TimZ

In addition to that, I don't think the stock ECU will fire low impedance injectors. Can anybody confirm this?

Also agreed - I just wasn't going to go into that...

If you want a permanent gauge, they do make electrical gauges for this. If it's just a spot check, I usually tape a gauge to the outside of my windshield. Looks kinda stupid, but I'm not gonna burn to death, either. Have you done anything with the AFM? If you have not adjusted the spring pressure, you are probably just maxing it out. Your injector pulsewidths will most likely remain the same after that point.

Agreed. As far as the 'hard' coilover kits, AFAIK none of them have soft bushings/mounts. The Carerra one certainly doesn't. You should be able to get the spring rates that you are looking for from anybody that supplies 2.5" id springs. Eibach and Carerra both carry these.

If you aren't having problems currently, it's probably not an emergency, but IIRC the factory recommended retorquing every 15k miles. You should do it at least that often. If you are upping the boost, I would do it much more often. Mine gets retorqued about every 500 miles, but that's mostly because I'm anal, and I have it apart tinkering with it pretty often. Just follow the factory tightening sequence, and be sure to let the engine sit overnight (i.e., stone cold) before re-torquing. It only takes about 15 minutes to do. Agreed. Especially if it's your first time, start off with as low a bosst setting as possible, and get it running well at low boost first. Once you are satisfied with that, you can start upping the boost in small increments, dialing in the fuel curve as you go. You should get an exhaust gas pyrometer, in addition to datalogging whenever you are tuning.

Without a doubt.

Ditto on the -3 line for the oil supply. Use the teflon-lined hose only, preferably with a firesleeve. For the water I use -10AN, although many use smaller. I would not go smaller than -8. Depending on where you tap into the water system, you might not have a very big pressure difference, so the larger lines will help. Also, try to route the water lines so that air can easily find its way out of them on its own - i.e., no upside-down "U" shapes in the hose routing. On the head gasket and bolts, if you decide to stay with what is currently in there, you should still retorque the head bolts to the factory spec, and do it often (every few thousand miles). My guess is that 90% of headgasket failures are due to improper head torque. Also, if you replace the head gasket, make sure to retorque it after the first heat cycle or two, and retorque it a couple more times after that, with a few heat cycles in between. New gaskets tend to squish down a bit after the first few heat cycles, which lessens the head torque.

It's a teflon-lined braided hose. They have a higher heat rating (~450°F IIRC) than the regular stuff. Don't know how it compares to silicone vacuum line, but if you want an AN-style connection that's the stuff to use. I'd probably still add a firesleeve given the proximity to the exhaust - you really don't want that line to fail.

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I'd be a little leary of that setup for the street, too, but of course I live in Detroit . That setup has no compliance whatsoever, and I would be really concerned that you would be putting some very high shock loads directly into the unibody that the bushings normally would have absorbed. Compliance is not always a bad thing. If you do eventually go with that setup you would definitely want to check for cracks/tears/split welds at all of the suspension pickup points. Weekly. I'm not kidding. As far as the camber adjustment goes, do you know what you want to be able to adjust? Do you just want to be able to adjust out the negative camber from lowering and leave it? Do you want to add negative camber for the track and then put it back for the street?

Glad to hear it. I don't know how many times I've gone down all kinds of exotic diagnostic paths when the real problem was something very simple. Sometimes it's really hard to remember to start with the simple stuff first.

I think your problem isn't that it's going open loop - just the opposite. On cold start, the ECU generally runs open loop until the coolant reaches a preset temperature. It starts using the EGO sensor after this temperature is reached. It sounds to me like your problems start when the ECU starts trying to compensate for the EGO sensor readings. This could be for a number of reasons. For one, the EGO feedback is really only useful for making relatively small, long-term corrections, and doesn't handle transients very well at all. If your idle mixture is too far off, the feedback won't be able to compensate. Your idle fuel pressure could be contributing to this. I realize that you had idle problems before the fuel pump install, but this most likely isn't helping. Second, if your EGO sensor is giving funky readings, this could throw any hopes of getting a stable idle out the window. A cold sensor could cause this. How far down the exhaust is your sensor? I'd try to deep it within a foot of the turbine outlet. Also, a heated EGO would work better (I can't can't believe that this didn't come with the kit - they supplied a one-wire? ). You will have to figure out how to wire in the power for the heater, but the three or four wire sensors should work the same as far as the ECU is concerned. Another problem with having the sensor too far down the exhaust is called transport delay. Basically, the farther down the pipe the sensor is, the longer it takes for the exhaust to get to it. This can cause problems with the feedback loop, since it is expecting a shorter delay between the time it makes an adjustment and the time it shows up on the sensor. Oh - and sorry, but you cannot just hook up a WB EGO to the narrowband input on the ECU - the WB sensors require completely different interface circuitry, and have completely different output curves. You could use something like the LM-1, and have it 'fake' a narrowband output for the ECU, but this kind of kills most of the advantages of the WB. You could use the LM-1 to datalog with full resolution though, and this could be very useful, assuming you could reprogram the ECU. You should always wire the fan through a relay, and not directly through the temp switch. What has probably happened currently is that the contacts have welded themselves together, which is 'okay' for now. Problem is, if there was enough current to do this, it's also probably enough to eventually melt the contact completely, leaving you with no fan, and this almost never happens at a convenient time.

Yep. You should do this regardless of which gasket you are using - even the metal ones.

Because this type of bushing changes camber by moving the inner pivot point for the LCA around, it by definition changes the geometric relationship between the tie rod and the LCA. This will effect the way that your toe changes with suspension travel. This type of bushing also couples camber adjustment with caster, since it also changes the arc that the TC rod must travel through. This one is pretty severe - because of the relationship between the TC rod and the LCA, you end up with something in the neighborhood of a 1:1 change in camber vs. caster (i.e., a 1 degree decrease in camber will result in close to a 1 degree increase in caster, and vice versa). IMHO, it's preferable to keep your adjustments decoupled as much as possible, and there are other ways to adjust camber that do not have these problems (slotting the upper mounting points or camber plates, for example).

Maybe a dumb question, but are you sure that it's not just a vacuum leak/loose plug wire/etc, from pulling the valve cover for the adjustment?

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but I don't see how this fixes the problem that katman was describing. The TC rod causes the LCA to move in a three dimensional arc, but this bushing design tries to restrict the movement to a plane. I don't see how crossmember redrilling will fix this - you can try to find an orientation puts the plane in the middle of the 3D arc to minimize the misalignment, but this won't make it go away. Also, I've never liked this design for the front because it couples bumpsteer to camber adjustment (i.e., adjusting camber this way will change your bumpsteer).

The TEC3 (and TEC2, for that matter) use direct ignition, and thus have no use for the ported vacuum advance signal. Also, both have the controller for the stepper motor-style idle air controller built in, so there is no need for an external controller. Finally, the TPS reading that corresponds to closed throttle is programmable in the TEC. I use the IAC with my TEC2, but plenty of people use it successfully without. The ignition timing based portion of the idle controller in the TEC works surprisingly well on its own, so if you don't need to change idle speeds for things like AC, then an adjustable throttle stop should work just fine. On the knock sensor - yes it is a good idea to have one, but I generally caution people not to blindly trust it. You will still want to listen very carefully for knock, and check to see if the sensor readings correlate. Some people have had good luck with these, but I frankly don't trust mine -I've had times when it said I was detonating when I know it was not, and others when I could hear it pinging and the sensor gave no reading whatsoever. Also, I definitely would not recommend using the knock control feedback until you are certain that the sensor works reliably. Unfortunately this does call for more diligence on your part. Finally, there are a couple of TEC3 users here that can probably send you a .bin file. Assuming that they have a similar setup, a good deal of the settings should be transferable, but do not expect the VE table to be usable as is. Speed-density EFI systems are very dependent on all of the things that influence the amount of air the engine actually ingests for a given rpm/map. There are way too many variables (cam profile, cam timing, turbo efficiency, exhaust restriction, injector size/impedance, fuel rail pressure, etc) to expect that your engine will be "close enough". IMHO, your best bet will to use somebody else's map as a starting point, and then clear out the VE table and start tuning your own. Obviously, start with as low a boost setting as possible, and get that working properly first.