The Stagea build has taken months to complete
But through the hard work of a couple of mates
it is on the road and driving.
Now it's time to get it on the dyno at Haltech
get it tuned
and see how much power we'll be able to make reliably.
Tuning Fork is a massive Nissan fan
and jumped at the chance to work his magic on the VH41 Turbo'd V8
Today we're down at Haltech, we're tuning the Stagea
it's a little bit of an unknown at this stage so...
hopefully Scotty'll
help us out, and make it work.
What are your thoughts Scotty?
I think it's all petrol to start with, which I dont like.
Everyone knows I just like to put it straight on ethanol and just get it done.
But this time we'll be, the highest horsepower, highest boosted, MCM car...?
Potentially, hopefully. If it's not, fingers crossed.
(Just keep working on it 'til it is)
Yeah.
Lets do it.
(divided by 60, divided by 60..)
10 hours of driving
And it actually hasn't been tuned yet
so, we've had all the long term trim stuff setup
If you want to have a sneak in on there
Fuel, long term trim, so you can see here that
on the map that we're sort of roughed in so the guys can get it started and
check for oil leaks or cooling and all that sort of stuff.
Its been adding and subtracting fuel as it's been cruising around, so
at the, the more you drive it, the closer the tune gets.
So what we'll do now is apply that to all the base tables
Smooth everything out a little bit
and then we'll start the dyno tune with that
and that'll get us real close to where we'll need to be straight away
being a 4-stroke engine the way that we tune the car is using "Volumetric efficiency"
Which is a fomula that determines
how much the air goes into the engine
like the mass of the air of the engine
then we figure out how much fuel goes into the engine
everytime the injectors open and close
for a certain amount of time
if we know the amount of air that goes in
the efficiency
and we know the amount of fuel that goes in
then we set up a table, an "air to fuel ratio" table
the only thing that we dont know is how efficient the engine is
so, being a 4-stro.. any 4-stroke we can just say that
typically, they're roughly, say, 40-50% efficient at idle
somewhere between 80-100% efficient when you're under full load
So, what we do then is I'll go in and overestimate, so that everything is nice and rich to start off with
and the car will drive pretty well normally
And then from there
The O2 controller will start trimming back and back
and pulling fuel out, we never want to be putting fuel in, because it's running lean, it's unsafe
So, from a pretty good educated guess, we can get the car driving pretty well
use the trims, use the knock control
which is also another formula which uses
the bore size of the engine, so from the bore size we can determine the knock frequency
which will get us in the ballpark so that if the engine does detonate
we can set up a whole bunch of stuff to pull a punch of ignition timing out of it
that'll also be long term so we can actually look in to see if anything has been knocking
I've had a look at the long term tables in here
which we'll zip down to
and we haven't detected any knock at all
But, I have been really really tame on the ignition timing on this knowing that
We loaded the map into it in Queensland
Because we're using like the GT-R platform R-33 platform from the Atessa or the factory 4WD computer
Is being used to control the center diff so
the torque slip between the front and the rear
to do that, all the Atessa system uses is a Throttle Position signal, that's it
so this car being a little different because it's got an electronic throttle on it
we're going to need to set up an output from the Haltech to control the atessa pump as well
'cus we've also a G-meter that, depending that setup on this car is sitting right here under the glove box which is
basically in the center of the car that determines the ptich and the roll
and from there it determines how much power to put where
What do you predict, cus' i mean, this is all a bit unknown
do you have any predictions about what might get in our way if this doesnt work today?
Um.. The only thing I can see a problem: fuel pump.
Um, the GTW Turbo I'm a big fan of
I think that's a
They're a real go-er they're a real nice thing that come on really early but..
I'm a little bit nervous I don't think it's got enough fuel pump in it
if we do get to ethanol today.
(don't get to do that very often)
It idles nice
We'll load it up for a while, we've got water temperature up on the dyno here
so we can see all the temperature we've set up warnings so that it's gonna cut out at 105 degrees Celcius
so the best we can do is load it up, turn all the fans on, and see what it does.
Tell me what we're about to do
We're about to beat the shit out of it!
That's not really what we're going to do
We just set everything up so we're going to do the first power run
so we've done our steady-state tuning up to about 4000 RPM
that's about as game as I'm.. as keen as I am to go steady-state holding and it gets nice and hot
so now we're going to do our first power run
we'll sit back, look at the data from that, and then fill in more parts of the map
How'd the temperature go?
It's, we're not too bad
You can see on the sreen there we're at 89 degrees Celcius at the moment
when we really load it for quite a long time
it goes up to 100 Celcius
but then, while it's still on the load, the temperature does start to come back down a little bit so
maybe the water's, somethings funny in the radiator
it's not staying int he radiator long enough to cool it down
Or, something going on like that
What are we about to do now, sorry?
So now's time for the first power run, don't expect miracles but
the first power run will normally give us a bit of a shakedown with
oil lines falling off, or overflow bottles, or
things rattling loose, all sorts of crazy stuff so
we'll give it a power run, turn it off, the boys can check the mechanical stuff
and we'll just fill the map in and then get ready for the next run.
(Mighty Marty laughter)
(inaudible V8 orgasms)
Yeah, bro!
Dude we just smashed Supergramps on the first run!
You finally brought us a good engine to use
What?!
Nissan!
You did Nissan, what do you say?
350 wha? 349 horsepower!
That's crazy!
First run, no real tune
Now we're going to start tuning it
Happy?
Yeah that's awesome man.
Not bad for a first power run of like, an hour of tuning
Scotty's a wizard man!
Uh, so Scotty, yeah cam control, so we got the science working, tell me a little about that
so we had a few little gremlins where probably they just seized up a little bit from sitting around for so long
So we just applied direct power to them just to warm them up and get everything happening
we've got both of them moving which, took us half an hour and it was worthwhile doing it because
if we have a look at the power graph now
we've got the grey one, which is the cam's just turned off the whole time
you can see that it made better power up top but, worse power down low
whereas the green one, we've got the cams advanced all the time
so it makes more power down low, less power up top
so, what we're looking at with the line down the middle there is 5284 RPM
in our software, we're going to turn the cams off there, so we'll advance the inlet camshafts up until 5200 RPM
then we'll turn the outputs off, the cams'll retard so we'll get the best of both worlds
we'll get that low end power, which is quite a lot of power
and then we'll also get the up top, we'll get the best of everything
This motor has responded really well to the boost pressure
so what we're going to do now, we're gonna do one last run on petrol
hopefully it'll make in the high 200KW
and then we'll drain all the petrol out, put it on ethanol, and then start pushing until we run out of fuel pump.
So, we've basically finalized all the 98 tune, and now it's time to put the corn in.
While we were putting the engine together we were using some of the air flow fuel quick connect connections
This was the main reason why so when we're doing the tuning
we can change fuels between 98 or E85 or any blend inbetween, basically by connecting this to the supply line, and then turning on the fuel pump
via the Elite, and then pumping whatever fuel is in the tank into the drums
so it completely empties the tank
then we'll put 5L of E85 through to flush the tank again and then we'll refill it again with E85.
So, we've just put give or take 5L in the tank
So it's going to pump that quickly through the lines now
and that'll pull a lot more of the 98 out and once that's done
we'll put another 5L in to check, just run it through the system so we'll take the bleed line off, run some fuel through the sensor
and see what the ethanol content comes back at
if it's in the window somewhere between 80 and 85%, we'll tune it at that
and go from there
So we've just filled it up with United E85
which is typically about 80-83%, somewhere around there
because it was mixed with petrol still in the system we've got to a composition of 72%
Which is still really high
We've added a bunch of corrections to add extra fuel
because we simply need more fuel to go through the injects when we're on ethanol
we've added a little more ignition timing, we're certainly very conservative with it
but being on ethanol it's going to take more so we've added a little bit of a correction in
so the first start up, I suppose we'll give it a bit of a start, make sure its all nice and it all sounds okay
we'll give it a bit of time for some fuel to flush through the fuel rail
and then after that we'll load it up, we'll do all the light load stuff again
and make sure all our corrections are good
Then we'll go straight back into it
and we'll do the same boost level
and see how much of an increase we get just changing from petrol to ethanol
It's worth mentioning that, how much boost is in it Scott?
This has got 10.9lbs
and how much boost control is actually influencing that?
We havent actually used the boost controller yet.
Benny that's ridiculous!
We haven't used the boost control yet.
Like it's already making
the better part of 400HP we havent even turned on the boost controller
that's insane!
look!
(That's awesome man)
Scotty, lets do it man
Let's just get into it
So now we've need to do, Mitch (Rich?) and I can just cruise through all out load sites
Make sure that all the maps is on track, and everything looks the way it should
so we'll just double check all the cruising areas, then straight into a power run
and see what we can do
So we're doin this bro, lets tune it!
We're up to 450HP we haven't added extra ignition timing we've got
pretty much the same boost it's gone up by about a pound
simply because we're adding ethanol and things are starting to become efficient
but
I'm having a bit of trouble getting em, getting the mixtures under control
and the reason why is because the fuel pump that's in this car
is rated at about 550HP
We're making 450HP, at the wheels
which means we can do some maps on it like we can figure out that we're out of fuel pump
The other reason we can figure it out is that in our data logs
because we got a rising rate fuel pressure regulator
so we've got 45lbs of base fuel pressure
if we put 10lbs of boost in it, it should go to 55lbs of fuel pressure
we're still staying at 45 it's not rising
so, there's no fuel behind the regulator theres no fuel behind the injects to get in the engine
so, we might have to talk about putting some pumps in this
Can I, can i just say
Benjamin...
That's 450HP dude
(that's pretty impressive)
with more in it, like that's
(it's literally just run out of pump and can potentially be, 5-550 with a better fuel system, a fuel system. I'm very excited)
That's, like to drive thats on the road
Scott, as a guess, guess before we even take on the road?
Awesome, it's gonna be a really nice thing to drive
Have you got another pump we can just quickly bodge into it now and get it done?
I dont have anything unfortunately
What did you drive hear in?
This
We can't pull the pump out of this and put it in this
you know he's excited when he's making you change fuel pumps in the middle of the night
That's rad!
Alright, well...
So, is that it? Or what do we do?
We go to either probably dual Pump, a Jewel dual setup anything maybe two of the 255L pump, I really like them
we can stage them so that higher engine loads, the second one will turn on
probably gonna be the nicest thing to do.
we do need to figure out a way to get extra wires through the pump holder
Which is always a little bit tricky
(Being a plastic top we can probably actually run bolts through it)
And then (what?) turned on it's side maybe?
You could be sensible though, and just.. this is it. You've built the car, you've done all the work, you've done everything.
just take the boost controller out of it, and then just leave it on 10lbs and 335KW at the wheels.
(smiles)
It's a good Stage1
that's definitely not what you should do
Scotty's like 'Not'
I was gonna say 'that's the right attitude' but now I think about it that's not the right attitude
That's the attitude of a Subaru owner
*Triggered*
With fragile engines
Hey um, dude that's, that's awesome
I think you need to take it for a drive my friend.
I might even put a camera in it and we should go with you
and sample your first drive
Celebrate your 449.9HP
Pretty impressive for a couple of dudes in a shed
Not bad eh?
Not bad
And a couple of willing chaps
and some awesome friends who managed to help out along the way
Happy Scott?
Yeah, i'm excited to take a drive
lets do it
This is pretty cool man
Pretty awesome to be able to actually drive this thing.
It just drives like a normal car
I cant bel.. that clutch. I honestly didnt think it was a twin plate
It's really impressive, eh?
Yeah
Lovely
Genuinely can't believe how good it is
(Scotty smile)
Wow
That's crazy
From an idea that was hatched on the highways of Japan, through to the completed car
We are very proud to present the finished
Turbo
V8
All wheel drive
Manual
Double Unicorn Nissan Stagea