I figured out what was causing flat shift to end early. I had basically narrowed it down to the clutch switch and I had looked at that signal previously, but not with enough resolution. Shout out to @redursidae because sure enough, at 1000 HZ sampling rate you can see the clutch switch signal bounce for a split second.




I have been using a 10 MS validation time and you can see here that the signal is bounding about 14 MS after the shift is started. I scrubbed through the rest of the log (keep in mind this is just city driving and I wasn't actually flatshifting at all) and found at least one other place where the signal bounced about 50 MS after the clutch was engaged. It only seems to bounce when the switch is engaged or disengaged, and not during steady state, so that's good. It also seems to happen mostly coming out of 3rd gear, but I have to assume that's just me imagining things, as I can't see how the clutch switch would know what gear was engaged.

So from here I suppose I might clean the clutch switch and increase the validation time. I definitely want to collect more data and get this consistent because I don't think I'll actually use it if I'm missing shifts all the time.

Outside of that I tinkered with the car a bit this weekend. Cleaned up some places where hoses were rubbing and noted some pretty good gouges/abrasion on one intercooler pipe which will probably be remedied in the offseason. The patchwork on the drivers seat started to lose it's adhesion on our Montana trip so I grabbed some from Walmart and bandaged it up. Who knows how much longer this seats going to hang on. At the rate it's going I think it'll be more black than red by the time I get a new one.











I also added some of everyone's favorite blue coroplast to the underside of what I'm calling the intake diaper. I've been thinking, and a friend commented recently, that the materials seems like it could pretty easily get sucked around the filter and limit airflow. This should keep it rigid enough to prevent that.

I really need to do some back to back comparisons to see if this (and the whole air box/shield) is doing anything for me. It basically blocks off an entire hood vent, so I'm not sure if it's helping more than it's hurting. I did run some of Top Gun without it, so I will probably see if I can glean anything from those datalogs.







And finally, one of my favorite new mods for the car that I picked up on our way home from Montana.



Oh yeah, and I have picked up a new squeak. I only get it when reversing out of the garage, but it's a pretty loud squeak/squeal like rubber rubbing on something. I did some investigation last weekend but didn't find anything, so I'm going to keep an eye on that. I'm hoping it's not the bushings starting to lose their grease.

 

Damn, thought I responded to your last post but I guess I didn't. Congrats on the result! I think I remember you posting this venue last year. That's a fast autoX course!

Funny you'd mention you didn't flat shift at the event but you'll use it on the street. I'm the opposite for some reason. I'll take it easy on the street but once the green flag comes out, I'm mashing that clutch for all 0.3 seconds per lap it's worth

Good diag on the clutch signal issue as well

 

Well that wasn't too hard. Ran out to the garage, pulled the clutch switch, sprayed some contact cleaner in it and reinstalled it. The clutch pedal had almost no travel in it when I went to check how the sensor engagement looked, almost like it was the brake pedal instead of the clutch pedal...

So after cleaning the brake light switch I then found the correct switch and pulled that. There are 4 tabs that hold the clutch switch housing together, so I could actually pull it apart pretty easily unlike the brake switch. The mechanism is fairly simple, and nothing looked terrible, but there was a bit of crud on some parts of the contacts, so I sprayed everything down with some contact cleaner and slapped it back together. With some big channel locks it's pretty easy to bend the little tabs back down around the housing.







I'll check the logs in the next day or two to see if there's any change in the switch behavior. I'm going to guess it'll look about the same on account of the fact that this is just a really old switch that's probably not intended to be operating precisely in the 10's of milliseconds range.

Side note, more 3d printing content. I noticed that the lower clutch "blue thingy" was missing, and of course there's a file online. A couple cents of filament later and about 10 minutes and we've got a replacement.

Lower clutch pedal bumper, aka "blue thingy"


I also redesigned the garage door opener case I made a while back. The old one, printed in PLA, had warped a bit and the design was pretty rudimentary. On this iteration I added a little button, tightened up the hole in the front and rounded all the edges. I also printed in PETG this time so it shouldn't warp in the warm weather.




Snug as a bug in a rug. Surprisingly it doesn't rattle around when driving.

 

I'm glad you found the culprit for that flatshift issue. Hopefully cleaning the switch does the trick and you don't need a large validation time. I would be interested to know how a longer validation time feels to you though. Since the validation is done at the activation of the switch, not the de-activation, so you may end up with a large validation time to skip this bounce. An option you could test is to send the Clutch switch through a GP output with an off delay just longer than your bounce.

And funny about the "blue thingy". A long time ago mine was also missing and I ended up printing that same file you got haha. I dig the garage door opener that fits in the little pocket. Very neat.

 

Well, it isn't always shiny new parts and go fast bits... I figured with a track day looming, and more and more preventative maintenance items coming to mind that I should probably dig into the car and do some inspecting.

The coolant return line from the turbo had worn through the outer layer of insulation which was pointed out to me recently. I zip tied some old hose around that for a while, but figured it was worth replacing that. The heatshields for the turbo and the air filter take up a lot of space on the drivers side of the car and obscure a lot from view, so I pulled both of those to get better access.


I find the color gradient on the manifold to be interesting. Not sure if that's related to the extra heat trapped by the heat shield.

Both of the 2560's I've had usually have a bit of oil here when I pull the filter. Not sure if that's normal, but it hasn't caused an issue for me.


Crazy how much space there seems to be when you take away an air filter. I also find it interesting to see what parts have changed colors and which haven't. There's a mishmash of hardware in here and some of it behaves differently. Some of the turbo studs are blue, some have retained their gold color. Same thing with the Vband, parts have shifted color and other have stayed the same.






Probably overkill, but I figured while I was in there I wanted to see what the oil drain hose looked like. I always felt like this hose was just barely long enough and it has a pretty tight clearance to one of the brackets on the engine (AC I think). I figured pulling the turbo would allow me to get better access to the coolant line I was going to replace anyway and I could get better access to check out the hardware on the turbo.




So that guy was just dangling on there doing nothing. That's always the hardest nut to get to as well, so I suppose it was worth pulling the rest of it apart. You can also see some of the crud left behind from the anti-seize I applied to the vband. I still needed to pry the vband clamp off of the flanges, but it seemed easier than before, so I think I'm going to keep doing that.

I haven't had the car pulled this far apart in a while, but it gave me much better access to the area behind the timing cover as well. Everything has a nice film of oil on it, so we'll see how many seals/gaskets I throw at this thing in the winter. Some of the wet spots are from the coolant line swap. I didn't have a good place to put the coolant, so I just spilled some instead of draining the system.


Valve cover leaks

Everything else leaks too

And finally, the only thing that was actually accomplished here, the coolant hose I replaced. I don't think it looks as bad in the photos, but either way, I'd rather throw $5 of hose at it than try to replace/fix this on the side of the road or at the track.






I opted to pinch the new hose in the guide that I was using. Previously the hose could move through the P clamp pretty freely, but now it's pretty secure.





Not sure why changing a coolant hose requires 15 photos, but it's what you get. Thankfully the oil drain line looked fine, so that was a relief considering I don't think I have enough hose on hand to replace it. I'll probably throw everything back together later today. I realized the air filter looked pretty gross when I pulled it, so I might take a bit of time to scrub that up as well.

Next up is to investigate the squealing I'm getting when backing out of the garage. I was thinking power steering, but moving the rack through the full range of motion while stationary didn't recreate the noise, so I'm not sure now. I'll be swapping brake pads (and possibly rotors) before the track day as well, so I'll probably do a deeper inspection while I'm in the wheel well.

 

All said and done nothing looks bad in there. But now that you have the turbo off.. might as well slap a new one on right?



Sorry, that's the kind of logic that gets me everytime, so I'm pushing it on you. Probably not enough time to get a new turbo in hand anyways.

 

If I had one on hand then sure, but waiting for something to get here would put the car down for a while and I like driving this thing too much. I agree though, feels a bit silly to do all this when it's going to be required for a new turbo whenever that happens.

Like I said, it's not always shiny go fast bits

 

As someone who likes cramming cramming too much work into too tight of a timeframe, I also vote that you order that PTX right now and get it done with

Looking good, sometimes getting in there just to make sure you're not about to have a failure is worth the hours put in.

 

Like I said man, sometime maintenance is just maintenance...

So anyways, I figured while I was in there it was probably worth throwing on this new 2860. It just randomly showed up on my doorstep yesterday so I figured why not





Aint no way I'm pulling a turbo just for fun lol. A handful of these showed up with stateside shipping the other week so I pulled the trigger. Did I really need it? Probably not, but I found enough ways to justify it to myself. I spent most all of yesterday afternoon and night working on getting it installed. First I ported the wastegate. Looking back on it I feel like I was just cosplaying as someone who was porting a wastegate. Fireindc had issues holding boost pressure and knowing that my clutch is going to be towards it's limit even on lower boost levels I figured I'd give it a shot.





We'll see how much that does for me. I got the 7.4 PSI (0.5 bar?) spring in the wastegate. I read online that enlarging the hole was both the correct way to do this and something you shouldn't do under any circumstances. I played around with making a bit of a channel to the wastegate as well and smoothing the transition to the wastegate hole. It was pretty smooth already but I think I made a slight improvement. Again, this was more of me playing around than anything.

Next up was the lack of a port for the wastegate vacuum line. The old turbo that was on the car had a port on the compressor outlet that I had been using. Instead of trying to get a bung welded to the intercooler piping or something along those lines I opted to drill and tap a 1/8 NPT hole into the compressor housing. If you enjoy being stressed out of your mind I highly recommend doing this job.




I stuffed that shop rag in right before the bit finally broke through which worked really well to catch the bit and prevent me from gouging the inside of the housing. This location seemed like the best place because the casting boss (not sure if that's the right word or not) allowed the fitting to be threaded in without protruding into the compressor much, if at all. I figured that would have less of an impact on the flow out of the compressor.

So then we got to the fun part. After cleaning all of the metal shavings out of everything the turbo got reassembled and I started working on getting it clocked. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, why the hell do turbo's have different threads for the compressor and exhaust housing?! When I pulled everything apart some of the bolts had thread sealer of some kind on them and were hard to remove. All the bolts were the same size head and length, so I assumed they were the same thread pitch as well. When I was reassembling the housings I assumed that the bolts weren't threading easily because they were gunked up. Nope, I was just casually using an impact driver to cross thread some bolts in. That was a heart sinking moment. I only got 1 of the bolts very far in before realizing that. Thankfully the threads weren't fucked too badly because I was still able to get everything back together, but holy **** that was a frustrating and stressful realization.

Well... with the way the turbo needs to be clocked for the IC piping the wastegate fouls on the compressor outlet. I figured I could pull a bracket or something off the old turbos I have lying around, but those ones both have mounting locations on the front of the compressor housing while the new one doesn't.

At this point I'm fairly caffeinated and feeling stressed/rushed to get the job done (not really sure why), but I start thinking of a bunch of hairbrained schemes to get the car back together. I figured out that I could get the arm pretty close if I flipped the bracket around, but it still left the arm a bit short even fully unthreaded.



At some point I decided I could cut the reinforcement gusset on the bracket and bend it. Well... no I couldn't. Maybe if I had a vice I could have, but even smacking the thing with a 2 lb metal hammer did nothing to it. I've been playing tennis on Thursday evenings lately, so when the time rolled around for that I decided that taking a break to get some air and exercise would be good.

I get back from tennis and realize, I could just use a compressor housing bracket from my old turbo, get some washers and longer bolts at HDR and space out the bracket.


For anyone who also wants to be an engineer, I used 1" 5/16-18 bolts and 8 (I think) washers stacked on each side with one of those weird turbo housing brackets on the far end (photo later in the thread).

So, swap over the coolant and oil fittings, fumble around with the turbo studs (holy **** I can see the appeal of VBand turbo housings even more now), and eventually the turbo is on. The intercooler coupler that comes off the compressor doesn't fit quite right since the other compressor outlet sat quite a bit higher, but I managed to get everything fitted for now. I also think the downpipe seems to be much happier for some reason. I used to need a jack to get the exhaust lifted up and had to really wrestle with the vband to get it clamped, but it was pretty easy to do by hand with the new turbo.

At this point it's about midnight or just after. I figured I'd take it down the road a little ways. Nothing was leaking on startup, she smelled smoky, but that's not unusual with all the oil/grease burning off the housings. Well... she was still pretty smoky after ~5-10 minutes, so I pulled over and popped the hood to check things out. There was a lot of oil sitting on top of the CHRA.


Damn, look at those "custom" cuts to the wastegate bracket.

I used the provided oil restrictor that Pulsar includes which is a 1mm or 0.040" restrictor. I ended up pulling that back out this morning and cleaning up all the fittings I was using. I also checked the drain line to make sure it wasn't kinked, as it's just barely long enough to wrap around the compressor bracketry for the AC. Fired her up and no luck. After a minute or two of idling there was a small amount of oil starting to come back up through the restrictor.






When I got my old 2560 I just used the fittings that Watterson had on there because I figured it had worked for him. When I checked this morning I realized there wasn't a restrictor there. I think I'll try running the turbo with no restrictor next and see what that does. If it's still leaking then I'm going to suspect the oil drain line, but if not I'll probably run with no restrictor or get one that's slightly larger. Pulsar recommends keeping the turbo around 40-45 PSI at max speed, and my car will make around 60 PSI hot at redline.



I didn't get into any real boost on that first drive since I wasn't sure about how everything was working and I didn't want to get stranded at 12:30 in the morning, but holy hell this thing whistles. I didn't have my airbox on which muffled my old turbo a good deal, but even cruising at 2500-3000 RPM this thing is loud as hell. Honestly I can't imagine I'd want to street drive this turbo at that volume, much less road trip it. I think the box will muffle it a good deal, but if not I might have to make some changes to the intake setup.

Pulsar's marketing team be like (42 seconds in, links don't seem to work quite right here)

 

As soon as I saw the YouTube link in my email, I knew I was in for a treat. So unexpected




Haha, you sly f*cker! I wish I could double up on cats to give you. I seriously just showed one of my buddies the whistle tips video last week lol.

In for VD pulls and clutch-melting results.

 

Haha, I was grinning to myself when you guys were saying I should just throw a 2860 on while I had things apart. I mean, come on, I can let @Fireindc have all the fun

Yeah, once I get this oiling issue figured out then we'll be getting some numbers estimated. I'm hoping to see what it'll hold on wastegate and go from there. Hopefully not much more than Fire's making because I think much past 270 WHP and the clutch is going to be questionable. Fire's making ~260 at low boost IIRC.

Fire, did you use the provided restrictor when you installed your turbo?

 

Update, pulled the restrictor and added a straight through fitting, no oil seemed to be leaking from the feed, drain or compressor after ~5 minutes of idling and some revs. I think I'll just run it like this for the time being.

 

Oh man, YOU GOT ME. That's hilarious, I felt bad suggesting you get that new turbo while you had things apart. I'm the same way, and it was the main reason I went with a new turbo. I had to pull the old one off to fix the drain, which was cracking and horrible/leaky.

I absolutely used the restrictor that came with my Pulsar. It was slightly smaller than my old restrictor, which was specced for my gt2860 (also ball bearing). But IIRC garret recommends a .035-.040 restrictor for any motor that makes over 60psi of oil pressure.

I've done quite a bit of research of the years on this, and IMO a ball bearing turbo definitely needs a restrictor on a BP. IMO this also explains the oil you see in your compressor, it's crazy to me that you ran that gt2560rs (ball bearing) for that long without one. Typically this will push oil past the seals and can ruin the turbo over time. I'm not sure why yours leaks with the restrictor though, as mine worked great outta the box with the provided restirctor.

As for the rest of your porting shennigans, I pulled mine apart with every intention to port it. Once I saw how limited the wastegate flap gave me access to the hole when fully open I NOPED out, as most the material I needed to remove was in a hard to reach spot up/behind the flap. I was afraid I'd marr up the WG flap, sealing surface, or both. I think you did a fine job considering. Props on the rest of the work, once I had that turbo in my hand I couldn't bring myself to throw metal shavings all over and opted to just install it.

I will also note that it's generally better to get your boost reference from the TB side of the IC piping. You are more likely to see PSI droop (on wastegate) if referenced there, due to the pressure drop across the I/C. With EBC this is kinda a non-issue now days, but back in the day on wastgate or MBC you'd always see a drop in PSI at high rpms if you sourced it off the hotside.

 

Good to know. I just ran to a company lunch without the restrictor and everything seemed fine (only about 5 minutes each way), but I'll do some research over the next week or so and see what I can figure out. I believe @Watterson02 put around 30K miles on that old 2560, presumably without a restrictor, which is how I got it.

The weird thing to me is that the turbo would leak with the restrictor and not leak with it. It seems like the restrictor would limit the overall flow but increase the pressure it flows at (like putting your finger over a garden hose). Granted that doesn't make sense considering the restrictor is supposed to help with higher oil pressure. I guess I need to do some more reading. Regardless, I would expect the increased flow without the restrictor to cause a leak more than the other way around. I suppose I can assume the issue isn't my drain line though.

I mostly went with that wastegate signal location because that's what my old one was setup for. I did briefly look at some other options but this seemed like the easiest. On the upside, I can always throw a 1/8 NPT plug in there in the future if I really want to change it up.

 

Oh by all means I don't think you are going to have an issue immediately, or anything like that. But I would say that both Pulsar and Garrett recommend the restictor on their ball bearing turbos, so I'd suggest running one. Typically the leak from an overpressure situation would be into the CHRA and out the exhaust, or into the intake area.

 

That's what I assume as well, over time I'm sure it's not great but I'm guessing it'll be fine for a week or two. I'll definitely try to get it sorter sooner or later.

I did check the turbo inlet after running without the restrictor and it was dry, so I think we're OK so far. Highest oil pressure is usually right at startup, so while I haven't pushed the turbo at all yet, I think it's seen the highest pressure it should in daily use.

I might start another thread about the restrictor once I've done some more research on it.

 

Drove the car a good amount this weekend and got some boost control settings dialed in. Not super stoked on how much the boost controller is needed to flatten out the boost curve but I assume that once I've got everything setup I won't care that much. I went out last night and did some pulls to try to get an idea of how much of a taper was needed to flatten out the curve. I found that about 30% duty cycle over the rev range would keep things flat.

I changed the boost control tables since taking this log, but the overall taper is about the same. The log below was on the DC 2 taper.




Unfortunately after doing some of these pulls I smelled a good amount of oil burning and pulled over to find my CHRA leaking. I actually took the car to a show that my buddies church was putting on earlier that day. I did about 2 hours of highway driving without issue. At this point I'm thinking that the fitting simply loosened up, but I decided to redo the oil drain line since I was a bit suspicious of the old one. I had some used oil line lying around so I was able to cut that down. The Evil Energy fuel line I had been using was actually in decent shape. I think the DEI heat shield I used helped a good deal because I used the same line for my catch can and I recently found it to be dried and easy to crack, presumably from heat rising off the manifold.

Old versus new seen below. I ended up pulling the turbo back off after struggling and not being able to get the drain line onto the barb fitting properly. I threw some of the DEI heat shield onto the new line as well, although the new stuff is way thicker than the old.




I decided to throw the restrictor back in as well and when I went to pull the oil feed line it seemed like the unrestrictor was loose. I'm still not sure if that loosened up when I was removing the rest of the feed fittings. With the restrictor in place I'm still seeing a leak. I created a new thread to hopefully get some theory answers if nothing else. In the meantime I ordered 2 more restrictors from Amazon and will see if either of those fix the issue, if not I guess I'll just return them.

I should also mention that I randomly had another restrictor from Pulsar in my box of spares which leaked worse than the first one.

Autocross is happening this weekend, so if nothing is figured out by then I'll try running the unrestricted adapter for the time being. Hoping to have closed loop boost control roughly dialed in by then as well.

 

Sorry to hear! how tight are you going on those restrictors? They are of course flare fittings and should seal without thread sealant. How's the flare fitting on the turbo side look?

I snugged mine up (no clue on tq, but just snug + 1/4 turn) and it never gave me a lick of trouble.

And for me, I found the opposite with my boost control. I had to wayyyyy lower my duty cycle requirements. Though I suspect that's more of a change of the wastegate than anything else.

 

I tried really tight (a bit tighter than I felt comfortable with) and just snug but noticed no difference. I went and bought thread sealer but I ended up skipping it since it seemed like a bandaid and I figured if anything it was going to end up causing more issues.

I guess I'd need to go and look at my old boost controller settings. For me it's mostly the taper that's annoying. I used to taper up a bit to combat boost sag but now I'm tapering down like crazy to get boost to be stable. I'm not sure how much boost I'll be able to make now without a good amount of creep in higher RPMs, but we'll see.

 

Oh, I see, yeah tapering down. I re-looked at your table and it makes sense now. That's because that turbo is super efficient and wants to flow a lot up top. I think it will be fine as long as you keep it above where it tends to creep to. Interested to see!

The way I see it, too much boost is a good problem to have! I used to have to do the opposite and add in a TON of duty cycle to keep a flat boost curve above 17-18psi. Now my duty cycle looks closer to yours, but it really flattened out once I got above the boost creep range. 18+psi and duty cycle is pretty flat there.