Beat ways to earth/ground wires?

Hi all,

just wondering what the best methods are in regards to grounding wires to the chassis, body of car and the engine block? and can you use stainless steel bolts to attach wires to the chassis/block?

regards

lindsay

G'day Lindsay.

It can depend on the specific application, but a ring terminal properly crimped on the end of the ground wire, which is securely fastened directly to the chassis or engine block is the best way to go. You want to make sure that the terminal makes direct contact with the metal of the engine block or chassis, which can mean removing some paint underneath the terminal.

Yes, you can use stainless bolts to attach ground wires to the chassis / block, but you want to make sure the area is dry and use some dielectric grease on the threads of the stainless bolt to prevent moisture ingress, which can lead to galvanic corrosion. I'd avoid stainless fasteners that may carry an electrical current into aluminium altogether on a marine application, as preventing moisture ingress will be pretty difficult.

G,day Zac

Thanks for your feedback.

The issues i am currently having are causing me to go over all my wiring and to check for any faults and i thought why not try to improve what has been done.

I have a RB30 single cam, running a Haltech Platinum sport 2000, 2000cc injectors,LS coils cam and crank trigger (1 sync on cam, 12teeth on crank with GT101 sensors) 3 bosch 044 pumps.

On the dyno we have found once we hit roughly 5000rpm we see a miscount on the crank sensor, sometimes a low count sometimes 16 odd counts so we tried 2 new sensors and rewired them and run the wires away from other electrical sources thinking that maybe there is some interference. Still the same issue.

Plugged in the latest Motec into my loom with a few small changes a quick tune and run it up on the dyno and the same thing happened so this proves the ecu is not the issue. So we called it a day and took it home, i found my sensor was off centre to the teeth on my disc so i have fixed that up and have a much smaller air gap now i think originally it was just over 2mm now down to 1mm.

Now i am checking all my wires and connections and planning to re route some wires to keep them from being in a large bunch, currently the power to the ecu is taken off from a stud at the front of the car with the battery in the boot. i am thinking of running a wire from the battery to a relay (ignition switched power to this relay) so hoping this way i can eliminate any possible NOISE going to the power to the ecu.

Hopefully im on the right path but any suggestions are more than welcome.

kind regards

Lindsay

G'day Lindsay.

Your best bet might be to go hunting for actual noise before making a heap of changes. Have you go access to an oscilloscope at all?

Your original 2mm air gap does sound a bit big, have you tried running it up again with the adjusted setup?

I'd be really keen to see a scope trace of your trigger signals, as if they're phased in such a way that the cam trigger signal edge occurs very close to one of the crank trigger edges, this can be a source of really frustrating errors.

A little off topic, but this made me think of it. Life Racing ECU's have a really great feature, they will store a scope trace picture when they encounter a trigger signal error, so you can load up that picture once the engine is shut off and see what was going on. Helped me track down an issue with a 60-2 crank trigger setup on an X20XE engine.