Hello everybody!
MIGHTY CAR MODS
Welcome to another episode of Mighty Car Mods
proudly supported by Just Car Insurance
Now last episode we upgraded the very tiny turbo
on a very big Forester and stuck a ball bearing(?) VF 34 on there
That's right and now today we need to tune it
so the car is gonna be happily mating with the turbo
SO we have a rock star team!
Over here we have Ben from Port Hacking Automotive,
-- who stole my freaking hat --
And on this side-- this is Lachlan from Chip Talk.
He has literally just stepped off a plane from the Gold Coast.
Why is he here? 'Cause he's a guru.
Marty was reading his technical articles when Marty was only 5 years old!
AND, he invented the EZ Flash Tune
which you may have seen on a previous episode of The Forester where we did a flash tune
but today we're doing it custom. We're doing it mad.
Everyone's got crazy hats
Let's do it!
MOOG : Since swapping from my S15 Silvia to this NY09 Forrester
I've tried to make it as "unboat-like" as possible.
After the most important suspension mods,
we installed a full stainless steel turbo back exhaust...
(engine revs)
And then using Chiptalk's EZ Flash,
we reprogrammed the factory ECU to take advantage of the extra flow.
This woke up the car nicely.
But the small TV04 factory turbo was holding it back.
So last episode, we swapped it out,
for a larger VF34 ball bearing turbo from a STI,
which should see a good increase in air flow.
But to take full advantage of it we need to do a custom tune,
so we're off to Port Hacking Automotive where Ben's gonna be running the Dyno [dynamometer]
and we've flown down Lachlan Redel(?),
a tuning guru with decades of experience, from Chiptalk in the Gold Coast.
And he's going to be doing a custom tune on the Forester.
I'm Lachlan from Chiptalk.
I've been doing engine management reprogramming since 1993.
I've done an awful lot of Subarus and an awful lot of other vehicles.
I'm here to actually program the Moog machine today
and see if we can't get some decent power out of it,
get the results that we think it should have
for the changes we made in the last episode.
The EZflash from last time had a preset set of tunes in it for the changes you've made.
This time we are actually doing a custom version,
which we would do regularly at our shop in the Gold Coast,
or we can send out pre-programmed versions.
This time we'll program it for the VF34 turbo charger
to get the best we can out of it.
The EZflash and using the factory computer to do the programming
lets you keep all of the nice things that Subaru has spent millions of dollars on
and millions of hours on, making your drive nice.
Make sure your air-con works,
make sure it starts up nice and drives nice when the vehicle's cold.
But having done that, with the EZflash,
you can actually have multiple boost tunes in there
So you can even run it on a 95-octane fuel for example.
MOOG: Now a lot of people think that the problem with putting on a big turbo
is then you lose some of that down low responsiveness
because you've got more spool time.
Is that something that can be adjusted in the tune as well?
LACHLAN: There is some adjustment; but realities of physics cannot be changed.
So if the turbo charger is bigger it's going take more time to get the air in there,
so you will lose some torque at the bottom end, in order to gain more power at the top end.
That's a fundamental of physics.
But we can work around that
to make sure we get as much as we can out of the turbocharger change.
MOOG (voice over): Now at this stage, instead of replacing intercoolers, injectors and the fuel pump,
our scientific focus is to see what kind of reliable and safe power is possible
with the existing factory supporting parts
when they're matched with the full exhaust and the upgraded turbo.
The car is still running the original flash tune that we flashed on there,
and we've gone from around, last time we got around 145 kilowatts,
The best we did this time, I think, was around 157 kW.
So that's no changes to the tune at all. That's just the bigger turbo.
And if you come over to the dynograph, you can see,
The thing that was most impressive about this, is,
You can see here the TDO4, the boost pressure,
just goes down, down, down, down, down
whereas the VF34 takes longer to get up to boost,
but once you get to around 4000 RPM, where the [TD04 curve] is dropping,
it's still climbing.
So we're gonna see some pretty mad gains.
So, Lachlan, we're still running 10 pounds. There's no change to the boost map.
But we made more power. Why is that?
The airflow of the larger turbo can make more. Given more turbo, it will make more power for the same amount of boost pressure.
MOOG (off-camera): That really is you and me in the future, Martin.
There's Martin...and there's me.
CHRIS (dryly): I don't know if we should be offended by that.
Dude, if you had a beard that epic, I'd be so impressed.
Really
I recon you can do it.
Aah, you can't.
with a sideways hat and those glasses on
wants to drive your car the answer's yes.
The answer's also yes.
If this guy comes up, lock your doors and RUN.
WHAT?