IT RUNS!!! - My 500whp build - Element motor and Moore Performance Twin Scroll Kit! by dexterous

8 minute(s) of a 312 minute read

I have the car all tuned up for the drive down to element. The AFRs under boost were way lean even after I added 10% more fuel. I think I had to multiply the cells between 5psi and 20psi from 2200RPM through 7000RPM by an average of 1.16 to get things in the mid 11s at WOT.

The fuel mapping is not exactly great but since the car starts, idles, drives well, operates knock free and is in general pretty quick on the street I would say its a victory for a guy with extremely limited tuning experience.

7-4-2011

Yeah, the third time had better go well because I really cant afford a 4th this year.

I was originally going to go down unannounced again in an attempt to just post up that it was finished but what the hell. You guys have been so supportive and at this point I could use all the people rooting for the car that I can get. Tomorrow (July 5th) is the day and I am supposed to arrive at Element at about 1PM. Its possible that the car wont go on the dyno until after 3PM and its unlikely that it will finish any time before 6pm. I need to immediately get on the road and head directly home so dont get your hopes up to much for an update until Wednesday morning.

7-6-2011

I will start off by saying thank you to my wonderful wife who has supported me through this entire ridiculous process. I don't know what I would ever do without her...

If you have been following my thread you know that over the winter I installed an Element Tuning race motor with high compression, big heads, big cams, 8500 RPM redline, etc. I also installed a new fuel system which was designed to support 700hp at the wheels even though I would never run a turbo large enough to actually hit that power level. I also installed a pre-production version of the Moore Performance "Slayer" turbo kit which leveraged Evo 9 framed turbos on a Subaru.

I finished up the car in early April and took it down to Element Tuning in Washington D.C. for the first dyno tune attempt which didn't go as planned. The Evo turbo wasn't able to build boost pressure correctly because the turbo's internal wastegate design didn't work well with the EJ257 platform. At that time slayer kit was still in development and had only been tested on stock 2.0 motors. My fully built motor exposed the need for a design change to keep the boost control system operating correctly even under the most extreme conditions. About two weeks after I brought the car home from Element Ryan and Dale tested a revised Evo turbo kit on another car and clearly demonstrated that they had everything was working correctly. At that point, the only task was to get the kit off of my car and into their hands for an update.

In the meantime Ryan and Dale were also hard at work on their secrete twin scroll rotated kit project. They were just starting to look for somebody with a built motor to test the new kit and since I already had my car totally torn down he had a great opportunity. Ryan Moore mentioned the possibility of testing out the new kit and the idea sounded pretty awesome (how could I resist?). Part of the deal was Ryan and Dale's request to keep everything on the DL since I was testing a yet to be announced product so I keep everything secret.

Here's a few picts of how my car has looked for the past month:

I really think the new setup looks amazing and I am very pleased with the quality, fit and finish of everything Moore Performance has made for me. The new kit is based around a custom made twin-scroll turbo with a billet compressor wheel, ball bearing center cartridge and a large hot side. For comparison, the turbo is fairly similar in size to a 1.03 AR 35R but its significantly more advanced. The header is a new twin scroll design from Moore Performance that somewhat resembles a JDM header form a 2.0L STI. The kit also includes dual TiAL wastegates and a optional set of EWG silencers that make the gates so quiet you would never even know they were there. (More details will be posted later by Ryan and Dale).

Any way, I went back down to Element to get the new kit tuned on Friday June 24th. I noticed that the car smelled like it was running very rich when we loaded it on the dyno but I figured that it just needed tuned. We did a quick pull and it was obvious that something was very wrong. The AFRs were way way rich and the car was smoking really bad even thought lots of fuel was pulled out of the map. We took the car off the dyno and tore it down in the parking lot to see if we could figure out what was going on. I pulled the plugs out and found that one of the plugs was extremely fouled. I moved the injector on that cylinder to another location and replaced the plug with a fresh one. The issue followed the injector and since there were no replacements around the day was clearly over. I swapped in an injector of a different size, had Phil scaled the Hydra accordingly and limped the car home. The trip cost hundreds of dollars and all of it was totally wasted.

Ultimate Racing immediately replaced the bad fuel injector with an entirely new set. I installed the new injectors as well as a second fuel filter (100 micron post fuel pump) and called it a day. The car needed a significant amount of fuel added to get the AFRs back in spec so it was obvious that it was partially tuned on bad injectors. I adjusted everything last Saturday and the car seemed totally healthy. The AFRs were in check, the idle was good and most of all, it didn't smoke. Phil was able to squeeze me in on Tuesday, July 5th (yesterday) so I made a third trip back to element. Ken Badger was nice enough to ride along and help as needed which helped a lot.

I arrived at Element just after noon yesterday and had the car on the dyno by 1:15PM. All signs pointed to the car being healthy so Phil started doing a few pulls. On the second pull the car started to smoke even worse than it did the first time and I knew the day was over. The smoke was terrible, it filled the entire building like a tire fire! I was extremely upset and feeling sick, "how could this be happening again" I said! Ken did is best to keep me calm as they took the car off the dyno and parked it outside. I was devastated to say the least. That was another several hundred dollar tune wasted for nothing.

I went back to the office at Element tuning to calm down and call Ryan Moore. After several conversations with Ryan, Phil and the turbo maker we came to the conclusion that the item we all thought was an oil restrictor was actually just a filter. The filter and the restrictor are identical in appearance except for some non-obvious markings on the side of the part. We all through we had the restrictor fitting and since it's a ball bearing turbo we were pretty sure thats what would have been shipped. It was a very minor mistake with a very major consequence but I guess thats life.

While the filter/restrictor problem is absolutely an issue that must be corrected I am really concerned that something else may be wrong. The symptoms fit the issue but the way the smoke comes out and the specific circumstances really leave me with a lot of worry. A proper restrictor will be here on Thursday so I guess I will find out soon