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I like a little **** talking in motorsports, and I see why Ryan thought wingman's congrats was underhanded. I do hope we get a record setting 1.6 car out of this though! Ryan's old turbo car back in the day was fast, and I know he's fast.
Started out REALLY poorly.
For the last few weeks I've been chasing intermittent battery/idle issues. Basically, car would *normally* start and idle fine. But as operating temperature came up, the idle would become more and more lumpy, rough and rich. Sometimes it would get so bad the car would oscillate itself into stalling. With some RPM's while moving it would be... mostly smooth, but still pretty jerky down low. In addition, battery voltage indication in the ECU would start jumping around. Instead of holding a steady 14v, it would oscillate around 12v-13.5v, and sometimes while cranking battery voltage would drop all the way down to 7v and everything shuts down at that point.
Oddly enough, the Haltech dash would hold a steady 14v during all this, so it wasn't seeing the voltage fluctuations the ECU was. I rang out a ton of wiring, swapped relays, fuses, switches, replaced/redid a few key connections/wires, but couldn't solve it. I got so deep I started messing with valve lash thinking that I had made it to tight and the valves were being held open slightly when hot causing my bad idle, which was messing with alternator charging... No dice, idle and battery issues persisted, so I said **** it and swapped to a lithium NOCO battery(******* awesome by the way, super light, amps for daaays) thinking I had damaged the OEM one during an alternator failure that spiked everything to 16v a few weeks ago(whole other story). And that... had zero effect. GAH!
Finally it was THE DAY of the dyno and I HAD to sort this out. So I spent 4hrs in the garage digging through wiring, replacing anything that looked even slightly suspect, cleaning grounds, cleaning and reseating connectors. Still no dice... untill, with car running, I saw something momentarily arc all the way back on my main battery buss.
You see that one brownish ring terminal right next to the main leads? It was ******* loose, rattling around, and intermittently arcing. And what did that particular wire feed? Oh, just my entire ECU/Engine harness relay. Coils, injectors, every sensor, ECU, wideband. Literally the entire nervous system of the car.
I cleaned and tightened that terminal. Fired the car back up and holy crap it idled smoooooth again.
The good news: I found and fixed the issue, car acted normal again.
The bad news: the last two weeks of tuning I had done was garbage. Would yah believe it, but with a steady voltage supply, everything behaved soooo much differently than it had with voltage bouncing around like an ADHD toddler hyped up on sucrose.
I was out of time for any street tuning. I did two quick pulls and 3min of idle adjustments to kinda kick the tune into the right zipcode, and it was time to load it onto the trailer for the great journey.
It was dyno time.
Last time I was here car made 404whp/375tq on 14psi. When I hit that 400whp number back in 2022 I kinda freaked a little and stopped right there. I've always suspected there was a lot more power in it just from spark, so after a baseline pull(17psi) of 440whp/370tq and some cam tuning to reset the VVT, I started adding ignition timing to it. Ended up adding 6* of additional spark angle before it stopped making power on just spark, no additional boost. Jeez, I really pussied out last time.
Then it was adding boost. 35 pulls and 3hrs later I was pushing 28PSI and hit what would end up being peak for the night. 527whp/445tq.
35 pulls? Why so many? Well several things were going on here.
1. Fuel tuning was hot flaming garbage due to the aforementioned issues and lack of time to street retune. I'd have to do 3-4 pulls just to get fueling to somewhere I was happy with, then do 2-3 pulls playing with spark, then add in ~40kpa of boost and do it all over again, starting at 220kpa and going all the way up.
2. I still had boost control in open loop. While close enough for street usage... I forgot how differently the dyno loads the car. As a result boost control was all over the place and I was having to do adjustments on the fly to put and hold the boost where I wanted it. Having BC properly working in close loop would have saved me a TON of time here.
And umm... I didn't stop at 35 pulls. The total for the night ended up being 48 pulls and 4 hours. But car started hitting a major ignition breakup around 26psi, you can see even in the above graph the roughness and dips from 5500 up. We spent around an hour trying to push past that with no luck. Swapped for fresh coils, swapped in fresh plugs(with the same .020" gap), let the car cool for a bit... no dice. It just didn't want to and I'm not 100% sure why, as I thought the stock K24 ignition system was pretty stout.
I think with consistent ignition this thing makes 530whp all day long. And I think the turbo is pretty done there as well. I'm not the greatest at reading compressor maps, but I think this is about where I'm at... not at the limit limit, but definitely starting to drop off the edge.
First world problems, "ohhh nooo my Miata only made 530whp". All things considered, that's still going to be a handful in this short wheelbase, 2200lb car. The motor I built in my garage gave me zero issues* and took the power like a champ, and with some ignition fixing/upgrades, its gonna have a mean powerband.
"zero issues" he says...
Saw this when it came off the dyno... Uhh... don't know where this oil came from... must be the horsepowers leaking out of the engine...
K24 harmonics snapped my alternator tensioner in the weirdest way possible... that gap *did* have a steel threaded bolt in it... apparently it broke that eyelet in TWO places. Wat.
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that the additional 120whp on track is gonna take some getting used to anyways, and that magic 600whp number will not be missed after your first lap, lol.
Congrats on the successful dyno day. You must be stoked to get back on track after a year hiatus haha.
You continue to be a godsend. I've been using generic Home Despot Racing elevator bolts which are terrible quality aluminum(I should know, I've been welding them) with horribly weak threads. And the obvious solution to a stronger tensioner was literally already on the car. I think those should be juuuust long enough for my needs, after doing a quick measurement of the ones already installed.
Ever since Emilio posted pics using their super short NC endlink to brace their Kraken low mount EFR, I've been thinking of random places to use their endlinks. I love how the bodies are short, all 17mm, along with every other benefit they list on their site.
Lots of OTS turn buckles out there used for alternator adjustment out there. The one I used for my turbo bracket is for a "454cid Big Block Chevy". Added some mechanically deformed lock nuts and it's been good all year.
I'm gonna give my take as to what happened here based on the IG story. Hopefully that's not stepping on any toes when OP hasn't given us his perspective.
I feel like your IG description of events is pretty straightforward. A leak probably started at the coolant pump delete plate. The coolant then drained into the crankcase via the oil passage. Eventually the cylinder head got so hot that it warped and/or the head gasket failed. You got water into the cylinders which wasn't hydrolocking when you burnt it off, leading to low EGTs. When the engine was cold and couldn't burn it off, you got hydrolock.
Now for the part that may get me some hate:
Wingman, I don't want to kick you while you're down, but I think a reality check is needed. I may not be the most qualified messenger on here, but I am an automotive engineer and I feel at least one person needs to say it or this forum is doing you a disservice by just being a bunch of cheerleaders and not giving real advice.
The root cause of a complete engine failure appears to be a coolant leak from a part that looks, shall we say, underengineered and hacked together. This is a part that had been engraved and bent as a wing support, repurposed after a crash, welded, bent into shape, and bent back again after getting smacked by a rod. In my mind this part should have been cut from much thicker material, or at least a fresh piece that wasn't engraved on a sealing surface. The stock part is a large and deep casting giving it strength and stiffness. This new part is not just separating oil and coolant. It's holding back pressure when the coolant system is hot and has a cantilevered load from the alternator tensioner that itself has snapped once. These factors all likely combined to start a leak, and it was a cascading failure from there. A small part made from scrap seems to have taken out several thousands of dollars worth of built engine.
I feel there's a theme here of finding quick solutions rather than complete ones. A door latch pull that fails because it's made out of copper electrical wire could be life threatening if it slowed you from getting out of a burning car. The ABS failure due to a lack of heat shielding on a plastic part next to a turbo almost put you in the wall and could have started said fire if it happened differently. Sure, those are unlikely worst case scenarios, but **** happens and they are additional examples of foreseeable safety related failure that happened soon after the first real stress test.
It is easy for me to be an armchair QB, and much harder for you to go out and actually do all this. I've looked at some of your posts and said "That's going to be an issue" before it happens, and now I feel like I should have typed it out and shared my concerns prior to failure. I know you're sharing your failures and successes for us all to learn from, often after you've already had them fail and figured out a more robust fix. I've learned a lot from following along! But if you continue down this path of a largely home designed time attack science project, I think a serious change of mindset on how you design and fabricate parts needs to occur, or you will find more expensive and perhaps life threatening failures.
I hope you bounce back better from this. Truly. I've edited this a few times trying to phrase it as well meaning as I can.
Last edited by OptionXIII; Dec 10, 2024 at 12:14 AM.
I've made a similar conclusion from the IG story FWIW... I'm sure we will learn more here in time.
As far as the second more lengthy half of your response goes, I don't see it as "out of line" as it should be taken as constructive criticism. In a very short summary, I see a lot of this build tracking with the classic "reliable, cheap, fast" decision triangle. In some sense, we are all here because we are too cheap to buy a car that is already faster, so I'm not one to judge too hard for trying to save a dollar here and there within reason lol. As you pointed out, there are few notable areas where "cheap" and "fast" were the selected build triangle avenues for a variety of reasons, so it shouldn't be as surprising when those systems have problems.
Sticking to what I am painfully familiar with (lubrication/cooling systems), I'd find it rather difficult to spend all the time fabricating a custom water pump delete plate from scrap material like Wingman did when a reputable vendor (Tractuff) sells a beefy billet plate for $140 that he's proven out over years of installs. Cooling and oiling systems are not areas to try and save money on as I've learned in my industry time and time again. When either of those systems fail, it generally is a time intensive and/or very expensive repair... unfortunately, hindsight is usually 20/20. Parts link below for future reference...
Seems like more than few of us who are engineers from various industries have reached out to discuss that plate being the likely initial source of the failure. That Tractuff plate definitely looks like the easy button for this problem. I'm not faulting Phillip for what he attempted to do. Sometimes that DIY brain thinks, "I see what they did, but I can do it cheaper."
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