- It's Andre from High Performance Academy, welcome along to another
one of our webinars.
Now this time we're going to be having a look at how you can go about
rescaling the mass air flow sensor if you are reflashing a late model factory car.
Specifically our example is going to be our GM L98 engine, pretty similar to
an LS2 for all intents and purposes.
And we are gonna be using the HP Tuners tuning platform.
However to a reasonable degree, the techniques that we're going to look at
and the principles behind it are gonna be applicable to a wider range of vehicles
as well.
So something for just about anyone into reflashing modern engines that are
fitted with mass air flow sensors to learn.
Before we get into that though I just wanna continue on with a few things
that have been happening around the shop over the last week.
And for those who did join us last week, you'll know that I was talking about
our latest acquisition which is a version 11 Subaru STi.
And we're intending to use this for creation of some course material.
Specifically we're going to be performing some reflashing on this and it's really
popular in the Subaru tuning market to reflash, there's a lot of open source
software packaged in particular that make it really cost effective for
home enthusiasts to reflash their own vehicle.
Realistically your only cost there is the Tactrix Openport cable to interface
between your laptop and the OBD-II port.
We're excited about that vehicle and being able to bring some content out on it
but of course we wanna be able to tune this on a wide variety of platforms
and for starters we are getting our Haltech Elite 2500 installed in it.
So we'll just swap across to my laptop screen for a moment.
This is the vehicle again for those who haven't seen it.
Nothing particularly special, it's a 100000km old 2008 version 11 STi.
In almost completely stock condition.
All we've done to it is fitted an aftermarket exhaust system from
the turbo back.
Now this is the Elite package that we are fitting.
And it is an adaptor harness which is what we can see, whoops let's try
turning my pointer on, we can see our adapter harness here and the little
adapter box that is there.
So this goes between the Haltech harness and the factory header plugs for the ECU,
the stock ECU.
Makes it nice and easy, there are a couple of problems with this though,
one of them, and again I was talking about this a little bit last week,
so for those who have watched, sorry for doubling up.
But one of the problems is that this setup from Haltech is actually suited
for their Australian domestic market 2.5 litre engine.
We've got a Japanese domestic market model, that's what we predominantly
see here in New Zealand, and there are some significant differences.
And one of those is that the Japanese domestic market two litre engine
is fitted with a quad ABCS or variable cam control so we've variable cam control
on the inlet and the exhaust.
The Australian domestic market 2.5 only had that at that version on the intake.
So we had to do a little bit of work on the adapter harness to add in those
pins and one of the problems we struck with this, which I really wanted to talk
about just in terms of diagnosis in general if you are an EFI tuner,
is that once we got up and running on the Haltech, we found that we had really
poor control over one of the inlet cams and one of the exhaust cams.
Now of course because I've made some wiring changes to this adapter harness,
straight away this was my suspicion.
Turns out that was actually partly right as well.
There was a problem on the exhaust side with one of the inputs that I'd,
sorry one of the actuator outputs that I'd added in.
That didn't explain the fact that I was also having trouble on one of the intake
cams and this was all completely factory through the Haltech adaptor harness.
So it's always a good idea when you're in a situation like this if you can to revert
back to stock and just make sure that physically the system is capable of
controlling.
So what we're trying here is making sure that the mechanical system is physically
able to control the engine.
So we did this, we're using ECU edit to do some scanning.
And if we head across to my laptop screen for a moment this is a log file
from the engine on the stock ECU.
So we'll head across to the left hand side here.
And we can see that in our second group of graphs we've got our exhaust,
valve timing, position for left and right, so that's the red and the white there.
And then we've got on graph three below that, our intake cam position
for left and right.
Now these don't always track absolutely perfectly but in particular we can see
around about here we've got quite a big discrepancy between our left and right
for our exhaust.
It's also showing quite serious change there for our inlet.
And if we move across to the right a little bit, this actually gets quite bad for our
exhaust in particular, we can see that the red trace has moved quite a long way
away from the white trace.
Now any time we've got a discrepancy in our valve timing values, our cam angles
between one bank of cylinders and the other, we're gonna have a big problem
with the volumetric efficiency of the engine's going to be different
bank to bank.
One cylinder bank's going to end up running richer or leaner than the other.
And just generally this results in a lot of ugly drivability problems
and rough running.
So we don't want this and just remembering again, this is the situation we were
facing in stock form.
Now for those of you who are Subaru fanatics, you'll know that this isn't
actually a usual situation for these engines particularly when they are
high kilometre examples.
And a lot of this can come down to the way the car's been cared for,
whether it's had regular maintenance, regular oil changes and whether it's
been well looked after.
Now despite that fact that ours did look like it's been in pretty good
condition, we obviously have this problem so a little bit of research here
showed a few options along with talking to a few other Subaru specialists that I
deal with here in New Zealand.
So what we ended up doing was an engine flush which is an additive we put into the oil.
Basically this problem can be down to basically sludge build up in the oil system.
So anything that's gonna slow down the ability of those cams to actually react
and move as well as the ability of the solenoids to actually do their job properly.
After that we also ran through an oil change of a diesel oil.
Now diesel oil has a higher detergent content than a normal oil that we would
use for a gasoline engine.
So we ran this through the engine a few time, got it nice and hot a few times,
cycled that and ran it through so that the cams were cycling and this was just a case
of basically taking it out for a short drive, making sure that we're varying
both the RPM and load.
And we'll just head back across to my laptop screen again.
So this is the final log that we did yesterday I think it was.
After no changes other than those oil changes and the oil flush.
So we can see straight away that on both banks of cyinders, this is again our
exhaust, you can see how much closer everything's tracking there and our intake.
We've still got a few small discrepancies but this is more in line with what we would
expect to see.
So this dealt with one of the problems we've now got on top of the fact that
even on the factory ECU we know that the system is capable of controlling
the cam angle.
Now we can swap back over to the Haltech and we're confident that if there is an issue,
it's either in our wiring or it's in the ECU control strategy.
So this highlighted that we still had a problem on one of the exhaust cams
and this was down to basically where I'd modified the adapter harness it turned
out that we had reallocated a pin that was also doing another function
on the factory dash.
So by disabling that we've got our cam control functioning now.
So we're hoping to get this car on the dyno tomorrow and get a bit of a baseline
tune in it with the Haltech Elite 2500.
And of course as soon as we can we're gonna be bringing out some more content
on that.
We will be using that adapter harness to adapt this up to a range of ECUs.
One of the other ones we're really excited about is getting it up and
running on our ECU Master Black.
We've had quite a lot of people requesting tuning information and webinar content
on the ECU Master product so we're excited to get that out.
Now last week I was also talking about our Toyota 86.
This is the V8 swapped Toyota 86.
And we're at the moment in the process of fitting a TTI six speed sequential gearbox.
And this has actually been a real difficult job, something we thought was gonna
be a lot easier than it was.
And some of this is made difficult by the fact that the Toyota 86 transmission
tunnel is really really tight.
So the first problem we had was physically getting the existing R154
Toyota gearbox out.
There's not enough room unfortunately to pull the gearbox back off the engine
and get it clear of the engine as well as the clutch, the torque plate clutch.
And drop it out, so we actually ended up going through what was quite a
rigmarole, we had to drop the engine down on the cross member around
about 50 mil to allow us enough room to actually get the gearbox out.
Now the good news is that the TTI box is much smaller in its width.
So we're not gonna have that issue, and we'll just jump across to my
laptop screen, we can see the two boxes side by side.
So at the back there we've got the existing R154 gearbox.
I'll point out that these never came out behind the 1UZFE.
The 1UZFE always had an auto gearbox behind it.
So what we've got here is an adapter bell housing that is made here in
New Zealand.
This I think is a Knight Speed part, but these are available from a bunch
of people all around the world.
Just because these gearboxes are so popular.
So there we've got our TTI box sitting in front of that and you can quite
easily see how much narrower the TTI box is.
So that's great in terms of it gives us a lot more width to work with in the
transmission tunnel.
What's not quite so great though is straight away as soon as we lifted
up the gearbox and got it into location, we found that the protrusion at the top
of this gearbox was going to foul on the underside of the transmission tunnel.
And in particular there is some bracing here that just perfectly coincides with
where this is fitted.
So we have got the car at fab at the moment and again on our laptop screen
we've got a quick image of where we're at at the moment.
So this is with the gearbox lifted into place and hopefully you can see here that
there's already been a little bit of cutting gone into removing the bracing
from the transmission tunnel.
This almost gets us close enough.
Close but frustratingly far away.
We can get the gearbox in in this location but essentially it is touching the top
of the transmission tunnel.
That's never gonna work so there is gonna be a little bit of cutting and
a little bit of boxing of the transmission tunnel needed in order to give us enough
clearance.
But that will be the hard part, once that's done, everything else, fingers crossed,
should be pretty plain sailing.
Not entirely sure why I said that because I've been dealing with race cars and cars
in general long enough to know that there is very seldom any real plain sailing.
Alright I also just wanted to show you an Instagram that I put up last night.
And this is a topic that I think's really important for any of you who are
doing your own wiring.
When you are dealing with some of the more mission critical inputs to the ECU
and basically anything that's high frequency here but the common ones would be
aspects such as engine speed and position inputs, wheel speed or also knock inputs.
They do need to be run through shielded cable.
And that shield is there to help protect the conductors within the shield
from electromagnetic interference.
Problem with this is for that shield to work properly we also need to ground the
end of the shield at the ECU to drain that EMI away from those conductors.
And how we go about doing this is a little bit tricky if you don't know
the techniques.
Once you know, not too big a deal.
So there's two techniques that we have got shown here.
At the bottom we've got basically two stages of the same technique.
And what we've done here is that we have stripped the outer sheath off
our braid and this reveals our shield.
And what we wanna do here is basically use a small pick or a very very fine
jewellers screwdriver and just tease a small hole in that braid and basically
we're going to extract the two conductor wires out of that hole that we've just
created in the braid.
And in essence this now gives us three individual wires.
We've got our two conductors in this case, of course this is a two core shielded cable.
We could make them have a single core a triple core or whatever you're
actually working with.
So we've got our two cores in this instance plus our shield.
And what we've done here is we've used a conventional open barrel splice here
to crimp an additional wire which is our green wire, onto that shield.
And this gives us a nice reliable connection to that shield and then we can terminate
our new wire that we've just added in through that connection, through that
crimp to our ground pin on our ECU to drain away that EMI.
Now of course we can't leave it like this, there's two problems.
We've now got an exposed crimp, our open barrel splice is exposed there,
we don't want the risk of that shorting out against anything.
The other thing as well, we would like to give this a little bit of strain relief.
So the next step of this process is we've used this black dual wall heat
shrink here, this is a product called SCL.
And this is a semi rigid product.
So once it's recovered down using our heat gun, first of all, the glue inside it
melts which hopefully if you are looking on a big enough screen you'll be
able to see that some of that glue has actually squeezed out.
You can see that at the bottom in particular.
So that glues it essentially to the underlying conductors, makes sure that it's not
gonna move.
Also because it is semi rigid, it gives great strain relief there.
So that's our first technique.
The second technique which is shown at the top, this is probably one of the
few areas that you will ever hear us recommend using a solder based product.
And this is a solder sleeve.
So what we do here is we strip away our conductor, our outer sheathing again,
and what we can do here is actually then basically fold the shield back
over the top of the sheath.
We're then going to add our green wire again, that's obviously been
stripped at the end.
And we place the solder shield, which is again a heat recoverable boot
or piece of heat shrink for want of a better term.
And it's got an adhesive sealant at both ends and then a ring of solder
in the middle.
And by recovering that down what happens is that that solder melts and
it forms a nice reliable junction between the shield and the piece of wire
that we've added in.
Now of course there are problems with solder that we're very vocal about.
Why this works is because it is a very controlled amount of solder.
It's not going to wick up that shield by miles and cause a problem and the other
really important aspect here is because it is a semi rigid product when it is
recovered, it's going to add strain relief there.
So this is gonna mean there's no vibration associated with the solder joint
and this makes sure that it's going to lead a long and reliable service life.
So just a couple of tips there for those of you who are wondering how you
go about terminating those shields.
Also while I'm on it, probably important to mention here that when we are
terminating shielded cable like this, we only wanna terminate this at one
end and that's almost always going to be at the ECU end.
So it's a big no no to be shielding that at both ends, we can end up with some
big problems there if we shield both ends.
Alright our last topic for today, I just wanna mention that we have got another
one of our giveaways running.
So this time we have partnered up with the team from K1 and they are providing
any of their shelf stock aftermarket conrod kits.
So they've got kits for the majority of popular engines, both import and
domestic so if you're considering embarking on an engine building project,
and you are considering a set of rods then this is perfect timing for you.
You're going to get the set of rods as well as freight anywhere in the world.
So it doesn't matter where abouts you are based, you don't have to be in the US
market, we will ship them anywhere in the world to you.
We're also gonna be chucking in our full suite of engine building courses,
so this will give you our engine building fundamentals, our practical engine
building course and you'll also get access to our private online community consisting
of our forums as well as our private members webinars.
I'll get the guys to chuck a link down that you can follow if you wanna get
your name in the draw there.
There's also a bunch of additional steps that you can take that are gonna multiply
the number of entries you get in that draw.
So all pretty easy, so give yourself the best chance possible and as always there's
absolutely no cost involved with getting into that draw.
So make sure you don't miss out.
Alright guys thanks for joining us there for our little pre show, give me a few
moments and we'll get started with our webinar today.