Liquidog

Hey all. Short background on the car - 1990 with a 1.8 and a small IHI turbo. DIYPNP built by me. Yellow-top RX8 injectors. A few years ago the timing belt jumped a tooth and in chasing that down, I finally got it started and let it rev too high too soon, and it proceeded to eat a camshaft. The car sat for a few years as I moved it, and myself, from Chicago to LA. I put on a fresh rebuilt head and got things going again. She's running and idling but the tune is terrible. I had the car running ok in Chicago, enough to drive around, but it was never quite right, and the AFRs would bounce around a lot. Now that I have it put together again, it's doing that, but worse. I can't seem to get it right and it just fouls plugs, making restart very difficult. It also tends to die after you give it throttle, unless you blip it a tiny bit before it drops below 1k, to encourage it to stay running. I've watched a lot of tuning videos. I'm stumped and asking for help.

Here's a video of the car running and me attempting to get timing on it. I had the timing ok back in Chicago but it's been difficult to verify now, because the timing marks jump all over the place. It's a new harmonic balancer, a fresh timing belt, and I've checked the timing belt and the tension multiple times. Coils/wires/plugs all new (I pull the plugs every so often while tuning and clean them because they keep fouling with soot.) So in the video the timing is held at 10 degrees in tunerstudio but as you can see I can't get the timing marks to cooperate. I'm guessing it's a symptom of the fact that the revs won't settle. And as you can see, the AFRs and RPMs are all over the place.

Running the car like this will eventually result in the plugs looking like this. It doesn't take more than a few minutes either.


Here's a data log and my current tune. The datalog is for the next start and run AFTER the video above. I start off with the timing still at fixed 10 degrees, but then I change it to table so you guys can see how it behaves without the fixed timing.

I'm sure that despite my best efforts I have borked this up somehow. Thanks in advance for your help.