The Sledgehammer - Shooting for 1,000hp

There is a guy on V8 miatas FB group that seems to know about programing. He is working on traction control. Our cars are grip limited in the sense that the largest time we can run is a 275 which requires some work to do. At my current power level (376whp) with some old 225-15 NT01's I still loose traction on the 2-3rd shift. I will be putting some 245-15 RT660's on and going down to either a 3:15 or a 3:08 rear ratio.

If your car already has abs it's easy to add a sensors front and rear I needed to add a sensor for the GM PCM on my build. It would be easy to add one to the other side of the front of the car.
Hell for you (if you don't have abs) you do have a lathe, you could press fit a tone ring somewhere on the front possibly?

I will see if he is interested in chatting with you.
 

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That is really cool. Sure, I'd love to chat with him. And as you surmised, a 1984 LTD doesn't have ABS - it's basically a Ford Fairmont under the skin. Nothing but the finest pedestrian '70's automotive technology here, lol. It just happens that the chassis is ideal for hooking in a straight line. Little things like turning and stopping (mostly stopping) are somewhat afterthoughts...
 
AlexLTDLX said:
BTW - The MGM guys said I should be fine with dropping down to a 1.5 second spool up time; and then after they look at the logs again (I assume they're looking for current spikes), they think we could still go quicker - like 1 second or so.

There is an issue with MSA's arduino code when using the potentiometer - when the pot's set to max, the ramp up time appears to go away - it just snaps from throttle at zero to throttle at 100% after the first time it's triggered. I've reached out to him, but haven't hear back. Anyone want to look at the code who knows what they're looking at? He did a great job; it's above my head. Software isn't my strength.
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hmm ... I could have a look too.
Can you pls reply with a link to the source code?
(I will not be able to test and debug though ... I have a arduino derivative)
 
AlexLTDLX said:
That is really cool. Sure, I'd love to chat with him. And as you surmised, a 1984 LTD doesn't have ABS - it's basically a Ford Fairmont under the skin. Nothing but the finest pedestrian '70's automotive technology here, lol. It just happens that the chassis is ideal for hooking in a straight line. Little things like turning and stopping (mostly stopping) are somewhat afterthoughts...
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What was the "priorities" at this time ? 🤣
Does it run? -yes
Is it fast? -yes
4 wheels with 1 steering wheel? -yes
Congratulation you have a car
What do you do with handling? And safety?
Keep the wheel straight and you have brakes. What's the problem?
 
cmoalem (and anyone else who wants the code) - you should be able to download it here (I *think* the permissions are correct, if not please let me know): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yR3lZB1b85WoEOcJJNVAFfzdpvaJphp5/view?usp=sharing

Also, if you do make changes, please be sure to keep the original author's name there - I'm grateful for his work, and would like to maintain that credit. You can add to the attribution, "With modifications by: xxx"

WB - lol. That's kind of how I feel about it. It does the job, has power windows, power trunk release, power door locks and inflatable lumbar supports. But it can always be made nicer...
 
AlexLTDLX said:
cmoalem (and anyone else who wants the code) - you should be able to download it here (I *think* the permissions are correct, if not please let me know): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yR3lZB1b85WoEOcJJNVAFfzdpvaJphp5/view?usp=sharing

Also, if you do make changes, please be sure to keep the original author's name there - I'm grateful for his work, and would like to maintain that credit. You can add to the attribution, "With modifications by: xxx"

WB - lol. That's kind of how I feel about it. It does the job, has power windows, power trunk release, power door locks and inflatable lumbar supports. But it can always be made nicer...
Click to expand...
Thanks! downloaded, Arduino/Teensyduino set up ... n ready to roll.
Will activate my Teensy 4.0 and see what I can do over the weekend.
 
Thanks. Again, the biggest issue I'm having (and not really an issue, since the MGM ESC has ramping control built into it) is with the knob activated, after the first hit at any setting other than 100%, it's like there's a capacitor that has to discharge between activations to get the pre-programmed ramp. At 100% setting, after the first trigger signal (which does ramp up properly), any trigger after the initial there's no ramp. And if you try to turn the knob down from 100% and then activate it, it doesn't do anything at all. I *think* this has to do with my supply voltage - it's just a hair over 5 volts - specifically, in my case, it's 5.13 volts. But I'm just guessing, tbh.
 
Hey Alex. The guy I mentioned got back to me. He is interested in chatting with you.

I have his email I can send you. Let me know how you want to go about it
 
I chatted with him a bit, he is running drive by wire on his set up. He may have insight on programming though.

I know I'm excited to see what info/data you have coming next.

My wife just started working again this last week and we will be getting rid of our Jeep and Cx-5 payments hopefully on Friday. Between the two I should be able to start acquiring parts by the end of next month!

Given I'm grip limited I would only be looking at a set up that can produce 3-5psi on my aluminum block 5.3 LS. While using some form of Traction control. I would like to be at around 500whp. That wouldn't be too bad in a 2600-2700lb car.
 
Through a lockup, modern trans your goals should be pretty easy - basically, the P2/VESC variant should do it. I'm trying to schedule dyno time with Ray right now. I've got the necessary liquids already on the way from the folks at Klotz - a non-MMT octane booster for safety and a bottle of "secret sauce" that should buy us some additional ponies...
 
Thanks guys. I've been spending all my free time trying to get everything sorted. I've made a steel "base" for the battery packs out of steel angle (it's not completely done, but good enough for dyno testing; not good enough for the track yet), changed the oil in the car, changed a few software parameters in the ESC (mostly for a little faster spool up), and now I'm trying to decide which cameras to use.

I'm pretty excited, but nervous that something will fail. Can't wait to get my own dyno.
 
Just got back from the dyno... 100 miles each way, especially in the traffic we have here, is certainly a tiring experience. We made 7 pulls in total, 3 naturally aspirated (Ray, the tuner, really wanted to zero in on the tune), and going from a 75mm throttle body to a 100mm throttle body was worth 12 rwhp on this car.

On the Sledgehammer front, it worked fine (I was REALLY anxious about it, TBH), and overall we picked up over 140 rwhp with it. The (sorta) bad thing was after driving it 100 miles to get there, the trans fluid was hot (it got thin), and while naturally aspirated the torque converter would lock up fine on the dyno, with the electric turbo running, it would blow through the torque converter (i.e. it would never "lock"). You could plainly see it when plotting the power vs mph - naturally aspirated, it got up to 140-145 mph, but with the electric turbo, the best we were able to get was 135-140 mph (these numbers are from memory, don't quote me until I've looked at the data). 10 mph is a lot to lose to slip, even 5 mph is pretty significant. After pulling off the dyno, there was a small puddle of trans fluid that puked out of the vent - it's never puked trans fluid before. It didn't hurt it, it just hurt the numbers a bit. FWIW, the car made 385 rwhp naturally aspirated and about 532-533rwhp on the Sledgehammer (~527 rwhp without the oxygenate - that's another story. We tested several things.)

The Sledgehammer itself pulled insane power levels - almost 700 amps running; ~32kW.

Bottom line: It worked. Really well. The gains would've been more impressive had the converter been able to lock. Consider this: we saw about 6.2-6.4 psi on average. The most the car made on the dyno was 557 rwhp with the Whipple supercharger I had on before, but that was at 12 psi. I'll have to go back through the old dyno pulls to confirm those figures. Electric turbo efficiency is very real.
 
Tough break with the converter. What are the specs on it?

Depending on the actual data it seems that 4-6% HP was lost to heat. While that doesn't seem like much, it is a considerable amount.

On the sledgehammer side It would have been nice to see a peak of 7psi with it. I am assuming you had it maxed?

Either way 23Hp per psi isn't that bad.
 
Congrats on the success with sledgehammer. Having it to work without failure is rewarding. Get the get the other small sorted with the car and it will killer. Once more congrats on success with sledgehammer and thank you for all the hard work you have put in and info you have provided.

Work is easy up for and Time to get back on my project.
 
Thanks guys. Keep in mind, even 532 rwhp is 700hp at the flywheel. The converter's a 10" BTE unit with a steel "C" stator. Actual flywheel horsepower from BSFC is 755 (pessimistically; using a BSFC of .5).

SGL12GUNNER - We saw a peak of 6.9 psi. It's not really "maxed" - there's always room for improvement. I can still feed it more power - we could put in another set of battery packs in parallel to reduce voltage drop, but we are already pulling a pretty insane amount of electrical power. I didn't charge the current packs between pulls (until the last pull, that is), but voltage dropoff from pull to pull wasn't much. I may be better off optimizing the compressor side. We are playing towards the "choke" region of the compressor map - where drive power goes up dramatically. There are still a lot of options ahead of us, just need to decide which choices to make.
 
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