So how did it go?

I still haven't managed to get the boost fine tuned on the dyno yet yet, but it's roughed in from some street tuning. The car seems to hit much earlier and (mostly) hold boost better than the OEM controller allowed.

One thing that is a bit frustrating, though, is that the car holds different boost levels at different loads with the Hallman. Right now in 5th the car will hold boost past 1.5 bar for as long as I ask, but in 1st or 2nd the car doesn't even want to break 1.5 bar. In 3rd or 4th the car will break 1.5 bar slightly but then taper back some. With the OEM boost controller the car the car would just break 1.5 bar and then taper (more) in every gear.

If I can't get that resolved I may eventually install quality aftermarket EBC. I've also heard that changing out the waste gate regulator can help remove some boost taper. I'll need to do a bit more research and see what I find.

 

After seeing the numbers Dave Bushur has been seeing on his new Mustang dyno I've been feeling alot better. My car seems to be consistantly 300-305 range on pump gas with a stock turbo (10.5 hotside), stock intercooler, etc. without a stand alone ECU. I still need to get a good tuner to dial in the timing maps though.

On a related note, I may be finished upgrading my Evo. I'll still do the small stuff as I get around to it, but I recently did something very bad - at least for my Evo's future development.

A friend of mine let me drive his Swift DB-2 race car at a recent track day. While the car isn't very powerful (say 160 HP or so), it is an 1100 lb dedicated race car. While my Evo has a bit more acceleration, the Swift just flew around the course - it was simply amazing. Imagine jumping from Honda Civic into the Evo and that's roughly the difference in feel and track performance from jumping from my Evo into the Swift. I'm completely addicted.

So my "toys" budget is going to be reorganized into eventually buying a Swift or similiar spec racer and doing some door-to-door racing. The Evo is still a blast, but it's never going to have that "amazingly fast" feel for me again. Long term I knew this would happen, but I think the time table has been bumped a bit.

 

Mike, so when are you heading out to the dyno again?

 

Hopefully very soon!

I have been looking for a way keep my XEDE's OEM boost control capabilities but be able to raise the car's overall boost. I did try a Hallman MBC, and it hellped a bit, but it didin't give me the kind of detailed control I wanted. I also didn't want to spen another $500 on a good EBC when I already had an XEDE.

My goal was a solution that could hold a peak boost at redline of up to 21 lbs or so, but to be able to manage and shape the entire curve using the OEM EBC through my XEDE.

I did some research on what people had posted as working for them and even tried out a couple of the solutions, but none of them actually worked. The problem with running two boost controllers is that if you run them in series, the first controller always wins. If you run them in parallel, the weakest controller will always win. The trick was finding a lay-out that wasn't limited by those constraints.

After lots of thinking and a bit of elimination by testing I've het on a solution that works! The results are in and it should deliver everything I had hoped for and more.

Initial testing with the EBC map set to a flat 10% boost and the MBC set to minimum boost the car delivered a peak boost value about .78 BAR. When I left the EBC's values at 10% but set the MBC to "wide open" the car quickly hit 1.5+ BAR. This means that I can dial the MBC in for my desired max possible boost at red-line and then use the EBC to control and shape the boost curve.

I'll need to spend some time on a dyno carefully getting things dialed in, but once that's set I should see some nice top-end gains and safer mid-range transitions. Once I have some real results, I'll update this thread again!