Well here we go.
It leaks. The two bottom bolts holes have oil seeping out of them that will accrue after about 15 minutes of run time. I'm sending the btch back for a reseal. They say they'll do it under warranty and turn it around in one day.
In the mean time, I'm tearing the sides of the engine off. In this case that'll mean both the intake, and the exhaust. I tightened the bagillion bolts that held that plate on, and they were in fact a little loose. But, no sooner did I run the thing for 15 minutes di a small trickle start to find its way down the side of the engine....I'm fixing that thing bonce and for all....I'll make sure to thoroughly seal the side plate w/ the right stuff on a clean surface and do away with the cork gasket.
When you lay under the car while it's running,..It'll gag you. Even though I was only able to find a small pin hole in the actual exhaust pipe under the car,..it sounds like there's a hole somewhere up front,.......a big hole.
So I'm also gonna remove the exhaust system, and check to see if I can find evidence of a crack or something that I missed when welding the thing,...and while the engine is sitting naked in front of me,...
I'm considering changing the engine color to black. Maybe some satin black engine color....I.I.I...don't know,...I'm just not so warm and fuzzy about the orange engine bottom now that the top half of the engine is black...
So I got that going for me,.....and I have to get it done....quickly.
Then there's the engine oil itself...
This is the same oil that was in the engine after start up...probably a little over 200 miles on it.
It's black,..and it smell like combustion gases..Two of the three drain plugs have magnets on them,..and they were coated in metal funk..but the filter showed nothing...But,..in my engine the oil comes directly to the pump, then goes through a big assed oil cooler, then gets routed through a filter before it goes back into the engine,...Maybe that oil cooler has managed to trap some of what shoulda been in the filter?
I'm really amazed at how dirty the oil was,......It's like it's been in there for 6000 miles instead of 200.
Oh well,.....I'll guess it's the low tension ring set that's to blame for that,....nothing I can do about it.
Lastly,.....I'm gonna do one of two "performance upgrades" while it's apart...It's gonna be one of those "6 of one, 1/2 dozen of another" kinda ding dang deals..
Either I'm:
A. Gonna bump the wastegate springs up to 10 p.s.i. (I know that the car will tolerate this based on the junk assed chinee wastegates dumping in 10-12 p.s.i. when I had those junkers on there).
B. Enable the electronic boost control circuit..and force the 7 pounders to stay closed longer and give myself 10 p.s.i. that way.
Now it makes sense that I already have that circuit in place, and that I should just go ahead and make it work,.....but it's more Voodoo.....Another thing in Tunerstudio that I have no idea how it works, and whether or not its wired correctly, and if it's reliable..
10 pound springs will work, and if they're like the 7 pounders that are in there now,..will be dead reliable.
So,..I'm off to ship the pump off to california..best case scenario is probably 2 weeks before I'm back to running again.
