nick_968

Well we have made some good progress over the christmas period with virtually every spare hour devoted to the 968. The thing has been up and down on the ramps more times than I care to count with us chasing one rattle after another as well as a few electrical gremlins. No sooner did we fix one rattle then another would appear as if by magic as bolts worked themselves loose, heatshields rattled when hot but not when cold and vice versa. We also found a small blow where the wastegate dump tube met the main exhaust which we removed, refitted and sealed up with some sealant. It has been a long process but finally the damn car sounds like a porsche rather than a cross between a tractor, a boat and a kit car!! Driving it today with no noises apart from a slight bit of resonance from the exhaust between 2000 and 3000 rpm was extremely satisfying as me and my best mate must have spent a good 40 hours working on the car over the holiday. Jon is on holiday so I am still waiting for all the wiring diagrams so I can tidy up the electrics ready for the dyno session. Today the car got its first fill up of PROPER oil instead of that muck we used to run it in with (a necessary evil but I hate it all the same). It sounds so much better with some good quality lube in there and the new engine is at last starting to put a smile on my face. The water temp is still running up too fast until the fan kicks in, but we will cure that with some ducting to direct airflow and also stop it escaping around and over the radiator. I think the engine is going to be a peach, hats off to Simon Peckham for a dilligent job there, I have a couple of oil drips on the sump and cant quite work out where they came from but looking at the colour of the oil compared to the drips I can only assume that they are from regular dipstick checks and oil changes as the oil that came out today was a lot blacker. From what I can tell the engine hasnt lost a drop of oil according to the dipstick since the first oil change at 200 miles. After another visit to the Motec man Arron Tucker we have cured the stalling with some anti stall code that he wrote into the M400 raising tickover stlightly and playing with the timing as the revs drop and the car only now stalls when its cold, once warm it runs nicely and we fixed the hot start problems by reducing the cranking fueling. One strange thing we noticed today when we did the tracking on the car was that both of the front control arms were bent, I dont know how this has happened or if is just old damage that we didnt pick up before, any ideas why they would be bent other than accident damage?



Oh and guys.....I havent forgotten about the photos but we have been way too busy to do any kind of photoshoot.....I will get some pics for you as soon as I have a chance to clean the thing and the sun comes out!!

Happy New Year to you all......have a good one....I know we will

Diver944

Excellent news Nick

I really felt for you after your first few reports once the Motec was up and running (but not particularly well). Are you sure the drips on the sump are oil and not the anti-corrosive fluid that Simon has coated the engine with? I had the same worries with an oily smell and pools of residue on the garage floor but it was only the excess fluid 'sweating' off the hot engine during the first few weeks. Its stopped now and my engine has been oil drip free

nick_968

Thanks Paul, look forward to seeing you at one of the meets in the New Year.

It is definately oil, the smelly stuff has been well burnt off. I will be monitoring it, and fingers crossed it is nothing that requires the engine out to fix!! Judging by the colour difference it is just from spillages finding their way to the bottom as all oil spilt eventually does.

The mapping is someting I have to put up with until I can get the car to the dyno but I have to sort the electrics first, the wiring around the Motec is a mess and the guy wont map it until it is all tidied up as it is a potential minefield. It is my next job as soon as I get the diagrams and some more time. Hopefully the car will take a big leap forward after that and we will see its true potential.

I am glad to see you are getting such good results with yours it certainly is a great setup/ combo. You MUST get some bigger wheels and a KW kit......like YESTERDAY!!

nick_968

On re reading my post it may seem that I am inferring that the loose bolts, teething problems and wiring etc are directed at the guys who did the install end all the bits to make the turbo conversion work. I would just like to point out that in no way are these problems anything to do with their work which was nothing short of exemplary and without them the car would never be finished. The control arms I dont think could be their fault, I just wanted to know if anyone ever had problems similar with theirs being bent somehow? ALL of these problems are just regular teething problems and are as expected on a project of this sort

Jon, when you surface from your well deserved xmas break give me a call so we can arrange a time to meet up and review the progress so far and thanks again for a great job

333pg333

Hi Nick, good to hear that your making some headway. The whole ems thing has scared me into going a different route. I can't imagine why both your control arms are suddenly bent?Sounds like someone's done the old 'switcheroo' on you lol.
When you mentioned before about putting your choice of oil in after using an alternative for the run in purpose can you illuminate us as to what those are and why you needed the other for the run in? I know Jon likes to use differing oils during this process. What and why are they?
Patrick

nick_968

Thanks Patrick, I dont think someone has switched the control arms, it must just be something that I missed. Dont be put off using an aftermarket ems, in the end the results will be good. It is always the way to use a mineral oil to run in alusil blocks, then once the rings have bedded in you can switch to synthetic, I used Mobil 1 15W50.

333pg333

I hope you get it all sorted soon and can post some numbers for us all to drool at!

nick_968

On the case.....dont worry

Luis de Prat

Congrats on a very exciting project. Great to see the front end watercoolers are still alive and kicking after all these years.

Now since you have a extra hour over the rest of Europe before the New Year, hurry up and post some photos!

nick_968

Lol nice one Luis!! Just rushing around trying to organise our NYE party I wish I did have the time!!Happy New year

95ONE

quick note. When breaking in any new engine. use Non-detergent oil for break in. Most major brands are detergent.

333pg333

What are some of the Non detergent choices? Please don't tell me M1 as it's never going near my car.

indi9xx

Its good to see its finally running better for you Nick.

One of the problems of a part project like this is that we are involved just as far as the customer asks us to be, so the customer gets the chance to get their hands dirty and complete the project and get to enjoy some of the rewards that this brings.. It also means that the customer sometimes has to deal with the teething problems.. But its good to see you seem to be over the worst of it now Nick.

Paul's project in contrast was much more turn key, where we got to sort out the teething problems over the first 200 miles of the engines life in our hands and Paul got to collect a 99.9% complete package (almost just top up oil as needed and drive drive drive, then get it mapped)

No switcheroo here PG! I have contacted Nick and it would seem that when we changed his caster mounts for 968 MO30 ones, because we didnt have the chance to re set the geometry the handling of the car was different (changed caster position effects caster tow and camber). So when Nick felt it was different and went looking for a problem, he thought his wishbones looked bent (which they may or may not be) and thought this was the cause of the altered feel of the car... If the arms are bent, they must only be bent by a fraction as we didnt spot it and there isnt any way we could have bent them... so they have probably been this way for a long time. But an front suspension alignment adjustment should see the car on top form again.

In a running in oil, you want an oil which does not have too many high tech friction reducing additives, as you need friction to run the engine in (rings in particular).

We do not recommend that the running in oil is used for a long duration, normally 200 to 1000 miles of light but varied duty.

There are specific running in oils out there for exactly this purpose and which we use for the first fill up for the engine.

333pg333

Hey Jon, all in jest. Not for one moment did I mean that anyone really 'switcherood' Nick's wishbones. I imagine that your explanation is in fact the correct one.
In regards to running in oils, what do you suggest as I will be going through this process in the near-ish future and want to put the best possible oils in for this application?

nick_968

Time for an update.

The car was dynoed at 375 rwhp but the dyno sheet looked a bit odd to me. Not enough area under the curve and it showed the car making full boost 1000 rpms later than I was getting on the road. The car also ran very badly on tickover and the dyno shop were blaming the install in general and in particular the throttle body. Not happy with the car they did not charge me but assured me the map was safe and power levels good and asked me to come back when I had sorted the install to have the mapping sorted properly, referring to cold start and cold running in particular.

Something was not quite right so I went to see Jon Mitchell so we could put our heads together and work out what was up.

When I got the car back from the dyno they had swapped the recycling valve (bypass balve) round telling me it was on backwards (someone else had said this but Jon assured me it was right) even though I told them to put it back the right way round mid week when they called to tell me this having checked with Jon. They had also taken it upon themselves to tighten the balance belt twice as tight as it should be so the car was whirring when I got it back. I should point out that both these things were done with the best of intentions but were both wrong due to lack of knowledge on their part.

Anyway Jon got Simon Peckham to supply me one of his reconditioned throttle bodies, which are an excellent product and probably better than the factory original. Unfortunately this did not cure the tickover problems and in vain I tried a new throttle position switch. Still no good. The only answer was the mapping.

Another issue I was having since the dyno tune was the car was overboosting in 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th at earlier rpms the higher the gear. The dyno told me that all I would have to do was trim the boost controls down on the motec. So I waited for my trusted motec man and engine builder Aaron Tucker of HT Racing (he didnt build this engine, Simon Peckham of SPS did) to plug his laptop in and adjust the levels when he was next free. So I waited for a while with the racing season about to start he was understandably busy. I was driving the car now and then on the basis that the map that the dyno shop had given me was safe. Finally Aaron was available this Saturday just gone and I went over to see him at the Brand Hatch workshop. We plugged in the laptop and started to look for the boost control that was supposedly setup. All we found was a very crude method of boost control so we went out on the road to try and turn it down. We turned it up to 100 and down to 2, 1-100 being the operating range. Nothing.......no boost control. If we turned it off then the car ran happily on the wastegate. After some hunting around on the motec website and interrogation of the software on my ecu we found that the motec boost control device was not even setup properly so it couldnt work even if it looked like it was switched on. We reconfigured it and low and behold.....we had boost control. That problem solved we then thought it wise to take a look at the fuel map. Suprise suprise this was way out as well. With a lambda reading of 0.73 on full boost the car was running way too rich - this converts into an air fuel ratio of 10.73 which is way richer that you would ever want to run and possibly dangerously rich. So using another Motec ECU with full datalogging and lambda control enabled we remapped the fuel curve bit by bit until we got it to a safer level. The car smelt better, ran better, stopped shooting quite so many flames of unburnt fuel out the exhaust and unsuprisingly became at least 25% more economical!

As for the dyno shop.......why would they do this? I know they have successfully tuned other peoples cars so why me?

I only have two answers - either they left it until the last minute, they had the car for 10 days but I think they put it off until they were under pressure to give it back. They then realised it was going to take longer than they thought and they didnt want to stick to their price or simply didnt have time, then they just stuck a quick map on it and chucked it back to me for free....?

Or....as the car was work in progress and they didnt quite get the setup, they didnt want to take a risk on it blowing up.

Personally I think it is the first. They did not want to admit defeat or that they were late to start work on it and instead blamed the install and passed it back to me.

Funny thing is, they told me my injectors were maxed out at 90% and I needed a bettter fuel pump or bigger injectors to run the requested 18psi. Where this came from I do not know as the system told us on Saturday we were running at 56% duty cycle!!

I guess I cant complain to the the dyno as they didnt charge me, the guy even said to me he didnt want to risk the 'excellent' reputation of his business on my car as there were too many problems with it. At the time I thought great, I got some free work and I am one step further with my car. Now I am very annoyed as I could have driven my car for ages thinking I had a safe map.

Thankfully I have people around me like Aaron Tucker, Jon Mitchell and Simon Peckham who are all passionate about what they do and true enthusiasts. Not worried about their bottom line just interested in delivering top service and products these are the people who made my car happen.

The car now drives very well, very smooth and responsive. It is very fast indeed especially in 4th and above. For the first time I can say I am pleased with the end product and all the hard work has been worth it. Stage 1 is now complete and I can concentrate my efforts into improving the performance and efficiency of the setup i.e. cooling, intake and exhaust and fuelling. The KW suspension setup works very well and in the dry the car holds traction in a straight line even in 1st with no LSD!! This is partly due to the fact that the turbo is not really coming on song until 3800 rpm and not making more than 15 psi in 1st gear. I think the turbo may be a little big for my application and I am waiting on a full Garrett solution that is currently being worked on by Simon and Jon as I know Diver 944's car is spooling up much much earlier that mine mainly due to a smaller coldside turbine and housing. Maybe we can inprove in the spool up when I work on the intercooler, pipes etc, it just doesnt seem to be making the most of the turbo right now especially with the 6 speed box. Jon at Vitesse has been very helpful with the setup of my car and helping to throw some light on a couple of teething problems I had as well as recommending the correct piston squirters to use in the block. I hope to go to another dyno soon to do some more work on the fuelling and timing especially with respect to the spoolup rpms.