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**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 02:51 AM

"so i'm going on a 500 mile drive at 9am" post made at 2:50 AM on 06/08/08

Originally posted by SamuraiSam

current state of car:

:emo:

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 02:54 AM

Crosspost of my ClubSi post (http://forums.clubsi.com/ubbthreads....Number=2714847) recapping the NASIOC Cascade Loop 2008, minus most of the pics. Click that link to view pics.

I made a post early yesterday morning around 2:45: http://forums.clubsi.com/ubbthreads....Number/2712369

while taking a quick break from putting the Sil-eighty back together so I could attend the 2008 NASIOC Cascade Loop cruise. I've gone the last three years and never in a Subaru, but my group of friends are always in with the Suby guys because they put on the best events, mature people, perfectly paced driving.

This year was a little interesting because it was just a few days after a training class I was attending in San Diego ended. I hauled ass back North along I5 in my 1994 3-cylinder Geo Metro:

to meet up with Nate047 in Portland, who let me crash on his couch and hang out for two days. Then I hit the road again with a few stops in Tacoma to drop by Import_Tuner's shop and see some friends in Seattle's U-District. Finally I came home, spent a day relaxing, tore apart the Sil-eighty, and proceeded to drop some car audio junk into it that'd just been taking up space in my attic since I flipped my Honda.

I started working on it Friday, and took things apart and Marc built the speaker mounts out of MDF and such Saturday. Some girl who I'd never met before was brought by the house by some guy- and after sitting on the couch in the garage watching me work for a few hours, practically begged me to let her ride along. She was hot so what do you think I said?

By Saturday at midnight all the power, RCA's, and speaker wire was run front to back and into the doors & crossovers and the carpet was on its way back in. At 2:40AM on Sunday (day of the drive,) it looked like this:

to having the seats and front speakers in and the amp mounted up and wired at around 4:00... said FUCK the back speakers and went to sleep for an hour and a half. Woke up (barely), put the trim pieces back in, met up the new friend and co-pilot Christina, washed the car, and finally arrived at the meet-up at Cascade Mall in Burlington at around 9:30:

(from JTink on NASIOC NWIC)

After taking off, scrambling for three 5 hour energy shots, BAWLS, and some gas, headed back just in time to miss the first half of the driver's meeting:

and for Ryan aka modaddict, to pick Marc & I as suby drive veterans and ask us to be group leaders. Then we headed into formation, ass to mouth/bumper to bumper style (whatever your persuasion).

(Praet0rian, www.paulwhittaker.net )

Finally, we headed out of Burlington across Highway 20 through Sedro-Wooley and Concrete to Marblemount, where we pit-stopped for the only bathroom break before Winthrop. The fun road is Highway 20, to Diablo Lake's overpass for pictures, and then continuing on all the way into the Methow Valley. We ate lunch in Winthrop (I ate at Grubsteak & Co and got another Chicken Tandoori wrap FTMFW!!) and then continued on East, onto 153 South, and then down and 99/97 south to Lake Chelan. At the gas station there we ran into a group of CB7tuner guys out on a cruise to Chelan and Back just along highway 2, actually a bunch of pretty polite guys and almost all clean cars. I talked to a few of them and shared a quick tale of my long gone 2000 Si... then it was back to the road, down and back West towards Leavenworth where the group split up. Most headed over to I-90 across Snoqualmie Pass and back to Seattle, while us Northern-enders go through Leavenworth on Highway 2, across Stevens Pass for a good stop, and back into Monroe and then Everett. And on with pics...

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:00 AM

montana_slim:

heftylefty:

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:03 AM

more from 3dscott on Honda-Tech:

laueddy on NASIOC:

**accordaffair** · 06-10-2008, 03:15 AM

wowowow at some of these pictures!!

Did you take these?

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:15 AM

A post originally titled,

"Kids, please don't buy SSAutoChrome- a crosspost"

Originally posted by SamuraiSam View Post

You will end up ruining an auto technician's day.

(This is a long story written by an extremely tired, disgruntled, pissed off tech who wants to sit down and ramble and ***** with lots of story and pictures that has nothing to do with the title and the main point of this thread so if you aren't in for a non-turbo-honda read, just hit the "back" button". I'm crossposting it here because contained somewhere within this rant that most of you would probably be best skipping over and heading straight for the pictures, is a tiny backstory and a few snapshots of the Seattle Golden Gardens Nissan meet last Sunday.)

On the 24th we had a customer come in with a pretty heavily abused, SR20 swapped S13 240sx that he had just put a topmount turbo setup on with a pretty nice looking turbo and a great looking manifold. He needed to have a downpipe fabricated because his setup was really jerry-rigged - just enough to get to the shop. Turns out the manifold was some SS autochrome/XS power deal he had picked up from some guy for 80 bucks. We made some comment about how they look great but aren't actually built well. Anyways so I put the car up on the four post and we checked everything out, and my co worker that does almost all our exhaust work built the downpipe and it turned out great, except we didn't have a wastegate flange to make a dump tube (he wanted to have it dump out the side of the car) and after a failed attempt to trace a flange and cut it freehand with the plamsa cutter, we said we'd order in a new flange and that he could come by next Saturday and we'd do the dumptube.

So the next day I went down to the Nissan meet at Golden Gardens and had a great time for the most part. Got to drive down in a brand new G35 coupe and back up i drove a single turbo FD. All of the Japanese prosti-tots wanted to model all of our groups cars including my roommate's GT-R...

They were all over the G35 i drove down also, but those pictures turned out super ****ing blurry god dammit.

So that was fun except for some of the super badass drift kids doing burnouts and popping off the revlimiter and ****. Then the whole work week showed up and it was five times as busy as it's ever been this year and I was really super stressed all week, just absolute hell at the shop, and finally Saturday comes which is either a day off or an easy day. We do shop breakfasts every Saturday morning and then I was going to just come in and clean up for about two hours and take off and go to the local Honda-Tech meet down in seattle (2hr drive). So last night I stayed at the shop until midnight trying to get all the little **** done and finish up a bunch of work, went home got to sleep at 2AM, came into breakfast and went to the shop, and was getting ready to leave as the 240 came in.

The customer pulled up and the car sounded pretty different, louder. Customer gets out and says his car started sounding different last night and he had no idea what was going on, anyways he's here for the dump tube and could you check that sound out for me?

We pop the hood.

The wastegate is lying on the crossmember.

Of course the POS manifold cracked in the worst place and the weld broke 360 degrees around the pipe going to the wastegate so it fell and took the weld with it, but warping the manifold and putting a bunch of cracks in the 'tube' barely attached to the flange. Of course, this is an emergency, I should have said **** this and left, but I'm too nice of a guy so I figure if i bust ass and then Blake can get it welded up quick I can still get out of here by noon or noon-thirty and make the meet, so I have to put the car on the lift and pull all this ghetto rigged **** off - i'm talking a four piece ghetto rigged water line - stock hose goes into a 90 degree piece of brake line into another soft line into the stainless braided line into the AN fitting. All the lines were the wrong sizes/lengths. The oil drain was a piece of fuel line held with lockwire in 2 places to keep it off the manifold. I mean absolute ****ing terrible ****. So I got everything tore down in about an hour and then I cleaned the crap out of the mating surfaces with brake clean and then sandblasted all the carbon buildup off. The pipe from the manifold to the flange is literally half an inch or less so it had to be TIG welded from inside the collector which i'm sure was a huge PITA for my fellow worker. Got everything done and when it cooled, put it back together in about an hour and got the car off the rack and then the car went to the other rack for the dumptube and **** and by then the meet was already going and i was two hours away and now I Get to go into work tomorrow and god damn the piece of **** SS autochrome ****, don't buy it, or you will drive your mechanic to ****ing jump off a building.

oh by the way i snapped some pictures with my cell phone - check out that thick wall tubing!

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:16 AM

A post from back in 2006 over on ClubSi about the Loop that year

[QUOTE=SamuraiSam;1311632]A friend and I (Marc, aka icsbnr32)went on a weeklong road trip hoping that his new transmission would be awaiting our return.. as we had a big drive coming up that weekend!

We got back on Tuesday the 25th and the tranny arrived the morning of the 26th. It was an R33 trans so we needed to swap bellhousings (push vs pull type clutch). We got everything done and fired the car up on jackstands Friday night, watched all four wheels spin, and checked for leaks.

Went to sleep and then went for a drive with our local Subaru owner's club the next day.

EDTHEMANJP brought his R32 GTR, Marc took his GTR and let me borrow his sil-eighty, the red FD is another friend, and the red EG civic just got running the previous week with an H22 swap.

We made a pit stop at the "A" lot @ Stevens Pass before Ed and the white 'rex headed south, and the rest of us headed back to Burlington for some Applebee's.

Few pics that other people took:

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:19 AM

A thread I started in ClubSi's "Got Boost" forum, after I took part in a discussion on the FreshAlloy GT-R board with a few really, really smart people. Titled,

'the imaginary turbo lag problem'

There is an interesting discussion taking place on the FreshAlloy Skyline GT-R message boards right now that was started by Sean Morris [size:8pt](sn Tyndago, probably more well known that anybody in the American Skyline GT-R community for his contributions with helping out owners to providing a huge database of information about fixing, repairing, legalizing, and modifying them - former MotoRex employee, works with RB Motoring now, has had tons of experience in every facet of those cars)[/size] with some comments from Eric Hsu [size:8pt](sn XSDAILO, longtime and now former XS Engineering employee/big name in the EFI tuning world... has probably tuned more RB series motors/GT-R's than anyone else on the continent, and now works for Cosworth Racing Engines)[/size] dealing with the perception of turbo lag as applied to different turbo setups, from stock, to the almost-stock sized "N1" turbos, to the very popular HKS GT2530's and their almost identical Garrett counterparts the 2860-5's, up to big twins and also moderate sized and BIG single turbo setups. Some interesting topics came up like what does turbo lag really mean and that kind of shit. so I figured ClubSi might want to have a looksee. The last post I made turned in to a long diatribe about percieved turbo lag and response issues, which are even more of an issue on very small displacement, very well-flowing turbocharged B-series engines (and is how I know all this stuff in the first place).

The original post can be found here and is definetly worth a read, but if you want to skip to the goods then here are the key posts.

Very small part of the initial post by Sean:

Originally posted by tyndago

Turbo lag. I have been thinking about turbo lag, and response. Its the favorite buzzword.... GT-R guys all want to be like Mines, and have insane "response".

I have been looking at a ton of dyno charts, and I have driven a lot of different configuration GT-R's. I think a lot of what people think is lag, is they feel the big rush/doubling/trippling of power when the turbos really come to life.

Some comments:

Originally posted by XSDAILO

Originally posted by tyndago

I get sick of looking at some people talking about turbo lag. After looking at a number of different dyno charts , I think that most RB26 engines will respond similarily around 3000 rpms. Close at 3500 , then the small turbo cars gain a lot.... come back near 6500 rpms and the big turbo cars are making 300-400% more power than the small turbo cars.

The stock turbo car that is making 80 whp at 3000 rpms is accelerating at a certain rate. When that power builds slowly, the swell of power is much more gentle, and the car will feel smoother aka "no lag".

Big turbo car - 75 whp at 3000 rpms is accelerating at a certain rate, however at 6500 rpms its making 700 whp , huge difference. I think most people would notice how different the car felt at 3000 rpms vs 6500 rpms...... "turbo lag" ?

I think you are trying to argue what society's perception is of the term "turbo lag" and although you might be right, I'm not sure how you are going to spread the gospel and get it through everybody's head. Society's concept of turbo lag is: the time it takes for the engine to come into powerband (on a turbo car) while disregarding the boost guage and simply going by the butt dyno. It's simple to see why that perception defines the term "turbo lag" - they think before the car starts accelerating hard that the turbo is "lagging". It does take more TIME for the larger turbos to hit XXpsi of boost than the smaller turbos which could also be defined as "turbo lag" (this disregards hp delivery).

Each of these cars may deliver XXXhp at XXXXrpm, but their torque levels/cylinder pressures are vastly different. I totally see what you are trying to say, but I think to validate your idea that you would have to run each of those cars with an accelerometer and measure their acceleration times to prove the point. Otherwise the perception of "turbo lag" as it stands right now is much easier for the average person to "comprehend". Damn that was a lot of quotation marks....

In response to that, I enter the fray.

Originally posted by SamuraiSam

Something to think about. I don't use the term turbo lag, because i firmly believe that 95% of people use the term incorrectly. Same kind of people who want to know how much boost your running, whats safe for them to run. How many bar? How much psi? Without knowing what turbos are on the car. I am not nearly as smart/experienced as most of the posters in this thread... but I like the terms 'transient reponse' and 'boost threshold'. The real subject here is the tradeoff of how high rpm-wise the boost threshold is versus mid-high to high rpm power.

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:24 AM

Part 2 of the imaginary turbo lag post

And the real meat of the discussion thus far:[quote=SamuraiSam]

Originally posted by KB240SR

When i think of response, i think of the time it takes for the turbo to start spooling again after throttle changes. When I think of lag, i think of how long it takes for full boost to hit. Examples, Response would be the time it takes from boost to start again after shifting. Lag would be how long it takes the boost to build going from a roll.

I'm going to throw out some really basic ideas that I'm sure everyone is familiar with, and mix it up with what some of these terms mean to me. Feel free to correct anything thats wrong - I'm no professional engine builder, just a 20 year old car nerd.

Transient response is similar to what you described, but you have to make sure that when you try to quantify it, you need to be talking about being in gear and well above the boost threshold, and its basically doing the same thing as 'measuring' throttle response but by watching the boost datalog instead of just using the butt dyno to feel acceleration- watch the boost gauge or a datalog of boost alongside a g-meter or better yet on a dyno, and see how the car accelerates (or power increases) exponentially more quickly as manifold pressure rises. You can do the same thing for trying to quantify the boost threshold. When you're talking about falling out of boost between shifting or waiting for boost to come back as you roll into the throttle after a shift- this isn't purely transient response. It plays a large part here but so does the powerband of your engine, really, the VE curve of your engine and other factors are at play as well.

Now what you call lag is what we're trying to refer to as the boost threshold. Lag is an incorrect term because the definition of that word involves slowness, delay- a direct relationship with time. Now when you're talking about what you say is "how long it takes for full boost to hit" or "how long it takes the boost to build going from a roll"... Really has nothing to do with time at all.

The amount of boost a given turbo produces (until the point that it produces whatever you consider "enough" that you use a wastegate or VATN to vent excess exhaust manifold pressure, or size the turbine such that it deliberately becomes a restriction to building boost) is directly related to the amount of airflow through the motor. There are plenty of factors here- the motor itself is the biggest one. Dealing with the any single motor in particular, there are of course ways to modify it to improve airflow and thus power, (going back to the old adage "an engine is basically an air pump") and you can target specific rev ranges to improve airflow in low, mid, or high rpm areas via displacement, headwork, camshafts, et cetera.... Sure you can size a turbo to provide a ton of low end power, and it works very well, but it isn't going to deliver the high end power that actually makes the car perform better. Just look at Volkswagen and their trends on turbocharger sizing on the 1.8T and 2.0T. It's very clear that they, like many other OEM's, are more concerned with the false perception of speed and low-end torque than any sort of actual performance- that's just what you get when you size a turbo that way. There are ways around this when dealing with a low displacement motor and turbos, like using a sequential system on the FD3S - direct all the exhaust gas energy into one small turbo when the engine isn't flowing much air, and then after that turbo comes up to 'full boost', direct the extra exhaust into a second turbo, and finally as that turbo spools up use a wastegate to control maximum boost. It well "when it works" - the stock setup nets a 10-8-10psi boost pattern, but it does spool significantly sooner than the exact same setup converted to nonsequential operation. The better solution, in my opinion, is to play to the motor's strengths. I come from a Honda background- there, you're dealing with very small displacement, very well-flowing engines. The correct solution is to forget about any off the shelf turbo kitsm (save for the good stuff from the likes of Full-Race and various copycats like Lovefab and Peakboost,) get a good manifold and size a quick spooling turbo that will make tons of power around 6500-9000rpm. I believe the same thing applies to the RB.

As the RPMs rise the amount of power the engine is producing "on it's own" is increasing because the VE of the motor is going up, the motor is able to intake an increasing amount air per revolution and then you add a correspondingly larger amount of fuel in a revolution, so you make more power and the revs keep climbing.

Another big factor here is the turbo itself, as the turbo starts to spool and compress the air, obviously more air comes out the exhaust ports and then directly into the turbine providing MORE force to power the turbine blades and drive the compressor... you get the point. Eventually you get past the "threshold" in the rev range where there is enough airflow through the motor to provide enough exhaust gas energy to spin the exhaust wheel with enough force that the compressor wheel can start compressing air, and everything compounds from there.

6 months or maybe 8 months ago I would have been pretty uneducated on the subject of sizing turbos for RB's, and today I still have 1/100th of the knowledge as some of you. But in those 6-8 months then I've done a lot of reading, a few days of wrenching, a couple hours of dyno tuning, and a far too short stint behind the wheel of a 2530 powered R32.. Now, I don't understand why 99% of people would go to the trouble to do a turbo upgrade and go with anything less than the HKS 2530s or the Garrett equivalents (GT2860's) or even be concerned with the response from them vs stock- if thats something that's ever even come up.

this next tidbit has probably been said by dozens of people hundreds of times, but I think maybe sometimes people look at the fact that since the turbos are noticeably bigger with noticeably more power potential there will be less transient response and a higher boost threshold, when really the transient response is far and above stock due to the vast developments in turbo design in the last 15+yrs and the boost threshold is about the same or better, depending on the car (as evidenced by Sean's dyno charts) to stock. I'd be curious to know just how much more improvement there is with these 2 important (and finally defined) points on the smaller turbos like the GT2860-7 N1 equivalents and what purpose you would need to build such a quick responding car for?

another nugget of info regarding the boost threshold. If you ever get the chance to build a factory NA car and build it into a forced induction car, put the car onto a dyno in the NA state. If you use the exact same motor and just throw a turbo on it, its very interesting to look at the NA dyno graph's torque curve (which is really also a representation of Volumetric Efficiency on a NA engine) and correspond that to a dyno graph of the now-turbocharged engine that has HP and TQ- and manifold pressure/boost.

So to summarize the boost threshold - it's not a time related issue, but an airflow related issue, and since airflow is related to engine speed, you can connect the dots here and put the car in the correct gear & therefore be at an RPM above the boost threshold. Also, like Sean said - if you can't catch a lower gear since you're sitting there at the Christmas tree at a dead stop, launch the car at a higher engine speed. you'll start out above the boost threshold at 0mph and your ET's will thank you. Voila - no more imaginary "turbo lag" problem!

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:25 AM

Anyone else absolutely LOVE it when you squeeze the last drop out of the tube? The longer something takes to finish - the more satisfying it is. Stick of deodorant will put a smile on my face, but completely exhausting the toothpaste tube is a months-long process and brings me much happiness.

It's the little things, yeah?

**SamuraiSam** · 06-10-2008, 03:26 AM

Good friend of mine from Western's FSAE team just sent me this link to a video that a student up there put together for their marketing jazz.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=7IlDP_Z1svg

"I am a member of the Western Washington University formula team. This year we completely re-designed our car and built it in under a years time, which is pretty impressive. The car is the fastest 4 wheel object I have ever driven. Some of the specs on the video are there for drama, but they are close to correct. We put down about 85 whp on the dyno and weighed around 440 lbs with a full tank of fuel. The car just goes WHEREVER you point it."

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