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This past week for Crez and myself has been all about heading down to Atlanta to visit SNS (Jwatts and Mrkrad) for some custom stage-5 dyno chip tuning. We could have done dyno runs here at our local dyno and mailed chips back and forth but I did not want to deal with the hassles and delays that can occur when things are not done hands on.
Crez had everything setup with the dyno reservations and gathered the necessary parts for me to prepare his car. Crez's car is a stage 4 Corrado with a BBM Lysolm charger running a upgrade "15psi" pulley that puts out 17psi so Jwatts recommended red top injectors (310cc) to support the boost. Jwatts sent Crez some chips that made for another car's setup using 340cc or 350cc (I can't remember the exact size) injectors. My feeling was that these chips would run us lean. Our injectors were smaller than what the chip was made for and I was very secure with running the same chip that I had been running my car hard with since September when I received it from SNS after I installed my red tops.
Our trip down with 2 friends Thursday night went fine. Except for the fact that I got really bad fuel about an hour before we arrived in Atlanta Friday morning and my car was detonating all over the place at WOT. I called Jwatts after arriving at the hotel and asked about getting some unleaded 100 or 110 race fuel and he couldn't come up with anything but the subject of Toluene came up so I set off for a gallon at Sherman Williams. I added a gallon to my 12(+/-1) gallons of bad gas and my car was off like a rocket with no pinging at all.
After a short nap we headed over Jwatts apartment to start some pilimary chips. He did say he would have liked us to run the chips he had sent so that he would be a little further along in knowing where our cars were. We sat around while he worked on a chip that both Crez and I would run for the evening. While he was doing this I brought up a few things. The biggest being a few rumors I had heard through the G60 grapevine about how a number of engines blew up last year in the late summer/fall time frame. Jwatts response was "Everybody loses engines." This response got me wondering. So the chips are done and I'm installing the chips into our ECUs when Jwatts says don't worry about putting the shielding, ECU frame and all the screws back in. The screws I can agree with but the other items I think were put in for a reason, especially the shielding.
Well the test drive was very revealing. The vacume/boost point was like an on/off switch, being very abrupt and hard on the drivetrain. The acceleration seemed much better but then again I was running a very high octane fuel mix and the evening was very cool. I returned and waited for Crez to arrive back at Jwatts apartment. Then Crez returns with Jwatts driving. The first thing I notice is how badly his car sounds at idle. And then Jwatts immediately says that he hasn't driven many 268 camed cars but he was sure that it should hit much harder (the power) and says that there was something wrong with Crez's setup. But the thing is the car ran fine before when it had the autothority chip and the only changed to make it idle like crap was the SNS chip. Jwatts says the timing was definitely off a tooth and that it needs to be adjusted. I tell him how I know the car's timing is DEAD ON.
(Back when we first installed Crez's BBM 268 with a BBM adjustable cam gear we were a tooth off on the cam as we installed the setup very late at night just a few hours before a VW show that was 4hrs away that we were going to attend. We dynoed this setup a few days later and got 156hp and 177lbs. I then went back and redid the timing belt job thinking that the cam was off a tooth because the BBM cam gear does NOT have the same marks as the stock G60 cam gear. So I matched up a stock G60 Cam gear and marked where the TDC#1 mark is supposed to be on the front of the BBM gear and retimed the car and Crez felt he picked up a little power)
I told Jwatts that I would check the timing but I was certain the timing was dead on but I'd check it and if it were off I'd retime the car at the hotel. He said that I could be on the marks and still be off. He said, "Don't check the timing just change it!!!" This burned me up as the only thing that had been changed was a chip and the car was sounding like crap. Also Jwatts had never driven Crez's car with the Autothority chip that had Crez driven down to Atlanta on let alone even seen a Lysolm before, made me wonder what he was basing this idea that Crez's car was not timed right on.
(Personally I think that Lysolm just doesn't have the same Horsepower or torque that the G60 has. I really like to see a G60 car run at the dyno and turn right around the next day and run a Lysolm charger with no mods changes from one day to the next other than Pulleys being changed so that the chargers put out the same PSI. I'd love to see the HP/torque/Air fuel/boost curves as recorded by the dyno)
Also Jwatts tells me that there is no need to remove the crank pulley or bottom timing belt cover to change a timing belt so now I'm think what the F have I been doing for the past 7yrs. The VA Beach crew heads out to dinner after arranging to meet the next morning to head over to the dyno around 8am. After dinner we head back to the Marriott and check the timing on the crank and the Cam. And we already know that the ignition was at 6degrees from when we redid the Cam gear mark a few months ago. At this point I decided that I was not going to let them (SNS) touch my car anymore and that I wasn't going to adjust Crez's car to their recommendations. Crez then adjusted his Cam gear to 6degrees of advance as Jwatts recommended and this makes me think that his setup is being put right back to where I had mistakenly put his cam timing at a few months back when installing his cam and gear the first time.
I recommended to Crez that he should NOT have SNS tune his car as we are 580miles away from home for "Everybody loses engines" and that I want nothing to do with his car after it has an SNS chip in his car. Up until now I've cared for/worked on his car as if it was my own. Recently I've actually spent more time with his car than I've spent with my wife that I love VERY MUCH. So I was very unhappy/disappointed when Crez decided to risk losing all the work I'd put into his car over the past year. And needless to say we got into a damaging argument and words were said that can never be taken back (yes it does sound very sappy)
I put my car back to a version of the SNS chip that I've been running since September. (This chip was an SNS stage 5. But I had told them I needed it for red top injectors and 20 psi. I found out this weekend that the chip sent to me a version of Mrkrad's turbo chip that was meant to run green tops. This explains the pining I hear occasionally at WOT low in the RPMs. I plan on getting an off the shelf stage 4 chip and just run rich as can be until I can get another chip company to build me a proper stage 5 chip or until I can afford SDS. If I have to I'll detune my setup for the time being.
I agree to the friends that rode down to watch that I would jump in and not allow anything that is way off my idea of what is right.
We met up with the Atlanta Corrado locals Saturday morning and got to watch some little kids try and burn up a little shrub and a Honda. But I was kicked in the butt by my friends used one of my fire extinguishers on it before the fire dept could arrive.
Everybody headed over to dyno. Crez got on the dyno first while I backed out by telling Mrkrad and Jwatts "I'm going to not dyno tune today so Crez can have more time to get his setup right." While Crez's car was being hooked up by the dyno technician Jwatts was worked on revising a chip for Crez's car. I suggested that we might want to hook up the boost reading for the dyno plotting that way we would then have the HP/torque/boost/air-fuel to allow more information for the tuning experts. So we were looking for a good vacume point to tap into. There were a few suggestions by Jwatts that would disable parts of the vacume system and in my opinion not run the car on the dyno in the same manner as the car would run on the road with everything hooked up properly. So I tapped into the vacume line that runs from the firewall side of the TB to the Vacume manifold/cut off valve on the front of the passengerside strut tower.
At this point I just kept an eye on what was going on but it was out of my hands as I'm now just an observer. I think the first run was at 132hp after which all the other runs begin to blend together and I remember seeing 156hp at some point and my friend swears that the last run was 147hp. I got the print out of what I thought was the last run and it shows a 156.7 hp. Jwatts and Mrkrad come up with the idea that the fuel pump is the reason they can't get stronger numbers out of the car. My feeling was that if the fuel pump were bad there would not be 170.9lbs of torque for the best run of the day. I think the Lysolm just has a different type of power level. But there is one way to solve the fuel pump question and that is for Crez to install a Fuel pressure gauge.
After 2hrs of Crez being on the Dyno,
(It was planned to have both mine and Crez's done within 2hrs, and I didn't think that was possible way back when the plans were first made)
Jwatts and Mrkrad come to tell me that its my time to get on and this is where I got put on the spot about why I didn't feel SNS was right for my car. I like things to be done right to almost an extreme degree and I felt they were a bunch of hacks with chip burning software. I didn't have the Balls to say this to them in person. But I told them that I didn't think their work was my cup of tea and that I'll most likely be going with a overly rich green top chip until I can afford SDS or some other setup that is more in line with style of tuning. I'd rather risk burning up my Cat and O2 rather than burning up my engine and that I thought the chip from the night before was just too hard on my driveline for streetability.
We then watch SNS play with another Corrado and then head back to Jwatts as he wants to burn a new chip for Crez before we head to the Cookout that the Atlanta Boys have setup for a post dyno GTG.
Then we head back to the hotel to relax and unwind. That night while we were out running around the stomping grounds of Atlanta I got a couple of calls on my voicemail from Jwatts. He said that he really wasn't feeling all that well when he was tuning Crez's car and that he wasn't able to put forth his best effort but he had worked on a chip that evening for Crez to pick up before we left. This kind of blew my cork. Why did Crez even spend $200 on the dyno and then all the money for the road trip if he wasn't going to work hard while Crez was on the dyno! Hell we don't know what type of HP/lbs/air fuel numbers Crez car is putting out now with any of the chips he came home with. All this work and money and Crez only received a dyno sheet equal to what he ran 5 months and $600 ago from who knows when in the day and the chip has since been revised 2-3 times
Now his car does pull ok from what I've watched on the road but that is nothing more than it did before.
I really didn't want to say anything at all as I know this will ruffle a lot of feathers but I thought many people would be asking how the weekend went and what my opinion was.
Frank
Crez had everything setup with the dyno reservations and gathered the necessary parts for me to prepare his car. Crez's car is a stage 4 Corrado with a BBM Lysolm charger running a upgrade "15psi" pulley that puts out 17psi so Jwatts recommended red top injectors (310cc) to support the boost. Jwatts sent Crez some chips that made for another car's setup using 340cc or 350cc (I can't remember the exact size) injectors. My feeling was that these chips would run us lean. Our injectors were smaller than what the chip was made for and I was very secure with running the same chip that I had been running my car hard with since September when I received it from SNS after I installed my red tops.
Our trip down with 2 friends Thursday night went fine. Except for the fact that I got really bad fuel about an hour before we arrived in Atlanta Friday morning and my car was detonating all over the place at WOT. I called Jwatts after arriving at the hotel and asked about getting some unleaded 100 or 110 race fuel and he couldn't come up with anything but the subject of Toluene came up so I set off for a gallon at Sherman Williams. I added a gallon to my 12(+/-1) gallons of bad gas and my car was off like a rocket with no pinging at all.
After a short nap we headed over Jwatts apartment to start some pilimary chips. He did say he would have liked us to run the chips he had sent so that he would be a little further along in knowing where our cars were. We sat around while he worked on a chip that both Crez and I would run for the evening. While he was doing this I brought up a few things. The biggest being a few rumors I had heard through the G60 grapevine about how a number of engines blew up last year in the late summer/fall time frame. Jwatts response was "Everybody loses engines." This response got me wondering. So the chips are done and I'm installing the chips into our ECUs when Jwatts says don't worry about putting the shielding, ECU frame and all the screws back in. The screws I can agree with but the other items I think were put in for a reason, especially the shielding.
Well the test drive was very revealing. The vacume/boost point was like an on/off switch, being very abrupt and hard on the drivetrain. The acceleration seemed much better but then again I was running a very high octane fuel mix and the evening was very cool. I returned and waited for Crez to arrive back at Jwatts apartment. Then Crez returns with Jwatts driving. The first thing I notice is how badly his car sounds at idle. And then Jwatts immediately says that he hasn't driven many 268 camed cars but he was sure that it should hit much harder (the power) and says that there was something wrong with Crez's setup. But the thing is the car ran fine before when it had the autothority chip and the only changed to make it idle like crap was the SNS chip. Jwatts says the timing was definitely off a tooth and that it needs to be adjusted. I tell him how I know the car's timing is DEAD ON.
(Back when we first installed Crez's BBM 268 with a BBM adjustable cam gear we were a tooth off on the cam as we installed the setup very late at night just a few hours before a VW show that was 4hrs away that we were going to attend. We dynoed this setup a few days later and got 156hp and 177lbs. I then went back and redid the timing belt job thinking that the cam was off a tooth because the BBM cam gear does NOT have the same marks as the stock G60 cam gear. So I matched up a stock G60 Cam gear and marked where the TDC#1 mark is supposed to be on the front of the BBM gear and retimed the car and Crez felt he picked up a little power)
I told Jwatts that I would check the timing but I was certain the timing was dead on but I'd check it and if it were off I'd retime the car at the hotel. He said that I could be on the marks and still be off. He said, "Don't check the timing just change it!!!" This burned me up as the only thing that had been changed was a chip and the car was sounding like crap. Also Jwatts had never driven Crez's car with the Autothority chip that had Crez driven down to Atlanta on let alone even seen a Lysolm before, made me wonder what he was basing this idea that Crez's car was not timed right on.
(Personally I think that Lysolm just doesn't have the same Horsepower or torque that the G60 has. I really like to see a G60 car run at the dyno and turn right around the next day and run a Lysolm charger with no mods changes from one day to the next other than Pulleys being changed so that the chargers put out the same PSI. I'd love to see the HP/torque/Air fuel/boost curves as recorded by the dyno)
Also Jwatts tells me that there is no need to remove the crank pulley or bottom timing belt cover to change a timing belt so now I'm think what the F have I been doing for the past 7yrs. The VA Beach crew heads out to dinner after arranging to meet the next morning to head over to the dyno around 8am. After dinner we head back to the Marriott and check the timing on the crank and the Cam. And we already know that the ignition was at 6degrees from when we redid the Cam gear mark a few months ago. At this point I decided that I was not going to let them (SNS) touch my car anymore and that I wasn't going to adjust Crez's car to their recommendations. Crez then adjusted his Cam gear to 6degrees of advance as Jwatts recommended and this makes me think that his setup is being put right back to where I had mistakenly put his cam timing at a few months back when installing his cam and gear the first time.
I recommended to Crez that he should NOT have SNS tune his car as we are 580miles away from home for "Everybody loses engines" and that I want nothing to do with his car after it has an SNS chip in his car. Up until now I've cared for/worked on his car as if it was my own. Recently I've actually spent more time with his car than I've spent with my wife that I love VERY MUCH. So I was very unhappy/disappointed when Crez decided to risk losing all the work I'd put into his car over the past year. And needless to say we got into a damaging argument and words were said that can never be taken back (yes it does sound very sappy)
I put my car back to a version of the SNS chip that I've been running since September. (This chip was an SNS stage 5. But I had told them I needed it for red top injectors and 20 psi. I found out this weekend that the chip sent to me a version of Mrkrad's turbo chip that was meant to run green tops. This explains the pining I hear occasionally at WOT low in the RPMs. I plan on getting an off the shelf stage 4 chip and just run rich as can be until I can get another chip company to build me a proper stage 5 chip or until I can afford SDS. If I have to I'll detune my setup for the time being.
I agree to the friends that rode down to watch that I would jump in and not allow anything that is way off my idea of what is right.
We met up with the Atlanta Corrado locals Saturday morning and got to watch some little kids try and burn up a little shrub and a Honda. But I was kicked in the butt by my friends used one of my fire extinguishers on it before the fire dept could arrive.
Everybody headed over to dyno. Crez got on the dyno first while I backed out by telling Mrkrad and Jwatts "I'm going to not dyno tune today so Crez can have more time to get his setup right." While Crez's car was being hooked up by the dyno technician Jwatts was worked on revising a chip for Crez's car. I suggested that we might want to hook up the boost reading for the dyno plotting that way we would then have the HP/torque/boost/air-fuel to allow more information for the tuning experts. So we were looking for a good vacume point to tap into. There were a few suggestions by Jwatts that would disable parts of the vacume system and in my opinion not run the car on the dyno in the same manner as the car would run on the road with everything hooked up properly. So I tapped into the vacume line that runs from the firewall side of the TB to the Vacume manifold/cut off valve on the front of the passengerside strut tower.
At this point I just kept an eye on what was going on but it was out of my hands as I'm now just an observer. I think the first run was at 132hp after which all the other runs begin to blend together and I remember seeing 156hp at some point and my friend swears that the last run was 147hp. I got the print out of what I thought was the last run and it shows a 156.7 hp. Jwatts and Mrkrad come up with the idea that the fuel pump is the reason they can't get stronger numbers out of the car. My feeling was that if the fuel pump were bad there would not be 170.9lbs of torque for the best run of the day. I think the Lysolm just has a different type of power level. But there is one way to solve the fuel pump question and that is for Crez to install a Fuel pressure gauge.
After 2hrs of Crez being on the Dyno,
(It was planned to have both mine and Crez's done within 2hrs, and I didn't think that was possible way back when the plans were first made)
Jwatts and Mrkrad come to tell me that its my time to get on and this is where I got put on the spot about why I didn't feel SNS was right for my car. I like things to be done right to almost an extreme degree and I felt they were a bunch of hacks with chip burning software. I didn't have the Balls to say this to them in person. But I told them that I didn't think their work was my cup of tea and that I'll most likely be going with a overly rich green top chip until I can afford SDS or some other setup that is more in line with style of tuning. I'd rather risk burning up my Cat and O2 rather than burning up my engine and that I thought the chip from the night before was just too hard on my driveline for streetability.
We then watch SNS play with another Corrado and then head back to Jwatts as he wants to burn a new chip for Crez before we head to the Cookout that the Atlanta Boys have setup for a post dyno GTG.
Then we head back to the hotel to relax and unwind. That night while we were out running around the stomping grounds of Atlanta I got a couple of calls on my voicemail from Jwatts. He said that he really wasn't feeling all that well when he was tuning Crez's car and that he wasn't able to put forth his best effort but he had worked on a chip that evening for Crez to pick up before we left. This kind of blew my cork. Why did Crez even spend $200 on the dyno and then all the money for the road trip if he wasn't going to work hard while Crez was on the dyno! Hell we don't know what type of HP/lbs/air fuel numbers Crez car is putting out now with any of the chips he came home with. All this work and money and Crez only received a dyno sheet equal to what he ran 5 months and $600 ago from who knows when in the day and the chip has since been revised 2-3 times
Now his car does pull ok from what I've watched on the road but that is nothing more than it did before.
I really didn't want to say anything at all as I know this will ruffle a lot of feathers but I thought many people would be asking how the weekend went and what my opinion was.
Frank
