One-Nut_McGee

And so it begins...
The Mediocre Motoring Scion tC, a proud member of the Balliztik PNW crew, has finally started its transformation from "slow track star" to "slightly-less-slow track star"!

After many long months of waiting for final parts to get in and money to be free, we're finally ready to get started!



Wednesday April 21: Baseline Dyno session

Took the car out to Carb Connection in Kirkland, WA to get a baseline run and to get a feel for the place. They're AEM certified and have a pretty good rep so I'll be working with them to get the car tuned for the first time.

The car put down numbers in line with almost every other stock 5spd tC out there and was very consistent over the three runs we did when at operating temps.

HP: 134 TQ: 143




Right now the injectors are being cleaned and flow matched at Carb Connection and will be picked up later this afternoon if all goes well.







Next steps:

1. Install kit: Saturday April 24th - Sunday 25th
2. Tune car: Tuesday April 27th - Wednesday April 28th
3. Track testing / Shakedowns: May 4th (tentative)

Stay tuned!

bbszero

iTrader: (6)

Nice Stephen, I'll be watching this.

breauxseph

I shall be tuned in.

Infeliciter

i'm glad that this is getting started. what turbo did you go with? are you going to use that power cell too? i'm interested in how this all turns out.

One-Nut_McGee

Not gonna use the fuel cell just yet, Dave. I'll probably be saving that for a later project, but we'll see.

It's the Turbonetics kit so it came with the T3/04 E50 turbo that was sold with it.

Added a pic of the car on the dyno to the thread, sorry for the low quality.

Importspeed

looken good buddy

optional

I for one am super excited about this!

Kanchi

iTrader: (4)

Glad to hear you got a good feeling from that shop. They are the closest shop that can re-program that uni-chip and they seemed a little unsure about the tC when I talked to them...will deff. reconsider then!

watching as well!

Adorian

Watching

alienvictim

woot!!! exciting stuff duder

One-Nut_McGee

Actually I was talking about the Unichip with one of the guys there. He said he'd never seen a Scion before and all of a sudden there were 3 in a week and a half. He mentioned that one of the guys is going to be getting Unichip tuned by them as they're Unichip tuners (like you said).

Should be pretty cool man, I'm excited to see what you can get out of that Unichip I sold you!

YELOSUB

In for the install

One-Nut_McGee

Turbo install day begins...


...stay tuned

Infeliciter

pics or it didn't happen

axiom8888

...lol....well if it didnt happen he better show up here instead

One-Nut_McGee

Well that sucked.




I'll upload some pictures and post a quick synopsis in a few minutes.

One-Nut_McGee

Summary:
The day started off great. We got done with the break down of all the stock parts and were flying through the steps of the install. Stock manifold off, O2 sensor jammed (see below), stock air box/intake removed, new injectors installed, fuel rail reinstalled. We had to rotate the alternator back a little to get the header off, but that was no real trouble.

We were basically flying through everything with no problems until we got to the part where we were about to put in the turbo manifold, turbo, wastegate, and downpipe. We noticed a couple of little things and decided to take a closer look.






Problems:

• The primary O2 sensor was apparently put in by God himself as we weren't able to get it out. I put some elbow and "breaker bar powa"(tm) into it and we then found out that I can break brand new O2 sockets. See the hairline fracture below on the near side.

(See that crack right up the spine? Yea...that's a brand new socket I just broke)

• Turns out that hot side of the turbo housing (exhaust side) had a broken bolt in it and one bolt halfway in. When we went to take it out we found out that it was broken also and just held in the hole by a thread or two...great.

(Hard to see, but the leftmost two bolts are broken off in the housing)

• We tried to extract the two bolts, but weren't able. Took the turbo to the shop to have them try, but they weren't able to either. Being that it's the weekend all the shops we might need were already closed we made the decision to go back to stock.

Next steps:

• Refill oil and test fire with the bigger injectors
• bring the turbo to a shop capable of helping us with the broken bolts
• buy new exhaust housing if old bolts can't be removed
• try the install again

If this had been a virgin kit, we would've been done by around 5pm. Oh well, c'est la vie. We'll keep working at it until the Mediocre tC is up and boosting.

optional

Sounds like you guys worked your butts off today, stuff happens man, I'm sure it'll all get sorted out in no time at all, I know I'm super excited to see this car running.

alienvictim

i used a greatneck wrench to break my 02 sensor loose. just run the pigtail through the end. and than snake the wrench over the o2 sensor and go to town.

that is impressive though.

go to home depot or lowe's and buy some carbide bits. and a threaded bolt remover. looks like a reverse cone shaped screw

One-Nut_McGee

Yea, we were going to use a wrench, but when our buddy was on a trip to the parts store he saw that socket and figured we'd give it a try. Guess I'm just too studly even for tool grade steel.

Regarding the bolts, we used a couple different bolt extractor bits, but the bolts were just insanely hard. We couldn't get the extractors to hit (and stay) on center. They just kept walking to the side and making it sort of impossible to remove.

Oh well, we'll see if a shop can help us out and if not we'll just get a turbo shop to remove the exhaust housing (will try again tomorrow, but we were short on patience and energy tonight) and just get it replaced. More potential downtime/waiting...but oh well, no real rush to get this done.

I'm gonna play with the FI/C and some maps for the next hour or so then crash and get up and do it all again tomorrow.