Nah, but I'm working on it!

 

by divorced, do you mean divorced inside the downpipe, or external?

if you mean external, yes i think that would help, that way, turbine backpressure wouldnt be in the equation. that project is in development now.

 

Joedirt should chime in... But, last time I remember, he has put in ~25K miles on APS ST so far. If I remember correctly, he upgraded his actuator, tuned his unichip and has water injection. I don't think he touched the fuel delivery system however.

 

Doesn't sound like an out of box setup to me...

 

that number can be reached with the out of box setup with nothing more than a tune. That said, the tq on such a tune would very high and hard to run for an extended amount of miles. We have seen that hp number on numerous APS TT setups, considering they run the same fuel and ems, it is very doable

 

Any motor could hit that with any turbo kit on the market. But its certainly not a safe thing to do. You better believe it aint gonna last that long. And I'm sure the only hes getting it done is because hes running water/meth

 

It was mostly meant in jest. No offense intended, Sharif.

I know that most distributors aren't the ones making the big bucks. There are some manufacturers out there that jack of the price on some items FAR beyond the cost put into them. I think it's funny how Z owners see a brand name fiberglass lip kit and think $800 is an excellent deal. Also, for instance, a company designs a crappy intake manifold with no R&D involved, polish it, and charge ten times the expense required to produce it. People still rush out to buy this stuff... You know what I mean...

 

No offense taken Craig.
Before I got into the Performance auto business, i was in the consumer products manufacturing business. The amount of capital that goes into designing and producing a product is enormous.

For instance, we would sell a product for $.50, that would cost as about $.10 to make. At first glance, we are making a killing selling that product...right? But our bottom line operating profits were some of the lowest in the industry....about 10% operating profit. Sometimes, we forget about all the expense lines on a typical P/L such as overhead, materials cost, plant and equipment allocations, packaging, marketing costs, etc..etc. That stuff adds up quickly. By and large, I think Z owners get quality products, at reasonable prices. Also, mass producing an item brings the costs way down. There are 100's and thousands of Honda's out there, so I am sure a test pipe is far cheaper to product for those vehicles, vs. the a 350Z, which is a much smaller market.

Just some food for thought.

 

its BMW owners that get raped... $7000 for a chip upgrade that gives 35 hp.. now thats a good raping

 

Actually i ment the inside. When looking at the exhaust turbine side, u can see the "exhaust turbine wheel" and the "wastegate flap". Around that is the flange to where the dowpipe bolts on to. I was wondering if a simple divider between the "exhaust turbine wheel" and the "wastegate flap" would help the wastegate close and hold boost like we want it to.

Didnt someone run an APS ST w/o an exhaust and still had trouble holding boost? If so then i cant believe back pressure is the culprit. Im beginning to think its the local high pressure comming out of the exhaust turbine and its relatively short distance to the wastegate flap that is inhibiting the actuator to have complete control over the wastegate. Otherwise, id have to say that internal wastegates are just plain no good for high boost. WRXs and STis have had this problem forever. The high HP scoobs all go with external wastegates. The shop that worked on my car mentioned of welding the stock APS internal wastegates shut and doing an external wastegate within 3 minutes of opening the APS boxes and looking at the turbos, this was about 2 years ago. They where also the ones that mentioned "they should have had divorced wastegates," as well.

 

whats funny is that on the APS website, if you look at the pic of the downpipe, its divorced, there is a piece of metal seperating the flapper section and exhaust outlet section. but in the kits shipped out there is no divorced section, its all open. dont know why they changed it.

i did run my car with no exhaust, the boost did hold better, and response was better but it was loud as hell. plus my datalogger wasnt working, but i do feel exhaust backpressure has a tiny part in the issue.

what i think is the biggest problem is the turbine housing in general, i believe its too small. the exhaust outlet is only 2.5 inches and youve got 3.5L flowing into it. i think there is too much exhaust gas flowing into it, causing the pressure to build up inside the housing, once the flapper opens, it has a hard time closing due to the pressure inside the housing. my fabricator is working on an external wastegate setup right now.

you can see it in the following pictures, the smaller picture one has a totally seperate smaller pipe welded in and entering the downpipe downstream, the other pic shows the divorced section. in these pics, its the pipe in the center of the pic.

 

Actually my shop dropped the exhaust and the boost stabilized. we then replaced the fujistubo exhaust i was running for a jic ti. wanted something quieter so i eventually went with the aps st exhaust. shouldve got that one in the first place. now the turbo spool is waaaay louder than the exhaust.

 

Peter from aps said on another forum site they are in the process of fabricating an external wastegate setup for the aps st. this should help people out alot especially if you dont want to buy the aps exhaust.

 

wth .. i cant hyperlink APS's stuff in this forum?

 

I see what you mean tig.

I was looking at the TT kit and they didnt show a divorced wastegate. In their explanation of exhaust back pressure they did use another turbo with divorced wastegates though.

 

I was running the stock exhaust (yes I know stock=suck!)for a few weeks till my APS ST Exhaust came in, what a difference.....

 

Actually to do a proper divorced wastegate it really should be done like this:

 

i agree mia, if you look at that second pic i posted, it shows a setup exactly like you posted, 2 seperate pipes coming from the housing, totally seperate chambers.

 

100 percent sucess rate on all of our single turbo kits thus far...We have done about 4 singles off the top of my head..

 

First off you never were a customer of ours so I would appriciate if you curb your slander of our shop..FYI we have a 100 percent satisfaction rate amoung our customers.Our customers know and expect the best, thats why they are our customers.I have personally answered customers calls way after hours,from vacation,picked up customers from the airport in my personal vehicle and have fixed customers cars even when the problem was caused by other shops for little or no money, cause they were good customers..I really would have expected more class from one of Sharif's customers than that.