Cliff notes: Paragraphs summarizing wtf I've been doing the past two years and why the car still ain't running right. Probably should have kept my s2000 too.
So, uh. It's been a minute since I posted last. Lol. A lot has been happening in my life the past year or so and I never find myself in much of a mood to write but I've got a nice lazy day today so I figured I'd give you guys some updates on my car... if I only knew where to begin.
As of right now, I've owned the car a week shy of 2 years and ive put maybe 500 miles on it grand total. Sometime after my last post I made the choice to purchase Marc and Hank's joint efr kit with a 7163 iwg and custom map motronic. While I was waiting for the parts I started taking care of issues with the car, beginning with a new timing belt kit, noisy pulley, front engine seals and threw a set of 7a cams in while I was at it. Of course the cam gear keyway sheared when torquing it back down even with the gear holder and thus began my long dark journey.
So wouldn't you know it, I had no idea it was sheared until trying to start the car. It obviously wasn't compressing correctly so I took it apart, threw a tommis billet on it, and retimed it. Performed a leakdown once back together and found 20 and 25% leakdown on two cylinders, but otherwise ran normally. At this time I just figured oh well, since I was planning on building it eventually anyway, and went on to pull it and sent it out to be built by Jeff at FRP.
Jeff claimed no valves were bent, but he had found some corrosion on the valve seats probably from it sitting before I bought it. So I had him do the works, forged pistons, rods, all new valves, springs, light porting of the head to pick up some easy cfm, arp hardware, balanced, etc. I'll make a list at some point. Also replaced the bad rack and had a fab shop replace the cracked driver's rack mount while it was out and did Hersh engine mounts and 034 snub with bracket and trans mounts.
So it's about June or July 2016 by the time I get the engine back in. At this time all the mods have been installed to support the 7163 and a new southbend stage 4 with a full face ceramic disk and a refurbished 7a flywheel that Marc had been kind enough to provide for me. I had a local shop balance the flywheel then went along putting it all back together. Performed a near flawless first start but found the turbo oil return line threads weren't tightened completely at the block. A few drops of oil later and the car runs great throughout breakin except it's hitting a wall at 4200. Before I get the chance to diagnose why, the valvecover gasket splits near the front left corner and spews all but a qt of oil out over my 40 mile highway drive home without me noticing. I, of course, not having installed my permanent oil pressure gauge yet, have no idea until the red light flashes. I immediately shut it down but was getting a strange scratching noise so obviously freaked out.
I call up Jeff and send the engine to him and he checks it over and deems it's okay. I want to take a moment here and make a note about how amazingly helpful Jeff has been throughout my entire experience with him. He definitely went above and beyond to help me out during this time and I would recommend him to anywone. That being said, I get the engine back again, put it all back together and it starts intermittently. Turns out the crank cog keyway sheared and it was out of time just barely enough to cause the intermittent start. Now, I haven't actually told Jeff this yet so you all shut your mouths, but I can't really blame him anyway. I hear it's not uncommon and I never sent the flywheel with the engine so he would've had no reference to tell anyway lol. A new cog and the engine runs exactly how it did last time. I almost forgot, while the engine was out the second time I had to pull the rack again because the brand new boot had torn. Really.
At this point we are present day and the car is at a buddy's shop with vagcom. We found that the wall it's hitting at 4200 has something to do with how far away the engine speed sensor is from the flywheel teeth. We sanded down the speed sensor side of the sensor mount by 0.5mm at a time until it finally made contact. Each time the wall would go higher up the rpm band and it seemed completely gone after letting the flywheel eat at the sensor once it finally made contact, but upon driving, it intermittently hesistates around 3k only in first gear and hits the wall at 5500 now. So now we'll slap in and shim a new sensor and see where that goes. I've heard of reference signal problems with a 7a flywheel on vems but, this is the first time I've heard of this happening with engine speed and on motronic.
So friends, that is my long, drawn out explanation for my oddly brief introduction and disappearance. Hopefully this'll get worked out soon and I might actually get to enjoy the car and some shows this season to put faces to names. I also have a ton of photos to load sometime but my computer has been down for some months and I just wrote all of this on a smart phone. Oh and I got married sometime last October amidst all of this.
I'll try to post more haha
Ryan
