet now sheared off completely and lazily serving no purpose whatseover, the sensor was free to slop around inside the housing. I'm surprised I only had some short pops and blips with the timing situation; how did it even manage to stay running! Shut the garage down for the night and type up some posts on the other holley threads to find out how these other unlucky hyperspark victims handled it. Some with glue, some with this replacement (crap plastic again) sensor, but I would have to cut the wire connections and splice them onto my existing pigtail etc. Ugh. It was too late to call Holley so I called them first thing this morning. They used to have saturday hours, but now, of course, no help for car guys on weekends anymore; thanks Holley. I then call Jegs, where I bought the Hyperspark distributor, coil, and CD box from and I installed them on 9/16/2020. Expected to get nowhere, and thats how it went! They only cover 90-days for any warranty on this Holley ignition junk. Ha, also, a big kick in the nuts this morning was after calling the Holley phone line and having the robot tell me they are closed today, I get an email from Holley boasting about their current 20% off sale, couldn't help but laugh. Ain't no way they are going to help you on a Saturday, but be sure they want you to keep shopping instead!
So, now I wait until Monday after I get off of work to place a fiery call to Holley. They will probably push me off and I'll be stuck figuring it out and eating the bill for either a new distributor entirely or I'll do what I really don't want to do, and get out the bubble gum and duct-tape to try to do a hack-fix for the remainder of the year. I'd like to find a way to simply maybe finish this calendar year with the holley hyperspark stuff so I am not going to want to start researching or discussing any other non-Holley EFGI systems just yet.
*Let's please hold off on that entire topic for a moment.
I have some videos of the car on the rollers, and you can hear it act great during that timeperiod when there was no load on the dyno-brake, and also another video of how it popped and spit when load was applied just minutes later. I will upload them as I get time. However, here is a link to one of the youtube videos I filmed last night when I uncovered the sensor floating around:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxV6YrfnZio
also a link to another holley hyperspark failure:
https://forums.holley.com/forum/holl...rk-distributor
I have a screenshot of the datalog from when load was applied on the second roll when the problem came back and ended our session:
- If someone smarter than me has anything to add, please feel free. The tricky thing that I THINK is happening, is even through the dark-red line isn't showing many of the "event" it because the computer is still trying to hold timing at my pre-set timing map right? But since that sensor inside the distributor is chattering around, even thought the timing is probably accurately being commanded, its not arriving where it needs to at a precise time.. therefore, you can see the actual AFR suffer (light green line acorss the middle of the graph) which on a properly running setup SHOULD be really a really tight match with the blue line near it (which is my Target AFR). am I missing something?
A lingering questions is why does the issue not happen at idle and low loads, but under moderate load (and back on May 28 at the dragstrip)it comes about? If you look at the photos from my post in May you can see the grommet in its place, but the likelihood that it was just hanging out as a wire grommet and had already separated from the hall-effect plastic sensor is pretty high. When I was repairing the wiring odds are i nudged it back up into a place where it was snug enough to the sensor again and therefore held it in place for all of June and all of July. Then, this past Tuesday when I did my nut/bolt/fluids/underhood check, I certainly DO remember giving a physical exam of this exact wire loom, because the problems I had troubleshoot with it were fresh in my brain. At that moment, it seems likely that the broken piece of grommet/sensor separated again and just waited to "let me know" about it Friday morning. C'mon!
So, in reality, there is a silver lining in all of this I suppose. I am thankful that the issue happened during my drive to the shop instead of being unknown until perhaps 6000 rpms on the dyno with the nitrous flowing. That certainly would have been catastrophic. I hope Holley has the decency to address my situation in a manner that I even want to continue ever buying any of the cheap crap that keeps almost sending this car to an early grave. Jokingly, today I told myself that I will probably have to save up for a gravesite headstone for this car which will have some kind of inscription like "Here lies a 1987 Camaro - killed by cheap defective Holley parts".
I'll get it sorted out, but I had to add this update on here while waiting for my "chat' with Holley on Monday.