Had a bunch of initial problems with vacuum leaks around the lower injector o-rings. The ID1000 injectors I'm running are a tad longer than the factory S54 injectors and the o-rings weren't seating properly in the bores. I ended up making new brackets for the fuel rail and replaced the o-rings with ones that have a larger rope diameter.
Here's a shot of the oil pooling inside the intake ports that I mentioned in the last update. This kicked off a headache of epic proportions.
Every single port was soaked in oil and four out of six had pools of oil on the valves. The intake manifold, charge plumbing, and PCV system were all dry so it was definitely coming from the valve stem seals. Long story boring the first shop screwed the head up completely and all the work they did was suspect. I ended up dropping it off at Ed Pink Racing Engines and just asked them to fix everything. Got the head back after about two weeks ready to go. They did a kick-ass job and I won't let anyone else but them touch engine machine work from now on.
Got everything bolted back together and running smoothly. Karl and I struggled a bit with the fuel calibration, turns out a turbo and ITB's is a bit more complex than either of us are used to. Our calibration expert friend Neel came out and dropped some knowledge bombs on us, with his help we had the fuel map pretty damn solid in a matter of 20 minutes. Still tons of driveability work left but I can chip away at that pretty easily myself over the next few weeks.
Made a simple bracket that wedges in place into the lower cubby that holds a couple of auxiliary oil pressure and temperature gauges.
Last night Karl and I were out tuning around the shop when the ECU suddenly started tripping a bunch of e-throttle plausability checks. Realized pretty quickly that the e-throttle actuator wasn't working. We figured it was some roached wires inside the actuator or burned up motor windings but upon disassembly noticed that one of the intermediate gears was cracked.
This was likely caused by me not adjusting the throttle linkage properly and letting the motor hammer the hard stop inside the actuator whenever the throttles closed. Swapped in a spare gear, adjusted the linkage, and reduced the minimum h-bridge duty cycle to reduce load a bit.
After a few more hours of farting around and fiddling with tip-in and tip-out cal the car just up and died. Had to flat-tow it back to the shop. We looked over the data logs, did some testing, and realized the cam sensor had taken a big dump and was effectively shorting the ECU's 5v rail to ground. I'm going to swap in a spare sensor tomorrow and go back out for some more tuning, working on blending in some IAC valve airflow at low throttle positions to make the car behave better from about 0%-1.5% throttle.