- Hey guys, Andre from High Performance Academy.
Welcome along to another one of our webinars.
Now today we're gonna be covering the topic of piston to cylinder wall clearance.
We'll find out what that term even means or why it's so important and hopefully
break down a few myths and a few misunderstandings around the topic
while we're at it.
Before we get into that though just to get you guys up to speed with what's
been going on around the workshop over the last week or two, or actually
it is two weeks now.
I apologise, got a bit of man flu last week, I'm still recovering so that's one of the first
times for a while we've actually had to postpone one of our webinars.
So apologies to those who were looking out for that webinar but we're back better
than ever this week to repeat that.
So we have been doing a little bit of work on our FD RX7 project car and I just
want to cover off what's going into that.
So we'll switch across to my laptop screen for a moment.
And for those who have been following us you'll know that we are running a turbo
kit on this car.
So in particular we have got, if I just turn my pointer on, we've got our
Borgwarner 8474 turbocharger mounted up there on the Turblown cast exhaust
manifold.
And it's a pretty tight fit in the engine bay but everything is working out quite
nicely in terms of the exhaust side on that.
One of the things we needed to do to get to the next step with this particular project
was finalise some of the lengths for our sub harnesses for our wiring harness.
So Zac, before he left at the beginning of the year, as part of our professional
motorsport wiring harness construction course, he created a wiring harness for
this car that runs from the firewall, there's two Autosport bulkhead
connectors on the firewall, and runs through the rest of the engine bay.
However at that point that he constructed that harness, we didn't have all of the
components together for the engine bay.
So it's a little hard when we are making a professional motorsport wiring harness,
using Autosport connectors, Raychem DR25 et cetera, those techniques don't really
lend themselves that well to making modifications to the harness after
it's constructed.
So rather than have an inevitable problem with the lengths and the runs for different
sensors, we made the decision to leave some of the sub harnesses to a later point when
we could actually make sure everything was right.
So this is what we're going through now, making sure all our lengths are correct,
all of the sensors are in the correct location and then we will be able
to define the sub harnesses and we'll be able to carry on.
So one of the aspects that goes into that, and this is just dummied at the moment,
again on my laptop screen, we've got a new set of IGN1A coils.
So these are the fairly popular high energy inductive coils.
They're used on just about anything and everything these days.
And they've sort of almost made CDI ignition systems somewhat obsolete.
Which is great because particularly with a lot of the high powered drag cars,
high boost drag cars that I was involved with, maybe probably around about
eight to 12 years ago now, back then we didn't have access to coils at this level,
or inductive coils at this sort of level.
And in order to accurately light off the fuel air charge when you're running
40, 50 60 psi of boost or more, CD ignition systems were really
a requirement.
And unfortunately some of the CD Ignition systems can be a little bit finicky,
a little bit fussy and they are also pretty expensive so it's nice to have a really
high quality coil that's still inductive, easy to wire up, don't need an external
CDI computer to run it.
So that's our coil system, at the moment it's just sitting there on top of the 13B block.
Kind of still messing around with exactly how we are gonna mount this to try and
keep it all neat and tidy.
It isn't a show car but we always sort of figure that form and function can go
hand in hand.
So looking at the moment at mounting it somewhere under the upper inlet
manifold, kind of in line with what you can see there.
The other aspect that we are just finalising here, which I'll just get a closer shot.
So this is our CJ Motorsport fuel rail kit and this is kind of one of the last pieces
of the puzzle we were waiting for there.
So with this kit, it converts, particularly the factory primary injectors which we can
see located down here.
Which in stock form are a side feed injector, converts this system to take
the conventional top feed injector.
And in this case we have chosen to use a set of ID1300 primaries and a set of
ID1700 secondaries.
Now the fuel system sizing for a rotary engine is a little bit unusual in that we
only have one primary and one secondary injector per rotor.
So they do have quite high fuel flow requirements.
So what we're trying to do there is basically cover ourselves for the future
in terms of what we think we're going to be making with this engine power wise,
while making sure that we've still got an injector small enough in the primary
location that we can get good idle quality, good cruise quality.
So we're going to be using staged injection there to run that system
as you'd expect.
So really high quality kit, everything fits really nicely.
In particular there's some nice little CNC machined aluminium adapters that press
into the stock fuel injector location to convert to take a conventional 14
mil O ring seal.
So that was all really nice and seamless.
One of the other aspects I'll just talk about here while I'm at it, which I
think we see as pretty unusual in the aftermarket is that the fuel rail here
for the secondaries, it's a little hard to see because it is upside own,
but it actually incorporates a fuel pulsation dampener.
And this is something we've talked about in the past, particularly with our
FA20 upgrade with our Radium fuel system components, we also incorporated
pulsation dampeners.
And this is something that's often overlooked.
Quite often in the aftermarket when the fuel system is upgraded, the factory rails are
taken out and replaced and the factory pulsation dampeners aren't really
considered, they're probably thrown in the bin.
And to be perfectly honest, for most of my career, I've done exactly that.
And most of the time I've got away with that just fine.
Having a few situations in our Nissan 350z was one of them where we actually faced
some really odd tuning problems, particularly bank to bank fluctuations
because of a faulty factory pulsation dampener.
So it is actually a benefit to keep that pulsation dampener in place so I like
the fact that CJ Motorsports have incorporated that there with their
fuel system.
So we're getting along with that car pretty well now.
We're hoping that we can get some wiring underway on it fairly shortly.
And while we are talking about that car, I also wanted to mention the ECU
that we're running.
So we have got one of Adaptronic's latest and greatest, the modular M6000 ECU.
So this is what we're going to be initially running the car on.
And we've constantly been asked for Adaptronic content from a lot of our
members, particularly those of you from Australia.
But I know Adaptronic's also got a pretty strong following over in the U.S.
So really excited to get that ECU in and have the opportunity to see exactly
how it functions.
We've known Andy from Adaptronic for a number of years and he's always
impressed me as being one of the smartest guys out there in the
aftermarket ECU industry so looking forward to seeing how his little
brain child pans out once we actually get that ECU up and running.
Now with part of that as well, the modular style of the Adaptronic ECU allows it
to be modified and upgraded so it kind of can grow with you which is pretty unusual
in aftermarket ECUs.
Normally you kind of have to choose an ECU and you're trying to take a bit
of a guess as to what you may want to add to your car in terms of inputs,
outputs as you go along.
And quite often I've been in a situation where customers have started out with
one ECU, they've spent a bunch of money, it's been installed, it's been tuned,
and then a year or two down the track their needs change, they want to add
some additional functionality and all of a sudden the first ECU that they
bought no longer can do the job so that gets to be pretty expensive when
you need to pull that entire ECU out, sell it and upgrade to a new unit.
So I like the fact with the modular that we do have the flexibility to expand.
And in particular, a couple of aspects with that, so we've got, it's probably a
little bit hard to see, this little bag here is one of Adaptronic's modular drive by
wire controller modules.
So this is something we're gonna be doing a little bit further down the track.
Initially we will be getting started with the cable throttle body on the FD RX7 as they
obviously came out from the factory.
Later on we do want to actually switch that over to drive by wire.
We're huge fans of drive by wire, it gives a lot more control to the tuner,
there's a lot more functionality that we can use with a drive by wire system.
Little problematic on the FD 13B RX7 because of the triple butterfly style
with that factory throttle body.
So that's why for the moment we've kind of parked the drive by wire idea.
But we wanna come back and revisit that, it'll be as simple as adding that module
and obviously the additional wiring.
And likewise we've also got one of their modular LSU wideband controllers.
So again, pretty hard to see here but LSU 4.9 lamdba sensor which is
basically what everyone's using and it's an on the board lambda controller.
So the nice aspect with this, and this goes really for all ECU manufacturers
is having that on board wideband control, particularly if it is done correctly,
where it's using the calibration resistor that's part of the factory LSU 4.9
lambda sensor connector.
The calibration should be pretty well guaranteed.
Rather than doing free air calibrations where we only get one sample point to calibrate
the sensor against, the built in calibration resistor, essentially from my understanding
talking Bosch at PRI a couple of years back, gives two calibration points,
so the accuracy should be better in that respect.
The other aspect is having that on board gives a little bit more control depending
on how the ECU manufacturer decides to incorporate that.
In particular the wideband controller can be disabled when the engine isn't running
and I think there's a lot of people out there in the industry who are worried about
the life expectancy of the lambda sensor itself.
And one of the big reasons for failures is because the sensor heater is run
before the engine starts.
So that gets the sensor very hot, particularly when the engine is cold
and we first start it, there's a lot of moisture goes through the exhaust
and that can fracture the sensor very quickly, very easily and it's quite costly.
So by incorporating this on board with the ECU, obviously there's a lot more
functionality around how exactly that heater element is controlled.
Another product that I hope to give you a little bit more information about
but unfortunately at this point, I really haven't had enough chance to test it.
But this is the Tuner Nerd Knock Monitor Pro.
So this is something that we have had quite a few requests about,
particularly on our forum and for anyone who has been following us for a fair
while, particularly any of you who have been through our courses, you'll know
that I am a huge advocate for audio knock detection, any time you're tuning
anything on the dyno.
Knock, in my opinion, is one of the biggest killers of any performance engine.
Particularly when we are forced to tune on a poor quality fuel such as pump gas,
then in most instances we are going to be tuning an engine that is what I
refer to as knock prone.
Basically means that as we're advancing the timing up towards MBT,
we're going to encounter the onset of detonation.
When that happens, we obviously need to stop and actually retard the timing
to provide a safety margin.
So on that basis, accurately being able to detect knock is a real advantage.
In fact I'd say it's essential.
So up until now there's been two products that we've been using in house
and you'll see those in our webinars as well as our videos,
one of those is the Plex knock monitor, we've got both the version one
and version two.
Excellent product but it is very expensive, it's got some really advanced functionality
and this makes it more suitable to the professional tuner.
The other unit that we've been using is the Link G4 Plus Knock Block.
I like this unit because it is a little bit more sensibly priced, but in order
to get to that price point, it is very stripped out in terms of it's
feature set in that it purely is an audio knock detection device,
there's no display of the knock signal which the Plex gives us.
So the Tuner Nerd Knock Monitor Pro kind of gives us the best of both worlds
there in a package that is actually cheaper than even the Link G4 Plus Knock Block.
So we'll just head across to my laptop screen.
Now as I've said, I haven't quite had a chance to get this up and running,
so this is basically a brief sneak peak at what it is.
Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we'll be able to come back and give
you a bit more of a thorough review.
So this is laptop based which is kind of nice because you've got all of that data
coming straight into your laptop.
And up here on the left, we've got basically what gives us a visual indication
of the noise sample coming in from the knock sensor, we feed that straight into
our laptop.
We can also set up the frequencies for the knock detection.
So particularly for every engine there will be a specific frequency where knock
occurs, so that's adjustable.
And we can also just simply enter our bore diameter here and this will give
us a frequency estimate because the frequency that knock occurs is
very closely tied to our cylinder diameter.
Now the interesting part over here on the right hand side, and again I apologise,
I don't have any data on here that I can show you right now but a couple of
week's time, hopefully we will.
So basically what this will do is it will plot the knock versus our
engine RPM.
So the idea here is that we produce a run that is knock free, I should mention
we can still listen to the Knock Monitor Pro with an audio headset,
so we can actually hear what's going on as well.
It will give us a background noise sample, so that might end up looking something
like a kind of a lot of dots that kind of cover something that looks
like this line.
And then we can create a threshold.
So that threshold ends up just above our background noise level.
And basically once that's set and as long as it's been configured correctly,
if we do end up with any knock occurring, the knock signal ends up
somewhere up here, well above, or hopefully well above our threshold line.
So it makes it really clear when knock is occurring.
So on paper at the moment, looks like a great product, it is very well priced,
but as I can say, right now, I haven't had the opportunity to test it,
that's why we've got it, so look forward to getting stuck into that really shortly.
Right just let me head back across to my notes for a second here.
And the other thing I wanted to mention here, if we just jump across to my
laptop screen, this is an Instagram I put up last night on our HPA 101
Instagram account.
So this is something we learned about while we were over at the TX2K race event
and we got a chance to talk to Mike from Cobb Tuning.
Now at the time this was something that he was running on his own R35 GTR
development vehicle so we weren't able to talk about it at the time,
it now has been released.
But this little module here is a CAN interface for additional sensors.
So this kind of one of the problems when we are running a reflash
package on a late model ECU.
Reflashing technology has come a long way and kind of now there's really
very few limitations on what we can do by reflashing the factory fitted ECU,
but one of the big problems is if we do want to run additional sensors into
the factory ECU, we can be quite limited in some instances.
The reason for this is we can't go and add additional wires into the ECU
header plug, obviously that's pre populated.
So our options really come down to repurposing some of the existing
inputs to the ECU.
And of course when you do that, it means that you lose whatever input
you've decided to repurpose.
So what I'm meaning here is if for example we want to add an oil pressure
sensor or maybe an ethanol content sensor, we need a way of physically wiring
that into the ECU.
So what Cobb have come up with here is this little CAN gateway.
So this is a specific module and what it does is allows you to choose whatever
sensors you want.
At the moment there's a limited selection from Cobb but they're adding to that.
And then you can plug that sensor directly into this little CAN gateway.
CAN gateway requires power and earth and then CAN high and low.
And the tricky part is that it broadcasts the information from whatever sensors
you've got plugged into it, straight onto the vehicle's OE CAN bus.
Now that doesn't interfere with any of the factory operation of the CAN bus,
the data is simply there.
And then using the Cobb reflashing package you can incorporate that data
into control strategies and of course log it directly to your laptop.
So I thought that was a pretty smart device and really is gonna
expand I think on the capabilities of the Cobb platform, particularly as they
develop more sensors to go along with that.
Now talking about TX2K as well, we'll just head across to my laptop
for the Youtube channel and this is the video that we've just released today.
So this is a T1 Race built car.
George Dodsworth's R35 GTR.
And in a sea, a literal sea of R35 GTRs at TX2K, I'll admit it's pretty hard
to stand out but this was one that caught our eye straight away because
as far as I could see, this was the only car that had a one piece carbon fibre
front clip.
So that made it a bit of a standout but where it was a little bit unusual is that
most of the big power R35 GTRs running at TX2K all ran a front mount turbo kit.
The reason for that is that once you start getting up in the turbo size,
with the stock location turbos on the R35, you are limited between the amount
of space between the block and the chassis rails as to what size turbo
you can physically fit in there.
So this car currently, as far as I'm aware, still holds the world record for the
fastest stock location turbo R35.
I believe it's run a series of 7.0x passes, to the best of my knowledge it still
hasn't quite cracked that six but we have a chat to Tony, find out what
exactly makes the car tick, what their intentions for the car are and whether
they're actually going to end up stepping up to a front mount turbo kit once
they've got that six second pass so head across to our Youtube channel,
check that video out and while you're there, make sure you subscribe.
Lastly for today we are running a new giveaway.
We've teamed up with Wiseco and they will be giving away a set of their
shelf stock pistons.
So any shelf stock piston set that they provide, we're gonna be adding into
that our package of engine building courses so you're going to know
what to do with your new Wiseco forged pistons.
So if you're at a point in your project car build where you're considering
building a engine for it and you're looking around for a set of aftermarket pistons
to suit your build, then this is going to be pefect for you.
This giveaway only has just got started so it's perfect chance to get in the draw,
I'll get the team to drop a link in the chat that you can follow to get your
name into that draw.
Absolutely no cost to get involved and if you do want to get entered,
there are a range of other tasks you can do to give yourself a few more
entries, so if you follow the link you'll find all out about that.
Alright thanks for joining us there, give me a few moments and we'll
get started with today's webinar.