My latest dyno adventures

[XR1stang]

or
what I learned when I do things the right way
or
what happens when I’m bored out of my skull and decide to put my thoughts to paper

Well some of you may know, or remember, that I was going to do some modifications a while back on the stang. Some of you don’t know or care, but I’m going to tell you about them anyway Oh, and this is going to be a long read so pull up a chair, get some popcorn and have fun.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane. It was a year ago and I was moving from NC to Cali and decided that before I made the move that I would go ahead and put the heads and cam in the car. The mods that I had done to the car up to that point were pretty basic. Just a TFS Street Heat intake, pullies, Bassani X-pipe and a Borla XR1 cat back on a 94 Mustang GT. I had a few other parts sitting around that I wanted to put on, but the ones that I decided were “important” and had to be done before the move were the heads and the cam. The heads are TFS twisted wedge and are a stage I port by CHP and the cam is a custom Ed Curtis cam that is similar to a b-cam from Ford, oh yeah and I put on some FMS unequal length shorty ceramic coated headers (now that’s a mouthful) since I had the heads off. Oh and as to the reason why I chose only those items to put on was because I literally got this done on the last possible day before I had to move and I just didn’t have time to do everything like I wanted to.

So with the help of the wonderful folks at True Blue Performance I put the heads on, some new lifters, roller rockers, pushrods, cam, and the headers. Then I made the move, and the car had to sit with no mods or "fixes" for a couple of months after I got out here. I noticed at the time that the car felt sluggish and that it didn’t see to be nearly as fast/quick as it should have been. I also was experiencing some serious drivability issues with it and a cooling issue was beginning to rear its ugly head. The car would run fairly hot (usually 195+ with some dips in to the 200 territory) and when that would happen I would start having problems keeping the car running when I would drop to an idle. The car would bump off when idling hot or just after starting it up. It also would hunt for an idle RPM and would do the dance between 800 and 1200 RPM until it would just turn off because the cam and the computer wouldn’t work with each other.

I decided it was high time to take it to a tuner to get some dyno time and a chip burned for it. I found a local outfit, Apex Motorsports in San Jose and they were willing to take a look at it. The first dyno run was with no chip burned and no tuning done. I got a whopping 173 rwhp off of this setup and was pretty bummed by the low number. Then they burned a chip for me and we were off to the second dyno pull. This time I was a little bit happier until we started looking at the graph. I was up to 250 rwhp with just the chip burned and a minor adjustment to the timing. But looking at the graph we saw a problem starting to show up at around 4500 rpm. It was going flat and wasn’t getting nearly enough air for what the car wanted, I also had a HORRIBLE misfire going on from 4200 and up. It was like looking at a seismograph instead of a dynograph, the lines were all over the place. They messed around with the chip a bit more and we were able to squeeze out a decent 271 rwhp but we decided I needed to address my air problems and the misfire before doing anything else.

Over the next week or so I started tracing down the misfire which turned out to be a simple fix. My wires on my #7 and #3 plugs were loose and with the vibration from the engine at around 4200~ it would separate the boot from the plug a little bit and caused the misfire. While I was hunting down this problem I also decided to put on a CAI and an 80mm throttle body that I had sitting around. Then it was off for another round of dyno time and tuning.

First pull I had lost a bit of power and was down at 266 rwhp, but the chip burner did his magic and on my second pull I broke 300 with an output of 302 rwhp. He messed around a bit more but that seems to be the most my set up is going to put out without some more hardware changes. He also got my cooling issue under control a bit by turning the fan on at lower temps which has kept my car running at around 180 or so on a regular basis unless I start really romping on it but even then it drops back to the 180 range fairly fast. Not bad for a block and internals that have 151k miles on them huh?

So that’s my dyno adventure for now. As it stands I’m sort of in the middle of a new engine build up but I still haven’t really decided what I want to do. I have a block and crank, but I’m holding off on the rods and pistons until I decide whether I want to go forced induction or go the NA/spray route. Either way though I’m sure my car is going to become a weekend warrior and won’t be a daily driver much longer.

I haven’t had a chance to take it to any of the local tracks yet, and I’m not real certain that I want to. The tuner and I noticed a bit of an oil leak that has started at the oil pan (looks like a gasket issue) but it only happens when the engine is under load. It makes some pretty spray prints when it starts spitting oil out, but I haven’t noticed a marked increase in oil consumption. I just don’t want to be the one that people ***** about because I laid oil down on the track Hopefully if I have some time on my hands in the near future and I can drop the oil pan to put a new gasket on it and get some times on this setup.