Most of what I've been doing has been related to the wiring. I ran a couple new ground wires to the same place as the rest of MS for the ignition box and for the AEM UEGO gauge. It seems to be a little more rational now, but I'm still not positive that it's going to be spot-on. I think once this is up and running, I may look to adding in a new wideband for MS.

I've taken a lot of care to get the wires run to the right length and to have good solid connections everywhere. Pretty much every bit of wire also has some of the plastic split-tube stuff covering it and I've put in a bunch of those wire clamps to keep things from moving around too much. I got the starter wires all situated this morning, so I can go ahead and try to fit the radiator and cooling fans. All of the hose clamps are attached to the heater core lines, but the lower line still needs to be strapped to the head to keep it from moving around too much. Once the radiator and its hoses are installed, the cooling system should be all buttoned up.

I found a hose barb to add to the intake pipe for the PCV breather system, so that will need to be drilled.

Every time I looked over at the new voltage regular, I wondered to myself why I had unplugged it or if I had ever actually plugged it in. Turns out that while I may be going crazy, that isn't a symptom: The connector really doesn't have a good positive catch to the box. It looks like there's a place to string a zip tie across so I will try to strap one of those on there to keep it connected.

One thing that hasn't been done with the wiring yet is getting the sensors for the gauges all hooked in. I'll need to run some ground wire for them to something other than the headlight (boy did that give me some weird coolant temp readings!) and I'll need to run the signal lines back to the dash. I won't really be able to bundle them with the existing wiring, which is okay, so I'm planning to just run them on their own for now.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8bp-JcuFvbM

I had a problem with the oil cooler water supply lines - they were exactly where the axle wanted to be. So I had to get some new hose and re-adjust. I'm not crazy about the positioning, but it'll work. I filled it with fluids, plugged in the coil, loaded up a base tune, and on the very first crank it started right up!

I've really created a bit of a nasty maintenance problem in the general vicinity of the oil cooler. The sandwich adapter for the oil pressure and temp senders makes it impossible to remove the oil filter without taking off the hot side pipe. Plus, getting to the senders is rather difficult. I'm not thrilled about the monster that I've created there, but for now I don't see another way to get it to work.

Right after I started it for the first time, the oil pressure sender wire broke again, so I stopped everything to get it fixed up since I don't want to be blind on oil pressure with a fresh motor. After major gyrations, the sender came off and I repaired the wire yet again, this time wrapping it in copious amounts of black tape. With that done, I started it back up and tuned the idle a bit and played with the accel enrichment settings some. The throttle response off idle isn't great, but it is better.

The only leak at this point is a tiny drip off the drain plug. I think a new gasket/washer will fix that. Otherwise, nothing is dripping or spraying. My next step is to get the suspension back on and slip a power steering belt on and then drive it around and let auto-tune do its magic. The brakes got put on that, though, because I'm missing the jam nuts for the tie rod ends. Plus I need a new PS belt. I plan to pick those up tomorrow morning before F1 quali, then get back to work after quali is over and should be driving around tomorrow afternoon.

For my own reference: rebuild odometer reading is 77,427

6 down, 494 break-in miles to go!

After fighting with my laptop for literally an hour to get Tuner Studio to recognize MS (the problem was completely in the laptop), I put the LED bar on, backed the car out of the driveway, and took it for a little drive.

It really needs a power steering belt.

My alignment is sorta close, but not quite there.

The only leak is power steering fluid because I don't think I snugged down all the fittings on the pump.

It sounds like there's a big boost leak somewhere and I found one vacuum tap that needs a better cap on it.

The blow off valve is non functional.

The tune needs a lot of work.

I need to figure out the tach output from MS to the gauge cluster.

Holy E36 M3 does that car go from 20 to 70 without even thinking!

There were a couple vacuum nipples that I forgot to cap, so that's fixed.

I've read that the Forge BOV tends to have a little flutter, so I'm going to give it a little more of a chance before I rip it off and toss it in the trash.

There were a couple couplers that didn't have their clamps snugged down all the way, but pushing some compressed air into the system identified those quickly, and it seems to be boost-leak free now.

Power steering is all set up now. I got a 39 5/8" belt (they measure those on the outside diameter, not the inside, just for future reference) and then torqued down the various fittings.

It's actually pretty exciting that this is finally coming together. After taking so long and moving so slowly to get to this point, things seem to be accelerating and coming to completion rapidly. I've never rebuilt an engine before so the fact that it started right up with good oil pressure and no leaks or noises just blew me away. There was a serious sense of dread deep in me that when I started it up, there was going to be something terribly wrong that would require me to rip the whole thing back out and start over, but so far all it really needs is to work the tune out.

Congrats on getting it running! Good luck with the tune, the fact that it fired right up and idles seems like a good sign to me.

Thank you! I'm absolutely giddy with excitement that it actually ran and had oil pressure and didn't leak anything! I was figured I was about 60/40 that it would need to be pulled back out and torn down again versus that it would start up so it was a pleasant surprise for me.

I'm a little behind in pictures, so here's what I've been up to:

This is the recalcitrant oil pressure sender. I tried to fix it by wiring directly to it, but that came apart and I had to pull the sender and re-fix. The second time I knocked off the plastic cap that holds the terminals and soldered a wire to the inside of the sender where there was a little more of the original wire to work with. Once it cooled, I wrapped the heck out of it with black electrical tape and it's held so far.

The problem that I created for myself looks like this:

The combination of the oil filter sandwich and the boost pipe means that the oil filter can't be put on with the boost pipe in the way. So to do an oil change, that pipe needs to be unbolted from the oil pan and then disconnected from the pipe that goes in to the intercooler. Once the filter is in, re-install everything, and it fits like a glove:

I still have a nasty mess of wires that needs to be cleaned up, but I'm focused on getting everything running right first and then I'll make it pretty. In the meantime, here's the installed and running engine:

I had a little problem with the power steering belt. I thought I had it tensioned, but it was still really super loose so I tightened it up and it's nice and quiet now. The tighter ratio steering box is AMAZING, by the way.

On a couple occasions I've had leaks develop from the charge pipes, plus there is a constant whistle on acceleration, so that may need some attention. The pipes are tightened and the vacuum lines all have clamps on them now, but I'm not sure if there's anything else that needs to be done. It'll pull 14-15 pounds of boost (I haven't tried setting the controller any higher yet), but I really don't know if I'm leaking so much that I'm losing out on power. When I pushed compressed air through the intake, I was getting a steady flow of air through the valve cover breather as well as some hissing from the boost controller and maybe something from around the wastegate. In any case, I suspect that the boost pipes will need to be upgraded yet again -- at the least they'll need to have beads rolled on to their edges.

The Forge blow off valve is back off and the stock surge valve is back. I don't know what the problem is with that BOV, but I just can't get it to work. So be it.

Finally, I'll leave you with a little present. The original starting up video sounded terrible because of the cell phone microphone and some sort of reverb going on in the garage. Here's some video of tuning the idle. For some reason, the idle was showing a little rich here after I thought I had it worked out, so ignore that. I've since fixed it and brought it to around 13.5:1 at idle.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1cwrdcCJYy4

I've been working on finding boost leaks by hooking up a fairly constant 20psi (as measured by a harbor freight hammer/pressure regulator, so I'm sure that's wildly inaccurate) to the turbo intake via a tire valve inserted in to a 2.5" rubber sewer cap, capping the crankcase breather, and spraying soapy water everywhere.

The surge valve was leaking pretty badly, so I gooped it up with RTV and re-installed and it seems to be sealed up.

There was a leak at the turbo hot side pipe outlet, so I gave the clamp a few more turns and that seems to be sealed up. Same thing on the intercooler inlet with similar results.

There's some air blowing from the shaft on the throttle body, but I'm told that's to be expected and that there isn't much to be done about it.

Finally, the big problem:

Air is blowing all over from around the intake manifold as evidenced by the giant bubble bath. This one I'm not too sure about. The bolts are torqued down and the gasket is in place. I think the problem may stem from the fact that I'm using the 2.0 DOHC intake manifold on the 2.4 Turbo head. Time to do some more research.

When I first got my SRT-4, it would whistle on decel a lot... found it to be the intake manifold gasket cracked, which is kind of common.

Under hard boost, the stock turbos make a pretty unique sound that could be thought of as a leak, but if it's under partial throttle, I'm sure something is wrong with that gasket sealing.

That... is a bad leak. lol.

Are you using one of the thick reusable intake gaskets? If not, I wonder if that would do the trick.

Yeah, that's a pretty bad one. I don't think a zip tie or aggressive ignoring is going to work for that...

I'm just using one of the three regular papery gaskets that was in the DNJ set. Which thick gasket are you referring to? I need one with the 03+ head bolt pattern but with also the water neck.

In reply to wae:

Can't remember what the brand was, or if they have one for newer engines. I think I bought it from Modern Performace, but I can't find it on their website.

When I got back from Vegas, I went gasket shopping and the one I'm using is definitely the 2005 Dodge Caravan SE intake manifold gasket. This time around, I'm trying it with a tiny layer of RTV on both sides to hopefully get a better seal.

I don't know if this would have had anything to do with the air leak, but the head has some voids cast in to it which the gasket and the intake manifold do not match. The SRT4 gasket is just solid but the Caravan gasket has cutouts for the voids that aren't the right shape:

Those voids don't go anywhere and I would think that as long as the seal around the intake ports was good, nothing else would really matter, but just in case, I went ahead and glopped a little extra RTV around the tops of those to try to seal them off. The new Fel-Pro gasket is thicker and a slightly different material than the DNJ fiber one that was on there, so hopefully between the two things I'll have a better seal.

I can't test that seal right now, though, because I had to take off the throttle body and now I cannot find the gasket. I'm fairly certain that I had one on there before, although I can't be 100% certain and despite spending 15 minutes looking for it in, under, and around the engine I cannot find it. Naturally, it's a special-order part now from the various chain parts stores, so I won't be able to leak test today.

Everything is buttoned back up and it's sealing much better now. I think the thicker, more compliant gasket with the RTV chaser has helped tremendously. Amazingly, though, there are still a few tiny bubbles creeping out along the top of the manifold flange! I guess I need to work on sourcing an SRT4 intake and seeing if the pt throttle body will work on it.

There remains a bit of whine related to gas pedal pressure, but I'm not sure how much of that is coming from the intake and how much is related to air leaks. I know the throttle body leaks through the shaft and I'm sure there are some other leaks because it won't really hold pressure very long, but I'm sort of at a loss to find them. When I set the air regulator to 20psi and leave it hooked up and on, the boost gauge only reads 1 psi, so I'm assuming that means I'm venting the other 19 psi to the atmosphere through leaks, but everything else seems pretty solid.

Tuner Studio worked its magic for about an hour last night I drove around and did some pulls and steady cruising with VE Analyze Live and it's smoothed out nicely. There's a little bit of bucking around 1500 RPM at high-to-moderate vacuum but I think it's related to ignition advance switching between some fairly drastically different buckets. It's got about a hundred miles since the rebuild and I plan to put a few more on this week!

Power washed and then regular washed the car today. Then found out the RallyX that was supposed to be next weekend got bumped to the 22nd. I'll be at COTA for the USGP and won't be able to make it. Boo!

I've put almost 200 miles on the car so far and I've got a few problems to solve:

• Light throttle application can be a little touchy

• There's a spot in the fuel map where it kind of surges a bit and you hit that crusing in 5th at around 50mph or 4th at around 35-40.

• Sometimes the boost gauge shows -15psi at idle and doesn't go in to boost on accelleration, but other times it shows -10psi at idle and plenty of boost. Leak or bad gauge?

• There's a lot of whooshing and whistling and whirring under throttle. Regular turbo noises or big boost leaks? I hope it's regular turbo noises because it sounds awesome.

• I've developed an oil leak at the oil filter/oil cooler/oil temp sender/oil pressure sender/sandwich adapter. It's not huge and there's no oil above it, so I'm 90% confident that the leak is there. I torqued down the temp sender a bit since it had some threads sticking out and that seemed to help, but there's still a bit of drip. My plan is to wait until I do the 500 mile oil change and then pull the sandwich plate out, double check the gasket, and put some sort of oil-safe thread sealer on the senders.

• Speaking of oil, I can't check the oil level at all at this point. The handle on the oil dipstick broke off. I'd like to get a new dipstick and dipstick tube since I had to bend up the PT cruiser tube real bad to get it to fit around the DOHC intake. I'd like to go to the SRT4 intake and TB as well, so I'm kind of deferring that until then. If the dipstick and tube is the same on all 2.4s, though, I may go ahead and get that so I can at least use the dipstick to check oil.

As a sort of prophylactic thing, I pulled the plugs last night and checked compression. It was cold, throttle closed, with three plugs still in, but I got a solid 145psi on all four pots, so that's a good indicator. There's no behaviour from the engine that would indicate any problems with compression, but I just kind of wanted to check. The plugs were gapped pretty randomly, so I re-gapped them to .035 and re-installed. There was some oil on one or two of the plugs, but when I filled the oil initially, I did manage to spill a bit of oil onto the valve cover, so I'm hoping it is left over from that. There was also a slight exhaust leak that I think I took care of by torquing the O2 sensor down all the way.

After a wash it looked like this:

So I decided to use up some of the vinyl I had left over from the bike. After the $2012 challenge, some of the challenge-required stickers took bits of the paint off, so I've been wanting to cover it up for a while.

The first attempt at the quarter didn't go very well and I wound up with a terrible mess, so I pulled the vinyl off and cut a new sheet. You can see that the vinyl pulled more paint off, so I'm basically committed now. Interestingly, the knifeless tape is pulling the paint off, too, so it doesn't really take much.

When I did the door, I meant to continue down to the rocker, but I sort of got distracted, so that spot was left unfinished. Oops.

Ta-da!

Funny story: I only used this color because I had a bunch of it. The black and blue does look pretty nice, I'll admit, but there wasn't much thought that went in to color selection. After I got this done, I had just enough to do the top of the trunk lid, but I managed to tear the vinyl so I had to rip that off and discard. If not for the first attempt at the quarter and the trunk lid, I'd only need enough vinyl to do the bumper, door, and bottom of the trunk. But instead, I had to buy another 15 feet. Oh well, I think it'll look pretty nice when it's finished and I've got the new roll sitting in the living room now, so I may try to get some more progress made on that before I leave for Austin.

In the meantime, eastsidemav is on the way over to drive me around while I fiddle in TunerStudio and try to get things smoothed out a bit.

In reply to wae:

The blue looks nice. And I saw on Facebooks your adventures in tuning...and batteries.

Yeah... so that didn't work out the way I had hoped. Basically, right when we got it all dialed in and running pretty well, it started acting up and then died as soon as we got it off the highway. The battery cable was almost all the way disconnected, but even after torquing that down and getting a jump, it wasn't running right. So after a flatbed trip home, we put Tim's battery in the car and everything was fine again. It was a 6 year old Valucraft, bottom-of-the-line battery, so I guess I can't be too upset that it gave up the ghost. I've got a new battery and better battery terminals to install when I get back next week and things should be looking up.

Oh, what we wound up tuning was the accel enrichment. After staring at the ignition and VE buckets and seeing that they weren't changing but the AFR was all over the board, I realized that there was something else that could change the amount of fuel so I played with that while Tim drove and I think it's smoothed out pretty well now.

Where does the time go: An Update in Four Parts

Part One:

The whole breaking-down-on-the-road thing was the battery. I got a regular old battery from my FLAPS and dropped it in. I also took the opportunity to put real battery terminals on the ends of the battery cables so they won't be prone to coming loose. So far, so good on that!

Part Two:

Tuning. Lots of tuning. I've corrected a few out-of-whack settings I had in the project. My dwell and spark delay were kind of off as were some of the injector settings. I'm getting some misses at low throttle, low-rpm operations such as cruising at 50mph in 5th gear, but that seems to be related to timing, so I've pulled back the advance towards the bottom of the table and that seems to be helping.

I've reached almost 500 miles on the new engine, so it'll be time to drain and change the oil soon. I'll also take that opportunity to crank the boost up a wee bit, since I've had it limited to 10psi for the break-in period. I've figured out how to build the tach output circuit, so some chilly winter day I'll go out and whip that up real fast. At this stage, I'm not bothering with IAC circuitry yet since I don't know what the IAC will look like long term. The 1gn DOHC IAC is a stepper motor that the MS can already control but the SRT IAC is a PWM setup that I need to mod the board a bit to make work. I think I'd like to get an SRT4 intake and throttle body, but we'll see how that turns out.

Once I have everything pretty well dialed in at about 15psi of boost, I'm going to start thinking about E85 and 20psi.

Part Three:

Oil leaks.

Initially, I was pretty pleased that there wasn't a drop of anything coming off the bottom of the car. That has since changed and I'm getting some decently-sized slicks. Some limited investigation leads me to seepage from the oil temp and pressure senders as well as the drain plug on the oil pan. When I change the oil, I'm going to go ahead and take all those apart again and evaluate how to seal them up.

Part Four:

The fun part! I've continued with the wrapping:

I tried to do the trunk as one piece, but I just couldn't get it. I put a line of knifeless tape right on the body line of the trunk lid and two-pieced it.

I didn't have a large enough piece left to do the bumper in one shot, and I wasn't really sure that I'd be able to pull it off solo, either, so I did one bit on the center, and then used some knifeless tape on the corners. I've got the left corner yet to do and then I need to do the inlay for behind the license plate. That should pretty much run me out of vinyl.

So far, I'm really liking the look of the blue on the black. It covers up the previous "Hi. Powered" that was on the side which I though was at least chuckle-worthy, but apparently it's been too long since those original "Hi." Neon ads for anyone else to care or remember. It also covers the spots where the paint had been taken off by challenge decals. One thing I didn't want it to cover up, though, was my Dork sticker. Good news is that with my recent renewal, a new Dork sticker arrived in the mail yesterday! Woo! I need to think about where I want to apply that. I may go magnetic with it, but we shall see.

Oh, one pro-tip for you, if you're going to do vinyl in a cold garage: Use the head gun on its highest setting to put some heat in to the surface that you're going to be wrapping and then switch it back to low and hit the paper side of the vinyl very lightly, just to warm it a tiny bit. Then keep going back and just barely hitting it with the heat -- not enough to start to shrink it, but just enough to keep it to about 80-ish degrees.

That vinyl job looks really good!

I have always wanted to do something similar but don't have enough metal left for the vinyl to cover on my rallycross car.

Thanks!

It doesn't look quite as good in person. There are a few wrinkles here and there and some places where I stretched it a little too much, but it photographs well, so that's the main thing!

Vinyl will cover up a lot of sins once you get a few feet back, so throw some POR on the rust and slap the vinyl on top!

Going to be able to make the December 10th event?

eastsidemav wrote: Going to be able to make the December 10th event?

You bet! I should have the boost up a few psi by then :)

Hit 500 miles on the rebuild earlier this week so I drained out the old oil this afternoon. It had almost a greyish tint to it, not sure if that's to be expected or not, though. I pulled the oil pressure and temp senders and added Teflon tape. The pressure sender was actually pretty loose so I'm hoping that was the problem.

I sort of fell asleep lying under the car waiting for the oil to drain so I ran out of time before I could get the new filter on but I might have a little bit of a fitment problem.