Guest |266| Posted April 26, 2010 Report Share Posted April 26, 2010 I've been documenting the tuning process on this project so I have it broken up into days. 3/17/10-3/20/10 - Our customer Newman's Skyline powered BMW arrives for initial tuning. Newman's labor of love was dropped off for us to start preparations for tuning. He's taken an E30 BMW and swapped in an RB26DETT Skyline GT-R engine, which he's modified including the installation of a GT35R single turbo setup and more. He came to us with an AEM EMS that they'd given him a custom trigger disk for because they said the stock CAS wouldn't work properly with the stock disk. More on that later. When the car arrived we did the following: compression and leakdown testing tie wrap vacuum lines remove headlight, smoke test intake system for boost leaks remove compressor housing, seal, reinstall housing Newman fought with a PITA balance tube leak and won oil change and filter inspection replace non functioning wideband o2 sensor diagnose MAP sensor wiring issues Newman fixed the wiring issues start car and bleed coolant system get car onto dyno and call it a night The next day we: wrapped and secured the new wideband sensor cable so it doesn't melt on the header smoke tested the exhaust system for leaks found leaks at some welds, at the v-bands, and at the muffler Exhaust sealant was used on the v-bands. One is sealed now. The other one still leaks a little, but it's far enough back and nowhere near the wideband that it doesn't need to be fixed right now. It can be fixed off the dyno. Newman got a clamp for the muffler which was just stuck in the exhaust pipe when it arrived and that took care of that leak for the most part. We strapped the car down and I started the partial throttle tuning. Saturday I came in ready to get the bulk of the remaining tuning done. The cold start, warmup, and hot start related corrections are all very close to dialed, idle is good, tip in is snappy, and I worked on partial throttle tuning. Newman made new ground connections for the ignition module, we put some fresh plugs in the car gapped down to ready to boost the car, but before we got a chance to we hit a snag. Timing synched and held steady at idle, but as the RPM went up I found the AEM EMS was counting timing errors. I had timing locked at 25 degrees for testing and during a slow sweep in neutral, so the load was a low as possible, timing remained at 25 degrees until we exceeded ~3300 RPM at which point timing advanced a huge amount and started bouncing around the 40-60 degree area getting worse as the RPMs went up. I let right off. Needless to say that's a serious problem. I got my scope out and we set it up to record the crank and cam outputs from the Newman modified CAS (cam angle sensor). The signals tested out fine and the wiring was fine so I contacted AEM to discuss why the coils are being fired over 30 degrees too far advanced when this fault occurs. AEM was no help at all so I instructed the customer to purchase a ViPec plug in unit. Ray suggested we use a stock CAS so that's what we did. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Newman didn't have a stock ECU case to put the ViPec plug in board into...so he designed and made one... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Our ViPec order arrived: I got the car up and running quickly. When we checked the ignition timing and it was dead solid to 8000 RPM on the ViPec. With that issue behind us, I started moving through the partial throttle tuning. As usual the ViPec software allows for great efficiency during the tuning process so it only took a few hours to get it running very nicely despite the car having ITBs. This was taking at least twice as long on the AEM EMS. Here's a graph showing some of the pulls as I dialed in fueling at each throttle position using TPS vs. RPM as my primary fuel table axes since this car has ITBs. And here's a WOT pull on the wastegate spring at 8 psi. He's going to drive it like this for a bit to continue engine break in and take care of some housekeeping on the car, then come back for us to turn up the boost and make some real power. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4/24/10 he came back and the boost went up. After checking to make sure the car was running as I left it, I started bringing the wastegate duty cycle up until the boost went over the 8 psi wastegate spring pressure. As the boost started to go up it was clear that I would be able to achieve Neman's goal of 450 whp on 93 octane with no external injection. Here's a graph showing some of the pulls during the tuning process. I've chosen these ones since they're close to the boost levels we decided on for the boost by gear setup I've calibrated via the ViPec standalone ECU. After the pull to 449 whp shown above Newman and I decided we had to go a bit further to break the 450 whp barrier. I knew there was a good amount of room left to grow so I bumped the boost up a bit and made a small timing adjustment which resulted in a pull that I aborted because the car spun the tires hard on the dyno. After adding some weight to the trunk and adding some volunteer "passengers", we were able to get a pull in with less wheelspin. You can still see when it spins going into boost in the following video: high quality vimeo video: http://vimeo.com/11200475 low quality youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/user/InnovativeTuning#p/a/u/0/Pxia2HzC3QA And here's the graph of the high pull in the video: After dyno tuning was complete, I set up gear calculation and then boost by gear which is now set to provide 12 psi in 1st and 2nd gear, 16 ish in 3rd gear, 22 ish in 4th and a little more in 5th gear. In the future if Newman adds a wheel speed sensor on a non driven wheel I can set up active traction control for him using % slip calculation based response to get the most performance out of the available traction. On a test run without me in the car he said it fried the tires at 120 mph in 4th gear so he's going to decide if he wants to put Mickey Thompson's on it and give up some handling to gain some straight line traction or have me turn down the boost for now. As a side note, I used the new rev limiters available in the new firmware/software and they work awesome. I kept the throttle to the floor on the final dyno pull in the video and as you can see the limiter is quite mellow. The old setup caused a nice bang and fireball which the customer may miss when horsing around, but after some adjustment the new limiter is MUCH easier on the engine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest |207| Posted May 7, 2010 Report Share Posted May 7, 2010 on the second run in he video, as the car comes onto boost you can see a couple of pops from the exhaust, do you think that could be some detonation? do you listen to the engine when tuning with det cans or vipec knock control box ? could you hear anything? looks like its happening at max torque great car! would like to see some videos of this in action Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest |266| Posted May 31, 2010 Report Share Posted May 31, 2010 I see what you're talking about but it doesn't seem to be knock related. This car has a plug in unit so there's no on-board knock detection. I have a Phormula unit for knock listening on setups like this and use the V88's onboard knock detection on cars with that ECU. He got some Mickey Thompsons for it so I was able to adjust the boost by gear setup from: 1st gear 10 psi 2nd gear 13 psi 3rd gear 17 psi 4th/5th 24 psi to 1st gear 13 psi 2nd gear 18 psi 3rd/4th/5th 24 psi Unfortunately the extra power and his abuse seems to have caused some issues with the skyline transmission that wasn't perfect to begin with. Once he gets that fixed perhaps we'll have some video to post. For now, searching google's video section for "newman e30 gtr" turns up a few videos some other people took of him horsing around in the car. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest |525| Posted June 1, 2010 Report Share Posted June 1, 2010 Nice work Mike! This car setup and issues with the AEM makes me feel that sticking with the AEM is going to bear spoiled fruit!.... Head down and be positive i tell myself! its time to work out a date for tuning! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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