Thanksgiving is a great holiday.  A holiday that mandates getting together with family and friends to feast and (hopefully) pause for a minute and be thankful for things you normally take for granted? Sign me up.

This Thanksgiving was a little different for me, the plan being to drive from Boston to Corning NY for a multi-purpose trip. The first part was to get highway miles on the recently readied turbo prototype. After several weeks of trying to adapt the newer style of Ford ECU for use in the turbo kit, we had to revert to the original focus ECU because there was simply too much more time needed to decipher the newer ECU and make it usable. 5 days after reverting we had completed the base tune and were ready to start putting some miles on the setup. It's quite funny, because the Wednesday before Thanksgiving was the day the tune was finished with major revisions. Taking the van out to lunch that day was the last drive on the old transmission. It had been showing signs of the 3-4 slider problem and sure enough, we barely made it home from lunch. I guess the transmission figured its job was done, and it could go now.  I don't blame it... it lasted just long enough to not slow the tuning right before the trip.

So on Thanksgiving day, instead of driving to Corning, or eating, or watching football, I was under the van swapping the trans.  Luckily Daryl from AATransaxle had set us up ahead of time, and the newly rebuilt trans was sitting here waiting for it's predecessor to pass on.  I wrapped up Thursday evening, and started prepping for the trip: tools, monster fire extinguisher, extra parts, workaround parts, fluids, computers(yes more than one), data acquisition equipment, software, diagnostic equipment, and camera.  Right before hitting the road, I fixed the windshield wipers, the front heater blower, installed new tires all around, installed a stereo and speakers, and an inverter.

Let me sum up the drive to Corning, it was both nerve wracking and exciting. It was an exhausting drive, not only were the conditions nasty for the bulk of it(knarly headwind, pouring rain) but my eyes/ears were in constant rotation: road, gauges, console, road, gauges, road, road, gauges etc. The exciting part was that in addition to almost getting blown clear off the road twice(driving too fast + massive gusts) the turbo is awesome to drive on the highway.  Virtually the entire drive is in 4th gear, need to go? Just step into it. Feel like passing someone doing 70 on an uphill? Fine. Additionally I logged the entire trip there and back.

Once I got to my friend's place in Corning, there was the 2nd reason to head out there... my friends!  So cheers and beers all around, and I was introduced to the largest turkey I've ever seen tipping the scales at around 54 pounds. They'd been raising him for about 5 months I think, and he'd been off'd and plucked on Wed/Thursday while I'd been prepping the van back in Boston. Since he didn't at all fit in an oven, Matt had dug a pit for a pit roast and had already completed the bonfire, packing, burial, and 15 hours of cooking underground. I showed up just in time to try the other idea, which was to then crisp the skin over charcoal by supporting the almost fall apart bird in chicken wire and rotate him over the fire. It totally worked. The turkey was amazing, best and biggest I've ever had. Put store-bought birds to shame really.

Next day I started crunching numbers to see where things stood. I was a very happy camper. I had 30.898 million data points from my logs(and just under 63 million for the whole trip). That much good data is a blessing and makes my life so easy. The mean error in airflow, and therefore fuelling was about 17%.  I made a bunch of corrections from 25% in some areas to less than a percent in the higher airflow ranges(which is exactly what I expected to see since we are tuning WOT pulls the low end and cruise data is what needed correction).  The thing I was most happy about was the predictability of the whole setup. You can't really ask for anything more than that when doing this type of testing. It usually means you've moved from trying to understand what's happening to actually understanding what's happening(until something breaks in a weird way again and destroys your old picture of what's happening and you have to start over).

Saturday night we played around with long exposures and a laser pointer outside a bit since it had cleared up, and got some cool photos of the van.  I recalled the photos of moonbows I'd seen(long exposure and moisture that can render a rainbow at night, but is impossible for the eye to see) and we tried it with my camera, no moonbows but a cool daylight looking shot of the van. It really looks like daylight, but with stars in the sky, pretty cool, you can see the stars smearing/rotating over the minute long exposure. Bonus points if you can pick out orion's belt in the pic(bottom of page).

The next day I reflashed the van and headed back to Boston.  The return trip wasn't nearly as nerve wracking as the trip up. I predicted I'd see 17 mpgs on the way home after getting 15.2 on the way there. I got 17.88 for the trip back. Both trips were with cruise speeds between 70-75mph, almost identical average loads(trip there was about 7% higher mean load), and on several occasions bouncing off of 85. The mean airflow/fueling error went from 17% to .7%... which is funny because a 16.3% increase in fuel economy over the 15.2 mpgs yields .21 mpg less than measured mpgs.  Anyhow, nearly 18mpgs cruising between 70-75(which also means maintaining those speeds on grades) on 87 octane isn't too shabby at all. The next two turbo kit parts are getting ordered tomorrow.  It was a very successful trip with both main objectives satisfied... nothing quite like getting two birds stoned at once. Pics below.