The Mellon Racing EVO head mysteriously lifted and the culprit has been found!
Jan 12, 2012, 05:35 PM
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The Mellon Racing EVO head mysteriously lifted and the culprit has been found!
As some of you might have noticed by now Mellon Racing & Buschur Racing had a falling out recently that was aired out publicly on Evom. The thread was closed (as it should have been) by the mods/admin before it got real ugly. There was a debate as to the cause of my head lifting and it finally came to a head.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened:
I had my shortblock rebuilt and assembled at Buschur Racing and also stepped up to the aluminum rods while we were in there. Gary and I flew to Buschur Racing to tune it on the dyno. David was gracious enough to do the rebuild at a hefty discount and let me borrow the dyno for free. He helped me strap it down, turned a few wrenches as needed, drove while I tuned and even bought us lunch (Gary got to ride in the Bad Bish!). This was in great part because we’ve always been loyal customers and resellers of his products. He’s also helped me out considerably with previous issues that weren’t his fault when he didn’t have to. For that I will always be appreciative.
The dyno session went well and the car did excellent, 668awhp (stingy mustang dyno grrr) at 42psi. We did a few test pulls on the street to make sure that if I was going to have a problem it would be near his area just in case. The car rips, spinning the tires in 3rd gear from a roll is very easy. The car made it home just fine taking it easy with a highest peak of 22psi at part throttle. When we got home we went over the car and double checked everything, boost leak test, fresh fluids etc…
We decided to do a 4th gear pull on the street just like on the dyno with the same mods/boost/octane to see how the power compares with Virtual Dyno when set to Mustang Dyno mode. Unfortunately on the very first pull the head lifted so badly that it blew both radiator hoses off and busted the seams loose on the bottom of the radiator. Obviously we were left scratching our heads, how could it make it through a dozen high powered dyno pulls and 700 mile drive home and not survive the very first pull?? I recalled the peak boost, it was the same 42psi, tune was the same etc… I pulled the logs and the knock was 0-2 counts, AFR was low 11’s at peak boost. This just didn’t make sense to me.
I contacted David at Buschur Racing to discuss the reasons it failed. Right off the bat he said “it must have detonated” but I didn’t want to believe that since I’m confident in my tune being fine. He said it might be the octane so I tested the e85 and it showed e87. David and I went back and forth via email and he said I could send it back up there to be fixed but he wasn’t going to do it for free due to the detonation, discount and he didn’t tune it. I still didn’t believe it was detonation at the time so I wasn’t happy about sending the car back and spending more money. I also felt insulted because the detonation was being blamed on my tuning. I told David that he should cover it under warranty, I don’t know what caused it but it wasn’t the tune. I had a big problem with him blaming it on detonation/tune before seeing the car and telling me it wasn’t going to be free. Some arguing via email ensued and eventually I stopped replying. Nothing was said for some time and I just tried my best to internalize and let it go.
Later I made a video to show the dyno graph and 3rd gear pull on the street in a thread on EVOm. Things were going well until someone asked me how I was enjoying the car. Me believing in transparency between companies and the public said in a nutshell that it was because the head lifted mysteriously. David chimed in and said something to the effect about him being eager to determine what caused the failure. That didn’t sit right with me because I felt like he already “determined” that it was my fault due to the tune. So I made a smart *** comment about that letting everyone know he denied the warranty without seeing the engine. David sent me a PM asking if that’s the route I wanted to go but I got busy and didn’t reply timely. David seeing me online doing other things moved forward with a retort to my smart *** comment and it got ugly from there with personal insults and even spilled over to other internet sites after that when the mods/admin closed the thread on evom.
In the mean time I finally went into the garage and pulled the head to see for myself what happened since there was no chance I was sending it back to Buschur. Right away I noticed the head gasket had a few grooves cut into it on one of the cylinders. That groove lined up with one on the block and the head. By this time I’m starting to think to myself, this doesn’t make any damn sense. This is even more serious than I thought. I began to realize this thing did have a catastrophic detonation but why? I noticed there was an odd black material fused to cylinder wall I talked to Gary at Mellon Racing and my friend Ed Hotchkiss about it and we weren’t entirely sure what it was. I tried cleaning it off with wd-40, brake cleaner and gasoline but nothing seemed to help much. The piston domes cleaned up nicely tough.
Racking my brain I’m trying to think, where can another substance get into the cylinder to cause this, it didn’t seem to be coolant related. Then it hit me, the injectors! I pulled them out of the rail and sure enough every single one of them had black gunk inside. One of them was nearly completely clogged. I probably used 20+ q-tips soaked in gasoline before I finally got all of it out of there. Right then I knew what happened to my engine, it went considerably too lean in that particular cylinder and detonated. Ironically out of the blue I got an interesting PM from David the following day with a link to a customer of his that also lifted their head. They found the same residue in their cylinder/injectors. Talk about some mixed emotions, I felt relieved that it wasn’t my tuning and that we finally found the true culprit. But I felt like crap because I was in denial about the detonation and David was right about that all along.
I spoke to David to smooth things over and to let him know my thoughts and we agreed. Tuning at that power level, even with excellent fuel like e85 in the tank requires that everything has to be absolutely perfect. There’s very little room for error with the slightly leaner e85 AFR I had so if anything goes wrong with the fuel system you’ve got big problems. I have a feeling that one affected cylinder was running considerably too lean for some time due to an ever worsening injector spray pattern and I just didn’t know it. Unfortunately WB02 gauges only show the average AFR of the four cylinders combined once they collect in the exhaust system. If I had a fancy setup with a WB02 sensor in each cylinder we would have caught this in the data logs.
I’ve always been acutely aware that e85 from some gas stations can contain residue from when they were previously used as diesel fuel tanks etc.. but I’ve never seen it build up that much, that fast. I doubt these injectors have 1000 miles on them yet so I must have gotten a batch of some really nasty stuff at one of the 4-5 various gas stations I hit on the way home. I’ve been running e85 for years now and I’ve never seen build up from the e85 pumps in this area. Short of checking the pump socks, fuel filter and injectors frequently I don’t really have a good solution to this problem yet. I’m going to ship the injectors off to have the flow tested and professionally cleaned soon. I’ll probably replace the fuel pump socks and inline filter for the Buschur Racing twin pump.
I wrote all of this to say I owe David Buschur an apology for not trusting his instinct regarding the detonation and being an *** about it in public. It’s just that I felt so strongly that my tune wasn’t the culprit. It turns out he was right that it did detonate, but it was due to some dirty injectors and not my tune. Had I sent it right back up there for him to inspect after the head lifted he would have seen that mess in the cylinder and none of this would have gone down this way. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s how you handle them afterwards that makes the all of the difference in the world.
I’m sorry about the way I handled things David . It’s clear to me now that the problems I had were nothing to do with your engine build or installation. You guys did a great job as always. I’m chalking this one up as a hard lesson learned.
btw, I posted a dyno results thread that includes a 3rd gear pull for those who missed it https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/ev...cing-dyno.html
here's a pic of how many q-tips it took to clean the injector as best I could.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened:
I had my shortblock rebuilt and assembled at Buschur Racing and also stepped up to the aluminum rods while we were in there. Gary and I flew to Buschur Racing to tune it on the dyno. David was gracious enough to do the rebuild at a hefty discount and let me borrow the dyno for free. He helped me strap it down, turned a few wrenches as needed, drove while I tuned and even bought us lunch (Gary got to ride in the Bad Bish!). This was in great part because we’ve always been loyal customers and resellers of his products. He’s also helped me out considerably with previous issues that weren’t his fault when he didn’t have to. For that I will always be appreciative.
The dyno session went well and the car did excellent, 668awhp (stingy mustang dyno grrr) at 42psi. We did a few test pulls on the street to make sure that if I was going to have a problem it would be near his area just in case. The car rips, spinning the tires in 3rd gear from a roll is very easy. The car made it home just fine taking it easy with a highest peak of 22psi at part throttle. When we got home we went over the car and double checked everything, boost leak test, fresh fluids etc…
We decided to do a 4th gear pull on the street just like on the dyno with the same mods/boost/octane to see how the power compares with Virtual Dyno when set to Mustang Dyno mode. Unfortunately on the very first pull the head lifted so badly that it blew both radiator hoses off and busted the seams loose on the bottom of the radiator. Obviously we were left scratching our heads, how could it make it through a dozen high powered dyno pulls and 700 mile drive home and not survive the very first pull?? I recalled the peak boost, it was the same 42psi, tune was the same etc… I pulled the logs and the knock was 0-2 counts, AFR was low 11’s at peak boost. This just didn’t make sense to me.
I contacted David at Buschur Racing to discuss the reasons it failed. Right off the bat he said “it must have detonated” but I didn’t want to believe that since I’m confident in my tune being fine. He said it might be the octane so I tested the e85 and it showed e87. David and I went back and forth via email and he said I could send it back up there to be fixed but he wasn’t going to do it for free due to the detonation, discount and he didn’t tune it. I still didn’t believe it was detonation at the time so I wasn’t happy about sending the car back and spending more money. I also felt insulted because the detonation was being blamed on my tuning. I told David that he should cover it under warranty, I don’t know what caused it but it wasn’t the tune. I had a big problem with him blaming it on detonation/tune before seeing the car and telling me it wasn’t going to be free. Some arguing via email ensued and eventually I stopped replying. Nothing was said for some time and I just tried my best to internalize and let it go.
Later I made a video to show the dyno graph and 3rd gear pull on the street in a thread on EVOm. Things were going well until someone asked me how I was enjoying the car. Me believing in transparency between companies and the public said in a nutshell that it was because the head lifted mysteriously. David chimed in and said something to the effect about him being eager to determine what caused the failure. That didn’t sit right with me because I felt like he already “determined” that it was my fault due to the tune. So I made a smart *** comment about that letting everyone know he denied the warranty without seeing the engine. David sent me a PM asking if that’s the route I wanted to go but I got busy and didn’t reply timely. David seeing me online doing other things moved forward with a retort to my smart *** comment and it got ugly from there with personal insults and even spilled over to other internet sites after that when the mods/admin closed the thread on evom.
In the mean time I finally went into the garage and pulled the head to see for myself what happened since there was no chance I was sending it back to Buschur. Right away I noticed the head gasket had a few grooves cut into it on one of the cylinders. That groove lined up with one on the block and the head. By this time I’m starting to think to myself, this doesn’t make any damn sense. This is even more serious than I thought. I began to realize this thing did have a catastrophic detonation but why? I noticed there was an odd black material fused to cylinder wall I talked to Gary at Mellon Racing and my friend Ed Hotchkiss about it and we weren’t entirely sure what it was. I tried cleaning it off with wd-40, brake cleaner and gasoline but nothing seemed to help much. The piston domes cleaned up nicely tough.
Racking my brain I’m trying to think, where can another substance get into the cylinder to cause this, it didn’t seem to be coolant related. Then it hit me, the injectors! I pulled them out of the rail and sure enough every single one of them had black gunk inside. One of them was nearly completely clogged. I probably used 20+ q-tips soaked in gasoline before I finally got all of it out of there. Right then I knew what happened to my engine, it went considerably too lean in that particular cylinder and detonated. Ironically out of the blue I got an interesting PM from David the following day with a link to a customer of his that also lifted their head. They found the same residue in their cylinder/injectors. Talk about some mixed emotions, I felt relieved that it wasn’t my tuning and that we finally found the true culprit. But I felt like crap because I was in denial about the detonation and David was right about that all along.
I spoke to David to smooth things over and to let him know my thoughts and we agreed. Tuning at that power level, even with excellent fuel like e85 in the tank requires that everything has to be absolutely perfect. There’s very little room for error with the slightly leaner e85 AFR I had so if anything goes wrong with the fuel system you’ve got big problems. I have a feeling that one affected cylinder was running considerably too lean for some time due to an ever worsening injector spray pattern and I just didn’t know it. Unfortunately WB02 gauges only show the average AFR of the four cylinders combined once they collect in the exhaust system. If I had a fancy setup with a WB02 sensor in each cylinder we would have caught this in the data logs.
I’ve always been acutely aware that e85 from some gas stations can contain residue from when they were previously used as diesel fuel tanks etc.. but I’ve never seen it build up that much, that fast. I doubt these injectors have 1000 miles on them yet so I must have gotten a batch of some really nasty stuff at one of the 4-5 various gas stations I hit on the way home. I’ve been running e85 for years now and I’ve never seen build up from the e85 pumps in this area. Short of checking the pump socks, fuel filter and injectors frequently I don’t really have a good solution to this problem yet. I’m going to ship the injectors off to have the flow tested and professionally cleaned soon. I’ll probably replace the fuel pump socks and inline filter for the Buschur Racing twin pump.
I wrote all of this to say I owe David Buschur an apology for not trusting his instinct regarding the detonation and being an *** about it in public. It’s just that I felt so strongly that my tune wasn’t the culprit. It turns out he was right that it did detonate, but it was due to some dirty injectors and not my tune. Had I sent it right back up there for him to inspect after the head lifted he would have seen that mess in the cylinder and none of this would have gone down this way. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s how you handle them afterwards that makes the all of the difference in the world.
I’m sorry about the way I handled things David . It’s clear to me now that the problems I had were nothing to do with your engine build or installation. You guys did a great job as always. I’m chalking this one up as a hard lesson learned.
btw, I posted a dyno results thread that includes a 3rd gear pull for those who missed it https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/ev...cing-dyno.html
here's a pic of how many q-tips it took to clean the injector as best I could.
Last edited by Mellon Racing; Jan 14, 2012 at 07:31 AM.
Jan 12, 2012, 05:47 PM
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Good job to DB n Mellon for gettin the issue solved, sorry u had to go through that Mellon but something to learn from, guess its better now to stick to the E85 stations u know
Jan 12, 2012, 05:48 PM
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Good, I'm glad the dispute is sorted, well done Chris for the write up, and as you said everybody makes mistakes, it is how you deal with them that makes the difference!
Marios
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Jan 12, 2012, 05:51 PM
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glad to see you found it!! when i got my motor back together after my oil pump failed, it turned out one of my injectors was completly clogged and had to get them all flow tested and cleaned as wel!
since the car is parked for winter right now, im running a tank of 93 through it to clean out the injectors again
since the car is parked for winter right now, im running a tank of 93 through it to clean out the injectors again
