Sams Polo 3.0

[Sydneykid]

The only downside is we can't rotate tyres front to rear, so instead of carrying 2 spares (1 x Left and 1 x Right) we have to carry 4. An upside is that the 205's are cheaper than the 225's.

Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

So my compomotive 16 x 8's with 225/45/16 are 18kg. As a point of reference what were the RPF01 16 x 8's with the same tyres?

[sambb]

sad. Sabine Schmitz died. She was good value..... and fast! watch

Sabine Schmitz Last Moments Before Her Death - YouTube

[sambb]

Got an oil cooler plumbing question as I have to redo most of what came with the car. I thought it had a thermostated sandwich plate but its plate just redirects the flow without any temp regulation.
So is it usual to go pump/housing>thermo plate>cooler>plate return>filter OR do you filter first and then send the oil out to the cooler?
Also in a vertically mounted cooler does it matter if you bring the pumped source oil in at the base or the top?

edit: I should clarify. The car is running a remote filter so I have the option of doing the oil cooling either pre or post filter.

[HaydEn]

I would say filtering pre cooler would be better, in case foreign objects slowly create a blockage in the cooler core.

Pump side on top to assist gravity draining at the bottom?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Sydneykid]

So my compomotive 16 x 8's with 225/45/16 are 18kg. As a point of reference what were the RPF01 16 x 8's with the same tyres?

I can't say as I have weighed them with tyres recently, without tyres the RPF1 in 16 x 8 weighs 7.1kgs and the TE37 weigh 5.7kgs. From memory the RPF1 and tyre together was 16.something Kgs I think those tyres were brand new so full tread and weight. I'll be at the workshop tonight, I'll try and remember to weigh a couple.

Cheers
Gary

[Sydneykid]

Got an oil cooler plumbing question as I have to redo most of what came with the car. I thought it had a thermostated sandwich plate but its plate just redirects the flow without any temp regulation.
So is it usual to go pump/housing>thermo plate>cooler>plate return>filter OR do you filter first and then send the oil out to the cooler?
Also in a vertically mounted cooler does it matter if you bring the pumped source oil in at the base or the top?

edit: I should clarify. The car is running a remote filter so I have the option of doing the oil cooling either pre or post filter.

On a wet sumps system I run oil pump ---> filter ---> cooler ---> engine. Keeps the gunk out of the oil cooler and lines. Oil coolers are basically a throw away if you lunch an engine with the cooler plumbed before the filter.

I'm not a fan of mounting the cooler vertically, but when it is unavoidable I plumb the oil pump output into the bottom of the cooler to make sure that there is no air trapped in the core (which can happen if you run the feed into the top). I also run the engine up on the starter motor first (no spark plugs, fuel pumps off) to make sure that there is no air trapped in the cooler, lines or the remote filter.

Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

Jeez the volks are light arent they. I didnt realise the RPF01's were as light as that too. They are in my gumtree/ebay keyword alerts as of now so that hopefully I come across a pair.
RE the oil cooler thats what I thought. Makes sense and its logistically easier for me RE plumbing doing it that way. Just wanted to be sure. By having the remote filter I can now run with the oil/water heat exchanger in place (good for street/hillclimb minimum temps) and will have the flow to the oil cooler stat controlled so I should have best of both worlds with that setup. Time to drop some bucks on a few more pushlock fittings and then i'll crack on with that.

[Sydneykid]

The 16 x 8 RPF1's are a bit heavier than they need to be, they actually have the 15" centres and the 16" barrels are bellied down to fit the smaller diameter. As a comparison the 17 x 9 RPF1s that I have on the Skyline are 7.3 kgs, so only 0.2kgs heavier than the 16 x 8's. If Enkei had used a 16" centre then they would be probably ~0.4 kgs lighter. That's why the TE37's were appealing.

To bad you don't have 5 x 114 as there are 2 sets of RPF1's not being used any more.

Oh and we had a couple of issues last night so I forgot to weigh the wheels with tyres.

Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

Finally got around to doing a DV relocation to just in front of the TB. I'd done this on the last car and found better boost response after gearchanges, quieter DV operation (less BOV'y) and negates the compressor surge that my car gets when I reverse up the hill out of my garage (that no doubt my neighbours hate me for).
My car has A Harding performance 2/1/4in pipe from IC to TB which opens up to 2.5in just before the TB. Pipe is 2.5in with 1"tee for the turbosmart DV. Basically wherever you do this in the pre throttle body area, just run the DV output hose around to the stock location in the TIP and make sure you plug in the hot pipe where the DV used to be fed from.

[sambb]

So this is the direct port water meth hardware setup I've been running on the generic APR tune that came with the car. The system is a Snow performance 'Boost cooler Stage 3 with mpg-max'. Basically unlike the cream gear eg Aquamist where they run fixed 150psi pumps and then use pulse width modulated solenoids to deliver very accurate spray, the Snow uses a variable voltage signal to the pump ie it ramps up pump pressure to match water meth to the fuel curve. With a system like this because you may be starting from low pump pressures you need to really run a small nozzle pre throttle body to get things started and then a solenoid (on/off only) then opens up a second nozzle stage for when the initial small nozzle cant meet demands.
So I basically ran a 60cc pm post IC/pre TB nozzle that would start spraying at 30% fuel injector duty and then at 55% duty the solenoid would open which would fire up the direct port nozzles seen in the pics above. The line that goes off to the left comes from the pump, it feeds into the solenoid which is mounted directly to the water meth manifold before each line goes out to each inlet runner.
Now a few things I think I discovered:
- the pre TB nozzle works super well at keeping inlet air temps down. I could start a 3rd gear pull at 26 degrees and finish on 24 degrees! If only inlet manifolds were see through but I would love to know if the water meth marketing is true and all that nozzles droplets were evapoarted by the time the air passes the iAT sensor and the sensor is truly reading cooled air. I do suspect though that part of the cooling is due to the fact that this is simply not true and what is really happening is that un evaporated droplets are wetting the iAT sensor and then as air rushes past it, of course it reads very low.
- what sort of confirms this, for me, is that well after the nozzle has switched off, iAT readings stay low and usually continue to drop (say after you've given the car a short sharp hit and then backed off). That could only happen to my mind if the sensor was actually wet. Also I think droplets make it all the way through to the runners in un evaporated form because when I was running this pre sensor only, I could use it to cancel timing pull on cylinders 1 and 4 but 2 and 3 would still suffer timing pull. If the water meth was truly in a gaseous state then you wouldnt see that.
- now the ECU in our car from what I've been told by a tuner is always trying to jump into more aggressive timing maps based in large part on favourable inlet air temps. What I saw using the pre TB nozzle was that if you were trying to fix a situation where you were seeing 6 degrees of timing pull, you could add water meth, you would see in the logs that the car was running much more timing across the board, yet you would still see 3-4 degrees of timing pull. I found this on my first water injected Polo too. I think what happens is that the water meth produces low inlet air temps, the ecu says 'sweet, we're in Sweden, i'll add loads of timing' but then the water meth you are spraying pre throttle which produces big temp drops, isnt actually sufficient to handle the knock. It might have been able to cancel the knock that you first saw, but not the knock produced by the additional timing the ecu added. Hope that makes sense but it seems to me that you see a certain amount of timing pull, but you are never really able to counter it with a pre TB nozzle because the ECU keeps moving the goalposts on you.
- so then I thought Ok the pre TB nozzle will drop the temps, the ecu will see that and step to a more aggressive timing map, so what I need is direct port water meth to handle the sum total of the timing pull that the engine was predisposed to + the additional knock that will exist due to the ecu having advanced the timing further. So the above direct port was added. The car had already come with direct port but it needed a re-jig to get it ship shape and the above is what I ended up with. What I discovered is that direct port is very very good at killing off knock. So much so that without any water meth the car had sometimes been pulling timing and spark had been coming 0.5 degrees after TDC!! With the pre TB cooling nozzle it was obviously in more advanced maps but then the addition of direct port meant that finally all timing pull was cancelled. In the same spots the car might have had 12-15 degrees BTDC. So it was hugely effective.........but bum dyno said this is not as fast as before and the logs proved it. It was down 10+ g/s of air through the maf at the top of a third gear pull.
- What I think was happening there was that the water meth was so effective at stopping knock, that it was getting into that E85 characteristic of being able to actually take so much timing without knock that it was well past MBT ie you could keep adding additional timing without knock but it wasnt actually making any more torque. So I was watering it to the point of killing off all the timing pull but at these levels it wasnt going to make any more torque and I beieve actually loosing power because by then my octane was probably at 116 due to all the meth.
- so what I then did was ditch the pre TB nozzle. My thinking was that I didnt need to fool the ecu into thinking I was on a cold winters night. The timing that the ecu wanted to run with was probaly most appropriate and if there was any timing pull happening, then the direct port water meth could deal with that over the narrow range where it was a problem. This was definitely the best solution. Timing stayed more petrol-esque rather than E85-ish. The car still had snappy boost response but you could see where timing pull would try to happen and then cancelled very quickly. Problem was, then I was getting O2 sensor heating circuit too low or open circuit errors. I dont think its possible that un evaported water meth could get though the combustion cycle at all so I dont think the sensor was getting 'wet'. It could be that either the exhaust temp was so low due to the effect of water meth that the O2 sensor wigged out, the by products of methanol were damaging the o2 sensor in some way, or more likely that last part of a third gear pull when you lift suddenly was throwing a hugely rich water meth solution through it at a time when the injectors had already turned off. Either way this aint good either so I think from here what is in order is:
- accurately measure the pump pressure and drop it from there. If that fails then choke down the feed line with a restrictor to get it so that only just enough water meth that is needed is sprayed.
-come back from 50:50 water meth to say 70:30 to cover off the possibility that meth is hurting the sensor.

So this was mostly an experimentation with water meth on a tune that had some pretty manic timing pull and allowed me to get my head around its workings in case I choose to run it down the track. The car is in the process of getting remote tuned right now so with a sweet dialled in 98 ron tune, the water meth I have here will probably be null and void but it'll be good to have in the back ground in a much less aggressive state for those insanely hot summer hillclimbs when I'm sure timing pull will creep in.

all testing was done with 50/50 water meth and yes I did pull the primary fuel back a bit allowing for the additional fuelling that the meth would add to the mix. So where I had 0.82's with petrol only, I was still on 0.82's with the 50/50 water meth throughout.

[Sydneykid]

You already know the answer Sam, you need to move to E85, be it 100% E85 or by adding some E85 to the Pump 98. Having 2 tunes and being able to quickly swap between them would be good. Removes all the water injection hardware and most of all the metal gymnastic working around the shortcomings.

Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

Indeed. Yep having seen how effective alcohol is at killing knock in a pretty knock limited engine, I'm pretty well sold on the idea of E85. As soon as the car gets a Link G4+ or an Elite 2500 plug n play it'll be tuned for E85.

In terms of doing it sooner, I do have two ECU's now. The one in the car has the immobiliser on it so will always be the petrol/road ECU but my spare ECU is immob defeated and would be perfect to switch in for track duties. What concerns me though is:
- can I run with existing pump/underbody fuel lines with E85 provided the E85 is only ever in the car for a weekend maybe 8 times a year? The adjustable FPR is E85 tolerant and so too are the EV14 injectors. The APS fuel pump isnt classed as E85 safe and I'm not sure how long those hard nylon click fit fuel lines will tolerate things. The rubber fuel lines in the engine bay are easily changed though.
- If I was to tune on a factory ecu there's no way to integrate a flex fuel sensor. If I'm flying a little blind RE specific actual ethanol content then the tune would have to be a conservative one and to add to that it'd be a remote tune because flash tuning on a dyno is not something I have the dyno time/dollars for - so I'm unsure if THAT sort of E85 tune would still be that much better than a decent 98 tune.

Yeah water meth injection is great but once I got it working effectively it astonished me how much water it was going through. Its fine to have a little 2L container on the street but on the track I dont think you could even do 5 laps at full send without it going empty and then your engine goes bang. I dont like the ide of having to run with a 10L container of extra fluid on board.
Also while I was testing, the Snow nozzles use 1/4 inch fittings but I only had 6mm tube on hand. The fitting felt secure but in service a 6mm hose blew out of one of the nozzles and sprayed 50/50 meth all over the engine bay. If I'd been running richer than 50/50 on the mix I may have had a fire, the fluid emptied the tank almost immediately and if that happened on one cylinder like that on the track you may not feel it at all and thats the cylinder that would then rattle itself to bits. So for the amount of hardware you have to have in place, the risk to the engine if any one part of the system fails and the added hassle of carrying around a second fuel that you always have to keep an eye on....... I think I'd rather just go E85.

[Sydneykid]

I have an E85 tester (tube) which, if I remember rightly, also has markings for E10 and E50, could easily add more. The United E85 is pretty consistent, never seen any below 80% in 12 years.

Something like this CHECK YOUR E85 CONTENT!!! EASY HOW TO WITH SIMPLE TOOLS - YouTube

Quite a lot of guys mix their own E20 (103 ron), being ~5 litres of E85 mixed with ~15 litres of Pump 98 in a 20 litre drum. That seems to overcome the detonation issues and enable decent ignition timing. The common quick tuning is to add 5% more fuel and then tune the ignition timing to suite. It's not enough ethanol to cause fuel systems issues (which I think are overrated anyway) and 5% extra flow from the fuel pump is not normally too much of an ask.

Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

hmm you've got me thinking on the E20 method there Gary. I'm really wondering why not. Thinking I may not even have to adjust the FPR as the injectors probably have enough duty cycle head room in them on the current small turbo.
If on E20 the engine was still knock limited before MBT (like with petrol) then I'm thinking it'd be totally within the scope of the remote tuner to sort an effective E20 tune. Yeah It'd be no big deal leading up to an event/track day to run the tank right down, go to the servo and test the E85 is legit and if so mix my own 20L containers of E20, plug in the 'track' ecu and then head off. Once all the covers are off changing an ECU takes 5 seconds. Just like pre-mixing an outboard (or a rotary ha ha).