Well, that went less than well. I drove the car down the driveway no problem , turned out ok, drive about 50', idle sounded a little funny. Turned the corner and drove about another 50' before she died. Fortunately I was driving uphill (as my town is pretty much entirely on a hill) so after unsuccessful attempts to keep her idling I just put on the hazards, threw her in neutral and rolled her back down the hill, around the corner and into my driveway. Guess I'm going to try to get a tow to Turbotrix tomorrow.

Oh, and compression's ok. At first I was really scared I may have bent a valve or something. I determined the car was very rich both on sensor readings and from looking at the plugs. I think she may have drowned herself, and there's a distinct possibility I'm simply out of fuel too. My fuel gauge is reads way off, so it's hard to tell.

 

Man, you should have told your car the story about the train that thought it could, and was able to go up the big mountain... Hope its something small like no fuel. With what you descrive as your luck, it should be. Good luck at TT tomorrow

Off Topic: Did you ever get your gauge cluster blue?

 

It's been blue, but it's not very bright. I'm also not in much of a rush to fix that at the moment. So many more pressing issues that it's taken a distant, distant back seat. The car's getting towed tomorrow no matter what, because I didn't have the opportunity to even street tune it. I'm certainly not driving it on the highway when its stability is that much in question. Oh well. Lancer kicks Andrew in the groin again. At least the compression is ok. My heart woulda sunk 6' under if it came up anything less than perfect in all cylinders.

 

Today summed up in 50 words or less: Long wait for tow. Mark got it running after a lot of annoyance from the car. Tapping sound from valves. Fuel cutting under boost. ****.

 

To elaborate on yesterday's events, my car stopped running on Thursday when I tried to move it out of the driveway. See last few posts. So I call AAA to tow me down to Edison (we have AAA+ and I have the same name as my father so...free tow + tolls). Card expired on 6/15/05 >_< So we couldn't arrange it on Thursday. Instead we had to call up on Friday morning to reinstate membership and THEN arrange for the tow. All this was done at 8:30am, AAA said about 60 min. At 10:30 still no tow. He finally showed up a little after 11. Nice guy. Pushed the car onto the flatbed and headed to TurboTrix in Edison. Ended up getting there around 12:15 and Mark was out to lunch. So I did some school work for my research paper.

When Mark got in we pushed the car into the garage and he started doing his thing, rewriting from a base map since my old maps were so far off with different injectors and no FMU. As I mentioned I had her idling all week, but all of a sudden she didn't wanna play. Well, after adding fuel, checking for spark (plugs fouled quickly from so much restarting), testing injector (one wasn't firing properly) and testing fuel pressue, Jeff realized I put the throttle line too taught when I put the valve cover back on (D'oh!). With that fixed Mark got her started and purring like a kitten in no time. Then my car took back seat for a while while they moved cars around and dyno'd an Evo with a meth injection kit. It put down impressive numbers on pump gas with meth. I went and did more reading for my research paper, watched the car dyno, and tried not to fall asleep (hadn't eaten much or had much sleep the night before).

After a while the Evo was done on the dyno and my Lancer got strapped on. Mark got the idle down pat and basically tuned everything before positive boost, but during that time an intermittent clacking started to come out of my motor (****). It SOUNDED like something in the valvetrain, but it went on and off randomly, so at the time we didn't know what it was. We also ran into a problem similar to what I had before. Under boost the injectors simple were not flowing enough fuel, even at max parity. So I had the options to leave it, tow it or burn it. I considered options 1 and 3 and decided to go with just leaving it. I got a ride most of the way home and my mother was nice enough to pick me up the rest of the way. (Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Mom )

They're busy as hell over there, so I don't expect it to be done right away or anything, and I appreciate the fact that they took my car at all considering the ballet of cars they have to perform every day, but hopefully they can figure out what the clacking was and why I'm losing fuel under positive boost. I just want to have the car running right once and for all. Then I can start cleaning up some of the crap I need to fix like my gauge cluster, battery tie down and other such crap. Always hoping for the best but expecting the worst. I have the utmost faith in TurboTrix though...they definitely earned their reputation, they're nice guys and do consumate work.

 

dang man, sorry to hear that. but its in good hands now, i'm sure it'll all work out

i wanna see this thing when its done, its going to be a beast

 

Man, I'm sure your dissapointed, but sounds like your making some progress and your car can still idle

 

It won't be THAT much of a beast. I'll probably just be running 7-9lbs assuming the fuel will keep up. I still can't figure out why the hell that would happen. The 255lph and 440cc injectors should be FAR more than enough...the only thing I can think of is maybe it's electrical or something. Apparently it was dropping 2 cylinders towards the end of the dyno run so I don't know...such weird **** that makes no sense. And the noice from the head just really scares me.

 

I mean...yeah of course I'm disappointed. I've had a lot of disappointments with this thing though, so it's par for the course. If anyone can figure out what it is and fix it it's the guys at TurboTrix. When I get the CC bill is when it's probably going to hurt most. They're fair with their pricing without a doubt, but it's going to end up being a lot more work than just the tuning I was hoping for.