Okay, so I love my HARBL. (That is, my '93 Geo Metro.) Mileage is good (50+ MPG! WOO!), rides decent (with a buttload of body lean in turns), and it's about as simple as simple can get.
BUT...
...WTF is up with these stupid automatic door locks, and a total lack of a tachometer? In any other car, if the door locks automatically click shut when you go above about 10mph, they will also UNLOCK when you shut off the ignition, or at least unlock as you are pulling upon the inside door handle. In this thing? Noooooo! That's why the passenger-side door handle is broken in my car - some prior owner's passenger must've assumed it was like any other car with an auto-unlocking feature or whatever, yanked on the handle, and POP! No more handle. But anyway. Stupid feature. Stupid feature must DIE!!
Secondly, on any other engine, especially when it's NOT running a distributorless ignition system, throwing on an aftermarket tachometer is no biggie. Since Suzuki, in all their infinite wisdom and cheapness, decided that nobody should ever NEED a tachometer on a manual-transmission Geo Metro, I gotta throw on a cheap-o mini-tach so I know WTF I'm running in what gear, how close I might be to banging the rev limiter, and whether or not my clutch might be slipping. (In a car this slow and flimsy, it's hard to really tell.)
BUT...
...this is a 3-cylinder motor. I'm sure I could just hook it to one of the coil wires for the tach signal, but the trick is that it's never going to read straight (or read anything, at all) unless I find some way into tricking the tach into thinking it's either a 4-cylinder or a V-6 or something. Searched and searched and searched online, but to no avail. The only thing I found was some dude that hacked apart a later-model gauge cluster's factory tach and somehow retrofitted it into his older Metro - cool, but impossible for me because 1. tach-equipped clusters are EXTREMELY rare, and 2. if I muck up the install, I will burn up the tach and be completely screwed without a working cluster, at all. Summit Racing's tech section just says, "Contact the manufacturer," which is pretty much a non-answer along the lines of, "We don't carry one, so go ask someone to custom-fabricate one for you."
SO...
1. How do I disable the stupid automatic door-locking feature? (I'm thinking of just pulling the door panels and disconnecting the door lock actuators, but I'm worried that might freak out the "Lock Doors" warning light or something.)
2. How do I get a regular tachometer to correctly read the signal from a 3-cylinder TBI motor?
Any suggestions are welcomed. Not terribly desperate here, just really annoyed by these things, already, after only driving this car for two weeks...
BUT...
...WTF is up with these stupid automatic door locks, and a total lack of a tachometer? In any other car, if the door locks automatically click shut when you go above about 10mph, they will also UNLOCK when you shut off the ignition, or at least unlock as you are pulling upon the inside door handle. In this thing? Noooooo! That's why the passenger-side door handle is broken in my car - some prior owner's passenger must've assumed it was like any other car with an auto-unlocking feature or whatever, yanked on the handle, and POP! No more handle. But anyway. Stupid feature. Stupid feature must DIE!!
Secondly, on any other engine, especially when it's NOT running a distributorless ignition system, throwing on an aftermarket tachometer is no biggie. Since Suzuki, in all their infinite wisdom and cheapness, decided that nobody should ever NEED a tachometer on a manual-transmission Geo Metro, I gotta throw on a cheap-o mini-tach so I know WTF I'm running in what gear, how close I might be to banging the rev limiter, and whether or not my clutch might be slipping. (In a car this slow and flimsy, it's hard to really tell.)
BUT...
...this is a 3-cylinder motor. I'm sure I could just hook it to one of the coil wires for the tach signal, but the trick is that it's never going to read straight (or read anything, at all) unless I find some way into tricking the tach into thinking it's either a 4-cylinder or a V-6 or something. Searched and searched and searched online, but to no avail. The only thing I found was some dude that hacked apart a later-model gauge cluster's factory tach and somehow retrofitted it into his older Metro - cool, but impossible for me because 1. tach-equipped clusters are EXTREMELY rare, and 2. if I muck up the install, I will burn up the tach and be completely screwed without a working cluster, at all. Summit Racing's tech section just says, "Contact the manufacturer," which is pretty much a non-answer along the lines of, "We don't carry one, so go ask someone to custom-fabricate one for you."
SO...
1. How do I disable the stupid automatic door-locking feature? (I'm thinking of just pulling the door panels and disconnecting the door lock actuators, but I'm worried that might freak out the "Lock Doors" warning light or something.)
2. How do I get a regular tachometer to correctly read the signal from a 3-cylinder TBI motor?
Any suggestions are welcomed. Not terribly desperate here, just really annoyed by these things, already, after only driving this car for two weeks...