Back in a Lotus - 2006 Exige S
Discussion
It looks like the car is now fixed, still have to put a lot of parts back onto it but with (a lot of) help from SeriouslyDave, it looks like the issue was related to my fuel pump.
I took the pump assembly to Dave as he'd kindly offered to lend me the use of a fuel pressure gauge, so using a bucket and some butchered hosing we setup a test rig.
We were aiming for 3.25bar in accordance with Toyota specs, but at barely 2bar my pump assembly was venting fuel back into the bucket. Initial thoughts were the FPR failing, but closer inspection showed the fuel coming up from the union between the pump and the filter housing. Hmmmm. We repeated the test on an OE pump
I need to put in a massive disclaimer here: The night before I took the pump assembly to Dave, I dismantled the assembly on my bench just to check for anything obvious. The only thing I really noted is that the pump 'fell out' of the filter assembly easier than I expected, after I pushed it back in - it felt a bit more secure. Me putting this assembly back together may well have caused some of what we went on to find... so keep that in mind.
We split the assembly apart and since Dave has a massive array of Lotus/Toyota OE parts on the shelf we were able to compare against a standard unit.
Missing is the white spacer that sits between the seal and the main pump body, this prevents the seal from being pushed down over the nozzle of the pump. I ran this by the vendor of my pump who confirmed that the spacer is missing intentionally and that it shouldn't be needed if the seal is fitted dry and lubricated externally.
Also the seal (not photographed) had ridden up the outlet nozzle so it looked something like this:
(green is seal, red is spacer).
We refitted the seal, and nicked an OE spacer (I.O.U Dave), put the pump back together and lo and behold it held close to 4bar with no drama.
I brought the pump home not totally convinced we'd fixed my problem, I was pretty sure that the out of place seal was purely a result of me rebuilding the pump the night before, but after refitting the pump the car fired up and idled perfectly. Fuelling right on target and will rev up a treat, no more misfiring or stumbling.
So bit of an odd one, all I know for sure is that the car didn't work last night, and it works now. All I've changed in that time is removing the pump and adding the spacer/refitting the seal. Maybe bouncing on the Blyton curbs (or more likely, the potholes on the entry road!) caused the pump to push beyond it's seal? Seems like a long shot, but it works now but it does seem completely unrelated to the Jet refill I had at lunch, so sorry about that Jet
One fact, this would have been a nightmare to find without the help of Dave @ SeriouslyLotus. Knowledge and tools are only half the story, but having the sheer range of parts available on the shelf to inspect/compare is absolutely invaluable. This is the second time Dave has bailed me out this year under very similar circumstances, previously helping me to prove to Competition Clutch that my pressure plate was faulty by comparing to his stock. Considering Dave offers service/maintenance/hands-on services, I feel he's gone out of his way (twice!) to help out a DIY'er, can't really ask more than that. Cheers Dave
I took the pump assembly to Dave as he'd kindly offered to lend me the use of a fuel pressure gauge, so using a bucket and some butchered hosing we setup a test rig.
We were aiming for 3.25bar in accordance with Toyota specs, but at barely 2bar my pump assembly was venting fuel back into the bucket. Initial thoughts were the FPR failing, but closer inspection showed the fuel coming up from the union between the pump and the filter housing. Hmmmm. We repeated the test on an OE pump
I need to put in a massive disclaimer here: The night before I took the pump assembly to Dave, I dismantled the assembly on my bench just to check for anything obvious. The only thing I really noted is that the pump 'fell out' of the filter assembly easier than I expected, after I pushed it back in - it felt a bit more secure. Me putting this assembly back together may well have caused some of what we went on to find... so keep that in mind.
We split the assembly apart and since Dave has a massive array of Lotus/Toyota OE parts on the shelf we were able to compare against a standard unit.
Missing is the white spacer that sits between the seal and the main pump body, this prevents the seal from being pushed down over the nozzle of the pump. I ran this by the vendor of my pump who confirmed that the spacer is missing intentionally and that it shouldn't be needed if the seal is fitted dry and lubricated externally.
Also the seal (not photographed) had ridden up the outlet nozzle so it looked something like this:
(green is seal, red is spacer).
We refitted the seal, and nicked an OE spacer (I.O.U Dave), put the pump back together and lo and behold it held close to 4bar with no drama.
I brought the pump home not totally convinced we'd fixed my problem, I was pretty sure that the out of place seal was purely a result of me rebuilding the pump the night before, but after refitting the pump the car fired up and idled perfectly. Fuelling right on target and will rev up a treat, no more misfiring or stumbling.
So bit of an odd one, all I know for sure is that the car didn't work last night, and it works now. All I've changed in that time is removing the pump and adding the spacer/refitting the seal. Maybe bouncing on the Blyton curbs (or more likely, the potholes on the entry road!) caused the pump to push beyond it's seal? Seems like a long shot, but it works now but it does seem completely unrelated to the Jet refill I had at lunch, so sorry about that Jet
One fact, this would have been a nightmare to find without the help of Dave @ SeriouslyLotus. Knowledge and tools are only half the story, but having the sheer range of parts available on the shelf to inspect/compare is absolutely invaluable. This is the second time Dave has bailed me out this year under very similar circumstances, previously helping me to prove to Competition Clutch that my pressure plate was faulty by comparing to his stock. Considering Dave offers service/maintenance/hands-on services, I feel he's gone out of his way (twice!) to help out a DIY'er, can't really ask more than that. Cheers Dave
Back to Blyton last weekend for some unfinished business.
After fixing the fuel pump issue, I had the car in a few million pieces so I used the opportunity to whip my dashboard out and terminate some new wiring which I'll use later, maybe.
The Dashboard has two 'switch to ground' outputs on it which can be used for just about anything you can think of. I have a plan for one of them, a gearbox oil cooler. This switch to ground can be used to trigger a relay when my gearbox temps reach a certain level, which will in turn power a pump. Not sure about the other one yet, but I've run them both to the boot anyway so I can decide later. The other wires are for a 3pin sensor which will most likely be fuel pressure. It annoyed me a bit that one of the few things I don't monitor caused my issues, so at least I can cover it off for any future mishaps. The sensor is connecting to the dash because I'm out of capacity on the ECU itself, but I can forward the fuel pressure data over the CAN network so I can still use it for corrections, limp home modes, etc.
Having the interior out allowed me to run neatly up the gear lever surround, up the rear bulkhead and out through an existing grommet.
Dash is pretty dinky when out of its surround. Lot of nice gubbins tucked into that wee package.
I made the decision to not refit the rear bulkhead plastic trim. It serves a function of holding the rear speakers and the interior light, but I've long since retired the rear speakers and the hassle of inspecting/servicing the fuel pump is increased tenfold by the presence of the trim - so it's staying out for now. I would like to smarten it up and trim it a bit maybe before reintroducing it. Maybe a winter side-project.
With the seats back in, you really can't tell it's missing.
One final tweak was to put the front ARB on the stiffest setting. From feedback from Ishy, he expected a negligible improvement, but at least no downside - so no reason not to set it like this.
Onto the trackday, Ishy had kindly agreed to join me again - he was Southbound for Hethel on that day so he came in his Exige all kitted out for his trackday the day after.
The day was well run by TrackObsession but I'm fairly sure the universe conspired against me having any real clear running. I've never known a day at Blyton like it! It wasn't obscenely busy, but every time the traffic parted was for me it would either get red flagged or start raining. It started getting silly when I finally got some space out in front of me, got my head in the game for a hot one - then had the black flag thrust in my place to be then told (oh, wrong Lotus. lol). Then on another occasion we were attacking Port Froid a bit, so making some space, going at it and altering lines etc - but kept catching up to the car in front. He finally let me passed, then saw him clip the cone at Port Froid in the rear view mirror leaving it right in the centre of the racing line - so my next lap was compromised by that anyway :lol:
Despite the complaints, it was still very productive and more importantly the car survived all of the sessions with no hint of the fuel pressure issues returning.
I felt we made great progress on the first corner (Jochen?), Bunga Bunga and Port Froid. I frustratingly never got Bishops right all day... seem to have gone backwards at that corner, but it's robbing me of a good lap now.
Ishy kept contributing to car setup tweaks, and we found ourselves running the rear dampers on their stiffest setting by the end of the day. Trying to prop up the rear a bit on the fast direction change of Port Froid, and ideally we would go stiffer still as it wasn't really compromising us anywhere else, even in the damp the traction was fine in slower corners. Looking like an argument for some stiffer springs I think, but need to check with Nitron first whether my valving is suited to it.
Oh, I also had some new dash layouts for the occasion. Spent a lot of time making very minor tweaks and tidying things up but I'm getting close to something I'm happy with... until it all changes again.
Road:
Track:
After fixing the fuel pump issue, I had the car in a few million pieces so I used the opportunity to whip my dashboard out and terminate some new wiring which I'll use later, maybe.
The Dashboard has two 'switch to ground' outputs on it which can be used for just about anything you can think of. I have a plan for one of them, a gearbox oil cooler. This switch to ground can be used to trigger a relay when my gearbox temps reach a certain level, which will in turn power a pump. Not sure about the other one yet, but I've run them both to the boot anyway so I can decide later. The other wires are for a 3pin sensor which will most likely be fuel pressure. It annoyed me a bit that one of the few things I don't monitor caused my issues, so at least I can cover it off for any future mishaps. The sensor is connecting to the dash because I'm out of capacity on the ECU itself, but I can forward the fuel pressure data over the CAN network so I can still use it for corrections, limp home modes, etc.
Having the interior out allowed me to run neatly up the gear lever surround, up the rear bulkhead and out through an existing grommet.
Dash is pretty dinky when out of its surround. Lot of nice gubbins tucked into that wee package.
I made the decision to not refit the rear bulkhead plastic trim. It serves a function of holding the rear speakers and the interior light, but I've long since retired the rear speakers and the hassle of inspecting/servicing the fuel pump is increased tenfold by the presence of the trim - so it's staying out for now. I would like to smarten it up and trim it a bit maybe before reintroducing it. Maybe a winter side-project.
With the seats back in, you really can't tell it's missing.
One final tweak was to put the front ARB on the stiffest setting. From feedback from Ishy, he expected a negligible improvement, but at least no downside - so no reason not to set it like this.
Onto the trackday, Ishy had kindly agreed to join me again - he was Southbound for Hethel on that day so he came in his Exige all kitted out for his trackday the day after.
The day was well run by TrackObsession but I'm fairly sure the universe conspired against me having any real clear running. I've never known a day at Blyton like it! It wasn't obscenely busy, but every time the traffic parted was for me it would either get red flagged or start raining. It started getting silly when I finally got some space out in front of me, got my head in the game for a hot one - then had the black flag thrust in my place to be then told (oh, wrong Lotus. lol). Then on another occasion we were attacking Port Froid a bit, so making some space, going at it and altering lines etc - but kept catching up to the car in front. He finally let me passed, then saw him clip the cone at Port Froid in the rear view mirror leaving it right in the centre of the racing line - so my next lap was compromised by that anyway :lol:
Despite the complaints, it was still very productive and more importantly the car survived all of the sessions with no hint of the fuel pressure issues returning.
I felt we made great progress on the first corner (Jochen?), Bunga Bunga and Port Froid. I frustratingly never got Bishops right all day... seem to have gone backwards at that corner, but it's robbing me of a good lap now.
Ishy kept contributing to car setup tweaks, and we found ourselves running the rear dampers on their stiffest setting by the end of the day. Trying to prop up the rear a bit on the fast direction change of Port Froid, and ideally we would go stiffer still as it wasn't really compromising us anywhere else, even in the damp the traction was fine in slower corners. Looking like an argument for some stiffer springs I think, but need to check with Nitron first whether my valving is suited to it.
Oh, I also had some new dash layouts for the occasion. Spent a lot of time making very minor tweaks and tidying things up but I'm getting close to something I'm happy with... until it all changes again.
Road:
Track:
For the first time in what seems like ages I took the floor off the car for a bit of prep before my next trackday, this weekend at Lotus HQ Hethel.
Quick oil change, keeping my 100% record of making a mess of the garage floor in the process.
Followed by a general spanner check, I did notice a couple of things - some loose fixings, hose popped out of its clip, usual Lotus things
Something I did notice I hope will be significant though...
I took the car away for a weekend a few weeks back, one of the first times in ages I didn't drive the car with either a helmet on or earbuds in and I felt the gearbox was feeling a little noisy when coasting. Box has always been a bit noisy, partly due to the harsher mounts I have fitted but I couldn't help thinking it was louder than usual.
What I found under the car was the dust shield from the half-shaft part of the OS driveshaft just hanging loose:
It should be just an interference fit onto the flared end of the driveshaft, but it's popped off and has been bouncing around on that shaft for god knows how long. Because it's worn itself down a bit, it won't fit onto the flare anymore, so I've blobbed it on with araldite until I can get the shaft out and address it properly later on. Hopefully that's the source of my rattle, but we'll see.
Final tweaks made to the map, since I've been using AC a lot this year I've noticed a few things that weren't apparent last year, mainly around idle compensating for the additional load generated by the AC compressor. Worked on some correction tables and got the idle nice and stable with the AC running.
That's about me prepped, I've had a kind offer for somebody to take a spare set of wheels down for me so I'll drive down on my AD08RS and have them as an option if it's damp. ZZRs will go on otherwise.
On the note of taking cargo, we've swapped the daily drivers around a bit and we have a possible candidate for a tow car
Within days of buying it the Government lifted the requirement for us younguns to sit an additional test to pull a trailer, so I'm a towbar away from being able to give it a try. Scary
Quick oil change, keeping my 100% record of making a mess of the garage floor in the process.
Followed by a general spanner check, I did notice a couple of things - some loose fixings, hose popped out of its clip, usual Lotus things
Something I did notice I hope will be significant though...I took the car away for a weekend a few weeks back, one of the first times in ages I didn't drive the car with either a helmet on or earbuds in and I felt the gearbox was feeling a little noisy when coasting. Box has always been a bit noisy, partly due to the harsher mounts I have fitted but I couldn't help thinking it was louder than usual.
What I found under the car was the dust shield from the half-shaft part of the OS driveshaft just hanging loose:
It should be just an interference fit onto the flared end of the driveshaft, but it's popped off and has been bouncing around on that shaft for god knows how long. Because it's worn itself down a bit, it won't fit onto the flare anymore, so I've blobbed it on with araldite until I can get the shaft out and address it properly later on. Hopefully that's the source of my rattle, but we'll see.
Final tweaks made to the map, since I've been using AC a lot this year I've noticed a few things that weren't apparent last year, mainly around idle compensating for the additional load generated by the AC compressor. Worked on some correction tables and got the idle nice and stable with the AC running.
That's about me prepped, I've had a kind offer for somebody to take a spare set of wheels down for me so I'll drive down on my AD08RS and have them as an option if it's damp. ZZRs will go on otherwise.
On the note of taking cargo, we've swapped the daily drivers around a bit and we have a possible candidate for a tow car
Within days of buying it the Government lifted the requirement for us younguns to sit an additional test to pull a trailer, so I'm a towbar away from being able to give it a try. Scary
gofasterrosssco said:
I run the Cornering Force ARB set-up which has a smaller rear ARB, which is primarily there to balance out the fairly stiff (but very adjustable) front, but I do notice it supports the rear of the car quite well without having to run stiffer rear springs. Not sure if they sell the rear bar set-up separately, although its likely to be significantly pricier than a pair of rear springs.
This is on a VX220 with Exige-spec Bilsteins, and mostly road but you get the picture.
The rear-ARB comes up in conversation occasionally, but it never made it to the point of being a "mainstream" modification. Perhaps I'll explore it one day, but I don't think my driving capability is anywhere close to exploiting the lack of rear ARB, I feel the same about going stiffer on springs too actually - seems wrong that I'm needing a more 'focussed' setup when I know I'm still chunks of time away from maxing the car out. I think the one exception is Blyton, I'm maybe a bit closer to the limits of the car there just because I've done it over, and over again so I need to be considerate of that before I go and 'ruin' my car everywhere else.This is on a VX220 with Exige-spec Bilsteins, and mostly road but you get the picture.
Hethel Update
Attended a trackday at Lotus HQ last weekend, unfortunately no cameras allowed on site so not much in terms of pics/videos but was a good day nonetheless.
I last visited Hethel in 2016 and to be honest it was a bit of a dump. The factory itself looked like it wasn't producing much of anything, lots of weeds/overgrown bushes around the track and a few abandoned cars littered the grounds around the circuit. Thanks to the Geely money though they've had a pretty drastic transformation, beautiful visitor centre thing, manicured lawns and a few prestige classics dotted around made it feel like a totally different place.
Track was great too, perfect tarmac, nice kerbs etc. I remember not gelling with the track THAT much back in 2016, and you definitely get reminded that it's a circuit built to test cars, and not to make a driver feel "good" on a regular basis. Lots of flowing sequences that are easy to get wrong, and very hard to know when you've got right. Oh, it's very fast too. They slow you down with a cone-chicane but still exceeded my fastest speed records (according to my dash) by a good 10mph...!
I had a kind offer from a friend to take me some spare wheels down, so for the first time ever I could try tracking a Lotus on a "road tyre" for a bit. I did the first two sessions on my AD08RS and treated them with a bit of respect, but honestly the car felt fine. After 10mins or so they did start making lots of squealing noises under heavy braking and turning (but not locking up) so I didn't try pushing them further. The car generally felt the same in terms of characteristics, didn't feel lairy and was fun enough to drive.
That said, I bolted my ZZRs back on for the third session and the car immediately felt a LOT faster. Obviously it's hard to say on a non-timed event, but if I was the sort of person who would have some sort of GPS device in the car that could log times I could probably say with some confidence that the car was immediately 4.X seconds quicker on the first lap out, eventually becoming 7.5 seconds by the end of the day. But I'm not, so I can only speculate.
My damper settings remained as they did at Blyton and I had no reason to touch them all day.
Just before lunch I realised I wasn't getting a lambda reading to my dash, here we go again. Quick check with the laptop and sure enough, lambda probe has died. I was happy with my fuelling prior to the lambda failure, so I went ahead without wideband correction for the rest of the day.
This is my third probe to fail now.
First one (supplied and fitted by RRR) lasted 2 months-ish and a couple of trackdays
Second one (in hindsight probably a fake) lasted 1 month and no miles at all
Third one (again supplied by RRR) has lasted me all year and 8 or so trackdays
If the next one survives another 8 trackdays/9months I can probably live with treating them as a consumable, but if this one dies quickly I really need to figure something out. Potential options are to 'downgrade' to an LSU4.2 which are considered a bit more robust if not slower to respond, weld something into the manifold to shield the probe a bit (Lotus (or Toyota more likely) did this on some later manifolds). Final option is to run a totally separate wideband controller and add it as an input to the ECU.
Interestingly (or not) later in the afternoon I got a check engine light on the dash, I noticed it at about 7000rpm in fifth gear so I shat my pants expecting the sound of a grenade going off behind me but later analysis in the pits showed me it was just reporting the Lambda failure. This is odd because none of my other failures have registered as a failure in this way, and it's also odd because the lambda was definitely "constantly dead" because I can see from its output flatlining, but the CEL only flashed up under heavy braking or high-G right hand turns.... Investigation to follow.
Day finished without incident, and the convoy set off for the looooooooong slog back home.
Ended up home for 10pm, and straight to bed for a 6am start to go watch the BTCC at Croft. I'm dead
Well I can't blame Bosch or ECUMaster for this one. Woops, I'll take responsibility for this one.
Though I imagine the wiring is an easy repair job, I'd already ordered a new lambda probe so the old one can go in a box to be fixed another day.
Getting genuine Bosch sensors is not as easy as it sounds, but a general rule of thumb is to consider anything <£100 as a fake, even if it's listed by a reputable company. This one from Opie passes all of the authenticity checks, so fingers crossed.
The factory probe is held onto the subframe by some little clips. I'd re-used these and they've evidently gone AWOL. To give myself a bit more confidence, I added a rivnutted p-clip to the heatshield for the engine mount and hopefully this will prevent any future problems.
Before doing the swap, I used the opportunity of having a legit failure to work on my dash a little bit and created an error for this. This is in addition to the traditional engine warning light, but gives a bit more detail so if it throws up on track again when doing big RPM at high speed, I don't panic quite so much.
Probe all swapped over and working now, but seems I now have a puncture. Fun never ends.
Though I imagine the wiring is an easy repair job, I'd already ordered a new lambda probe so the old one can go in a box to be fixed another day.
Getting genuine Bosch sensors is not as easy as it sounds, but a general rule of thumb is to consider anything <£100 as a fake, even if it's listed by a reputable company. This one from Opie passes all of the authenticity checks, so fingers crossed.
The factory probe is held onto the subframe by some little clips. I'd re-used these and they've evidently gone AWOL. To give myself a bit more confidence, I added a rivnutted p-clip to the heatshield for the engine mount and hopefully this will prevent any future problems.
Before doing the swap, I used the opportunity of having a legit failure to work on my dash a little bit and created an error for this. This is in addition to the traditional engine warning light, but gives a bit more detail so if it throws up on track again when doing big RPM at high speed, I don't panic quite so much.
Probe all swapped over and working now, but seems I now have a puncture. Fun never ends.
Anglesey Update
After the biblical conditions of my Anglesey trackday earlier in the year, I wanted another stab at it. I really love the circuit, but hadn't come close to 'leaning' on it yet. This was supposed to be my maiden voyage towing my Exige with the new Volvo V90 daily, but it all got a bit cocked up. I had my B&E towing test booked for September, but then mid-month the Govt' abolished the certification to free up resource for new HGV drivers. The certification and hence my training/test was cancelled immediately but the law change that would allow me to tow without it doesn't come into force until Nov 15th. How annoying.
Anyway, the missus kindly offered to make a weekend of it and follow me over in the Volvo anyway which meant I could take spare tyres, tools, etc. We stopped over with a friend in Snowdonia the night before and arrived at the circuit to find yet more biblical weather.
I started the day out on my "road setup", AD08RS tyres and very soft damping. The car felt pretty grippy to be honest, weak front end but loads of traction even when getting a little bit abusive with the throttle.
Track was rather wet, but no real standing water to worry about so the ZZRs would have probably been "fine" too. I used the opportunity to play with the adjustable traction control that was fitted along with my ECUMaster dash. It has 10 settings which gradually alter both the slip target and the aggressiveness of the intervention. I was warned that it may need tuning and playing with once I'm on a wet circuit or skid pan but on it's most intrusive setting it worked really well, if anything I think it could probably do to be a little more intrusive for a true "nanny mode" but I was pretty impressed.
Rather than just cutting fuel when it detects slip, it's got a gradual way of pulling timing and trying to bring you into the slip target smoothly. The fuel cut only comes in if you're really rough with it, but without the telltale on the dash you wouldn't even know it was triggering half of the time - very impressive. On some of the intermediate settings you could still get a bit of slip and allowed you to really lean on the throttle in the slower corners whilst still feeling like a bit of a hero. Thumbs up ECUMaster for that one, it just works.
The rain was on and off all morning, but over lunch the sun came out and the track started drying out. By 15:30 or so it was completely dry, but still pretty slippy particularly around Church (going onto the back straight) and the final corner where there's a new piece of tarmac which feels like wet glass.
Pace ramped up, and ZZRs went on around 3pm ish. Dampers got stiffened up the session after that and the last couple of hours were fantastic fun.
Uneventful lap, this was about as dry as it got. Still pretty slippery, but could lean on it in a couple of places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pxBsO6UqI&ab...
The day finished with a completely empty fuel tank (put 41litres into a 38litre tank when I limped to Menai Bridge!)
Car didn't get through completely unscathed, lambda sensor (yes, the new one I've only just bought) died after 2 sessions so the car was over fuelling a fair bit to compensate. Meant a few dash warnings through the day but it didn't really spoil the fun, probably a bit down on power.
Still loads more to come from Anglesey though, it's quickly becoming a favourite and there's loads of time to be had there on a properly dry day. Bring on 2022.
After the biblical conditions of my Anglesey trackday earlier in the year, I wanted another stab at it. I really love the circuit, but hadn't come close to 'leaning' on it yet. This was supposed to be my maiden voyage towing my Exige with the new Volvo V90 daily, but it all got a bit cocked up. I had my B&E towing test booked for September, but then mid-month the Govt' abolished the certification to free up resource for new HGV drivers. The certification and hence my training/test was cancelled immediately but the law change that would allow me to tow without it doesn't come into force until Nov 15th. How annoying.
Anyway, the missus kindly offered to make a weekend of it and follow me over in the Volvo anyway which meant I could take spare tyres, tools, etc. We stopped over with a friend in Snowdonia the night before and arrived at the circuit to find yet more biblical weather.
I started the day out on my "road setup", AD08RS tyres and very soft damping. The car felt pretty grippy to be honest, weak front end but loads of traction even when getting a little bit abusive with the throttle.
Track was rather wet, but no real standing water to worry about so the ZZRs would have probably been "fine" too. I used the opportunity to play with the adjustable traction control that was fitted along with my ECUMaster dash. It has 10 settings which gradually alter both the slip target and the aggressiveness of the intervention. I was warned that it may need tuning and playing with once I'm on a wet circuit or skid pan but on it's most intrusive setting it worked really well, if anything I think it could probably do to be a little more intrusive for a true "nanny mode" but I was pretty impressed.
Rather than just cutting fuel when it detects slip, it's got a gradual way of pulling timing and trying to bring you into the slip target smoothly. The fuel cut only comes in if you're really rough with it, but without the telltale on the dash you wouldn't even know it was triggering half of the time - very impressive. On some of the intermediate settings you could still get a bit of slip and allowed you to really lean on the throttle in the slower corners whilst still feeling like a bit of a hero. Thumbs up ECUMaster for that one, it just works.
The rain was on and off all morning, but over lunch the sun came out and the track started drying out. By 15:30 or so it was completely dry, but still pretty slippy particularly around Church (going onto the back straight) and the final corner where there's a new piece of tarmac which feels like wet glass.
Pace ramped up, and ZZRs went on around 3pm ish. Dampers got stiffened up the session after that and the last couple of hours were fantastic fun.
Uneventful lap, this was about as dry as it got. Still pretty slippery, but could lean on it in a couple of places. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6pxBsO6UqI&ab...
The day finished with a completely empty fuel tank (put 41litres into a 38litre tank when I limped to Menai Bridge!)
Car didn't get through completely unscathed, lambda sensor (yes, the new one I've only just bought) died after 2 sessions so the car was over fuelling a fair bit to compensate. Meant a few dash warnings through the day but it didn't really spoil the fun, probably a bit down on power.
Still loads more to come from Anglesey though, it's quickly becoming a favourite and there's loads of time to be had there on a properly dry day. Bring on 2022.
Since mid-summer I've felt like my gearbox was getting noisy. Only when coasting, it would rattle - and dipping the clutch and/or applying any throttle load at all would silence it. I'd made a decision around September time to get the box back out of the car over winter and send it for an inspection. It's obviously been running fine, surviving a fair few trackdays this year - but I wanted to protect my investment and make sure I wasn't going to grenade it due to something silly that may have occurred during the last rebuild.
This week I got my car up on the ramp and started mentally preparing myself to take the gearbox out again. It's really not a bad job, just time consuming and not something I wanted to be doing again so soon.
With the car up in the air, I had a good waggle around of everything and found a fair bit of play in the crossgate shift linkage. Grabbing it and giving a shake gave a very metallic rattle, could this be the cause of my noise rather than something internal to the box?!
Luckily it's pretty accessible, so took the offending parts off the car and had a look.
At the end of the crossgate lever is a large round pin, this goes into a plastic bush which "converts it" to a rectangular shape where it then sits in a slot on the shift rod itself coming out of the gearbox. This plastic bush slides in the slot during gear changes, and the circular pin rotates within the bush too - so it's got an opportunity to wear from both directions.
Bad photo, but you can see metal on metal contact at the 12 and 6 oclock position on the pin where the zinc plating has worn off.
Luckily these parts seem to be available from Toyota for not a lot of money, but I wanted a way to try and test the theory to decide whether or not the box would still be coming out. I took the pin and covered it with some heatshrink to pad out the 'slop' in the bush.
I can't see this lasting more than a few gear changes, but hopefully it would last long enough for me to see if the rattle had subsided.
Bolted it back up followed by a quick test drive... and it's a LOT quieter. There's no perceptible rattle anymore in 1, 2, 5 or 6. 3 and 4 have a slight soundtrack on overrun but it's not a rattle and I suspect it's more the semi-helical nature of the stronger gears I have in those slots. It's not unpleasant, it's not worrying and I don't think anyone would notice it if their senses weren't on overdrive.
For now I'm relieved, maybe "carefully optimistic" is a good term but I won't be rushing to drop the box out anytime soon after this discovery. I'll refurbish the linkage with new bushes, and I may consider some of the gucci billet linkage options that the US community seem to love. It replaces a few of the plastic/metal interfaces with proper bearings and rosejoints etc although annoyingly the round:square bush that I've found here is still part of that setup.
That freed up some motivation to get cracking on with a small pile of parts I've been sitting on for most of the year. I've been modifying my car so far to give as much reliability and longevity as possible but other than gaining a few ponies from the ECU and remap, I've not pushed power on at all despite having a platform now that I think/hope can take a bit more.
The car doesn't need to be any faster, on track it's got a lovely balance of grip to power where it still feels like I can lean on it and be a bit clumsy without it biting me... but I can't shake the feeling that there's some untapped potential in it.
First up, injectors. I can see my current 440cc injectors are getting close to max duty and can't keep up with any more boost. I'd been wanting some specific injectors for a while from Injector Dynamics but UK supply was just not available. When my fuel pump had an issue in the summer I bought some FiveO motorsport injectors to rule out an injector issue, but never ended up using them - so they got sold on. I then got in touch with a Lotus owner in the US who had bought some of the ID injectors and found them too small(!) for his build, so he kindly shipped them over to me.
They're ID XDS1050s, massively over gunned for what I need but they're now the smallest that ID make because they're so confident in their low load pulse control, they found the 750's they used to do are now redundant. I'm a big fan of ID injectors since tinkering with my Subaru, it's amazing what difference a quality set of injectors with real and accurate data can make to the low load driveability of a tweaked car - so hoping for the same from these.
Along with fitting the injectors, I've revised the fuel rail plumbing a little bit. Earlier in summer my fuel pump had a partial failure which meant I was running on only 1 bar of fuel pressure, enough to limp home but the engine/ECU had no way of knowing about the fault. The ECUMaster ECU has fuel pressure compensation strategies available, so by adding a fuel pressure sensor I can both inform myself of any future issues but also increase my odds of limping the car home safely if needed.
The least intrusive way of adding a 1/8npt takeoff for a sensor was to replace the flexible fuel hose that connects the rail to the hard line going to the pump. By converting to AN-6 fittings, it opens up a world of adaptors and fittings to make it work. I robbed the idea from an off-the-shelf replacement pipe from Radium Engineering, but I needed a slight alteration due to my catch cans blocking the route.
The analogue gauge is temporary just to help me calibrate the digital sensor that will replace it. Also got an "ultra flow" 90deg elbow coming too to properly radius the bend and prevent any pressure drops after the gauge.
You can just about make out the pipe run here, plenty of slack to allow for engine movement and nicely circumnavigates the catchcans.
Observant will notice a missing header tank, I barely touched the fkin thing and a take-off snapped off of it. Grrr
Once I get a header tank replacement, I'll get the car idled and finetuned on the new injectors to at least allow me to limp it to a mapper for a proper setup. Oh, and we'll need to arrange for some boost increases before that time too, so smaller pulley will be arranged.
This week I got my car up on the ramp and started mentally preparing myself to take the gearbox out again. It's really not a bad job, just time consuming and not something I wanted to be doing again so soon.
With the car up in the air, I had a good waggle around of everything and found a fair bit of play in the crossgate shift linkage. Grabbing it and giving a shake gave a very metallic rattle, could this be the cause of my noise rather than something internal to the box?!
Luckily it's pretty accessible, so took the offending parts off the car and had a look.
At the end of the crossgate lever is a large round pin, this goes into a plastic bush which "converts it" to a rectangular shape where it then sits in a slot on the shift rod itself coming out of the gearbox. This plastic bush slides in the slot during gear changes, and the circular pin rotates within the bush too - so it's got an opportunity to wear from both directions.
Bad photo, but you can see metal on metal contact at the 12 and 6 oclock position on the pin where the zinc plating has worn off.
Luckily these parts seem to be available from Toyota for not a lot of money, but I wanted a way to try and test the theory to decide whether or not the box would still be coming out. I took the pin and covered it with some heatshrink to pad out the 'slop' in the bush.
I can't see this lasting more than a few gear changes, but hopefully it would last long enough for me to see if the rattle had subsided.
Bolted it back up followed by a quick test drive... and it's a LOT quieter. There's no perceptible rattle anymore in 1, 2, 5 or 6. 3 and 4 have a slight soundtrack on overrun but it's not a rattle and I suspect it's more the semi-helical nature of the stronger gears I have in those slots. It's not unpleasant, it's not worrying and I don't think anyone would notice it if their senses weren't on overdrive.
For now I'm relieved, maybe "carefully optimistic" is a good term but I won't be rushing to drop the box out anytime soon after this discovery. I'll refurbish the linkage with new bushes, and I may consider some of the gucci billet linkage options that the US community seem to love. It replaces a few of the plastic/metal interfaces with proper bearings and rosejoints etc although annoyingly the round:square bush that I've found here is still part of that setup.
That freed up some motivation to get cracking on with a small pile of parts I've been sitting on for most of the year. I've been modifying my car so far to give as much reliability and longevity as possible but other than gaining a few ponies from the ECU and remap, I've not pushed power on at all despite having a platform now that I think/hope can take a bit more.
The car doesn't need to be any faster, on track it's got a lovely balance of grip to power where it still feels like I can lean on it and be a bit clumsy without it biting me... but I can't shake the feeling that there's some untapped potential in it.
First up, injectors. I can see my current 440cc injectors are getting close to max duty and can't keep up with any more boost. I'd been wanting some specific injectors for a while from Injector Dynamics but UK supply was just not available. When my fuel pump had an issue in the summer I bought some FiveO motorsport injectors to rule out an injector issue, but never ended up using them - so they got sold on. I then got in touch with a Lotus owner in the US who had bought some of the ID injectors and found them too small(!) for his build, so he kindly shipped them over to me.
They're ID XDS1050s, massively over gunned for what I need but they're now the smallest that ID make because they're so confident in their low load pulse control, they found the 750's they used to do are now redundant. I'm a big fan of ID injectors since tinkering with my Subaru, it's amazing what difference a quality set of injectors with real and accurate data can make to the low load driveability of a tweaked car - so hoping for the same from these.
Along with fitting the injectors, I've revised the fuel rail plumbing a little bit. Earlier in summer my fuel pump had a partial failure which meant I was running on only 1 bar of fuel pressure, enough to limp home but the engine/ECU had no way of knowing about the fault. The ECUMaster ECU has fuel pressure compensation strategies available, so by adding a fuel pressure sensor I can both inform myself of any future issues but also increase my odds of limping the car home safely if needed.
The least intrusive way of adding a 1/8npt takeoff for a sensor was to replace the flexible fuel hose that connects the rail to the hard line going to the pump. By converting to AN-6 fittings, it opens up a world of adaptors and fittings to make it work. I robbed the idea from an off-the-shelf replacement pipe from Radium Engineering, but I needed a slight alteration due to my catch cans blocking the route.
The analogue gauge is temporary just to help me calibrate the digital sensor that will replace it. Also got an "ultra flow" 90deg elbow coming too to properly radius the bend and prevent any pressure drops after the gauge.
You can just about make out the pipe run here, plenty of slack to allow for engine movement and nicely circumnavigates the catchcans.
Observant will notice a missing header tank, I barely touched the fkin thing and a take-off snapped off of it. Grrr
Once I get a header tank replacement, I'll get the car idled and finetuned on the new injectors to at least allow me to limp it to a mapper for a proper setup. Oh, and we'll need to arrange for some boost increases before that time too, so smaller pulley will be arranged.
Wee bit of progress, while I had the chargecooler off and a few other bits out of the way I whipped my cam cover off for what's turning into an annual check of lobe wear and valve clearances. All still within spec, happy days.
That then gave me an opportunity to swap for a blinged up cam cover that was kindly donated to the project.
Fitted some new seals/gaskets to that and gave it a good clean out - blowing some oil through the cam squirter lines and make sure it was all flowing freely and without dust.
My Toyota replacement header tank was next to arrive, was in better nick than the eBay photos suggested it would be and it cleaned up a treat.
Looks like it's been subject to much less UV abuse than mine
Then was the new bushes for my crossgate linkage. This has definitely tightened things up a bit, but you can still feel where the rocking motion comes from as the parts are just not in tight enough tolerance. I'll see if this is enough to fix/hide my coasting rattle but I fear I'm already falling down the rabbit hole of linkage upgrades. We'll see.
With everything buttoned back up, I then had the job of making sure the car would run on the new injectors. It's a pretty dry topic but I've been enjoying learning. Oh, and I fitted Lambda sensor #5... thanks Feirny.
The EMU fuelling model allows for setting up the injector parameters with fuel pressure compensations/corrections which means that the underlying fuelling VE table can be mapped independently of fuel hardware changes (in theory). Because my car went to RRR with unknown injectors and since the 2ZZ has no pressure sensor from factory, they were limited to what they could do here - so all of the work was done in the VE table. Nothing wrong with that, car obviously has been running fine but you can get a more accurate picture of things if you add in a fuel pressure sensor and set things up 'properly', which is what I intend to do.
The 2ZZ operates a dead head fuel rail so there's no rising rate FPR like I'm used to from faffing around with Subarus. It makes things a little more complex to get my little head around, but effectively the base pressure (4bar in my case) will either be assisted by manifold pressure in vacuum (so effective pressure goes up a bit during idle) or is pushed back by boost pressure, so the effective pressure drops during "pulls". Using some injector flow data comparisons provided by ID, you can then map in a correction table to compensate for this so that your fuelling will always be "right" and your VE table setup regardless of conditions. If you then had a fuel pump issue which was reducing your base fuel pressure (such as the issue I had at Blyton earlier in the year) then the ECU would know about this, could throw a warning and stick the car into limp mode whilst compensating the fuelling - allowing me to limp home with a safe level of AFR.
In the real world it'll make very little difference, but it's just another case of me having functionality from the standalone ECU - so I want to use it.
So far I've just got it idling right and everything has gone to plan. Car fires right up and idles bang on AFR target. I still need to finalise the wiring for my pressure sensor as it's bodged in at the moment, so I'll sort that this week then I can go out and make sure the corrections are working with a bit of load on the system.
I Still intend to get it mapped properly on a dyno, but hoping I can get myself 90% of the way there with the tools I have at my disposal.
That then gave me an opportunity to swap for a blinged up cam cover that was kindly donated to the project.
Fitted some new seals/gaskets to that and gave it a good clean out - blowing some oil through the cam squirter lines and make sure it was all flowing freely and without dust.
My Toyota replacement header tank was next to arrive, was in better nick than the eBay photos suggested it would be and it cleaned up a treat.
Looks like it's been subject to much less UV abuse than mine
Then was the new bushes for my crossgate linkage. This has definitely tightened things up a bit, but you can still feel where the rocking motion comes from as the parts are just not in tight enough tolerance. I'll see if this is enough to fix/hide my coasting rattle but I fear I'm already falling down the rabbit hole of linkage upgrades. We'll see.
With everything buttoned back up, I then had the job of making sure the car would run on the new injectors. It's a pretty dry topic but I've been enjoying learning. Oh, and I fitted Lambda sensor #5... thanks Feirny.
The EMU fuelling model allows for setting up the injector parameters with fuel pressure compensations/corrections which means that the underlying fuelling VE table can be mapped independently of fuel hardware changes (in theory). Because my car went to RRR with unknown injectors and since the 2ZZ has no pressure sensor from factory, they were limited to what they could do here - so all of the work was done in the VE table. Nothing wrong with that, car obviously has been running fine but you can get a more accurate picture of things if you add in a fuel pressure sensor and set things up 'properly', which is what I intend to do.
The 2ZZ operates a dead head fuel rail so there's no rising rate FPR like I'm used to from faffing around with Subarus. It makes things a little more complex to get my little head around, but effectively the base pressure (4bar in my case) will either be assisted by manifold pressure in vacuum (so effective pressure goes up a bit during idle) or is pushed back by boost pressure, so the effective pressure drops during "pulls". Using some injector flow data comparisons provided by ID, you can then map in a correction table to compensate for this so that your fuelling will always be "right" and your VE table setup regardless of conditions. If you then had a fuel pump issue which was reducing your base fuel pressure (such as the issue I had at Blyton earlier in the year) then the ECU would know about this, could throw a warning and stick the car into limp mode whilst compensating the fuelling - allowing me to limp home with a safe level of AFR.
In the real world it'll make very little difference, but it's just another case of me having functionality from the standalone ECU - so I want to use it.
So far I've just got it idling right and everything has gone to plan. Car fires right up and idles bang on AFR target. I still need to finalise the wiring for my pressure sensor as it's bodged in at the moment, so I'll sort that this week then I can go out and make sure the corrections are working with a bit of load on the system.
I Still intend to get it mapped properly on a dyno, but hoping I can get myself 90% of the way there with the tools I have at my disposal.
Overdue an update, lots of boring tinkering involving the fuel pressure sensor and the DIY map tweaks to get it running alright at low load/cruise. Summary is, pressure sensor is now in and reporting to the ECU which means the ECU now has a reading of what the effective fuel pressure is across the injectors (baseline fuel pressure - manifold pressure). I even made a wire.
The only real advantage of this is error checking, if I have a problem with fuel pressure now (such as I did at Blyton last year), the ECU will notify me of this (along with a soft RPM limit to limp me home) and it will also over compensate at the injector to make sure my limp home still is fuelling the car healthily. In theory the fuelling calculations would happen a bit more efficiently too, but that's never going to be noticeable by anything measurable. It also changes the 'shape' of the VE Table considerably, as it no longer needs to add fuel as part of the table as manifold pressure goes up, it looks less like a hill and more like a plateau.
With all this extra fuelling capacity, I next needed to consume some of it - so on went a 2.9" SC pulley from Seriously Lotus. It's Seriously Light too, less than half the weight of the original.
I estimated that the pulley would be worth approx. 3psi of extra boost, taking me from 7ish to 10ish. That's not an insignificant proportion but it's well considered that the Lotus pulley size is already getting close to the maximum from the blower in terms of diminishing returns. That said, with a capable fuelling system, programmable ECU and critically the chargecooler from Pro Alloy - I thought I had as good a chance as anybody to get some decent results out of it. I'd decided up front that if the gains just weren't there to be made, or were barely perceptible that I would revert back to stock boost as I was more than happy with it.
Getting hold of a mapper with some dyno time was proving quite difficult, I put a fair bit of work into the map myself to get it into a cruisable state which worked out pretty well. The car got me safely and reliably to Silverstone for an experience day but it was clear to see that any attempt to breath on the throttle was taking my map into uncharted territory.
I had to change cranking fuel too, one of the only parts of the fuelling calculation that's not proportional to injector size is the cranking fuel - so my new much bigger injectors were just flooding the cylinders on a hot start. Easy fix.
Expecting to cancel my final trackday of the year (Bedford next Monday) and retire the car for a few months until it could be mapped properly, I got an opportunity out of the blue to jump on a mapping session with Chris @ EFI Parts in Runcorn. He was going to map a friends S3 Elise Cup in the early afternoon, and he had time in the late afternoon to take a look at mine. Chris wasn't really on my radar, but I did know of one other person who had a 2ZZ Lotus mapped there fairly recently and he gave a good impression, so off I went.
The aforementioned S3 Cup car had a factory mounted chargecooler and it struggled for IATs for much of the session, despite it being bloody freezing outside. This gave me something to worry about, would my setup be able to cope with the extra pressure at load? (Spoiler alert, it coped).
I had a long chat with Chris about everything I'd configured and so he spent some time going over my fuel pressure delta corrections etc, and familiarised himself with my map in general. I made explicit effort to not come across as a know-it-all busybody, but I wanted Chris to know what I'd been cocking about with so that he wasn't building on a dodgy foundation. Generally he seemed happy with my tweaks though, and he was a gent at explaining things as we went along, helping me learn (a lot!) as we went.
Immediately it was clear that my DIY map was fine for cruising, but any attempt to apply load put you into an area of the timing map that wasn't previously used (because of boost coming in at different levels/times etc) so had I attempted to drive my car hard with "my" map, it would have quickly ended in tears.
Chris spent some time getting the low lift cam part of the map all dialled in, moving the cam switchover point way up to 6k RPM and only doing pulls up to that point. Played with cam timing a bit, and gave himself a few references as to where power was made, and where it started tailing off so we could pick the optimal point to swing over onto the high lift cam. Early signs that the car would produce a decent number came at this point, when it made 216bhp (flywheel) on the low lift cam at 6k RPM.
Once Chris had a catalogue of low-cam runs to pick from, he reversed the process and brought the cam switch over point in early, to experiment at "that side" of the fence too. With all that done, he could piece together what worked well and where, to come up with the final cam profile. Cam switch has come forward a couple hundred RPM as a result of this, it's now 4700rpm from 4900rpm.
Power delivery was still lumpy at this point, as I could see from the graphs - so Chris spent the next few pulls smoothing everything out. IATs were bang on, they rose roughly in line with RPMs on the pulls and then recovered to their resting 20degrees-ish within a few seconds. Back to back runs were no problem, and power figures very consistent between runs. How it'll compare to a 30degree evening at Donington? We'll find out one day.
With the power runs done, a lot of work was then put in to part throttle and transient conditions - I found this very interesting to watch from the sidelines, as I was aware of a few situations that could "catch out" my previous map, causing it to stumble for a moment. Nothing major, and nothing a lot of people would notice probably - but still it was encouraging to watch Chris try to unpick these scenarios. Acceleration enrichment needed a fair bit of fuel compared to the old map, not sure if that's an injector characteristic thing or just because the SC spins up so quickly (or both?!).
One of my complaints about this car since the very day I bought it (standard ECU) was the "return to idle", often it would coast down to a stall when slowing for some lights for example. Adding the ECUMaster ECU "fixed" this to a certain degree, by throwing loads of correction mechanisms at it, but the more you correct it, the clumsier the car would feel at low load due to slow falling RPM and stuff like that. I mentioned this and Chris spent a bit of time going through this too, he pointed out an architectural limitation of my particular setup in that the DBW throttle has a huge area/volume of manifold pressure between it and the inlet manifold itself. Any attempts to correct idle using the DBW throttle results in a latency, so you either have to deal with oscillations - or add enough margin in it to make the car feel slow to respond.
I'm still not entirely sure what Chris did, and how he did it - but he's essentially pegged the TB to a relatively static level and is using ignition timing to control the fall to idle now, and the results are fantastic. It's easily the best this car has felt, much better than OE and even my best attempts to tweak it on the previous iterations of my map weren't quite this good. I've had very little time in the car since, and I get the feeling it might need massaging a bit at a few different operating temperatures etc but once I can reverse engineer what he's done, I feel pretty happy about tweaking this as needed.
I'm sure Chris would have preferred to have the car over night to look at cold start/warmup enrichment stuff, but I had to get off - so we called it a day. I can take care of a lot of the cold start stuff if it needs tweaks, but early impressions look good.
Anyway, onto the figure. The number everyone pretends doesn't mean anything but secretly it's all they're bothered about.
In terms of the number itself, it's about what can be expected from my hardware. So difficult to get an accurate idea, as there have been some rather optimistic claims made about what this 2ZZ/MP62 setup can achieve over the years - but I think this is about in line.
For reference my previous dyno on standard boost/injectors made 279bhp and 176talks. I always viewed that as the higher end of what the stock system could do, I've seen many (many!) maps from various 2ZZ Cars over the last year or so from other community members and my RRR map always jumped out as being fairly aggressive on both fuel and timing. Obviously that never caused me any issues, car took everything I threw at it but since I was now running more boost, this was an opportunity to relax things off a bit.
On the EFI map I'm now running ~11.80 AFR right at the top end (slopes gradually down from around 12.3) and running around 22degrees of advance. On the RRR map it was closer to 12.50 AFR at the top end and 28degrees of advance.
Chris did push the timing a bit more, and we did make a little bit more power - but it was well into diminishing returns and as the car would be used for lots of track time, rather an extra degrees or two of knock margin than 3-4bhp so we pulled it back.
Numbers are one thing, but I wasn't going to judge success until I could see if it felt appreciably quicker. If it didn't, I'd go back to standard boost and my old map... borrowing a few of Chris' idle tweaks along the way. The drive home was freezing and torrential rain, so I barely got above 4k RPM but I finally got some miles on the car in some dry spells this week.
Early impressions are very strong, car undoubtedly feels quicker particularly before cam lift. Feels like there's an added bit of surge here, and traction has been a bit of a concern as a result. Beyond cam switch, the changeover feels smooth but I'm sure it sounds louder... can't work that out, maybe I'm just hyper sensitive to all noises/sensations during early testing - but it sounds good.
At the top end the car is ballistic, but then - it was before. It's definitely quicker and I would easily believe that it's making an extra 20bhp based on bum dyno. Away from the full throttle pulls, the car feels nicer to drive just about everywhere, responsiveness coming off the throttle is much better, as Chris lowered the fuel cut threshold (I believe RRR kept injectors going at much higher RPM as an attempt to "catch" falling revs due to the aforementioned idle issues).
Provisionally then, I'm happy. Feels like a lot of the work I've done to make the car more reliable and able to handle a bit more power is now justified - so hopefully it all works nicely together and I have a good year on track next year. I'm realistically at the limit of what the current hardware can do IMO, bigger/better superchargers are available and the 2ZZ head can/will respond well to a bit of work - but ultimately I've always got the gearbox skulking in the shadows.
The only real advantage of this is error checking, if I have a problem with fuel pressure now (such as I did at Blyton last year), the ECU will notify me of this (along with a soft RPM limit to limp me home) and it will also over compensate at the injector to make sure my limp home still is fuelling the car healthily. In theory the fuelling calculations would happen a bit more efficiently too, but that's never going to be noticeable by anything measurable. It also changes the 'shape' of the VE Table considerably, as it no longer needs to add fuel as part of the table as manifold pressure goes up, it looks less like a hill and more like a plateau.
With all this extra fuelling capacity, I next needed to consume some of it - so on went a 2.9" SC pulley from Seriously Lotus. It's Seriously Light too, less than half the weight of the original.
I estimated that the pulley would be worth approx. 3psi of extra boost, taking me from 7ish to 10ish. That's not an insignificant proportion but it's well considered that the Lotus pulley size is already getting close to the maximum from the blower in terms of diminishing returns. That said, with a capable fuelling system, programmable ECU and critically the chargecooler from Pro Alloy - I thought I had as good a chance as anybody to get some decent results out of it. I'd decided up front that if the gains just weren't there to be made, or were barely perceptible that I would revert back to stock boost as I was more than happy with it.
Getting hold of a mapper with some dyno time was proving quite difficult, I put a fair bit of work into the map myself to get it into a cruisable state which worked out pretty well. The car got me safely and reliably to Silverstone for an experience day but it was clear to see that any attempt to breath on the throttle was taking my map into uncharted territory.
I had to change cranking fuel too, one of the only parts of the fuelling calculation that's not proportional to injector size is the cranking fuel - so my new much bigger injectors were just flooding the cylinders on a hot start. Easy fix.
Expecting to cancel my final trackday of the year (Bedford next Monday) and retire the car for a few months until it could be mapped properly, I got an opportunity out of the blue to jump on a mapping session with Chris @ EFI Parts in Runcorn. He was going to map a friends S3 Elise Cup in the early afternoon, and he had time in the late afternoon to take a look at mine. Chris wasn't really on my radar, but I did know of one other person who had a 2ZZ Lotus mapped there fairly recently and he gave a good impression, so off I went.
The aforementioned S3 Cup car had a factory mounted chargecooler and it struggled for IATs for much of the session, despite it being bloody freezing outside. This gave me something to worry about, would my setup be able to cope with the extra pressure at load? (Spoiler alert, it coped).
I had a long chat with Chris about everything I'd configured and so he spent some time going over my fuel pressure delta corrections etc, and familiarised himself with my map in general. I made explicit effort to not come across as a know-it-all busybody, but I wanted Chris to know what I'd been cocking about with so that he wasn't building on a dodgy foundation. Generally he seemed happy with my tweaks though, and he was a gent at explaining things as we went along, helping me learn (a lot!) as we went.
Immediately it was clear that my DIY map was fine for cruising, but any attempt to apply load put you into an area of the timing map that wasn't previously used (because of boost coming in at different levels/times etc) so had I attempted to drive my car hard with "my" map, it would have quickly ended in tears.
Chris spent some time getting the low lift cam part of the map all dialled in, moving the cam switchover point way up to 6k RPM and only doing pulls up to that point. Played with cam timing a bit, and gave himself a few references as to where power was made, and where it started tailing off so we could pick the optimal point to swing over onto the high lift cam. Early signs that the car would produce a decent number came at this point, when it made 216bhp (flywheel) on the low lift cam at 6k RPM.
Once Chris had a catalogue of low-cam runs to pick from, he reversed the process and brought the cam switch over point in early, to experiment at "that side" of the fence too. With all that done, he could piece together what worked well and where, to come up with the final cam profile. Cam switch has come forward a couple hundred RPM as a result of this, it's now 4700rpm from 4900rpm.
Power delivery was still lumpy at this point, as I could see from the graphs - so Chris spent the next few pulls smoothing everything out. IATs were bang on, they rose roughly in line with RPMs on the pulls and then recovered to their resting 20degrees-ish within a few seconds. Back to back runs were no problem, and power figures very consistent between runs. How it'll compare to a 30degree evening at Donington? We'll find out one day.
With the power runs done, a lot of work was then put in to part throttle and transient conditions - I found this very interesting to watch from the sidelines, as I was aware of a few situations that could "catch out" my previous map, causing it to stumble for a moment. Nothing major, and nothing a lot of people would notice probably - but still it was encouraging to watch Chris try to unpick these scenarios. Acceleration enrichment needed a fair bit of fuel compared to the old map, not sure if that's an injector characteristic thing or just because the SC spins up so quickly (or both?!).
One of my complaints about this car since the very day I bought it (standard ECU) was the "return to idle", often it would coast down to a stall when slowing for some lights for example. Adding the ECUMaster ECU "fixed" this to a certain degree, by throwing loads of correction mechanisms at it, but the more you correct it, the clumsier the car would feel at low load due to slow falling RPM and stuff like that. I mentioned this and Chris spent a bit of time going through this too, he pointed out an architectural limitation of my particular setup in that the DBW throttle has a huge area/volume of manifold pressure between it and the inlet manifold itself. Any attempts to correct idle using the DBW throttle results in a latency, so you either have to deal with oscillations - or add enough margin in it to make the car feel slow to respond.
I'm still not entirely sure what Chris did, and how he did it - but he's essentially pegged the TB to a relatively static level and is using ignition timing to control the fall to idle now, and the results are fantastic. It's easily the best this car has felt, much better than OE and even my best attempts to tweak it on the previous iterations of my map weren't quite this good. I've had very little time in the car since, and I get the feeling it might need massaging a bit at a few different operating temperatures etc but once I can reverse engineer what he's done, I feel pretty happy about tweaking this as needed.
I'm sure Chris would have preferred to have the car over night to look at cold start/warmup enrichment stuff, but I had to get off - so we called it a day. I can take care of a lot of the cold start stuff if it needs tweaks, but early impressions look good.
Anyway, onto the figure. The number everyone pretends doesn't mean anything but secretly it's all they're bothered about.
In terms of the number itself, it's about what can be expected from my hardware. So difficult to get an accurate idea, as there have been some rather optimistic claims made about what this 2ZZ/MP62 setup can achieve over the years - but I think this is about in line.
For reference my previous dyno on standard boost/injectors made 279bhp and 176talks. I always viewed that as the higher end of what the stock system could do, I've seen many (many!) maps from various 2ZZ Cars over the last year or so from other community members and my RRR map always jumped out as being fairly aggressive on both fuel and timing. Obviously that never caused me any issues, car took everything I threw at it but since I was now running more boost, this was an opportunity to relax things off a bit.
On the EFI map I'm now running ~11.80 AFR right at the top end (slopes gradually down from around 12.3) and running around 22degrees of advance. On the RRR map it was closer to 12.50 AFR at the top end and 28degrees of advance.
Chris did push the timing a bit more, and we did make a little bit more power - but it was well into diminishing returns and as the car would be used for lots of track time, rather an extra degrees or two of knock margin than 3-4bhp so we pulled it back.
Numbers are one thing, but I wasn't going to judge success until I could see if it felt appreciably quicker. If it didn't, I'd go back to standard boost and my old map... borrowing a few of Chris' idle tweaks along the way. The drive home was freezing and torrential rain, so I barely got above 4k RPM but I finally got some miles on the car in some dry spells this week.
Early impressions are very strong, car undoubtedly feels quicker particularly before cam lift. Feels like there's an added bit of surge here, and traction has been a bit of a concern as a result. Beyond cam switch, the changeover feels smooth but I'm sure it sounds louder... can't work that out, maybe I'm just hyper sensitive to all noises/sensations during early testing - but it sounds good.
At the top end the car is ballistic, but then - it was before. It's definitely quicker and I would easily believe that it's making an extra 20bhp based on bum dyno. Away from the full throttle pulls, the car feels nicer to drive just about everywhere, responsiveness coming off the throttle is much better, as Chris lowered the fuel cut threshold (I believe RRR kept injectors going at much higher RPM as an attempt to "catch" falling revs due to the aforementioned idle issues).
Provisionally then, I'm happy. Feels like a lot of the work I've done to make the car more reliable and able to handle a bit more power is now justified - so hopefully it all works nicely together and I have a good year on track next year. I'm realistically at the limit of what the current hardware can do IMO, bigger/better superchargers are available and the 2ZZ head can/will respond well to a bit of work - but ultimately I've always got the gearbox skulking in the shadows.
Final trackday of the year and my first visit to Bedford Autodrome.
With the weather forecast and the recent changes to my car, this was only ever going to be a data logging session really - but it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Temp was low single figures, track was wet all day including a fair bit of standing water over lunch. With the time of year and forecast in mind, I didn't even consider going with my ZZR clad forged wheels, and instead went for the AD08RS I had fitted to my spares earlier in the year, making it my first full trackday on a non ZZR tyre.
Car ran great all day, limited periods of full throttle application due to the conditions, but also I was tripping the driveby sound meters. This is new for me, my car has always fallen well under the limits but the Bedford ones are particularly strict (87.5db driveby I think). My car has allegedly got a little bit louder according to bystanders, comparable to V6's which I find a little hard to believe so I need to figure out if this is just a by-product of running a bit more power, or is something amiss with my exhaust system.
Once I was politely instructed on the areas I needed to cruise around, I had a lot of fun. Car pulls like a train once it finally grips up, and showed no signs of slowing up when I needed to start the gentle preparation for the braking zones (easily locking up on the brakes, so had to take it steady). AD08 tyres heated up nicely and showed no signs of aquaplaning in the standing water, actually felt like I had more grip on the "properly wet" sessions rather than the damp ones towards the end of the day. Thoroughly impressed with them
The circuit encourages a playful nature, so my laps were largely cruising through the "loud" sections, and playing around at low speed in the tighter turns to move the car around a bit. Trying to imagine the place in the dry and it must be incredibly quick. The chicane between the two main straights was wide open and I imagine you can tip into there at a fair lick, 140+ must be easily doable in the dry which is terrifying in a car I've bolted together myself.
Can't wait to go back, not sure if I can squeeze it into the calendar for next year as it's already looking rammed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFa6cOJWIo&ab...
Short clip showing a more sedate/playful attempt at a lap, including my first ever trackday spin... yes, really :|
With the weather forecast and the recent changes to my car, this was only ever going to be a data logging session really - but it turned out to be a lot of fun.
Temp was low single figures, track was wet all day including a fair bit of standing water over lunch. With the time of year and forecast in mind, I didn't even consider going with my ZZR clad forged wheels, and instead went for the AD08RS I had fitted to my spares earlier in the year, making it my first full trackday on a non ZZR tyre.
Car ran great all day, limited periods of full throttle application due to the conditions, but also I was tripping the driveby sound meters. This is new for me, my car has always fallen well under the limits but the Bedford ones are particularly strict (87.5db driveby I think). My car has allegedly got a little bit louder according to bystanders, comparable to V6's which I find a little hard to believe so I need to figure out if this is just a by-product of running a bit more power, or is something amiss with my exhaust system.
Once I was politely instructed on the areas I needed to cruise around, I had a lot of fun. Car pulls like a train once it finally grips up, and showed no signs of slowing up when I needed to start the gentle preparation for the braking zones (easily locking up on the brakes, so had to take it steady). AD08 tyres heated up nicely and showed no signs of aquaplaning in the standing water, actually felt like I had more grip on the "properly wet" sessions rather than the damp ones towards the end of the day. Thoroughly impressed with them
The circuit encourages a playful nature, so my laps were largely cruising through the "loud" sections, and playing around at low speed in the tighter turns to move the car around a bit. Trying to imagine the place in the dry and it must be incredibly quick. The chicane between the two main straights was wide open and I imagine you can tip into there at a fair lick, 140+ must be easily doable in the dry which is terrifying in a car I've bolted together myself.
Can't wait to go back, not sure if I can squeeze it into the calendar for next year as it's already looking rammed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EFa6cOJWIo&ab...
Short clip showing a more sedate/playful attempt at a lap, including my first ever trackday spin... yes, really :|
honda_exige said:
Bedford is one of my closest tracks and I'm often there, let me know when you plan to go! It's great fun despite the flatness of it.
One of my vids there, best time for me so far is in the 2:43s I think.
https://youtu.be/4jstaAPEmuM
Aye I guessed you must be local, I bet I wasn't far off a minute slower than that on Monday One of my vids there, best time for me so far is in the 2:43s I think.
https://youtu.be/4jstaAPEmuM
Saying that, I'm still not exactly sure where the start/finish is, nor where the bloody thing goes. 4+ miles takes a lot of learning!On the first session a fella in front of me literally pulled up and gave way half way down the second straight, not sure whether to carry on going or pull onto one of the alternate layouts
FTW said:
Over the last few evenings I have read this thread from beginning to end, thank you for posting it.
I own an S1 111S and love it but I'm getting tempted to add an S2 Exige S or an S3 Elise CR to the stable.
The data you have shared about the charge cooler is very interesting - thank you. I was not aware of this issue and is certainly something to consider as I do trackdays. Do you know how the S3 CC performs on track, is it akin to your set up? You mentioned it was struggling on the dyno.
Hope the thread has been useful I own an S1 111S and love it but I'm getting tempted to add an S2 Exige S or an S3 Elise CR to the stable.
The data you have shared about the charge cooler is very interesting - thank you. I was not aware of this issue and is certainly something to consider as I do trackdays. Do you know how the S3 CC performs on track, is it akin to your set up? You mentioned it was struggling on the dyno.
The S3 Elise Chargecooler certainly struggled on the dyno, I have access to a fair few track logs from the same car and although it struggles a bit less in a real world scenario, it's still nowhere near as effective as the Pro Alloy kit on mine.
We suspect it may be the IAT sensor actually heatsoaking from the inlet manifold, it gets very poor airflow where it is compared to mine which is detached from the engine and is on the chargecooler cold side directly, so it may just be the figures being manipulated by environment.
I'm not sure how the S3 Exiges fare with the V6, but the general picture I'm building is that any SC setup which includes the CC Core within the inlet manifold seem to struggle. BOE in the US sell some kits which are packaged beautifully, but they generally struggle with IATs despite running a natively more efficient blower.
The Pro Alloy kit is a bit bulky and a bit "tacked on", but it seems to get the job jobbed.
I had every intention of having a Winter "off" the spanners this year. Have a big house related project about to kick off and my garage is going to become a temporary dumping ground as a result.
However...
I've referenced a couple of times in the thread this year that my gearbox is a bit noisy, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I don't think it's getting worse as such, but I'm focussing on it more and more which is feeding the paranoia. The Toyota C64 gearbox in a Lotus is noisy at the best of times so I've been trying to convince myself that it's normal and mentally comparing it to my old 111R but I can't shake off the feeling it's a bit noisier since the rebuild and due to the expense I've put into it, I really want to protect the investment.
I was expecting some whine from the uprated 3rd/4th cogs but they're pretty much silent. The noise I'm experiencing is a chattering/whirring/rattling type sound when coasting. Any load on the drivetrain at all will silence it, as will dipping the clutch.
I spoke to a couple of specialists, one was absolutely bang on with his verbal description of the sound and the circumstances that cause it which gave me some confidence that we were talking about the same thing. He believes that my differential preload is probably set either out of spec, or on the slack end of the spec tolerance. He explains that this is not unusual, as setting the preload is quite time consuming and often rebuilders will just lob a diff back in with the shims that were already fitted.
He did however go on to say that this may not be particularly harmful to the box, it's just annoying. He also explained that some brand new factory fresh gearboxes have been known to be on the slack side of tolerance, but generally with a full fat steel flywheel to dampen the chatter a bit and/or a car with soft mounts/sound deadening - it usually goes unnoticed for the life of the car.
In addition to the coast down noise, I've also started getting light crunching into third when the box is very cold and the competition clutch throwout/release bearing tends to howl when it's very cold.
With all that in mind, I've decided to have the box inspected and see if the diff preload is close to spec. I can sort the 3rd synchro out and put a Toyota release bearing in too.
If the report comes back that my box was built to spec and cannot be improved upon, then I have a decision to make...
1) Bolt it back together as is, know that I've had a second opinion that the box is healthy - and get on with life, ignoring the noise.
2) Bolt it back together with the original full fat flywheel to see if it dampens the effect a little bit.
Although the lightweight flywheel was a nice addition, it really hasn't been life changing - so I wouldn't lose any sleep by regressing on that if needed so I'm currently leaning towards #2. If however the report comes back that the preload was indeed way off spec, then I'll get it fixed and put the LW flywheel back in.
I've been internally debating the decision to drop the box for months now, so felt good today to finally get into it and commit. It's really not a big job to remove it, it's just a bit of a pig to refit... but I'll cross that bridge later. I won't go into much detail on the removal/refit because I've done it all before - but in just 60-90mins today I managed to strip everything off the car that needs doing - so it's just engine mounts and bellhousing bolts to come off now.
I did notice a couple of things to tinker with (as always) along the way.
It looks like my slipjoint clamp has failed. Can't tighten it up anymore but the box can freely spin around, and as a result it's shunted away from the cat pipe a bit and has been blowing like a goodun. Maybe contributing to my noise issues at Bedford.
Manifold gasket maybe showing some signs of some very minor blowing? Not convinced on this yet, but I'll take care to refit with a fresh gasket and make sure the manifold flange is running true.
I've decided to leave the rear clam on for this occasion. It's not mandatory to remove it for a gearbox job, but it makes access from above much much easier. As my garage will be filling up quickly with kitchen junk, I just don't have room to store the clam for a few weeks - so I'll get the box out (easy enough without the aforementioned access from the top) and then when it's time to refit - hopefully kitchen stuff will be gone, and I can then take off the clam if needed.
However...
I've referenced a couple of times in the thread this year that my gearbox is a bit noisy, and it's becoming increasingly concerning. I don't think it's getting worse as such, but I'm focussing on it more and more which is feeding the paranoia. The Toyota C64 gearbox in a Lotus is noisy at the best of times so I've been trying to convince myself that it's normal and mentally comparing it to my old 111R but I can't shake off the feeling it's a bit noisier since the rebuild and due to the expense I've put into it, I really want to protect the investment.
I was expecting some whine from the uprated 3rd/4th cogs but they're pretty much silent. The noise I'm experiencing is a chattering/whirring/rattling type sound when coasting. Any load on the drivetrain at all will silence it, as will dipping the clutch.
I spoke to a couple of specialists, one was absolutely bang on with his verbal description of the sound and the circumstances that cause it which gave me some confidence that we were talking about the same thing. He believes that my differential preload is probably set either out of spec, or on the slack end of the spec tolerance. He explains that this is not unusual, as setting the preload is quite time consuming and often rebuilders will just lob a diff back in with the shims that were already fitted.
He did however go on to say that this may not be particularly harmful to the box, it's just annoying. He also explained that some brand new factory fresh gearboxes have been known to be on the slack side of tolerance, but generally with a full fat steel flywheel to dampen the chatter a bit and/or a car with soft mounts/sound deadening - it usually goes unnoticed for the life of the car.
In addition to the coast down noise, I've also started getting light crunching into third when the box is very cold and the competition clutch throwout/release bearing tends to howl when it's very cold.
With all that in mind, I've decided to have the box inspected and see if the diff preload is close to spec. I can sort the 3rd synchro out and put a Toyota release bearing in too.
If the report comes back that my box was built to spec and cannot be improved upon, then I have a decision to make...
1) Bolt it back together as is, know that I've had a second opinion that the box is healthy - and get on with life, ignoring the noise.
2) Bolt it back together with the original full fat flywheel to see if it dampens the effect a little bit.
Although the lightweight flywheel was a nice addition, it really hasn't been life changing - so I wouldn't lose any sleep by regressing on that if needed so I'm currently leaning towards #2. If however the report comes back that the preload was indeed way off spec, then I'll get it fixed and put the LW flywheel back in.
I've been internally debating the decision to drop the box for months now, so felt good today to finally get into it and commit. It's really not a big job to remove it, it's just a bit of a pig to refit... but I'll cross that bridge later. I won't go into much detail on the removal/refit because I've done it all before - but in just 60-90mins today I managed to strip everything off the car that needs doing - so it's just engine mounts and bellhousing bolts to come off now.
I did notice a couple of things to tinker with (as always) along the way.
It looks like my slipjoint clamp has failed. Can't tighten it up anymore but the box can freely spin around, and as a result it's shunted away from the cat pipe a bit and has been blowing like a goodun. Maybe contributing to my noise issues at Bedford.
Manifold gasket maybe showing some signs of some very minor blowing? Not convinced on this yet, but I'll take care to refit with a fresh gasket and make sure the manifold flange is running true.
I've decided to leave the rear clam on for this occasion. It's not mandatory to remove it for a gearbox job, but it makes access from above much much easier. As my garage will be filling up quickly with kitchen junk, I just don't have room to store the clam for a few weeks - so I'll get the box out (easy enough without the aforementioned access from the top) and then when it's time to refit - hopefully kitchen stuff will be gone, and I can then take off the clam if needed.
fridaypassion said:
What did you do with the box Kyle? Jubu 3/4? The do make coast down noise. I've had a few in last year. Shouldn't affect other gears though. It's kind of a cool noise. I actually have one in at the moment if you wanted to have a listen.
SSC 3rd/4th and Kaaz FD.The new gears do make an almost imperceptible noise but it's quite an attractive noise as you say, a bit Motorsport.
The coast sound I get is in all gears, hence me focussing on the diff/final drive.
We're overdue a catch-up so I may take you up on that, but I'm also concerned a trip to see you would cost me too much.
Clutch out now, nothing too difficult with the removal even with the clam on.
Noticed two things, not convinced either are the root of my issue but still things that I'll be glad to sort.
First up, needs a little backstory for anyone who has not done a 2ZZ clutch before. Some (most) clutch setups out there use a pilot bearing in the flywheel/crankshaft to support the end of the gearbox input shaft when everything is mounted up. The 2zz does not, and instead the end of the input shaft is "floating".
This means there's nothing in the end of the crankshaft to push a clutch alignment tool into - so most clutch kits include a plastic bush that you can seat in the end of the crankshaft. Once the clutch is fitted, the bush can no longer come out, so it's trapped forever.
First time I did my clutch I left this bush out and aligned it by eye. After the issues I had with my first clutch being faulty, I didn't want to take any chances second time around so I used the bush. Though I've not had it out of the car yet, from what I can feel with my finger I think this has melted/deformed slightly. It was a very flush fit that needed pressing in with a good few taps - but its fallen out and has been rattling about in the small gap between the crankshaft and the clutch hub. :? I'll have to put this down to install error, maybe I put it in on the piss slightly.
Not sure what to expect after 4k miles, but the pressure plate diaphragm looks pretty worn by the bearing. The OE one I took out last year has nowhere near this much wear. The wear is also off-centre, but since the pressure plate is aligned on dowels and the release bearing is flush on the input shaft, there's no wiggle room for mis-aligning it, so I guess it's just manufacturing tolerances of the pressure plate.
Leading to... the throwout bearing that has been howling from cold, it feels pretty ropey to be honest after not many miles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKzT4o-exT8&ab...
This may be normal and to be expected, don't have a reference point - but a new 'yota one is going in regardless.
I'll still be sending box off for inspection, I don't believe this bearing or the pilot bush causing my soundtrack - but already feel like the effort has been justified so pretty happy.
Noticed two things, not convinced either are the root of my issue but still things that I'll be glad to sort.
First up, needs a little backstory for anyone who has not done a 2ZZ clutch before. Some (most) clutch setups out there use a pilot bearing in the flywheel/crankshaft to support the end of the gearbox input shaft when everything is mounted up. The 2zz does not, and instead the end of the input shaft is "floating".
This means there's nothing in the end of the crankshaft to push a clutch alignment tool into - so most clutch kits include a plastic bush that you can seat in the end of the crankshaft. Once the clutch is fitted, the bush can no longer come out, so it's trapped forever.
First time I did my clutch I left this bush out and aligned it by eye. After the issues I had with my first clutch being faulty, I didn't want to take any chances second time around so I used the bush. Though I've not had it out of the car yet, from what I can feel with my finger I think this has melted/deformed slightly. It was a very flush fit that needed pressing in with a good few taps - but its fallen out and has been rattling about in the small gap between the crankshaft and the clutch hub. :? I'll have to put this down to install error, maybe I put it in on the piss slightly.
Not sure what to expect after 4k miles, but the pressure plate diaphragm looks pretty worn by the bearing. The OE one I took out last year has nowhere near this much wear. The wear is also off-centre, but since the pressure plate is aligned on dowels and the release bearing is flush on the input shaft, there's no wiggle room for mis-aligning it, so I guess it's just manufacturing tolerances of the pressure plate.
Leading to... the throwout bearing that has been howling from cold, it feels pretty ropey to be honest after not many miles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKzT4o-exT8&ab...
This may be normal and to be expected, don't have a reference point - but a new 'yota one is going in regardless.
I'll still be sending box off for inspection, I don't believe this bearing or the pilot bush causing my soundtrack - but already feel like the effort has been justified so pretty happy.
I spoke with Competition Clutch and a few clutch/gearbox specialists and the opinion was unanimously that the clutch pressure plate was abnormally worn, probably due to a duff bearing and it should probably go in the bin... Great.
Looking into some options for a replacement clutch, but in the meantime I've had my initial inspection report from my gearbox this week.
On one hand I'm glad issues have been found, as it vindicates the decision to drop the box. On the other hand, I'm obviously disappointed that the previous build wasn't up to scratch.
The initial finding was that the inside of the box was covered in/full of loose bits of sealant from where the casing was stuck back together. You can see massive snakes of the stuff on the inside of the flange, and tiny bits floating around everywhere including inside the roller bearings. The builder doesn't think these caused a problem as such, but it's definitely not a good thing and is not a sign of good workmanship.
Next he found the circlip for 6th gear wasn't seated right in the groove. It was still in place, but who knows for how long.
The next issue was an area for confusion, the builder has worked with hundreds of Toyota C60 series boxes over the years but not many running aftermarket final drives. He was concerned that the meshing between the crown wheel and pinion was not letting him remove the output shaft from the casing as he normally would. Luckily Kaaz responded immediately to a support call, and confirmed that this is very normal due to the added tooth count and you have to sort of juggle the diff and the output shaft into the casing as one "premeshed" unit rather than sliding them in independently as you can with original components. So no issue really, but worth writing down in case anybody else runs into the same confusion in future.
Finally with the FD confusion cleared up, he checked the differential preload and found there to be absolutely nothing. I wasn't invoiced for shims when the box was originally built, which means they either got lucky and the new diff matched the preload of the old... or they didn't even bother checking and just lobbed it in.
Of the issues found, the lack of differential preload is the most likely cause for the sound effects I complained about. The good news is that the box isn't full of glitter, and there's no sign of abnormal wear.
I asked him to inspect 3rd synchro too as I got the odd crunch on a very cold box. He says it looks pretty new, but since it's out - we might as well swap it. As usual one thing leads to another and I ended up ordering a few more bits too, so gearbox build #2 is proving rather expensive so far!
Some pictures from the builder, bit blurry but you get the idea.
Looking into some options for a replacement clutch, but in the meantime I've had my initial inspection report from my gearbox this week.
On one hand I'm glad issues have been found, as it vindicates the decision to drop the box. On the other hand, I'm obviously disappointed that the previous build wasn't up to scratch.
The initial finding was that the inside of the box was covered in/full of loose bits of sealant from where the casing was stuck back together. You can see massive snakes of the stuff on the inside of the flange, and tiny bits floating around everywhere including inside the roller bearings. The builder doesn't think these caused a problem as such, but it's definitely not a good thing and is not a sign of good workmanship.
Next he found the circlip for 6th gear wasn't seated right in the groove. It was still in place, but who knows for how long.
The next issue was an area for confusion, the builder has worked with hundreds of Toyota C60 series boxes over the years but not many running aftermarket final drives. He was concerned that the meshing between the crown wheel and pinion was not letting him remove the output shaft from the casing as he normally would. Luckily Kaaz responded immediately to a support call, and confirmed that this is very normal due to the added tooth count and you have to sort of juggle the diff and the output shaft into the casing as one "premeshed" unit rather than sliding them in independently as you can with original components. So no issue really, but worth writing down in case anybody else runs into the same confusion in future.
Finally with the FD confusion cleared up, he checked the differential preload and found there to be absolutely nothing. I wasn't invoiced for shims when the box was originally built, which means they either got lucky and the new diff matched the preload of the old... or they didn't even bother checking and just lobbed it in.
Of the issues found, the lack of differential preload is the most likely cause for the sound effects I complained about. The good news is that the box isn't full of glitter, and there's no sign of abnormal wear.
I asked him to inspect 3rd synchro too as I got the odd crunch on a very cold box. He says it looks pretty new, but since it's out - we might as well swap it. As usual one thing leads to another and I ended up ordering a few more bits too, so gearbox build #2 is proving rather expensive so far!
Some pictures from the builder, bit blurry but you get the idea.
snotrag said:
Surely it should be an an-aerobic sealant used to joint the gearbox casings - just like a rocker cover/camshaft cover? What do Toyota specify in their workshop manuals I wonder... That is poor.
Honestly not sure, but the original stuff was red/orange... you can still see the remains of it on the flanges where it wasn't even cleaned off properly!Gassing Station | Readers' Cars | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff