Depending on your religious beliefs and/or religious tolerance for Christianity you may want to check it out. I'm a Christian so it doesnt bother me one bit - infact I sorta like it. Dave is well known for hosting 'debt-free screams' and if its something that I've picked up on it's that the married couples that go through the debt free journey fortify their marriages and many say they feel like they got raises when they got their money in order/live on a budget - a good place to start is his Total Money Makeover book. I'll buy it for you if youd want to read it. If there's anything I can answer concerning the subject dont hesitate to reach out.

deep breath ...

I dont know why I thought this but thought a good place to start would be to re-torque the heads ... but it took me getting the valve covers off to realize that the cams are in the way and they dont move out of the way unless the engine is out of the car.

The symptom is that I have abnormal exhaust coming out of the exhaust pipe (as seen in previous videos).

The bad ... I emptied the catch can and I estimate I have about 2 ounces of coolant/oil/gunk mix that came out of the catch can. Also I had a minimal but noticeable amount of milky'ness on the oil fill cap (roughly 1/8" x 1/8' square areas-worth) not much but good to document. I cleaned the cap and I'll re-inspect. I also cleaned the catch can. It should also be noted that I don't recall the last time I cleaned the catch can so some of these may be from my last round.











Conway has talked me off the ledge suggesting that a minimal amount could be anything including condensation for how cold it's been and how the car really isnt getting up to temp to burn any moisture off.

Pulled the valve covers and the valve train looks good...nothing looks out of place. I RTV'd my gasket seat, gasket, head mating surface and reassembled.





I removed the side exit exhaust and I had a good amount of this gunk. I speculate this is coolant & exhaust carbon mixed. It could be oil but I dont know. Could this be a oil seal leak or a coolant leak in the turbo? something to look at if compression check comes back clean. Would be pretty easy to take the CHRA of the turbo off and run the car for a bit.








I pealed off both waste gates and reached up and dragged my fingers inside and the passenger side didnt produce any gunk. The drivers side produced a small amount. I'm gonna do a little more investigation tomorrow.


Spark Plugs ... pulled the plugs and I speculate I'm running super rich. Which I sorta knew.





Next step:
Gonna do a cold-engine compression test and if I can pull it off then do a warm/hot engine compression check. Furthermore have my landlord look at it and get his opinion. Might talk to a few other guys around the denver metro.

It'd be smart to drop the oil and at a minimum inspect to ensure I don't have coolant in the oil. I'd like to get some miles on this oil and get a sample to blackstone and get their opinion & analysis.

My thoughts moving forward...I really want to see what compression looks like. If it's consistent and within spec and I can get consensus to run the car knowing that it burns 'some' coolant (2 ounces over 250 miles - I should note that I'm catching 2 ounces, in reality, I bet I'm burning a few ounces for every one ounce I'm catching).
If it's acceptable (maybe not a best practice) I'm gonna tune, run the car through the spring and run a few events (mostly pikes peak airstrip attack) and I'll reassess come fall.

Maybe it would be wise to remove the timing chain case, remove the cams and assess the head studs and possibly look at the water pump? maybe I have a leak in the water pump area?

thoughts, opinions, questions are always welcome -

 

IMO, with the moisture you found. Would not risk running the engine on that oil. Fresh filter and oil to be on the safe side plus next time you check can tell you if blown head gasket or not. Control the engine environment for easier diagnosing. If you have a media blaster you may be able to clean those plus but would drop in some v powers for now just to get it running. If you foul out another set they are much cheaper.
Sludge in manifold, would think oil over pressure or bad seals. Am sure the FI guys on forum can answer this better.

Thanks for the offer on the book. The church that we are attending, more myself since the mrs doesn't come often. Will be offering financial university in a couple months. Mrs stated she would get her job to take those nights off to go. Wether this happens or not will be another story. The church has been known for paying off alot of Veteran debt.

 

I hear what youre saying Rusty - I think I'm gonna put a few more cycles on it to get a good sample of oil to send off to Blackstone.

Did the compression test and borrow a gauge from the autoparts store and it doesnt mechanically 'save' the compression of each stroke ... so the gauge is reading around 90 psi each compression stroke but then immediately goes back to zero. All I can say is things are inconclusive. Gonna wait for the weekend and get a better gauge.

Another thing that is hampering the test is that I have the lightweight (450cca) battery - so the engine isnt turning over like it would with a traditional battery.

 

With the gunk oil/coolant mix. I'd honestly tend to think its condensation. I get a similar build-up on the bottom side of my oil cap when it's cold and my car has sat for a bit. I am curious what your compression looks like with a better gauge though.

 

appreciate the input - I'm setup on Sunday for a better compression test.

pretty frustrating with the junk gauge ... that's what I get though...

I definitely dont want to freak-out over it and yank the engine out but I do want to be proactive on solving a small problem before it becomes a big problem.

I dropped the oil and nothing looks crazy ... I did take a few ounces of coolant out of the radiator and a few ounces of oil from my drop-pan and the oil (obviously) is floating on-top the coolant/water mix.




I have a random 2liter bottle and I'm going to fill it with the oil to see if any coolant/water settles to the bottom over night.





Part of me wants to take the car out and hammer the **** out of it and see what happens ... trial by fire!

otherwise just about got everything buttoned up. Will need to lean-out my tune in the low-load / cruise areas before my next set of test miles...

 

Hey man- agreed with better compression test and Blackstone. Are you running an AEM wideband Failsafe? Z1 is just finishing my V3 install (used kit I couldn't troublesome if problems) and recommended this device / guage and I went with it.

 

Yea - looking forward to Sunday - formal compression test and getting a sample to Blackstone will calm me down a bit.

I run AEM EUGOs Widebands

Running dual widebands, but really only need one...**** Conway, maybe I should disable one of them?? maybe this is why I'm running crazy rich?


I'm not using their built in failsafes but I am using the UEGOs analog 0-5v signal for closed loop fuel control. Can you link me to the features? Assuming youre running an AEM ECU? I just dead-ended the fail-safe signal wire as the Link has inherent failsafes built-in.

 

I don't think the dual widebands is causing you run super rich. But I would deff drop down to once wideband since it's only pipe.

 

I'm gonna and I'm gonna lean-out my cruise and idle

 

You guys are light - years ahead of me, here's a quick primer on the AEM FailSafe.

 

Sorta what I anticipated but I do appreciate how simple it is, especially with the data logging. RPMs / boost / afr. I also like the feature of the ground-out if taken outside of a given parameter range. Hooking it up to a boost controller is probably the smartest idea...what I don't like about it is that it's not part of an ECU. I, personally, don't like having multiple components from multiple manufactures - I think you ask for problems when you have too many things interacting with each other that weren't necessarily designed to. I'm not hating or knocking on it - this is a very good solution for some builds. Happy that AEM is taking strides in this direction.

Most newer ECUs will have this / these features (but obviously at a much higher cost and complexity) but to think you can do a portion of this from your AFR gauge is pretty sweet. How do you like it? How have you set it up? Do you like the software?

Here's how mine works (this feature is why I went with Link, and I suspect Haltech has something very similar in the new ECUs - hopefully TCode or Hal or someone with a new Haltech will chime in) … essentially 3d table for each of AFR / Oil Pressure / Coolant Pressure / Fuel Pressure … my Y-axis is setup per gear but it doesn't matter and depending on what's being monitored over the X-axis. Depending on sensor reading I can limit my RPMs if the reading is too high or too low. The tables on the right setup each sensor and it's normal operating range. If the sensors reads outside of this range it'll flick the CEL on and pop an error code on the Link (read off the laptop). It also gives you an option to provide a default value to ECU during a fault condition.



Spent some time yesterday and today doing minor clean-up on the car. Wrapped the powerline to the cooling fan with some re-used DEI fiberglass insulation. Put nylon sleeve on a few un-wrapped wires left in the engine bay, replaced the fire suppression system tubing in the engine bay and moved my nozzles to the front of the engine where the turbo is.

Spent some time in the Link and, not to knock on them, they have some funky tables and crazy lock-outs ... some closed-loop fuel control lock-outs that may be contributing to my issues ... doing compression test and leak down test tomorrow under the supervision of a master mechanic. He did not think re-using rings and not-rehoning was a wise decision (all things considered) when I did my bearings. But it's well documented with HPA that this is an acceptable practice. He did mention if I wanted to ball-hone and seat new rings he'd help me with that and he has everything needed - so, options on the table.

Also enlighted myself ... weighed my old radiator (33lbs) and then my new one (well, the one I forked out) and it was 15lbs ... so a weight savings of 18lbs ... then went and compared my treadstone IC and it came in at 28lbs and had to jump on 350z tech dot com and find the greddy IC and it came in at 38lbs so another 10lbs of savings ... so a 28lb savings on the front most portion of the car...I'm secretly excited.

tomorrow will be exiting!

 

Mostly good news today ...

The Good -
first and foremost - the compression test. I was pretty nervous but it went well. 110psi out of all cylinders but one, which came back to 120psi. I was relieved when it was all said & done. Furthermore, the gauge psi climbed consistently during cranks between cylinders.

It seemed like the exhaust cleared up as the car got hot and was running above 160degrees.

The Bad -
I had problems getting the car to idle consistently and it stalled out quite a bit - will need to dig into the tune and the warm-up enrichment maps. The idle was set to 900rpm and I bumped it up to 1500rpm to run and that fixed the issue temporarily.

my three Link failsafe sensors are not working ... I dont know why and I turned them off and modified the failsafe tables to simple run regardless of sensor output.

I am pretty sure my spark-plugs are fouled as not all my exhaust runners are heating up at the same rate. This likely is causing the excessive exhaust / unburnt fuel. (hat-tip to Rusty)

We speculate the car is not performing closed loop fuel control properly. Two likely causes are the two O2 sensors ... I dont know that they are fighting each other, but I dont know that they are not either. Moreover, we ponder if the O2 sensors are too close to the open-air of the exhaust. Moving forward - I will re-weld a single bung and run a single sensor (what conway suggested).

maybe the worst news of the afternoon - my 1" radiator feed hose sprung a leak and dripped out coolant - so I'll need to rebuild this and/or reconsider how it's routed and/or should I go to a hardline?

quick little video

 

How close is your wideband to the end of our exhaust?

I did some reading on some honda forums, they were recommending 12"+ or you can get missreading on part throttle.

 

To correct the o2 issue, shouldn't the o2's be in the manifolds instead of the exhaust. Would be closer to the head and would imagine way more accurate to show which bank is doing what?

 

like maybe 3" to 4" from the top ... I remember reading that the sensor should be 18" or so from the turbo ... I dont know if there is a 100% right answer but I will weld in a bung much lower and closer to the turbo and see how it does.

This might be the issue in and of itself ... O2 sensors need to get hot and stay hot to be effective and if the sensor isnt warming up than its not going to give a good reading.

that's something that Dale mentioned as well ... he knew a mustang 1/4mile car that couldnt idle to get off the trailer but as soon as the car had rpm & load on it, the engine was fine.


I think they should be in the down pipes? that's pretty much where they are found in other cars operating with success? I dont have a mean to put them in the turbo collector and unless I want to run six o2 sensors (one in each exhaust runner) that'd be my only option. And I think this is frowned upon as the exhaust gas is too hot straight out of the cylinder.

moving forward -
gotta get another set of spark plugs in the car. And a round of checking coils would be smart.

gonna pick up a few feet of 1" ID aluminum pipe and make the coolant pipe hard past the runners and have a small section of steelbraided hose.

gotta figure out the link - if I can't immediately figure it out Im going to pay a tuner to set it up. eliminate one sensor.

gotta figure out the rescue sensors? why are they shut down.

 

The headers get to hot for the wideband. Thats why you need at least 24" post turbo. In an ideal world you would want 1 wide band per bank, but in a single turbo car its very unlikely unless you have the money to spend on widebands after they fail from the severe heat.

 

I think the best-practice is to put individual EGT sensors in each runner and from there you can assess/gauge if any cylinder is running lean based on temp discrepancies.

Conway - where did you hear 24" from? I know it's something healthy but I didn't think it was that much.

 

http://blog.innovatemotorsports.com/...our-o2-sensor/

Ideally, the O2 sensor should be placed at least 24 inches downstream from the cylinder head exhaust ports. This ensures that the O2 sensor takes its measurements after the exhaust gas from each primary merges into a common collector. In turbocharged applications, the sensor should be placed at least 24 inches downstream of the turbo.

Now this is best circumstances, with cars like yours you don't really get a choice. The only other option you have is to do a side exit not a hood exit.

 

cool cool - much appreciated … yea, best case scenario on a traditional exhaust … only one way to find out!

 

Moving forward …
I'm gonna get the coolant hardpipe off and re-route the coolant (likely above the headers - but pondering how I can run the line below without it interfering - ehhhhhh, may be a bad idea). I ordered about 4 sticks of 36" 1" ID aluminum tube. I may re-do the cold side as well - I don't like how it's laid-out.

Another set of spark plugs ordered and I think I may open the gap up to .035 to .040 from my current .03"

Also gonna do a round of checking coils per the FSM.

and take the exhaust off and put in a new bung

trouble shooting in the ECU and decommission one O2 sensor.

The goal:
Pikes Peak Airstrip Attach is June 20 / 21 … registration opens in February - tasks that I need to accomplish before then:


-aforementioned fixes and re-tune
-Consider a new hood?
-punch the wastegates through the hood
-fab-up the flatfloor & rear diffuser
-mount a front bumper
-and maybe? a dry cf hatch? maybe?