[weasel936]

i'm glad you found the problem gabe. i hope all is well now, keep us posted man.


Rey

[gabedude]

Originally Posted by BBBsti LTD

I dont understand, didi you drive the car and then found something wrong with it??? Your engine, pistons and heads are very clean with no sign of oil or carbon deposit.

What exactly happened???

No I just started it and it ran good for 15 minutes warmed up then it started smoking like a freight train and idle vacuum was too low. The rings are beveled so they are directional. When they break in they fold a tad too and act like scrapers against the piston wall. One ring was scraping the piston wall the wrong way, pumping oil into #3 instead of out of it. I just let it sit for awhile until I ripped it apart again. Since it only ran idling for about 20 minutes, the pistons look brand new still. You can tell the rings on the other piston have broken in well though.

[gabedude]

Originally Posted by weasel936

i'm glad you found the problem gabe. i hope all is well now, keep us posted man.


Rey

Oh I will. Waiting on some gaskets now. One headgasket and some intake mani gaskets. Engine will be dropped in shortly after I get those parts, then a few days later I'll have it running down the road. Then a couple weeks later, time for some power tuning.

[sti_kris]

glad you finally got around to to figuring it out. dropped the controller for a little bit. lol

looks good bro now get it running again.

[gabedude]

Well I almost beat the game. I am like 4 missions away. Hehe. I got kinda bored of it so I started working on the car again. Damn you GTA4!

[sti_kris]

just don't pick up bad company... my roommate is getting addicted to it. we don't have gta4 for the reason of us never putting the controller down. lol.

and if you and tess want some help on sunday putting your motor back in, let me know.

[gabedude]

Assuming that we do not miss the UPS man today, the motor is getting dropped in tomorrow. Sunday is fluids and other connections, soldering (new gauges), and hopefully starting it up, but I may wait till monday night to start her up.

[gabedude]

Lol, I just looked at that pic of the LH side head. It must have been burning some oil in 4 (not anymore). That piston when it came out had 3 small cracks in the compression ringlands. That must have been my oil consumption issue before it blew. #3 ringland failure must have just occurred because I went stage 2 and was running pretty lean and that cylinder was flowing 5% less fuel than the rest according to my stock injector report. It was tuned to the edge and back a bunch. The #3 exhaust port looks like that now too, but it was clean before my first attempt at putting the pistons in. It'll clean up eventually. Even the seats on #3 were ok, not great, but ok enough that they would still get a good seal. That crap will burn off anyway.

[flatthump]

Are you using Snow's controller for the Meth? If so, are you injecting a little upon start-up?

Are you able to just use the MAF or MAP exclusively as the scalar? I just bought the kit and was reading some problems it has over on Nasioc....

[gabedude]

Yup, the VC25-MAF. I don't have any problems with them and I have tuned a few. The only issue I saw was a voltage spike that someone reported on Snow's tech forum for the 07 STI upon startup causing the pump to squirt a bit of Meth when running MAF based. It is not a big deal to me. I have done both MAF and MAP on these guys and it doesn't seem to be a problem. If I have any trouble running MAF, I can easily make a circuit delay (or switch that turns on the failsafe as well) on power up for the controller hooked to the IGN wire.

I'll prolly run MAP based at first anyway as I am contemplating Labonte's full featured display and integrated controller instead of buying just a gauge. In any case, meth and boost will not be on until I put 3k more miles on her (at WG boost) and 3 oil changes.