My backstory...
 

Some have asked about how I decided to get involved...

I've spent 10+ years as a professional engine builder and engine tuner. I own a performance shop and spend a lot of hours working on producing high horsepower engines. Many clients arrive with poorly tuned and inefficient setups. I've always tried to strike a good balance between power, driveability and fuel economy.

I've spent a number of years producing everything from cylinder head modifications (hundreds of hours spent on a flow bench). Designing performance manifolds, turbocharger systems and other highly custom modifications.

I tend to go steps beyond my competition with extras like modifying the R/S ratio of an engine or having a cam custom ground to achieve the desired characteristics requested by a client. I've tuned and worked on everything you could imagine from turbocharged Kia's to naturally aspirated F360's and everything in between.

My background is really in computers with a little engineering thrown in. Before working on performance cars I worked full time as a computer programmer and some of this work involved subcontracting job for some major OE's. Let's say that eventually sparked some interest in cars.

Presently I spend about 10h every day reverse engineering factory computers so they can be reflashed for performance. I do have extensive knowledge of car computer innards as well as the associated electronics.

For the last 2 years I drove around a modified 350hp honda civic that ran only on premium fuel and got 11.2l/100km (average over 15000km) in the city. One day the car was stolen so I decided to go in a different direction because I was tired of pumping fuel into the car.

I really wanted to develop EV technology but the pricetag is too steep and one has to make a decent business case out of a project if they're going to throw big bucks at it. The small step in the middle was to get a cheap light car and put a more efficient engine into it.

So I bought a 1993 honda civic and installed a VX engine. Running on studded winter tires I've achieved 6.9l/100km (average over 1000km) with mostly city driving.

In my spare time I jump out of perfectly good airplanes, am a certified parachute rigger and teach people how to pack their parachutes.

hackish -

Great stuff!

Have you reverse engineered Saturn ECU/PCMs by chance? Almost no one has, but I just gotta ask!

CarloSW2

No, but I have replaced the computer entirely on saturns before. It's a POS but I used megasquirt a few times. Junk but it's a cheap solution for some people. The hours spent reverse engineering a computer is in the area of 1000h so one must decide if it's a good business choice first. No doubt nobody has done it because there isn't enough demand.

Just a quick test to see if I can get one of those ecomodder images to appear at the bottom...

It all makes sense now! Interesting back story - thanks for posting it.

...And welcome to the forum.

Darin

Can someone explain to me how to do it so that you get the ecomodder image with the link to the garage like some people have. Is there an easy automatic way to do it, or do you have to do it via the usual forum [Tag][/Tag] lingo?

I looked at the link for metrompg's post. The URL was like so:
/forum/fe-graphs/sig11a.png
I noticed by hovering over his vehicle that it's vehicleid #11. So I looked at my own and saw that it's vehicleid #3652. So I made the swap and put the IMG tags in my sig. Yay for spending years as a web programmer too.

Try:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/fe-graphs/sig3636a.png
http://ecomodder.com/forum/fe-graphs/sig3638a.png

Welcome to the site hackish. Thanks for the background.


BTW, theres instructions for setting up your signature here:

http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...ture-2117.html

Very interesting background. Welcome to Ecomodder's.