Dammit your lows are higher than our highs. But as a bonus, I have no drive to drive the summer car for 4-5 months out of the year so its much less painful to make it non-running for a large amount of time.

Here is how the engine bay sits for now. I need to make some sort of intake box and would like to make some heat shielding for the brakes as well.



Attachment 134995

She is running smoothly. I need to get lots of miles on her before I dyno it in two weeks. Good thing I have a long commute to help me out with that.

I have no idea how you kept that white manifold so clean. I gave up and VHTd mine black.

Looking good man! :party:

Lol, it isn't really... The lighting washed it out in the picture. It has blood, oil, and other random spots all over it. It also has a bunch other random metallic drips on it from (I am guessing) melted aluminum seeping out of the ceramic coating.

The car is running smooth and strong as i work my way through seating the piston rings. I have been working on getting the VVT portion of the build to work smoothly before my dyno time next week, but am running into some tuning woes. I am using an Adaptronic e420c on firmware revision 12

This morning i tried an expirament with the VVT solenoid. I am finding that the angle of cam advance responds quite sharply to increase in duty cycle. So the goal here was to create similar running conditions and move through the duty cycle range of the solenoid for each PWM frequency. The goal is to see which frequency gave the most controlled response.
100Hz makes a good bit of noise, so I feel it is safe to assume that is out of the normal range of this solenoid. I kept the engine running at light load between 3000 and 3500 RPM and cycled through the DC range for 200Hz, 250Hz, 500Hz, 1000Hz and 2000Hz and logged the results. (.ecu tune and .csv log shown below) I tried to keep each frequency limited to one cycle up and down the DC range but the PID stepped in from time to time giving my DC a bit of a jump. Either way, you should be able to easily see a clear separation between each frequency test starting at 200Hz and ending on 2000Hz. Look at the VVT1 (°), VVT1Set, and VVT1Duty data tags in the log.

In conclusion, out of all frequency ranges, I am going to get a sharp rise in cam advance once i am 1%DC beyond the threshold for that particular frequency. The steps seem to be less dramatic with the lower frequencies though. So i feel it is best to start trying to tune the PID with the 200Hz PWM.

One oddity that i noted when at the higher ranges of advance (total range should be >0* and <48*) is that the angle would randomly jump to ~80* advance. I am not sure what is causing this error, but i would like to find a way to isolate and eliminate it since it will surely mess things up a bit for the PID to properly control VVT actuation.

I will continue to tune the PID from this starting point. Let me know if you have any tuning advice or have any ideas about eliminating the angle jump fault.

Cheers,
Jared

Ask in the ecu section what people with MS are running as the frequency, the solenoid was designed for a specific frequency, if its performing poorly at that frequency you should tune the VVT PID rather than the frequency. Make sure you do the VVT PID tuning with up to temp oil, it need different setting based on oil viscosity.

The weird jump to 80° is probably a timing error. What does the adaptronic have for cam and crank signal filtering? I had to add an external low pass filter to my EMS4 because the filtering built into the unit could not handle how noisy the miata signals are.

cool, i will ask in the ECU section after work. from what i saw in the megasquirt secion, they were running a variety of different PWM frequencies. I saw posts with everything from 200-600Hz range.

I will definately be tuning in the PID functions soon, and of course all testing is done with hot oil. This is the first time i started using VVT on this car so i felt it was important to establish a baseline for what solenoid conditions provided different results.

I am not sure what signal filtering is available on the Adaptronic. I will start looking there to see what options are available to me.

Interesting note; while the rings are still sealing on a new built motor, TSE recommends using a non-synthetic oil without friction modifiers. Like this:

Attachment 135373

TSE recommended Rotella 15w40. I thought that would be too thick since my current ambient temperature in PA is around 20° -40°F. So I used this oil which met the criteria:

Attachment 135374

This was the wrong choice... When this oil gets up to operating temp, it doesn't maintain enough viscosity to provide oil pressure below 1400 rpm. I don't want to idle above 1500, so I just switched over to the Rotella

I am not sure if this is an issue with the quality of oil, VVT and turbo feed demand, a change to internal clearances during the build, or some other combination of factors.

Using rotella the engine does make a bit of noise on a cold start. But I think I will have to just deal with it for now. When I switch to synthetic I will try Amsoil Dominator 10w30. If that has the same issue, I will switch to the 15w50 in the same brand.

So for now we are looking at 270 whp.

Attachment 135900

The stock fuel pump can't support any more than 10psi out of this turbo. This is using the low pressure wastegate actuator with minimal preload. VICS, VVT, and EBC seem to be functioning well. I think the wastegate is blowing open a little on the bottom end with such minimal preload.

CONGRATS!!

270 out of only 10psi reminds me yet again how awesome this setup is

The main reason why rotella T6 is recommended is because it's higher Zinc or ZDDP content. Zinc helps with wear on Cams and other parts (if I remember correctly). It used to be a standard additive to oil but they took it out at some point because it's bad for the catalytic converters. Rotella T6 is a diesel formula oil which is why it still has the high Zinc content.

Here's some info on modern oils and ZDDP.

http://www.valvoline.com/faqs/motor-oil/racing-oil/

Hot damn, congrats for sure. That's pretty much exactly what I'm looking for as well. Good show! :bigtu:
This reinforces my hopes and fears about the "Low" WGA. Though TBH I'd be totally happy with that torque curve on CA91 with the "Low." I feel even I could drive that with some mechanical empathy.
I'd like to point out that TSE recommends the Rotella T 15w40 for BREAK IN. The Rotella T is a dinosaur oil as opposed to the Rotella T6 that is a full synthetic. Also, there is a bunch of scuttlebutt out there saying the formulation of T6 was changed not long ago to remove some of the zinc/ZDDP. Props on the Amsoil Dominator, another choice might be Valvoline VR1 depending on availability. Of course that is $$$ oil as opposed to us T6 cheapskates running $ oil. :giggle:

The real problem with T6 is that the film strength is terrible I would not choose to run it in a motor that sees north of 5k rpms regularly.

Yarr. I'll probably switch to one of the two I mentioned after breakin.

Something else to note, I feel that there is a large portion under the curve that could be tuned better here. After looking at the ignition and VVT maps, it doesn't look much like what others have posted up here on MT.net. The driveablity of it could also use some work in the vacuum range.

Either I am annoying as hell, or the tuner just didn't want to listen to me. He completely ignored most of what I set up and was telling him.

I will only make minor adjustments to fix the driveablity of it and to smooth out the PID functions for now. If I find any detectable ping I will add some safetynet for that as well. Next time I am at a dyno, I will tune it my self to see how far off his tune really is.

At this event in 2014 I blew up the last engine. Things are going much better this time around!


I think this was my best run of the day: