After spending the day at CXC racing at Narrabeen, the car has not been run in anger as it was busy having the expected teething issues that you would find with a build like this. Having all these problems appear before the car in on the dyno being pushed is a good thing as it has already, potentially saved the engine.
There were two oil leaks with one appearing at the start of the day while the second one appeared late in the day. Th first being on the connector for the oil pressure sensor, the second being a pin hole in the oil cooler mounting plate. It has two welded bungs which had a porous weak point which was (fortunately) discovered before it was bolted to the dyno.
The coolant system was put under a suction test then pressure filled but it did suffer a coolant leak at the electric water pump once the car was up to temperature. The engine was stopped while this was resolved.
A portion of the day was lost chasing more defective wiring by a guy in Victoria who now claims he can wire Haltech to 2GR. This is a joke as it continued to be a PITA right up to this point. Even so, there will be ongoing work to the loom at the start of the new year to really clean it up to a truly reliable standard.
The cam sensors were then next ones to slow down progress as it was unable to initially find synchronisation between Crank and Cam sensors. After solving the wiring defects, we found the home signal but the other three were not communicating. I was aware of the ‘pull up’ required but was meant to be sorted by Haltech but they only had this option for the Home signal not the other three, so we added a few pull up resistors then were in business. Even so, this was a 90 minute exercise in phone calls back and forward to Haltech until it was sorted.
The itb’s were checked to make sure they were balanced but they were out a little but overall, not too bad, so after spending countless hours with the fabricator it seems to have pulled up ok at the right time.
Near the end of the day the addition of EGT’s to the engine control system with every port now being monitored, immediately confirmed their worth by pin pointing a problem with cylinder 6. It was cold in comparison the rest. My immediate call was a dirty injector filter but after testing all possible outcomes, the injectors were removed and tested to discover the injectors did indeed have dirty filters which were blocking the injector flow. The number 6 chamber had basically no fuel flow to the point there was nothing to burn. Without the EGT’s it would have easily been overlooked then possibly broken the engine during tuning of overlooked.
So even though the engine did not run-in or tuned, managed to have a lot of key points solved before we get down to business tomorrow morning.
It was revved a few times when we were running the various tests with a amazing sound. A bit like a 3.6 litre superbike motor. Such a great song!