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The Wastegate actuator was a little beat up, either from use or from me doing something dumb like wrenching against it. So I ordered a replacement, which of course gave me clearance issues with the fan shroud. Iv'e already had to modify this thing a bunch to fit so this is just a continuation of that. It's a little hard to tell from the last pic, but there is plenty of space now.
For those wondering why I would jump through so many hoops to keep the OEM fan, its a combination of California Stealth and I have had many headaches with aftermarket radiator fans over the years so I'm pretty reluctant to give it up unless I don't have a choice.
I love the cams, but i have been chasing my tail around tuning rough spots like stop and go traffic, and basically its just suffering from some old car problems. After doing a boost leak test and removing one leak after another I think im almost there mechanically. Then I will resume tuning. So far i replaced the LICP coupler to the IC. Throttle body shaft seals, which only had 15k miles on them but where gunked up pretty bad and leaking. I removed the heater valve from throttle body because the seal was leaking and I think the mechanism might have something to do with the evo 8 having some cold engine stuttering issues when running the newer ROM's (gonna put that theory to the test). Plus its just annoying to take apart and put back in. I replaced the diaphram on my greddy recirc valve a while back but the bypass on it is just leaking a ton of air and i think its an internal seal issue, so I'm going to retire it and upgrade to a crushed stock 9 valve for now. The PCV valve on the valve cover is also leaking so I'm just waiting on that and the recirc valve and then hopefully I can start the WOT tuning. So far the car feels like its running much better though then before, which could be a lot to do with the dirty injectors but I can't wait to kill all the gremlins and start doing some WOT pulls.
Back to the gunk though, things are pretty gunky so im not surprised the injectors where either. I think its time to invest in a catch can / oil separation system.
Last edited by Biggiesacks; Aug 4, 2018 at 08:13 PM.
I am getting too old for the No AC in California game, ill save the weight somewhere else. So I bought a new condenser because i busted the original 6 or so years ago. I pulled everything out of storage, cleaned it all up, replaced the seals and reinstalled the rest of the system. I went to a local AC place to get a quote on a recharge and it was over $200 bucks. I knew I could buy the stuff I needed from Hardly Feasible for less then that, so that's what I did. Plus I knew if there was a leak they would wan't an arm and a leg to chase it down and I would be buying the tools anyway to do it myself so it made sense. However I did have to go on a mini quest to get the AC lubricant I needed. Apparently they don't use the same stuff anymore for our system, and after some digging the interwebs told me I needed to get some BG Frigi-Quiet https://www.bgprod.com/catalog/clima.../#bg-product-3 instead. Unfortunately this is not easy stuff to get your hands on as a hobbyist so I had to sweet talk that local shop into selling me a couple of bottles. I added the oil, sealed up the system, vacuumed it out, and waited. About 45ish minutes later I checkd on it, and the seal held. So I started it up, added the refrigerant, and now I have glorious A/C again.
Last edited by Biggiesacks; Aug 4, 2018 at 11:48 AM.
For those wondering why I would jump through so many hoops to keep the OEM fan, its a combination of California Stealth and I have had many headaches with aftermarket radiator fans over the years so I'm pretty reluctant to give it up unless I don't have a choice.
I don't blame you at all. I still run the oem radiator on mine. I run a half sized radiator and I never see coolant temps above 174 degrees.
I don't blame you at all. I still run the oem radiator on mine. I run a half sized radiator and I never see coolant temps above 174 degrees.
If it aint broke, don't fix it. I have a pile of bunk fans sitting in my storage that couldn't keep my mustang cool. Electric motors are one of those things that really just does come down to you get what you pay for, and to get a good oem replacement your gonna have to spend some good money.
Originally Posted by MinusPrevious
Super excellent DYI on the AC & all the other projects
Well done
Thanks Time will tell how well done they are For me the tinkering with the car is at least half the enjoyment of owning it.
It's been a little while, and I can't really do anything because I just had oral surgery so I figured it would be a good time for an update.
The reason it has been so long is mainly because I wanted to get the car all the way tuned before, but these cams have really forced me to dig down and read through tuning threads till my eyes bled. I have a couple things going on that i think where also working against me from the beginning. First I am using a piggyback peak & hold injector driver that i assembled and installed a while ago for the stock ECU. I'm using 1450cc bluemax Low-Z injectors and they are meant to be run by a peak hold driver. I did it for fun, education, and to just see if i could do it. That is working great but my latency's are nothing like what others are using so I'm pretty much working from scratch there. I had these all dialed in before the new cams but something changed after the cam install and i had to revisit these (or so i thought). The second thing is I'm using a completely stock intake plus K&N drop in. This is only a problem in the sense that I was under the assumption that meant I would never have to mess with any maf related settings. My guess is the HKS cams are just mild enough that it wasn't an issue before.
So immediately after the cam install I noticed 3 things going on. Poor starting, stalling after throttle blip and clutch in (inching forward in traffic, up hills etc), and my LTFT mid was maxed out negative. So the first course of action was to address any potential mechanical issues. The engine has 160k on it so there were bound to be some things. Sure enough the PCV valve was leaking pretty good (Even brand new they do, but this was alot) my greddy type-R recirc valve was leaking pretty good through the shaft busing, LICP to IC coupler, and of course throttle body seals. I went ahead and replaced the greddy with a new stock 9 recirc valve, new pcv, and new tb shaft bushings (this is the 2nd time i have replaced these over the life of the car). After all that though nothing changed. So began the tuning.
I started by trying to solve the stalling, because I dd this was by far the most annoying thing to deal with, and when ever I drove the wife around she would give me **** about it. I mostly messed with the ISCV tables but after a week or so of goofing around with those I wasn't getting to a good place. So i decided it would be better to work on the fuel trims. I wasn't really sure why these needed messing with, I did have the injectors cleaned, but they didn't really change flow much (~5%). I spent a good month of making tiny changes to scaling and voltage latency and observing the results while DDing around. No matter what i did i couldn't get them dialed in. I could get LTFT mid to be ok but then LTFT low was crazy positive and it drove like ***. I could get LTFT low dialed in but then LTFT mid was crazy negative. There was something i was missing, I needed to be able to specially adjust fueling at a finer level. which meant I had to go back and learn more. Thankfully these forums, and all the smart folks contributing to them, provided. As I alluded to before I had a naive assumption that a stock intake setup meant i didn't need to adjust maf related tables, and so i had never really learned about doing so. That assumption was wrong, and not only that but doing the added research got me to a bunch of new (to me) useful tables that where not a part of the original tephra V7 XML's, Unfortunately though all the information i needed wasn't consolidated in one place. You really have to just read through a ton of threads and try and pick out little nuggets of useful information. Some of the threads though are so packed with info that you need to read other threads just to put that info into context for different situations.
So basically what I needed to do was log maf hertz, stft, and ltft mid. Then i would drive and review the logs. I noticed LTFT mid changing alot depending on maf hertz, so I adjusted the maf comp table to target those specific hertz ranges and that was the ticket. Finally after months of dicking around i was making progress. As it is now I have LTFT low nailed at 0.xx% and LTFT mid will move between 0.XX and -2.XX depending on hertz. I believe to dial this down further i need to adjust the actual MAF scaling table. I haven't decided how worthwhile that effort would be as I am pretty close, but I might give it a try and see if i can really nail it down. So now its on to working on the starting. It cold starts like a champ every time, immediately restarting after warmed up is fine, its those in between areas that need work. This is one of those great threads I found while doing research https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/ec...cv-tables.html , big thanks to Jamie and MrFred for that. The stalling isn't as bad now with the better dialed in fueling, although it wants to stall every now and then. I'm kinda wondering if my ISCV is just getting a little long in the tooth. Once starting is all ironed out though, I can move to boost tuning. As noted earlier i replaced the WGA so ill have to readjust those tables. Then hopefully FINALLY I can move on to WOT tuning.
The 2 tantalum capacitors it came with both failed. One immediately during testing after assembly, and the other while i was driving about a year later. Luckily the way i wired it I was easily able to bypass the box and plug the resistor pack back in and flash in the old scalings. I replaced the caps with higher quality parts, and it has been working fine a year on now. The ECU trips out because it doesn't detect any current being pulled by the injectors but you can disable this check. Here is the thread for that https://www.evolutionm.net/forums/ec...-tests-ecu.htm
Jul 12, 2018, 10:29 PM
Time will tell how well done they are 
