Another GL1100 Megasquirt EFI project

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thesteve

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Location
Phoenix, AZ
After picking up an 83 GL1100 as a project, I soon discovered that the carbs were both gummed up and leaky. Cleaning the carbs didn't faze me, but upon reassembly I found

they leaked from nearly every gasket and something was wrong with the accelerator pump. Rebuild kits looked to be nearly $200 for some rubber pieces, so I decided to convert

the bike to EFI. This will be the third bike I've completed this conversion on; the first was a 1992 Suzuki Katana and the second was a 1997 Suzuki GSXR.

Let's begin.

Here's the new toy:
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The previous owner said the carbs were just cleaned and had a receipt showing it was done earlier that month. The shop completely took him for a ride, and after the carbs

were "cleaned" and $1000 worth of work completed that didn't fix anything, the shop said he needed a pulse generator which they couldn't get. Basically saying "we can't

figure it out. Here's your bill; come get your bike." I began the process of stripping it down:
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I then sat down and thought about it. The pulse generator didn't fit the diagnosis. All 4 cylinders fired and it would rev slowly to redline. This was a carb issue.

After opening up the carbs, I found that they were mostly clean. They leaked at every gasket and the didn't work well, but they were clean. Found some threads showing EFI

conversions were possible, so I decided to start collecting parts.

So here's where we stand.
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I'm stripping the excess weight and touring parts from this bike at the same time; I have the FJR next to it for actual long distance riding. For the purpose of this thread

I'll skip most of the weight loss and style changes and focus on the EFI conversion itself.

GL1200 plenum has arrived:
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Had to remove this air blocking plate to make some room:
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Tons of room now:
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Initial test fit with the left side bolted up:
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About .6" overhang as expected.
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Planning the cuts:
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Chopped out the 0.6" section with an angle grinder:
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Needed a bit of cleanup:
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Bolted up the two sides and found the TPS hits the motor mount:
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I marked the offending section with tape and trimmed it up.
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Now that the mount is out of the way, here's how it bolted up:
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Not bad. Slight gap, but small enough to fill in. Plenty of room to move it around as needed.

Back off the bike and prepping for JB weld. Backed the gap with duct tape so keep the epoxy in place while curing.
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First application of JB weld. Hard drive for weight.
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I recommend taping it better so you don't glue it to your desk like I did:
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First coat dry, tape peeled off:
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Looks pretty good. A bit thin in some areas.
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Started tapping on it with a screwdriver to test the adhesion. Had a couple sections fail:
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No matter, time for round two:
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Round two worked great. Ground some of the excess down with a Dremel and moved onto the throttle linkage. Had to drill a hole to accommodate the shortened plenum:
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Since I was going for a more stripped down look, I removed the ugly rubber boots from the injectors:
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I bent the fuel rail at this time. Don't do that; wait until it's on the bike. This hit the fan and had other clearance issues.
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I replaced the fan thermoswitch with a coolant temp sensor. Unfortunately this is on the cold side of the thermostat. I drilled a small bypass hole to prevent the sensor from

lagging too far behind.
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JB weld is dry, and now the plenum is bolted into place:
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Making good progress:
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Mounted the fuel pump under the bike. It's tucked up in there higher than it looks. There's no way it could be hit by any road debris.
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High pressure rated fuel filter:
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Petcock size vs pump supply line:
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Line from pump to filter, coming up from next to the driveshaft:
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Sealed up a few emissions holes and began looking at the idle control. The junction boxes with the red hoses all had reed valves in them for some reason. I removed the reeds

so they're now free-flowing junctions. The hose at the top will go to a GM style stepper motor IACV.
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IACV housing from diyautotune.com. Fits an early 90s Jeep Cherokee IACV:
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Throttle cables connected with no modifications:
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Airbox lid from a GL1200. Sectioned to match the plenum.
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Tight squeeze:
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Perfectly centered. Entering the home stretch now.
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GL1200 air filter. Smaller hole is plugged, larger hole fits the intake air temp sensor.
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No room for the airbox itself, but the filter fits in nicely:
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I decided the petcock was too small to feed that fuel pump, so I bought a few 5/16 barbs:
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Fuel return off the pressure regulator:
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Fuel feed from the lowest point in the tank next to the air suspension:
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Both fittings were threaded extremely tightly into drilled and tapped holes in the tank. I used JB weld as a threadlocker to keep them from leaking or ever moving. I've used

JB weld before in fuel-submerged applications and had no issues. Between the tightly threaded fit and the JB weld I've had no leaks.

Finding a spot for the O2 sensor:
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Welded the O2 bung in place:
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Bracket made for IACV housing on the front right motor mount:
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Decided to put the Megasquirt here where it's accessible from the fake gas tank:
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Relay panel. Left relay is for the radiator fan (now controlled by the ECU), right relay powers the Megasquirt, injectors, and O2 sensor (Innovate LC-2). There's a third

relay next to the battery for the fuel pump.
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Wiring for the fan. This used to go to the thermoswitch.
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These wires next to my relay panel go to the ignition coils. They'll work nicely for the MS's tach input.
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Wiring harness complete. Intake air temp sensor threaded into drilled/tapped hole in filter.
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Vacuum lines. This one at the base of the intake elbow crosses over the engine and goes to the pulse generator's vacuum advance.
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And she runs!
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Apologies for the blurry pic there. I'll get some videos uploaded soon. I'll post some info about the wiring and tuning a bit later.
 
Excellent write up, and great use for a platter hard drive!

Anxious to see the videos.

Since we have very little info doing such a mod, (actually none) I'll be copying the pics to your gallery for future safekeeping in this thread.
 
Sounds good. I don't know what Imgur's retention period is for pics saved to a personal account so storing it in the forum is a good idea. I'll get the rest of the details up tonight or tomorrow. There's a lot of details to sort out and screenshots of the tuning software to get.

I did take it for a test right last night and even with a very basic roughed in tune, it actually was very rideable. Now I'll begin the cycle of riding around getting logs, making adjustments, and repeating until it's perfect. The idle is already very smooth. Between the IACV and the wideband O2, it's able to adapt and make changes in real time to keep it running smoothly.

Here's the link to the entire Imgur album. It has a bunch of extra pics, though a lot of them aren't relevant to the EFI conversion itself. https://imgur.com/a/E0aPt
 
Wow! Start to finish in one post! Obviously you know fuel injection much better than I do. What was your total cost in changing to injection?
 
[url=https://classicgoldwings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=162532#p162532:11ps247w said:
slabghost » 10 minutes ago[/url]":11ps247w]
Wow! Start to finish in one post! Obviously you know fuel injection much better than I do. What was your total cost in changing to injection?


Total cost for the EFI swap was probably around $800. I kept fairly tight records at the beginning, but the last minute desperate Autozone runs occasionally slipped through the cracks.

GL1200 EFI manifold $230
Innovate LC-2 $160
Fuel pump $65
Airbox/plenum top plate $40
Jeep IACV housing $76
Relays with sockets $14
EFI O rings $10
IACV and air hoses $65
Fuel return barb $6
Fuel feed barbs $6
CTS connector $11
Misc hoses, wiring $30

Fortunately I already had a Megasquirt II laying around from a previous project that got parted out. That would have been another ~$300. My justification was that a proper carb rebuild isn't all that cheap, it'll never run as well as a properly tuned EFI system, and I just like doing this kind of stuff. The only big ticket items are the MS2, GL1200 plenum, IACV, and LC-2. A lot of this stuff can be found in junkyards to save money. The GL1200 parts are hard to find because so few were EFI.

You could also save money by buying the cheaper Megasquirt; I'm not using many of the features of the fancy one. The stepper IACV needs the MS2 chip, but if you use a different idle system you can easily get by with an MS1.
 
Great way to solve an ongoing problem with hard to find, & or afford parts for stock carb's. :read: NICE WORK! :salute:
 
I copied all of the pictures into your gallery and linked to them in your post.
That post will load much faster now since I resized the images from 4-5 MB's each which were coming off that sharing site real slow which was bringing this thread load to a crawl.
 
I got lost in some of the parts you used to build this but I was wondering why you didn't use all 1200 parts?

I'm imagining you can program the map, which gives me an idea what to do with this running 1200 FI motor I have.
Put on 1100 heads with early 1000 cams, C5 ignition, into an undressed frame.
 
[url=https://classicgoldwings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=162558#p162558:2nwd9wkz said:
dan filipi » Today, 9:22 am[/url]":2nwd9wkz]
I copied all of the pictures into your gallery and linked to them in your post.
That post will load much faster now since I resized the images from 4-5 MB's each which were coming off that sharing site real slow which was bringing this thread load to a crawl.


Thanks! It does load a lot faster now for sure.
 
[url=https://classicgoldwings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=162572#p162572:qa9b7nij said:
dan filipi » 50 minutes ago[/url]":qa9b7nij]
I got lost in some of the parts you used to build this but I was wondering why you didn't use all 1200 parts?

I'm imagining you can program the map, which gives me an idea what to do with this running 1200 FI motor I have.
Put on 1100 heads with early 1000 cams, C5 ignition, into an undressed frame.


So I did use some GL1200 parts, but there's a lot of stuff that isn't ideal on the GL1200 that I had no interest in bringing over to mine. Even Honda gave up on EFI after just a few years with it; they didn't try again until the GL1800 as far as I'm aware. The GL1200 has two MAP sensors, uses engine coolant to actuate an air valve for idle, doesn't support a wideband O2 sensor, doesn't have tunable maps, etc. It's just old tech at this point.

I used the 1200's EFI plenum since it was easy to adapt to the 1100 engine, but most of the other parts have more modern equivalents now. I don't really need the 1200's fuel pump for instance. The newer pumps are smaller, cheap and easy to find, and aren't 25 years old. It made the most sense to take just the plenum.

You could easily modify your 1200 engine like that and the Megasquirt would be able to handle it without issue. The stock ECU wouldn't understand the added airflow and you'd probably run pretty lean, but here you could easily tune for max power with those parts and not suffer any drivability issues whatsoever.

I've been out riding and tweaking settings all morning. It runs fantastically. I've got a nice smooth idle at 950 RPM, near-perfect throttle response, and good power and smoothness up to about 7000RPM. I'm still working on the top end, but the brakes on this bike of mine are beyond shot so high speed riding is a bit nerve wracking. I also don't have a headlight or turn signals yet so I really can't play with it unless it's light outside.
 
So I'll detail some of the wiring work next in case anyone's looking for a more start-to-finish guide on doing this. Most of it was pretty easy; you don't touch much Honda wiring at all, nor do you deviate much from the Megasquirt's own wiring guide here:
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You can see that there are only a few points where the MS is wiring into non-EFI stuff. It's pretty much ignition power, lots of grounds, the fuel pump, and the radiator fan. I ran 14 gauge wire from the battery to the relay panel I mentioned in the first post. The main relay is triggered by one of the wires going to the horn and signal fuse. This relay powers the MS, injectors, and O2 sensor.

The fan relay isn't wired to the battery at all. It's merely reconnecting the two wires cut from the thermoswitch. It's coil is powered by the main relay and it grounds through pin 30 in the diagram above. Pin 30 has been reassigned away from it's idle valve duty and is now set to trigger at 200 degrees to switch on the fan relay, which of course drives the fan.

The fuel pump relay is about 2 inches from the battery under the side cover. It's connected directly to the battery and is triggered by pin 37 on the Megasquirt. This way the pump is only run when the engine is running, plus a moment to prime the system.

The MS's tach input (so it knows engine RPM) is driven directly off the ignition coils. I'll refer to my crudely drawn diagram from when I converted my Suzuki Katana, because it worked so well I did the exact same thing here:
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Of course, instead of the CDI box we have the small ignition modules on the front left corner of the bike under the fake gas tank.
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The coils are fired with the blue and yellow wires. I intercepted both of them and T'd off each of them with a diode (banded side towards the factory wiring). Tie the non-banded ends together, solder them with a wire. That wire goes to pin 25 on the MS. Inside the MS you'll want to install a 12V pull-up resistor. This gives a very clear 12V-0v-12V-0v pulse to let the Megasquirt know how fast the engine is going. One thing to note with this method is you can't control ignition timing with it. To do that, you'd instead trigger off the VR wheel itself inside the pulse generator (which causes a few other issues I can cover later).

Other than that, you don't need to touch any of the bike wiring.
 
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