The machine shop finished their work and I've brought it all home, but have not yet done anything with it.
I've been driving it every now and again. Took it to a Cars and Coffee last week when the weather was nice. It was still pretty cold out in the morning but not to bad by noon.
Just a bit cold in the morning.
So the oil consumption and tail pipe smoking has gone up quite a bit so I did a compression test and it wasn't pretty. Last time I did a compression test a few years ago it was about 130psi across the board, and now it looks like 4 cylinders are low with one of them being very low. I ran out of time to re-test all the cylinders or try oil in the cylinders to see if it goes up.
With the Megasquirt I did a vacuum versus crank degree plot to see if anything obvious would pop up, like a few cylinders pulling less vacuum, but nothing definitive really showed up. The plot reads backwards, so right to left with the red line being crank degrees from 0 to 720, so each vacuum peak is a cylinder, from right side is 1-5-3-6-2-4, with the right side of the peaks being as the valve opens.
While I was their I checked my injector timing versus manifold vacuum. I had set injector timing based on a spreadsheet calculation I did, and it looks like it was pretty spot on at peak vacuum. This only really helps at idle and low rpm. My goal was to inject fuel at highest vacuum after the exhaust valve closes. This was based on PipeMax plots and cam timing.
So after doing this I started thinking about the oil consumption, and it seemed I was adding significant amounts of oil prior to even leaning on it with the turbo, aka it shouldn't have been the turbo that hurt it. Maybe the rings got stuck while it sat for a chunk of summer? So I put a bunch of Marvel Mystery oil in the cylinders the other day and need to crank the engine over with the plugs out and run it a bit to see if the rings free up. This assumes it's stuck rings AND that if they've been stuck for 4,000 miles it hasn't hurt the cylinder walls even worse. Either way, it's still getting a new engine.
So a bit of a Drag Week re-cap. I've already mentioned it's soft launching, only making 5 psi in top gear for 93 mph, or approximately 240HP at race weight. Though that 240HP is 65HP more than the 175HP it was making the last time I was at the track, or a 37% increase (it's definitely noticable!). I will likely need to get a different turbo, which is not unexpected, but will wait until the new engine and cam are in to see how it acts.
Now this will be kind of a photo dump of the drive out and week.
Ready for the highway.
Crossed a huge part of the country at 80-85mph.
First stop of the trip, Elko, NV.
It had been running hot, which it shouldn't have been because the new radiator, but the big intercooler apparently was killing air flow through the radiator. So I made a stop at a parts store and raided their cardboard pile to make some baffles to force the air back through the radiator. It helped out quite a bit. So at some point I'll make tin versions.
Lots of open road. I didn't take any pictures of it, but leaving Elko my turbo oil feed line blew apart due to me accidently kinking it at some point. I used a nylon fuel like patch kit to fix it until I got to a friend's house in Nebraska to swap a new line on (that he happen to have). But this work put my schedule about a half day behind.
Then it blew the gasket on exhaust port #2 to create a nice torch mark and singe some wire harness wrap. I actually at the end of the day just took some muffler repair putty and jammed it in the hole to sit over night and it held a few days.
In Wyoming met up with another Drag Week'er to caravan out (yes the Honda).
Cruising along at 2,800rpm at 80-85, pulling the trailer. Driving out I kept the engine on the rich side as a pre-caution. By the end of the week I had it leaned out quite a bit.
