OK good news: the Yoshifab throttle spool that I had from the other car is 2.5" working diameter which gives me the proper throw for the stock 240 pedal.
Bad news: getting it to actually work was way, way more involved than I thought or wanted it to be.
The throttle saga: I'll start with the cable and what I needed to do for it to work. I feel like Lokar over charges for what it is, but it is a good solution so I can't really knock it. That said, it was not quite a "cut it to length and throw it on" deal.
This is the cable I bought:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004L1Z63U/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The pedal end has a pre-made clevice that will work on a 240. The throttle body end is made for a carb linkage type of deal and is useless for us. This is what they list as universal though. The clevice is not actually deep enough, so it comes up short of the stock hole on the pedal arm (just barely, looks right but the pin won't go through). I had to open up the hole towards the back of the pedal arm in order to get it on. I then had to file the top corner of the arm a bit so the clevice could actually rotate around instead of being locked in and bending the cable.
That was easy, cutting things to length was easy, the struggle was getting a damn end for the cable. The stock cable has a little barrel connector on the end of the cable which I measured to .200"x.350". The Lokar cable is .065" (or about 1.5mm). I had basically written this off as no big deal, I'd just go to a bicycle shop and get some ends and off we go. NOPE. bike shops were worthless (tried 3 of them). I could get something online but I was trying to get a part in hand to work with over the weekend. Lord Athlon gave me the best tip which was a style of barrel that uses a set screw to clamp the cable. I took that inspriation to a hobby shop thinking of RC planes and control cables, strike 4. I tried Home Depot and Lowes, 5 and 6. I tried a chopper shop but they were closed so that's not their fault but still strike 7. I tried one last bicycle shop out of desperation and he sent me up the road to a CanAm dealership (for those keeping count, the 9th stop I made on this errand)
SCORE! This stupid thing was the answer
This is, evidently, a commonly used part that just turned out to be incredibly hard to ask for (no specific name, just barrel cable end) and even harder to find locally. As mentioned this came from a Can Am/Triumph dealer, here is a direct link:
http://get2itparts.com/index.php?ma...result&search_in_description=1&keyword=490500
if you want to solder one on, I would buy # 620-25662 and open up your spool the extra .035"
http://www.flandersco.com/action.la...Operator=Contains&Type=End&Catagory=CablePart
So there you go. I pulled out my hair so you don't have to. Do yourself a favor and just buy one in advance and save the hours of driving around searching.
Rant over. On to the spool which was actually more of a puzzle.
This Yoshi spool I had was causing me some issues last year because it is made of three pieces, two outer plates and the inner disc where the cable rides. The inner disc is spot welded to one of the outer plates, the second outer late is loose and only held in index by the clamping force of the nut on the shaft. I made it TIGHT last year, and still had the loose plate spin meaning I didn't have throttle control. The thought of that issue combined with my reservations about the return spring meant I needed a better solution.
Here's the issue with the return spring. The spring is held into this cheesy stamped steel retainer. The retainer has a rectangular opening to match the throttle shaft, and is held in place sandwiched between the shaft shoulders and the throttle spool. Here is the issue I was having; as I was playing with spools and TB's last year, I bolted a spare return spring down and it just instantly rounded out, leaving the spring spinning on the shaft. Take a look at my "good" return spring and you can see the problem:
What's happening there is that as the spool is tightened, the plate for the spring gets pulled up against the shoulders of the shaft, and that was neatly punching them out. That means I'm one *tink* of sheetmetal away from a completely out of control car. Scary.
As we were playing with things on Saturday, we figured out the real source of the problem. This was interesting because it was actually a design issue with both the Yoshi throttle spool, and the one that Nathan sent. The mistake both guys made was that the squared off hole is spaced away from the throttle shaft by a round hole (a washer on nathan's, the round hole of the outer plate on Yoshi's). So, as you pull your spool on tight, you are forcing the retainer plate down on the shaft past the squared shoulders, so the inside of a spool turns into a nice punch to make a round useless return spring. In this pic, you can see where the squared edge is recessed, and the plate would be sucked in through the round hole, giving you the weak and deformed area seen in the pic above.
Also in that pic you can see where we headed for a solution. We had talked about just welding the plate on so the spool would be one piece, solving my slipping issues. That still left me with the design flaw for the return spring side. We ended up with a pretty good solution, which was to drill straight through all three pieces of the throttle spool and pin it with tension pins. First time using them like this and it worked out really well. Additionally, it meant we could send the pins through the spring retainer plate. So we've got two pins which hold the halves the spool together, and also pin the spring plate from rotating. (notice it's a round hole now)
With the spring pinned, I didn't have to worry about the shoulder/rounding out issue. BUT when bolted on the TB this way, the spool pulls in too tight and rubbed on the TB. So, I had to space it out again, and that meant I needed something that would ride on the shoulders of the shaft (so no washer). We ended up taking a spare v90 throttle lever and cutting the square section out of it, then knocking the thickness down by half on the grinding wheel so it wouldn't be pushed out too far.
Voila, custom throttle shaft spring retainer plate spacer (tm). A good tip from personal experience: when you spend a day fiddling with the throttle spool, and you make a custom spacer that determines everything's position, don't set the spacer on the garage floor next to the parts washing bucket then forget about it for hours. That was a panicked ten minutes before I saw it sitting there...
This worked out well. The spool was in the right position on the shaft, held together for real, and the return spring was pulled up nice and snug between the spool and my spacer, as well as being pinned to spool for rotation. There was ONE LAST issue with this kludgey setup, which was that I now had like 4 threads of the shaft sticking out. I went and got a thin stainless steel jam nut which was enough to pull in flush with the end of the shaft. My Dad drilled through the flats of the nut, then through the end of the throttle shaft, and we were able to cotter pin it in place. Wicked in a few drops of red loctite for good measure and that thing is on there and not going anywhere. Spool may never come off again, at the least if it comes off something much nicer and custom made is taking it's place. For now, I can put the end on my throttle cable and be done with this headache.
Pain, but it did come together and is safe and functional.
This and the IC pipe were what I needed to go try the car out with the micro install, so I may get to drive the car tonight and see what's up. I spent a fair amount of time this weekend tidying up wires, doing some wrapping and bundling. It's looking much more finished, and I'm looking forward to finding some issue and having to cut back into the damn thing
. I'm going to order a bunch of Roundit 2000 and consolidate the looms in the split braid so things will look nice. I'd like to push the loom down below that firewall lip like it is stock, but there is basically no room with the coils so have to see what I can do. I'm kind of over caring about wires right now...
I also wanted to clean up the intercooler pipe before it went on so I wasn't pulling it out again. This was last night's elbow grease project:
before:
after:
I'm strange in that I actually really like polishing aluminum. It's kind of meditative if you do it with the right attitude, and the results are so rewarding! This is all by hand so it's not a perfect mirror finish, but pretty damn good. Process was 320 > 400 > 600 > 00 steel wool > 000 steel wool > 0000 steel wool > regular Mother's aluminum paste polish. 75% of the work is the 320, and the rest is just getting it smoother.
One last shiny thing to share: I've been wanting to revise the intake. The air filter is too small, the location not ideal, and to be honest I never liked the giant shiny 4" aluminum pipe. I had thought about a heat shield around where the filter sits, or punching the filter through and down to in front of the inner fender to get fresh air to it. I was iffy on how well I could execute either idea. the SAAB 9-5 has a big round cylinder air filter down in the inner fender and I was thinking if I had something like that in-line, I could just put a fresh air duct down low with the filter up in the bay.
As luck would have it such a thing exists, and not only does it exist it's made of CARBON FIBER. And who doesn't love carbon fiber? We won't address how much of this purchase was motivated by "mmm... carbon fiber", we'll just call it a good answer to the problem. It's a BMC airbox and it's awfully pretty for an air filter.