I was bit on the sick side today, but went to garage anyways so I could check what was going on. Widric was there, installing a Blitz blowoff valve into his WRX STI. Maladar briefly popped in just to leave his beloved Micra.
With the blowoff valve installed we went to a test drive. Widric had connected his AEM boost controller which was also on the test bench. For a while we got clean boost of about 0.6 bar (and nice blow off sounds) but then the car started to act weirdly. We pulled over to check that everything was ok under the hood. Widric handed me the boost controller manual and I noticed that the boost controller had its vacuum/pressure lines wrong way around.
No tools with so we couldnt do anything. Widric was baffled because he had checked and doublechecked the lines to boost controller but still theyve ended being reversed – the one going to wastegate was on the pressure side and vice versa.
At the garage Widric rerouted the lines and I went through the boost controller settings, setting it to what I thought was normal. Then we headed to nearest Shell station to get a full tank of nitro 🙂
My “normal” settings were bit off *cough* 1.2bar *cough* so we started from the zero. I first set the boost controller to minimum boost so we could see that the wastegate was working and opening around 0.55 bar as it should. Then we slowly increased the boost from the controller and got a nice stable 0.75bar from it. We managed to get around 0.85bar but then any higher boost after that was somewhat unstable and we went back to garage.
Widric was pleased how the car turned out. I was thinking that wastegate opening pressure setting wasnt correct and that was somehow now disturbing the boost. At this point we had to call it a day and leave. I sent a text message to Maladar telling him what we had found and while at it, asked if he still had those boost controllers. Maladar said that he still should have at least one – he would try to find it for me 🙂
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