hooo boy that's hott.

What did you pay total for the PSR, if I may ask?

 

I paid $760 shipped from Fab9. PSR has it a little bit cheaper but slammed with a 50% tarrif on top when I was doing my shopping around.

 

Interesting! My PSR was $735 shipped straight from them, no extra tariffs at the time of order (June 30th). Which in hindisght is kinda weird, seems like there should have been some extra fee?!?

Anyways, good price from Fab9, glad you were able to score it!

 

Welcome to the PSR2860 gang

I grabbed mine when they had some in stock in the US. I also got a coupon from ebay for $10 so mine was about $666 shipped (bought on eBay from "pulsarturbos").

 

Ha! Thanks! I'm super excited to get to the fun part and slap the new shiny bits on. Alas, I'm not quite there yet.

Over the weekend, I started tearing into the car to replace as many VVT related components as I could with parts from my spare BP6D head. Apologies in advance for butchering these component names. I swapped out the entire intake cam gear phasor.... thing, the actuator, and the adapter(?). I'm not 100% on the proper names but, I replaced the cam gear and these two things:


Replacing the intake cam gear obviously meant a lot of the timing components had to come off. I unbolted the top and middle timing covers and loosed the tensioner, slipped the belt off the intake cam, replaced all the VVT stuff, belt back on. Quick and easy right? Well, I went to to start the tensioning procedure after getting everything properly timed. I rotated the engine and noticed this lovely tear staring at me.


Why hello there, (un)happy to see you.

Welp, looks like I'm replacing the timing belt now. This is where things took a turn, not quite for the "worse," but it took a turn from an already un-fun job to a more un-fun job. Luckily, for some reason, I had a used Gates timing belt lying in a box in my garage. It has questionable miles on it but it visibly looks to be in fine shape. No cracks or tears. I got the rest of the timing covers off and the harmonic balancer.

I was now able to get a better look at the front of the engine. It had been leaking a little bit from the front so I just assumed it was the front main. They always leak for me even with the install tools - cam seals, too. idk what I do wrong. Anyway, I was surprised the see that the leaking doesn't appear to be coming from the front main. Worse, I think it's leaking either the seal from the oil pump to the pan or the oil pump to the block. It's tough to tell. I snapped a pic, but it's not the best. When I took off the little intake cam gear plate that exposes the cam gear banjo bolt, it leaked oil all down the front soooo...yeah, not that helpful. the area around my crank angle sensor has a nice coating of oil buildup on it though. You can sort of see it in this picture.



Like I said, not the most helpful. But, the oil on the right side around the crank sensor is caked oil buildup from somewhere. Not sure where. The seal from the oil pump to the block just above the "Boundary" did look to be a little wet with oil. Regardless, front main and cam seals don't seem to be leaking. I'm going to leave it for now and deal with it if/when I pull the pan. For what it's worth, the allen key plug in the BE pump doesn't appear to be leaking. I read those often leak. The left side around the pump outlet doesn't appear to be leaking. I would imagine if there are any issues with the O-Ring missing or torn, this area would be spewing oil. I think I'm okay here.

Do you ever question your ability to work on cars? Well I'm starting to. I put the new belt on and got it in time, put the tensioner spring on and started rotating the engine over to torque the pulley down. The belt kept slipping every quarter rotation of the engine. I almost lost my mind trying to figure out why. Had the tensioner spring suddenly gone bad? Had this used belt stretched? I'm ashamed to admit it was 20 minutes of staring until I noticed I had the belt routed on the exhaust side on the outside of the idler pulley, belt teeth againsnt the pulley. Ugh..

I routed the timing belt the correct way and got it timed and the proper tension. I'm including the pics of it in time, mainly for my sanity that it is, indeed, in time if I question it later down the road.



Looks good to me.

I put on my favorite pop punk band, Citizen, and went to town reassembling everything. During my reassembly jam session, i installed the harmonic balancer, went to torque down the last of the four 10mm bolts and it sheared right off. I was at maybe 5lbs of torque when it went. Dang it. Thankfully I was able to get the balancer off and took out the trigger wheel backing plate that the balancer bolts too.



This car is really starting to fight me. Does that mean I'm getting close to fixing my VVT/oil pressure issues or further away? Anyway, I spent what time I had left to wrench on the car getting this drilled out.

Sadly, this is all I have to report for now. I was really hoping to get it all buttoned back up and test driven before the work week. I may have some time to finish getting it back together later this week, though.

 

Shouldn't a band be poppy and/or punk to be considered a pop punk band?

Enjoy the wrenching...

 

Ha, I guess you got me there. Musical genres being so broad, it's exhausting to attempt to place a particular band in question in their proper sub-genre. Pop punk to me is something angsty with catchy chorus lines. Citizen's older album, Youth, brought the angst. The Story So Far, Knuckle Puck, and Neck Deep are other good ones I'd place in the pop punk genre.

 

Time for a bit of an overdo update. I've been pretty busy the past few weeks. My wife is a teacher and we like to travel on her Fall breaks. We usually try to go out of the country since flight prices are much lower around this time of year. This year, we opted to try our first cruise instead. 4-day cruise to the Bahamas with Celebrity. Our cruise went well, and we both enjoyed it. I got pretty tired of living in the stereotypical American excess pretty quick though. lol

Anyway, last I left off with the car I was in the midst of slapping everything back together after swapping out pretty much everything VVT related. Well, I got it all back together, reset base timing and took it for a spin. NOPE, didn't fix it. Towards the end of the ~20min drive, I revved it out to almost redline and got 42 psi of oil pressure at 6600 rpm. That's too low.

The options were either drop the subframe to gain access to the oil pump relief or pull the motor. I opted to just pull the motor. I'm getting an oil leak on the passanger side thats a bit too much to fall in the "it'll be fine" realm and addressing that with the engine in the car would be sort of a nightmare. Also, I'm planning to take this opportunity to install all of the shiny new Kraken/PSR bits as well.



Let the dissasembly commence! There isn't a whole bunch to report from the teardown for the engine removal. However, I did find a couple of my exhaust manifold nuts were loose. One of them had almost backed completely off of the stud. The other was just finger loose.



With the radiator and intake piping out of the car I was able to get a better look on the passenger side of the block. You can't really tell in the picture, but I think the leak is coming from the VVT oil supply banjo bolt. I vaguely remember reusing one of the copper washers and using a different crush washer on the other side when I first did the assembly. Don't worry, I ordered new proper Mazda OEM washers for the banjo bolt - suckers were $5 each if you include shipping...



I'm planning to redo any and all seals on this side. I think it's mainly coming from the VVT supply, but also some from my turbo oil feed port. Frankly, this whole area has been leaking quite a bit. The bottom of my subframe and oil pan has a nice layer oil all over it. Oh, and I'll re-wrap the wire loom that goes to the starter. It looks pretty janky.

I did end up test-fitting my kraken manifold and the PSR turbo to see if I would need to do any trimming. I had heard that some massaging may be required to get it to clear the partial shelf as well as the turbo compressor outlet area.



Seeing this was a motivation boost. Pun intended.




As you can see from the last two pictures, this lower radiator hose mount will need to be either trimmed or hacked off. I upgraded to the NB one piece lower rad hose back when I redid my hotside piping. So, this mounting tab is no longer needed. I'll admit, I forgot to mock up the downpipe to get a feel for how much clearancing needed to be done for the new setup. The MKTurbo setup required a few whacks on the partial shelf from a BFH. Hopefully, that is enough additional clearance for the Kraken DP, too. Any NA's here with the Kraken setup would like to share their experiences here?


The rest of the job went easy enough. I actually managed not to make a huge mess under the car whilst yanking the engine and trans out this time. Last time, I forgot to drain the transmission

 

Now, it's diagnosis time.

I got the engine seperated from the trans and mounted on my engine stand. I eagerly blasted off the oil pan bolts and to get a look inside. To be honest I don't know what I was expecting to see. Perhaps an oil squirter came loose? Maybe something visibly weird with the oil pump relief? Maybe the oil pickup tube was cracked? Nope, nothing obvious was found. oil squirters were all thereand oil pick up tube looks good to me.


Nothing of note here, just updates feel empty without any pictures.

The same goes for this pic. Ignore the pin being halfway out. I decided to take a picture halfway through.

I took out the relief valve spring, and just as I suspected, It has no shims. This is now were I think I made a discovery. I have my old OEM VVT oil pump on a shelf, I took out its relief valve spring and I swear the OEM pump's relief valve spring feels stiffer than the boundary spring. It's not a massive amount, but enough to be noticable when compressing it against a table. This has to be the issue, right? A weaker spring means the relief opens at a lower oil pressure. This would point to how my oil pressure just hits a wall at 40psi. I called Boundary with this discovery, ready to order a new spring from them and they stated they only reuse the spring that comes on the pumps they order before they get modified. Therefore, I'm stuck with it.

Here's where I would love your guys' input. I have the boundary shim kit right now. I'm obviously planning to add at least 1, maybe 2 shims. The question I have is, should I use the spring that came on the boundary pump and add 1-2 shims to it? Or can (should) I use the spring from my old oil pump and add 1-2 shims to it? I ask because I don't know how specific the spring dimensions/clearance/whatever is to each pump or different from OEM to BE. If I add 2 shims to the OEM spring, that should be ~12psi more before the relief opens, so roughly 72psi. However, if I add 2 shims to the boundary spring that is seemingly weaker than the oem spring, 2 shims might not equal 72psi. You see my dilemma? I'm all ears on this.

That is where I am at currently. I'd love your guys' thoughts on this. Untill then, I'm going to begin the fun process of removing old RTV from the pan.

 

It's a common theme for me to get way behind on updates. I'm very much the type to just get in a groove on a project and don't think to stop and take pictures. Therefore, pictures may be sparse

We left off with me deciding whether or not to swap in my used OEM VVT oil pump relief spring or not. I ended up measuring the the thickness of the coils for each spring. They were definitely different. I don't remember the exact measurements but the BE spring was something like 20% smaller in diameter than the OEM spring. Bingo. I threw the spring from the OEM pump in with 2 shims and started the reassembly.

Alright now for the fun part - slapping the shiny new Kraken bits on.



My old MKTurbo setup was with an oil-cooled turbo only and the PSR is water+oil. Napp Motorsports offers this welded -6 AN fitting to replace your waterneck/blockoff if you deleted it. It's comically shaped but it prutrudes just enough when installed where just the tip is visible.


Oh,.. umm. Happy to see me?

The rest really isn't all that interesting at this point. Miatas with Kraken kits are a dime a dozen on here. The kit is fantastic and the welds are beautiful. I was curious the size differences of the Kraken and big Magnaflow from the MKTurbo kit.



The magnaflow is huge. I meant to compare weights but forgot. oh well.

Other than that, it was just normal reassembly and dropping the motor back in. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but each time I drop the engine back in I have a devil of a time getting both mounts into the holes in the subframe. It might be the coolant reroute coupled with the engine leveler I use, but it's not fun. The last time it took me and a friend an hour and a half of prying, jacking, and pulling to get it in. This time we came in at 1 hour.

Engine in and everthing plumbed up, I was super eager and nervous to get the car started to see what oil pressures I was seeing. I unplugged the fuel injector relay in the fuse box and cranked until I saw oil pressure on the gauge, then sent it.

It's fixed. Fired right up and oil pressure pegged 90 psi on the gauge and in MS. previously I'd get about 60 psi on first start with cold oil. I am so stoked all of that work wasn't for nothing. I can conclude that the BE oil pump relief valve spring was ~20psi less than the OEM VVT relief spring. I hadn't stumbled upon anyone else running into this issue in my extensive research on here. So maybe this can help someone else in the future.

I let the car idle while I bled the coolant and double checked for any leaks. 10-15 minutes or so of the car getting up to temp, oil leak from the front area of the motor. Did it blow a seal with too much oil pressure?


Yep, that'll do it. I pinched the VC gasket when I installed it and wasn't aware. A quick trip to the parts store and we're ready to go for a drive, right? Well..

 

..Well, not really. I buttoned everything up and noticed the turbo starting to smoke and smelled oil burning. That's just stuff burning off right? Nope. The oil feed fitting to the turbo is leaking. The exact same symptoms as @SimBa had with his PSR 2860 he discussed here. His issue was the flare in the CHRA was fouling on the flange of the restrictor fitting before it was able to seal properly. Inspecting my fitting, I could see a ring where it was contacting. His fix was to simply drill out the fitting slightly so it can seal properly. That did the trick for me. Oil restrictor leak fixed!

Started the car and took it for a spin around the block and the turbo started leaking worse. This time from the drain area. Turns out I forgot to install the gasket for the drain flange.

The car rips! I'm currently on the 7 psi spring. As others have reported the wastegate spring pressure is only a suggestion. She creeps to just over 13 psi at redline. I'm planning to at the very least, add EBC duty cycle to the low end to flatten out the boost curve for the short term. The plan is to shoot for 300 while being nice to the 5 speed.. We'll see if my 15k mile SM Organic clutch will hold up to it. I'll try to get some type of video tomorrow or over the weekend. Cheers!

 

Hell yeah! Glad drilling the fitting out worked for you. I wonder if there was a bad batch or something. At least it's an easy fix, even better if you can get that spare CHRA through their warranty

Honestly leaving it on wastegate might not be a bad idea. I remember thinking the boost was pretty linear on wastegate and IIRC was pushing about 270 whp (estimated) at redline. It does spool way way quicker with EBC though.

 

Definitely get in touch with pulsar to get a free warranty CHRA. I would, at least!!

Welcome to the boost creep club. The power band is super safe on gearbox and motor internals like that, but you leave a ton of power under the curve on the table without boost control. Even on wastegate Simba and I's cars cracked 250whp so you are in for some fun. Enjoy and keep us posted!

 

Thanks guys! Yeah, I'm currently in talks with them for the warranty claim. The awkward part is they are asking for pictures for more context and I've already circumvented the leak by drilling out the fitting. So, I, uhh may need to get a little creative. lol I agree it may have just been a bad batch. It seems like Simba and I ordered ours around a similar time. I ordered mine late September from Fab9.

The wastegate power band honestly feels weird. It will hit 7psi quick but as it creeps up the party slowly gets started. It just feels like a laggy turbo at that point. haha. My replacement churbo on my MKTurbo setup was a larger compressor than the original, so it had a bit more headroom. I was running 12-13 psi from ~4300 to redline. The only decent Virtual Dyno plot I got with it was 255hp in the dead heat of summer with 4° of IAT retard in the top end. My old IC was way undersized lol.

That being said, I'm definitely going to turn it up. I may add some boost taper up top to help preserve the 5 speed, but I need a higher launching point. I miss the punch when I step on it. For the short/medium term I'm gonna try and flatten the boost out to get a fat 250-260hp. I'll leave it there until I can get my Bosch knock sensor wired and configured.

Speaking of knock, I'd love to take a peak at your guys' 93 octane timing map if you don't mind sharing since we're on very similar setups. Just to see where I'm at. Mine is what I believe to be conservative for my CR on 93 from what I've gathered. I wish E85 was more readily available here. We have 1 measly gas station with E85 and it's 20 minutes from where I live.

In other news, I've recently been looking into building a PiDash to put in the tombstone. It looks crazy cheap for what it's capable of. I'm an EE by trade but I work in the power industry so it's been awhile since I've done any sort of microcontroller/coding tinkering. It's got me kind of excited. I may dive into this over winter.

 

FWIW, when I thought my restrictor was the issue I ordered a pair of new restrictors from Amazon for $10. When that didn't fix the issue I cleaned those out with brake clean and returned them. Do with that info what you will.

As much as it's a pretty easy problem to fix, it still means the CHRA has an issue and if for some reason you need to change the restrictor out then you have to modify it to make it work. It's a pretty weak argument, but when you buy a brand new turbo I expect it to not leak oil.

I agree, I remember thinking the 2860 felt like a laggy turbo on wastegate, but I was also used to driving with my 2560 spooling pretty aggressively on EBC, so I'm not surprised. I actually haven't run 91 since I put the 2860 on, but I still have my map from the 2560. I keep meaning to get 91 in the car and double check that the map still works for the 2860, but being corncharged is addicting. I'll try to get that posted up later today when I've got my laptop handy. I'd assume it would be fine for a 2860 on 93 if it worked on my 2560 on 91, but I'm not too familiar with how that works.

 

This is what I was running on my 2560 on 91 octane. Keep in mind I was only running about 180-200 KPA from what I remember, so anything past that is basically a safety net.




And if you want to run ethanol just add about 10 degrees everywhere in boost

 

Thanks man for taking the time to send me this. Comparing this to mine has me slightly concerned. This map is a great deal more conservative than mine or is mine too hot? Maybe this is a 91 vs 93 kind of thing? Below is what i've been running since the rebuild on MKTurbo and now Kraken+2860. It's a conglomeration of Brain's Trubokitty basemap and what other reputable members here have shared. I've been running it in the 180-190kpa range. Boost cut is 205kpa for now. I'm open to any and all critique on it.



I'm so jealous of you guys and your corn availability. lol

I had the NB knock sensor wired in but I never was able to get it to a point where I trusted it. That's why I switched to the Bosch sensor. Now that the car is back up and running, knock detection is towards the top of my priority list. Man, now that I'm thinking about it, I made some electronic det cans from a thread on here a few years ago but I was never able to figure out how to get a usable output from the headphone jack. My desktop would recognize it and output sound from the mic, but my tuning laptop wouldn't I would really like to get some det cans I can listen for knock in real time with.

I spent today chasing down an exhaust leak and doing a general bolt check. I had to do some finagling of the exhaust sections to get the area where the resonator is to tuck up tighter to the body. I'm worried the resonator is going to slowly get eatien by the pavement from bumps and stuff. I've got a couple more drives with the new setup so i'm gaining confindence nothing is going to break/come loose/leak. Therefore, I'm starting to really enjoy it. I can't wait to get the boost curve a little more dialed and start to turn it up. I think I'm somewhere around 10 psi tapering (creeping) to 13 at redline. It's a ripper.

 

I might still have a log on my laptop somewhere, but if you go to this post you can see where I noticed some significant knock (from what I can tell) on my old setup. There's an old table in there as well. It was at an autocross event when it was pretty hot out. I do think my 91 table is probably a bit conservative but it hasn't been a priority to revisit it since I'm mostly running ethanol now. Its more of a backup for roadtripping at this point. I'll definitely dial it in if I make it to a dyno though.

https://www.miataturbo.net/build-thr...m_content=post

 

how long did it take you to wrap ur head around the tuning?
What resources or threads do you recommend?