And my wallet


Drove it to work since it was 71 degrees @ 7am this morning. The oil cooler seems to be working pretty good, after a 20min drive to work the oil only hit 130 degrees. I got the go pro working and took a 2 min clip of the car under boost. We really need a couple more hours to tune it out, hitting 10's in quite a few places.

Youtube link - 7PSI run

 

Very nice, are you planning on keeping it as a rear-mounted turbo or are you going to relocate it at some point?

 

It will be staying in the trunk. It is working unbelievably well and spools great. Easy to work on and I really like how everything is out of the weather plus the air cleaner can't suck up dirt/water. I will move the air filter to the passenger rear well and box it in so it sucks out of the bottom vent down there. (The trunk has a big plastic vent with a flapper on both rear corners) Another reason is that I can change out turbo's and switch to a straight out exhaust pipe in 30mins to 1 hour if I want to hit the track. I'm keeping the muffler on for inspections and daily driving (gotta love that almost stock exhaust sound at idle and low throttle)

I thought about doing a rear mount under the car but the oiling system would be much more complex. Also I fear that it would be unreliable and or hard to get it working correctly. With the turbo up as high as I have it I am able to gravity drain into the tank instead of using a scavenging pump and check valve. So my oiling system is half as complex (less to go wrong) as a low mount. Although I really did want to mount twin low mounts where the cats are

 

Are you going to have a custom pipe made for around the axle? I noticed that ground clearance is pretty low right there due to using factory couplings.

 

Yeah, as I test everything out more I'll make it more permanent. This is version 1.0, I'm sure there will be a lot of revisions. But it actually fit pretty darn good for a couple basic intercooler pipe/coupler kits! In the end I am going to make the whole hot side out of stainless because of the condensation that sits in the exhaust from heat cycling. The cold side I'll be buying bulk 2.5" aluminum tube and welding it into several sections so there will only be a few couplings instead of a thousand. (Seriously there is probably like 20) When I started building this car I decided to just put it together as simple as possible so if things change or didn't work as expected I could just pull it all and go another route. I have been bad in the past about putting too much time into things and finding out later that I need to change stuff and have to start all over again.

But after I get it fine tuned, dyno numbers, track times and decide on the turbo sizing I'll be finishing it up so it's not so messy. Same with the interior, I have wiring all over the place and gauges just hanging until I decide what is needed and what I can delete. Probably will have to make a custom plate to hold all of that crap too.

 

Do you have an intercooler? What have intake temps been sitting at. With that much cold side pipe I'm sure it looses a substantial amount of heat radiating off the pipe.

 

No intercooler currently. I wanted to see IAT's first. I went home on lunch today (85 degrees outside) and the oil tank temp only got to 150 degrees. IAT's 130-140 degrees while the AC was running. I'm sure when I crank it up to 10-14 PSI it will rise some. I think with the 6ft or so of aluminum tube and also sucking air from the rear instead of hot air by the engine/radiator/AC is keeping the IAT's down. The GTX3076R @ 7psi probably isn't heating the air up much at that low of boost. I think the fast spool up is related to not having a intercooler also. The car has positive pressure at 2800 rpm, I really didn't think that was going to happen.

 

Jeez if you put an intercooler on that thing you'll probably be sucking ambient temp air even with more boost. Really interested to see how this all turns out, not too many exciting G projects going on anymore.

Unfortunately the high mile 5AT will end up being the achilles heel that's going to wear excessively. What kind of plans do you have for when it fails?

 

The IAT's look real good, if I remember right the last time I had the 04' g35 out it was running 120 degree IAT's and it is stock N/A


When we started building RE4F03B transmissions for the G20 cars I started with a 135k mile stock transmission and a shift kit. Everyone said the transmission were junk and you couldn't boost with one. Well the first one lasted under 9-12psi for so long I just started to turn boost up until it started to fail at 14psi. Found that the high drum discs were not enough material to hold the torque so we machined the top plate and added 66% more clutch surface area. (Pretty sure that's right, been years since we have built that tranny) Another thing we did was make a relay wired to the AEM so it would lock the torque converter above 8-10 psi, Anyway that one is under 20psi and I have put 50k miles on the car and it is still going. Hopefully this adventure will go about the same way. Burn up the weak spots, disassemble, fix weak areas, push harder, break, repeat

As long as the clutch packs can hold and the fluid temps stay in range I really don't know why 500whp wouldn't be achievable. I have enough parts to rebuild 2 complete trannys so hopefully I'll be good for the summer. I have one in the garage getting ready to come apart now. Will make sure to get pics. Another cool tool I have that I didn't with the G20's is dataloging for the automatic transmission. I can detect slip and all sorts of neat stuff now!

 

Yeah and the nice thing about the automatics is you can keep adding bigger coolers to keep temps down, I just don't like that past a certain power threshold you have no choice but to use a shift kit to keep slippage to a minimum and it can get really old having the car always slamming into the next gear.

Do they have a stall converter option for that transmission or one from another transmission that would work? How is the 4th and 5th gear clutch pack on it, pretty light duty? I've never been that deep into the 5AT only the 6MT.

 

I'm pretty sure level 10 and another company (can't remember the name) rebuild the torque converters. I had a G20 converter built by level ten once. It did engage faster and felt a little perkier but wasn't worth the $$$. I will just lock up the stock manually from now on and save the $600 unless the stock one can't hold anymore. On the G20 after 200-250 whp it would start to shudder on engagement thus burning up the clutch on heavy load. Locking it before the torque hit fixed the problem. You also put down more power to the ground when locked, so I locked it at 8-10 PSI all gears. It is a little harder shift when locked but not real bad. Probably happens to all turbo/automatic guys at a certain boost level and above. Not sure about how built the clutch packs are yet. I only have the spare tranny in the garage open for the valvebody work right now. I really want to hit the U-pull yard and grab a RE5R05A out of a Titan to compare the packs and drums. You would think they would build them all the same but from what I have seen they build them to a certain torque level for each vehicle. Sometimes you can just equally stack new clutches and get a extra in there without any modification and be within spec clearance. If you need more or if the drum clearance is too tight the top plates can usually be ordered or just machined down for bigger applications. I know the high drum on the G20 had I think 6-7 different factory thickness top plates that could be ordered.

 

Well we were tuning the car to 10psi Sunday.... Was being really weird and would be lean in spots and then rich going all over the place and was completely inconstant and then it fell on it's face rich and went into safe mode. I started to check all of the cold side and finally found the problem. The old throttle body factory coupling tore and was leaking under boost. I had another in the garage from the FX35 drivetrain that I was going to put on until a 4 ply silicone could show up but it cracked when I stressed it also. So the car is down until Wednesday when the new coupler shows up. Sucks to loose a day over a $12 part. I am also starting a new informational LCD gauge setup that incorporates my original turbo health 2 line display. It will have my turbo pressure / temperature plus a bunch of other stuff I am adding. So far I have the turbo pressure and temp is calibrated and functional and the rest I'll knock out in spare time. Other than that I have been cleaning my garage out after the car build so I can get the spare drivetrain on stands so I can build the forged engine and built tranny. When it is ready I'm probably going to push the stock setup little by little until something gives. I also found some fender / grill / cowl push lock fasteners that fit real nice, I picked them up at Oreilly automotive.


New informational gauge

Original 05' G35x Coupler

Original 06' FX35 coupler

Fender / Grill Push lock fasteners

Fender / Grill Push lock fasteners

 

I installed a Turbosmart manual boost controller and bench tested it to figure out how many PSI per click I would gain. I only needed 1 click to bring the car to 10-12 PSI with a 7PSI wastegate. As soon as I did that we started to tune the car and hit the MAX voltage of the MAF at around 9psi then it shut the car down. So we went into the FIC6 and clamped it so it wouldn't go above 4.7 volts for now. Until now we have been tuning the car on the stock ECU and it really works great for 7psi but the MAF and the stock injectors on E85 (at 72ish PSI pressure) are maxed or close to maxed out. I have been thinking if I rescale the MAF in a custom housing I can probably get close to another 100whp out of it. And I am going to try some VQ37VHR stock 385cc injectors to replace the VQ35DE's for a little extra fuel. First I'll install the injectors and MAF independently in my 04' G35x and tune the car for each one. Then I'll install them in the 05' and change the MAF and Injector values and retune to get it spot on. Hoping to get it to 12-14psi without the secondary fueling. So far we have just over 600 miles on it and I'm driving it everyday now.

 

Flow tested the 09+ VQ37VHR injectors. They weren't quite as high flow as most say they are but still about 12% more than stock.

Stock VQ35DE = 328cc @ 3.5bar

Stock VQ37VHR = 368cc @ 3.5bar (344cc @ 3bar)

 

Made some changes to the turbo car for stock ECU tuning. I pulled the dual injector intake setup and installed the stock intake so we can tune for big primary injectors and MAF. We made a big MAF utilizing the stock sensor that should get us to the 450whp range. We got it installed on my stock 04' G35x and have it tuned already. Now we have the EV14 GT500 injectors in the 04' stock car and we are trying to get them dialed in and running properly before we throw both of them in the turbo car. It's a big learning curve for us since we have never worked with the factory ECU this way but will be worth it when it's done.