Barton

So I've had this car for over two years now and am getting real close to getting a turbo fitted on so I can join you boosted guys so I thought I'd make some sort of documentation of my progress and get some feedback if I'm doing anything wrong. I'll let pictures do most of the talking for me. Currently I'm trying to keep the car looking stock to avoid attracting any unwanted attention.




I picked the car up in a fairly stock condition. It already had some xforce headers, low king springs and a N*Power muffler (racing beat re-brand). Not long into my ownership a rear caliper seized on me and I ended up having to refresh all the calipers due to the pistons being rusted. Got myself some EBC greenstuff pads, braided lines and slotted rotors. I regret going doing all of that now as I should have just upgraded to 1.8 stuff and gone with better pads but I didn't know any better at the time. Currently I'm using Hawk HP+ pads which hold up fine on the track so far.



Not much happened for a year after than (poor uni student life sucks ) except for building a DIYPNP megasquirt and getting the car running on that. Couldn't believe the difference after removing the crappy flappy door AFM.




I then imported a nb8a engine from Japan to replace the old 1.6 motor and started buying parts for a turbo conversion. I cleaned up the engine bay while there was no engine in there, removing rust and painting stuff. Added some nice bits to the new motor including Garage Star pulleys, Astina valve cover and toyota COPs. I took a look at the wiring guide here for the COPs and decided to do it a simpler way. Instead of wiring it from the igniter plug next to the fender I just connected the COPs to the existing coil pack plug which supplies 12V and two trigger signals and I grounded the loom to the rear of the head. The only wire I had to run back to the igniter was a tach signal.





Someone decided to bring sad eyes for it lol.



Once all that was done she started up perfectly and I was quite pleased with the extra power the 1.8 has over the 1.6.
That basically brings me to where I am now. I've just installed some msm bilstein coil-overs using 7F 5R spring rates, 1.5" ISC rear top hats and NB front top hats. Next up is getting the car running on a turbo. I've already received a manifold and dump pipe made by Nitrodann and an intercooler. Just need to fab up some intercooler pipes, the rest of the exhaust and fit an oil cooler.

Barton

Recently I discovered a problem with the voltage my ECU was reading. With the car off the gauge in Tunerstudio would read 11.7 and with the car on it would be around 12.5. I checked the voltages at the battery and alternator with a multi-meter and was getting 14.7V. I also checked the voltage at the injectors and was getting the same value as what the ECU is reading so it probably isn't an issue but it does bug me. Anyone have any ideas to what it could be?
Unfortunately I lost my datalogs from before my engine swap so I'm not sure if the low readings are a result of something I did during the swap or if it was always that low. I checked all the ground points in the engine bay and cleaned them up but no change.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

ECU needs to match what injectors are getting.

Barton

Yup I've made sure that they are matching so that's all good but it still annoys me that I've got such a large voltage drop on the ECU power supply compared to other cars. A few other NAs that I've helped get running on megasquirt all measure around 13.6V at the ECU. I guess I should just stop thinking about it and move on with my life lol.

Barton

Received my new muffler and cat in the post. I chose a 3" Magnaflow 200cell cat and a Dynomax VT muffler. Not sure how quiet it's going to be since the muffler isn't that big but I'll see how it goes. I'd like to keep it as quiet as possible to avoid attention from cops.
I also still need to clock the turbo and test fit it so I can measure up the inter-cooler pipes I need to buy. Unfortunately I probably won't have time to do it until November


Here are some more shots of the manifold. Stock heat shield bolts up to it

Barton

Test fitted the turbo manifold to see what bends I need for the inter-cooler pipes. It sits nice and low and hopefully will be quite hidden with the heat shield over the top.




I also installed the msm bilsteins in the front. Looks like I might need helper springs to get it to the height I want since the springs lose preload when the suspension droops.

Barton

I added a sequential injection board to my ECU and will soon have a TinyIOx board to add as well for digital wideband input. Since the board gives me extra outputs I could use to activate VICS and the rad fan should I bother wiring up sequential spark as well? Might just do it anyway because I can.


Got a list of things to do hopefully over the next month
-Install 3.9 OBX LSD
-Rewire harness for NB cam and crank sensors and sequential injection
-Install FM 36-2 trigger wheel
-Cut inter-cooler pipes to size
-Drill sump for oil return
-Weld up exhaust

LSD waiting to go in (really need to clean up the rear housing)


Mock up of hot side inter-cooler pipes. Need to cut everything down to the correct lengths.

Barton

I picked up a cheap ms2v3.57 board, TinyIOx and sequential board to replace my diypnp. Not too sure how to mount the TinyIOx inside the case yet or whether to make a separate case for it.


My car is also now turbo!
Drilling and tapping the oil pan was a lot less painless than I thought and very straight forward. For the moment I don't have an intercooler but the piping to add it will arrive next week.

Sump drilled and tapped.


Fitting added. I used some sealant around it to make sure it doesn't leak.


Looking very OEM with the heat shield.


Also installed an AGI precision hardtop only roll bar with door bars.

Barton

Got round to mounting my inter-cooler and piping. Mounted it using aluminium brackets to secure it from the top and bottom. Intake temps are quite nice now sitting around 10-20 above ambient.




I also fixed a noise issue I've been having with my sensors. I was helping a friend install an Adaptronic e440d in a na6 and noticed in the instructions it said to cut a sensor ground wire located at the back of the intake manifold which would eliminate a ground loop. Cutting it removed almost all of the noise I was getting.

Before:

After:

hornetball

iTrader: (4)

Nice work.

G3ML1NGZ

very nice. Things look pretty well thought out

Barton

So I realised I've been having an electical issue causing the voltage reading that megasquirt sees to fluctuate wildly causing my dead times to be off. I narrowed it down to the LC-2 wideband ground at the ECU since unplugging the wideband gave me a stable voltage. I moved the widebands power and ground to the window switches which cleared up the voltage reading at the ECU but introduced a bit of noise in the AFR signal (also raising or lowering the windows affected the reading lol). Installing the TinyIOx board solved the AFR noise issue though and I can't believe how stable the signal is now. Digital ftw! Also after looking at the oem wiring diagram I noticed the diyautotune instructions for the IAT sensor gets you to ground the sensor at power ground and not signal ground so that was also fixed up. Sooo now I have some pretty noise free sensor readings

Before:


Wideband moved and IAT ground fixed:


Digital wideband input:


I re-purposed an audio splitter case for the TinyIOx since that's all I had lying around. Works fine for the moment.


aaand scored myself some SSR formula mesh wheels for quite cheap

stefanst

iTrader: (1)

Looks good!
But it also looks like your alternator isn't charging.

Barton

It would seem that way looking at the logs but the voltage at the ECU is lower than the voltage being output by the alternator. Not sure what is causing the voltage drop though. I've tested the voltage at the battery and the alternator and both read around 14V or so. Not really an issue since the voltage at the injectors is also the same as at the ECU.

Barton

Recently installed an MS3x ECU I put together. Heaps more features than the ms2 although I'm not using a lot of them yet. I'm planning on adding a number of sensors including GM flex fuel sensor, oil pressure, oil temp and VSS as well as sequential injection and ignition outputs. To make it easier all the extra inputs/outputs that aren't on the factory loom will go through a spare ECU plug I have from a nb8a loom.



The MS3 seems to have completely smoothed my battery voltage signal compared to what I had before. Very smooooth sensor inputs however my AFRs seem to fluctuate a bit. Possibly exhaust leak or something else I haven't considered?

Barton

My AFR fluctuations seemed to have disappeared which is good although I've no idea what caused it. May have been an issue with the LC-2, I'm not sure.
I had the opportunity to get my car on a dyno and mess around with my tune. Unfortunately I forgot to gap my spark plugs down so was misfiring at around 6500-7000rpm and I didn't have enough time to start messing with the ignition table.





Ignore the RPM scale since the dyno wasn't setup correctly to match the wheel speed with RPM. I doubt the power figures (kw) are accurate but it was done with a correction factor of 1.



Intake temps climb quite a bit during pulls.

Good shot of my "stealth" engine bay. The pod filter is a bit of a giveaway.

Barton

Made a new injector loom from the NB one that came with my engine. Stripped all the crap off it, crimped on new USCAR connectors to suit the new 1000cc injectors and terminated it with a deutsch plug. Eventually I'll get round to sticking it in the car and upgrading to sequential injection.

Barton

Fitten the 1000cc injectors and the new loom and switched over to sequential injection. Also made a LS2 ignition coil loom and fitted them using a bracket Beavis kindly made for me. Now time to turn up the boost.

Barton

Instead of running new wires from the ECU to the engine bay I've been re-purposing any spare wires I can. I've used two spare pins 4O and 4K, on the AFM for the two extra injectors wires and moved the fuel pump trigger to 1K (TEN) in the diagnostics box and jumped it to F/P to turn on the fuel pump.

Barton

Recently got round to upgrading my brakes. Nothing huge, just NB8A brakes using my old na6 calipers since I got them for free. Hopefully I won't be needing anything bigger just yet.





Also fitted a flex fuel sensor. Just have to find some time to set it up and fill up with some e85.