Fixing the Potbox, Soneil's Arrive

Over the past few days, the car has still been lurching around despite the potbox parameter adjustments that I've made inside the controller. I contact Bob Bath, the original CivicWithACord builder who sold me my PB5 potbox. It was brand new from KTA Services and not used/worn-out. Yesterday in stop-n-go traffic, the car was lurching again and the controller faulted when I haphazardly floored the accelerator with the car out of gear. After expressing my frustration, Ives at Synkromotive highly recommended that I install the factory throttle position sensor (TPS) from the original Civic instead of using the PB5 potbox.


Here's the factory Civic TPS installed. I mounted in the same place as the PB5 potbox, but used a piece of 1.5" angle iron 4" long to mount it. Unlike the PB5 which only has two wires, this TPS has three which allows for higher reliability and more accurate signalling to the controller.


Here is the rear side of the installation. You can see the top of the grey-painted angle iron that I bolted to the engine mount side. I had to chamfer one corner to prevent interfering with the engine mount rubber. The actual electrical potentiometer is black at the far left of the picture, while the cable attachment is on the far side of the large butterfly intake valve. There were some extra bolt holes in the throttle housing, so I just used a piece of all-thread and bolts to suspend a small piece of 3/4" angle iron to support the fixed point on the throttle cable.

After a test drive, the system was sooooooo much better. I can creep forward with the car now and the lurching is gone except when I really stomp on the accelerator. I'm now completely convinced that the PB5/PB6 potboxes are complete crap compared to the factory throttle position sensor. It's too bad the TPS doesn't go down to zero ohms, so it can't be used for many other controllers like a Curtis.



After I arrived back home from the test drive, the FedEx truck showed up and dropped off 13 brand new Soneil 7amp chargers. I've been waiting for these for over a month now and am happy they are here. This will replace the Belktronix charging system and allow me to remove all the spaghetti associated with the shunt resistors and battery monitoring boards.

This is a good day. The car is running smoothly again, and I'm psyched to get these new chargers put in. Have a great weekend everyone.

Cheers, Tim