Turbo Tuesday

Big Hybrid Turbos

Welcome to Turbo Tuesday and part 3 of the story.  We left off yesterday with the new turbo making a little more than the Pure700 with no doubt that there was more left in it.  The tune hadn’t been updated.  Now was time for a new turbo specific tune to take advantage of the improved airflow and a built engine.

Related: Turbos

Nathan started working with the tuner on his Dynojet in the shop.  He got the turbo up to around 680 wheel horsepower on the stock ECU at around only 28 PSI.  Well there was more left in the turbo.  He installed a Cortex EBC to run the boost as we still didn’t have 4 bar sensors and boost control available for the stock ECU.  Then ran it some more.  It made around 710-715 wheel horsepower.  Well that was still far away from the bigger power I wanted to see.  Something wasn’t right, the  waste gate was at 98% waste gate duty cycle. There wasn’t much left in the turbo at all with those numbers.  

Nathan started thinking about what else could be the problem.  He worked long and hard on what was going on and decided to change to a boost gate from the vacuum gate that it came with.  So we got a Turbosmart boost gate from Eurocharged Canada as they had one in stock and then Nathan had to pull the turbo out again and install it.  That took several more hours then he had to put the car back on the dyno and see what happened.  With no change in tune there was an immediate change in horsepower to 763 wheel horsepower on around 45% waste gate duty cycle.  It was like a magic pill!  Wahoo!!  Now we’re in business.

TurboSmart Wastegate

With more fine tuning we saw a maximum of 770 wheel horsepower on the Dynojet at Apex Motoring.  Nathan had it done by the Saturday night, two weeks after I had gone up to Canada.  I had booked 2 weeks of vacation from work.  With the complications of which waste gate to use and tuning that needed to be completed I didn’t have the additional three days to drive all the way home.  I decided to book a flight to fly home and then fly back in a few weeks to collect the car.  Nathan could also work on my TCU tune while it was there.

I flew back to Canada in late November taking Thanksgiving time off and a few days around it in order to give me some time to drive home.  Nathan had worked on the TCU and fine tuned the ECU tune.  It was making some power and was a blast to drive.  I drove it around for about 60-70 miles to see if any leaks would develop or other issues that needed to be addressed prior to driving it back across the country to San Diego.

Nathan did a few more last minute checks on the car to make sure no issues, buttoned up some loose ends on wiring and checked things like wheel torque specs to make sure it was safe to drive.

I took off on Saturday morning out of Toronto just in time to beat the snow storm which came in that night into the next couple of days.  I was on summer tires so the best route was to head directly south and take the 40 across instead of through Colorado.  More on that trip in a future post.

Once I got home cleaned up the car.  2700 miles of driving will make a car very dirty and it needed lots of care.  Then I got to enjoy it on Speed Society’s Mustang Dyno.  It was the first time on a Mustang Dyno and the TCU was still not shifting at quite the right RPM’s.  The Speed Society guys were awesome and Nathan was on the phone and on the computer dialing things in while on the dyno.  Before being put on the dyno the belly pan was removed and a leak was found.  Some things to fix.  A blog post will follow soon with that experience.

I then drove it up the Pure Turbos the next day to get it on their dyno to compare as well.  The car started “breaking up” at higher boost levels when it was cool so I knew I needed to get spark plugs that were a colder temperature range.  A couple days later I took the car to HG Performance to get the oil leak fixed and a once over prior to going racing the next weekend.  It turned out to be the APR inlet had worked loose again and it was letting oil out from the bottom.  Once everything was buttoned up and tightened with some working of the threads, the car was ready to go to Gila Bend for NoFlyZone.
Related: 180 MPH

I drove my car around for another couple of weeks having fun at Cars and Coffee with the San Diego Audi Club then decided to go run it at Fontana Drag Strip for Import Face-Off.  The event was on a Sunday and Nathan flew in on Saturday to help me prep for it as well as getting the TCU launch control setup and working.

I borrowed Jesse’s (Pure Turbos owner) trailer to tow my car up to Oxnard to RD Engineering to work on it there.  I stopped in Irvine area to get a set of drag radials and wheels that I was going to use at the event.  Nathan updated the tune I swapped on the drag radial set of wheels and then we went out and did some test launches.  The launch control worked amazingly and it had a great sound hitting the two step limiter.  We rode in the car together one was using Dragy to time it as well as logging and one driving.

During one of the hits we lost boost.  No worries just needed to go back to the shop to put the boot back on and snug it up.  Turned out there was no boost leak that we could see.  It was pretty late already so we went to grab a bite to eat then back to the shop.

Ronnie came back by and we were all working on the car.  Rigging up the smoke test showed that there were no leaks in the engine.  Nathan pulled off the intake and turbo inlet and checked the cold side of the turbo wheel.  It seemed to be fine.  Then he pulled the boost gate off and Ronnie pulled it apart to look at the diaphragm to see if it was torn.  It was completely intact.  The turbo was making lots of noise and not sounding like it had sounded when new.  In addition it wasn’t holding boost that was requested and only making around 22-23 PSI.  Something was broken.

We were up till around 2:30-3 am on Sunday morning trying to get it ready to go racing.  Unfortunately we weren’t able to go.  We came to the conclusion that the turbo probably has something that broke which we can’t see.  I’ve not gotten it fixed yet as I’m now going to switch to a big turbo setup.  When I get my big turbo kit finished by Race3 the hybrid turbo will come off and we can see exactly what happened.

I’m sharing all these things to give examples of what can happen and some of these things will most likely happen as you build.  You will wait for parts, you will need parts you didn’t expect and you will need to fix things that were out of your forecast.  Some of these things were little things and some were big but they are all an example of what can happen to you.

Some of these things you can avoid by planning ahead and deciding which direction you want to go.  If I had known the future on the bigger hybrid I would have stayed with the Pure700 and just tuned it for better torque.  It would have been fun and fine for me to drive around on the street.  You will never be the fastest for any long period of time.  There is always someone coming with more money and making more power than you.

Related: Car Builds

When you push the limits of parts things will break.  You need to be prepared for that and plan ahead.  The safe route is to stay stock but what fun is that? 
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Thanks for visiting and remember to “Strive to Arrive”!

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