Gollum

FWIW these are the ones I bought and I've been really happy with them. Might not be everyone's cup of tea in the looks department but I'm not exactly a purist in much of any way. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FS617J8 Didn't use the supplied wiring for the most part, was total crap.

As some know, I blew a mechanical fuse (headgasket) tuning which didn't bother me too much. But after several conversations I realized that I should probably do a thorough clean out of the coolant system, as there was likely good amounts of scale in the block and likely didn't help detonation problems. So I went ahead and pulled the motor and cleaned it out, put in new (steel) core plugs. I also wanted to replace my oil pan gasket while I had it out because I knew it was at least one of my main leaks. I was cleaning the pan out, and found: Yup, those are piston skirts... How long have they been in there? Who knows. Could have been like that when I bought the car for all I know. Do they even belong to an installed piston? Yup. #5. Was that the cylinder that blew the gasket? Nope. That was between 3 and 4. All this while I'm trying to get ready for an AutoX event in just under a month. Luckily it sounds like @stupid_fast will be hauling a motor over for my use in the meantime. I'll owe him big time. Then I need to figure out what I'll do about this motor. I'll need to call around and see what machine shop I should use and what it'll cost to get it cleaned, decked, and matched to a new set of pistons. I really don't want to spend $3k building a motor, but I also don't want to throw away money on something that won't be reliable for my goals (which are relatively mild). On the plus side, maybe I should be putting in an order with JeffP for a head gasket and doing his block modifications while I'm at it. Then there's STILL the chance I might take the block to a shop, just to find out it's not a candidate for keeping due to wall thickness. I know Jeff went through several blocks before finding a "good one". These are times that it's dangerous to have my lack of purity. F22C's start looking cheap. Or VQ's... Or LSx's....

Zcardude, I'd say there's a chance that a 3.5" downpipe might only net you 20 peak HP, but the benefits will be much, MUCH more important in all the other ways. You'll likely pick up a good amount of spool time, and by dropping the pressure ratio you're also likely to end up in a better spot of the compressor map which means you might drop a few degrees of inlet temp for a given scenario. You might pick up 30-40 like you say, and that'd be great. I'm just saying that I'd be more focused/concerns about the transient improvements. You're already getting pretty great numbers out of that turbo. Equally important of a mod would be to ditch the 280ZX Dizzy for "crank" signal. Put a sensor on the crank. You might find yourself able to run more timing as well as the dyno showing smoother power delivery. You're on a smoothing factory of 5 on a dynojet, and it's still showing lots of roughness. Imagine what it looks like with zero smoothing... I'd be willing to bet a huge part of that is trigger slop/scatter. Get that solved and suddenly the engine state will be smoother which helps ALL tuning aspects.

Leon, I think stupid_fast will also be at the autox at sonoma September 14th... You should come out. Fuel filter issue or not.

Something tells me you've been busy out enjoying the relatively mild summer we've had versus spending time in the new garage... I don't blame you. :-) That said, I signed up for an autox at Sonoma for September 14th in order to give me a kick in the butt to sort my car out. Would be cool to see you at a cars and coffee with the Velo Rossa sometime.

Yeah, I was doing essentially that via bash but that's not scale-able. If someone were doing this with a public service, you'd likely want to use a lambda function on upload of logs. I'm not sure I can quite afford that as a free service to people at the moment, but I can't think of a better way to convince people to donate logs (which is what I'm really after, ALL THE DATA!). Alternatively I could just run a small free license at home with a sftp site for people to drop logs and I could publish reports and take requests from people to show data. But I'd really rather have some help on the dash-boarding side of things as I don't have the time or the expertise to do it quickly/easily. Well, if you're ever visiting home office and have time, I'll take ya for a ride in my ratty 280z.

Wow, I'd just about given up on this thread.... My current status isn't any different than it was when I last spent a day at it. The biggest and most obvious obstacle is transforming the data into something useful from a time-series perspective. Splunk like other similar tools really likes data to have a valid time series format so that a lot of the logic "just works". My issue is that MS logs don't work off of something like a GPS clock which is standardized. If you don't have a RTC you don't even get good NAMES for your logs to track down a valid way to transform data. If you could be 100% sure on file naming conventions and that name containing valid time references, you could transform the time column into valid time for splunk. Once that's handled.... the rest is "easy" in that you transform/rename columns that you care about, and can also perform basic graphing, smoothing, plotting etc. I'm personally still changing my tune on an almost daily basis, so long-term data viewing isn't hugely relevant yet, but I should likely get back on this task soon. I've got a growing number of logs, and I could at least be using splunk to force my hand to name and organize them, and also have a way to easily recall data. Log ingestion is only half the battle though. Someone needs to do some dashboarding to make the data useful. In what I'd consider an ideal world, you could have a splunk instance that people could toss logs at from all variety of makes/models and you could compare logs of similar or even indifferent setups. I should also be able to drill down to a single time under WOT for a single log as a "dryno view" dashboard, though that shouldn't be the point of this excersize. The real benefit here is to be able to look at dozens or hundreds of logs in a single pane of glass to view trends and anomalies. Side note: Highstakes, if you ever work out of the SF office I'll have to stop by sometime. I've attended a couple of the monthly user group meetings, and though I don't work in SF at the moment I'm just north in San Rafael.

According to what I've seen Blake (1fastZ) say recently, you could likely make 10 and have them in stock for sale for about 5-10 years... That said, the recent intake group buy had a lot of buy in, buy also had a lot of angry customers. If you can provide a complete product for cheap there tends to be interest. But a DIY product or something more than a blue collar paycheck and it's going to sit.

Likely because you DON'T have a "VE" table anywhere. You have an "AFR" map as your only "fuel" map (that you've posted or shown me). There's an ignition map, but that's unrelated. So once the AFM is maxed out, the ECU likely takes that reading as it's "max flow" reading and the AFR table adds fuel on top at higher RPM where necessary. This means that in WOT beyond max AFM flow you're only operating on RPM scale, like an alpha-n would at WOT.

"Your" might be a bit misplaced there. I've always used include AFR target with my setup, so I'm not exactly clear on what stupid_fast was getting at when saying "air flow would be consistent". Maybe he's seeing or meaning commanded pulse width, which WOULD be similar with VE == VE areas all other variables staying constant. But that last bit you said was the point of what I was getting at. Everything is just an approximation, and the idea of a VE table being "accurate" is a relative term. What matters at the end of the day is how the car drives with the tune.

From my experience (granted this isn't my career, so there's that out of the way) there's no such thing as a true VE table. Considering this ECU seems to act like a MAF system in the lower airflow regions, and an alpha-n style of handling of high flow areas, there's no reason it needs to be a true VE table, but it does need a way to account for fuel beyond the capability of the AFM. I'm just pointing out that even in a perfect speed density setup, VE tables rarely if ever look like what the actual VE of the engine is. There's a myriad of reasons you use the VE table to adjust for other aspects that cause the math to not work perfectly. Idle is a great example. Who cares what the VE actual is? Looking at the curves, it's never "correct". You set the VE to what it needs to be in order to get the engine to idle nicely, because idle is an inherently unstable condition. Are your injectors perfectly linear? No. Is your fuel pump and pressure perfectly linear? No. Are the variances in expected thermal transfer ideals and reality? Yes. Unless you can put ALL your sensors INSIDE THE CHAMBER with absolutely ZERO unintended environment impact, you're going to need "non math-scientific" adjustments to get the results you want.

As much as the block can handle But really, I know this isn't EXACTLY like a K head in any sense of the word, but if we let the four cylinder crowd bench race for us, I think 600hp on pump gas at around 16-18psi wouldn't be unreasonable. Going beyond that you'd better have done some serious prep to keep bores round and such.

Consider that people have made 600+ hp on the factory manifold. Ported, yeah, but I think for your goals the inlet restriction will be largely inconsequential. You MIGHT see some issues at high RPM if you can get towards the top of the turbo's pressure ratio map. Otherwise, I bet you won't notice. And keep this in mind... Pressure in the manifold can actually be MUCH higher than inlet boost pressure before significant power is lost.

Ignition For Boost: I knew my ignition table was "not good" for raising boost. I'd made zero attempt at fixing this in any way as of yet. Well I found myself working on my dash in tunerstudio with some time to kill so I freshed up my knowledge on how much timing to pull, how people attack low versus high boost scenarios, and so on. I decided that for me, using a .75 degree timing pull per psi, while maybe a touch aggressive, would be a good place to start to see how the map looks and then responds at mild boost increases. Also, I'd found from a couple of sources that in many engines, the 0-4psi range you can essentially ignore timing pull compared to atmospheric. So I generated a quick excel calculator to normalize my data, and adjusted my 100-300kpa cells using 150 as my "normalization point" since the engine runs well with those current figures. Some of the timing figures end up sub 5 degrees, even at or under zero in the 300KPA region. This also got me thinking about how I'm not going to be running that much boost, ever, I should hope. If anything I'd be using overboost protection anywhere near that range. Even 250 was a bit much, but seemed valuable to have a "just in case" safe dead zone where I can pull timing if I ever get there. So after adjusting the values of my table, I then rescaled it, so be warned the KPA ranges don't mesh with the first posted graph. At any rate, here's the resulting table: You might also notice I modified/simplified the 10-60kpa range. I wanted to make it more of a "blank slate" for doing some cruise tuning in the coming weeks, and decided to get it closer to a common distributor curve which will also make it really obvious what cells I've changed since they're all even intervals now. I'm not hugely concerned about being 100% perfect here in the cruise space, as it's not uncommon for engines to make the same torque in a huge timing window. I just want to ensure I maximize economy when possible so I'll revisit it when I'm putting more miles on the car.

Update: MAT Air Density Table So I wrote a bit of a write up on this topic here: http://www.msextra.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=131&t=58903&start=20#p538309 And the short of it is that I was having different AFR in different gears with all environment variables being the same. (pulls done in similar time frame so Baro/Temps were the same, same stretch of road, same MAT temps at cruise before start, same CLT). This was more than a little troubling, because it was A LOT. My AFR in 5th was about .8 of an AFR point leaner than 3rd gear. I'd also only been having detonation in 4th and 5th (go figured). After a bit of research, I modified my MAT table. Provided base map looks like this: First off, I don't know who on earth has intake air temps in the -40's.... And sadly, this table (and possible MS in general) maxes at 300F, which I fear I might go over in some circumstances. We'll see. Here's where I'm at now: My theory as to why this was necessary has two aspects that need to be considered. 1: The higher the load on the engine (as applied by road/dyno/etc, not KPA load) and thus slower it revs, the more time intake temps have to transfer temps from the manifold/piping/cylinder head.Thus, the further upstream your IAT is from the valves, the more difference is likely to be created in higher loads. 2. The higher the IAT temps are at your sensor, the less likely they'll radically rise before reaching the valve. On this second point: Temperatures change faster when there's more difference, it's just basic laws of energy transfer. The closer the temperatures get, the longer it takes to transfer a given degree of Fahrenheit (or other scale/unit you like). If your cylinder head is at 250 degrees, and your intake is at 230 degrees, and your IAT/MAT temps are at 80 just after your intercooler, you can BET MONEY that the temps inside the chamber will be MUCH higher. Conversely, if your air temps are at 170 because you don't have an intercooler (like me), then less heat will be added. The idea of adding this "ideal gas law" modifier into your tune to compensate for inlet temps is definitely important, but I think it's short sighted to use the actual "theoretical perfect" as provided. No engine will ever operate like this unless you have temp sensors IN the chamber, or at least have everything ceramic coated with your temp sensor in the intake manifold with some way to prevent heat soak of the sensor. The downside (maybe upside) to doing this, is that my VE table was way off again. So here's the updated VE: That table only has minimal auto-tune on it to get it into the ballpark. Don't use it, or think about it, or judge it. I'm just posted it to compare against my above table to showcase what a huge difference the MAT curve can make. Edit: Oh, and I guess I should mention, now my AFRs are within .1 of each other between 3rd and 5th (for the most part, other small variances of course).

What's your plan to smog it? Still has the SR right? With any luck we'll have good news in a week and it will be a non-issue.

Progress continues on. Oil AND fuel pressure are wired in now, so I'm officially down to once ADC left on MS3X. Been working on a racepak inspired dash. Otherwise been putting miles on the car as much as I can.

You going to be running factory EFI? In and case it sounds like you've got realistic goals and such. Keep looking around here and you'll likely find answers to most your questions. Also never hesitate to reach out to our more active members.

Yeah I understand. For what it's worth I think a stock turbo motor is at about 94VE peak starting to trail off at 5300 or so and dropping down as low as 65-70 by redline. Improving top end flow with a better cam, valve unshrowding, and bowl clean up will help immensely. And thus hitting your projected 225whp at 10psi would be much easier. Though I don't think that's beyond reason with what you've mentioned.

Boost can creep in low and high boost situations depending on the airflow profile of the engine and size of wastegate. Using matchbot (Google it) I think you're going to last at about 50% wastegate actuation from 4-7krpm. This is assuming the wastegate port is about 1" or 25mm and using the turbine flow map found here: http://turbochargerspecs.blogspot.com/2013/02/garrett-gt28rs-gt2860rs-62-trim-360-hp.html?m=1 Learn to use matchbot. It's extremely useful.

At those power and boost levels creep shouldn't be an issue. The .64 AR is likely fine until you're pushing near the 300whp level.

Who says I'm limited by pump gas I'll be running E85 by next winter. I'll actually be doing initial tuning in the next couple months. I have no doubt I'll be able to run flat tops on E85. Now, what kind of boost I can manage on CA 91 octane remains to be seen.

Ha! Not only am I making it work, but it's working WELL. I'm actually kinda eager to find a flat top F54 bottom end.... Which was my plan all along. 9.5:1 is probably about right. And no, didn't even touch the short side radius. I plan on doing a more thorough street port on it down the road, and have someone cut the seats for larger valves. That'll probably happen if/when I drop it onto a block with flat tops. Or if I can't find that, I'll by some aftermarket flat tops with the same pin height as factory. I think the main reason this combo "doesn't work" for so many people's experience is that the ideal timing gets SO LOW at peak torque. I've had pinging at 4-5k at only 18 degrees advance... yet still making about 200 ft/lbs to the wheels at 7psi boost. So though that's a lot less timing than the factory curve, people running non-programmable ignition end up having to pull so much timing out of the base timing at the distributor that yes, there's no power in the engine. But so far, I'm definitely at least matching the torque/power I'd get from a P90...

Since it was bothering me trying to track rows and clumns on a picture, and I knew I had the original xls shared somewhere on my fileserver, I dug it up and put it up on google sheets. If you have a google/gmail account you can make a copy for yourself and modify/mark/note to your heart's content. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTiMRW_q9winvoPB7G4bQ42Br6aX8fVZRrag9IElIJi52ArTcQxYnWwxfn94x2VHYLA9Z7EawEqelMo/pubhtml

Here's a useful after/before tune diff: And a scatter plot which gives you a good idea of the weight of the cell data (I've removed off-throttle and transient data) Another interesting way to look at data, Pulse Width by Duty Cycle, colored by AFR. Same off-throttle and transient data remove as above. The logs: 2019-03-10_13.44.08.msl.zip Tune Resulting tune: Gollum-Tune.zip