The Full Banana
not yet good enough
- Joined
- Apr 15, 2007
- Location
- Lake Mills, WI
Kind of forgot about this thread. This year has had a few twists and turns.
My wife and I bought a new house and sold our old house (and garage) in March. On the day we closed on the new house, I drove the 242 90 miles to drop it off at Kelly Moss Road & Race (a renowned Porsche shop with a rather successful race team) for dyno tuning.
I'm missing the old garage quite a bit right now. The plan for the new house is to build a garage that will be a significant upgrade from what I had at the old house. The goal was to have the garage built by now, but we've had a hell of a time finding someone to take on the job. Here's a general idea of what I'm planning... 40x30 2 story shop tall enough for full-height lifts on the first floor.
The last two things I did before bringing the car in were to install a flex fuel sensor and finally ditch the dumb little battery for an original size battery, including retrofitting a factory battery bracket and tray back into the car (which had been shaved long ago). This was seriously one of the better decisions I've made on this car in a while.
With that ready to go, I drove the car to our house closing appointment, signed a couple papers, and then dropped the car off at the shop just before a snow storm hit.
Initially, they had the car for a month because of some delays and issues they ran into to complete tuning. They ended up installing a new wastegate, fuel pressure sender, fuel pump, and rewired the fuel pump, in addition to allegedly thorough tuning on the dyno over the course of multiple days including flex tuning to allow the car to run on any percentage of ethanol.
Okay, so the interesting part--dyno results.
The baseline tune when I brought it in showed 274whp 282tq. The car was around 16psi on the street when I brought it in, some I'm guessing it was around there for this run, but who knows.
They did a series of runs with different levels of ethanol. With straight E85 in the tank, the car put down 366whp 381tq. The boost control is pretty laggy and needs a lot of work, frankly, but the boost peaks around 21psi, if I recall correctly (haven't driven the car in months now).
They went pretty conservative with the tune, which was okay with me because I've gone through enough engines in this car already... I'm fine with taking it slow.
The torque is pretty intoxicating with E85 in the tank, but the car feels pretty anemic with pump gas in the tank. I'm attributing the majority of this to the lazy boost control calibration they did, but also some is probably just the stark difference that E85 provides.
Fast forward a couple months later... the 242 won't start, Kelly Moss couldn't figure out why, and they have left a very large hole in my wallet. My hopes were high, taking the car to them because they are one of the most reputable shops around and have an incredible facility. Yet at the end of the day I am incredibly disappointed at the outcome. I learned my lesson in having other people work on this car.
The first sign of disillusionment with the work they did was seeing how hastily they installed the external wastegate. They claimed they just did some of it as temporary installation knowing that I would want to make things nicer, but the carelessness was apparent. Thankfully, they ended up fixing the powdercoat and firewall issues later on.
They bent up the hardlines to force them to fit and cobbled a braided line to extend one line.
In doing so, they jammed those hardlines into the firewall which did a nice job of scratching the firewall up and bunching up the reflective insulation.
Scratched powder coat (minor, but the engine bay was pretty spotless and keep in mind this isn't paint... doesn't scratch easily)
When I initially got the car back, it ran great aside from a slight hot restart issue, which they told me was the crank sensor needing replacement. I was living it up for a few days. The car was properly quick and was feeling sorted all around.
Then the fuel pump relay died one day while driving. It obviously had gotten very hot.
I fixed the vacuum lines that they made a mess of with new stainless tubing. This is always so gratifying to do...
Over the next week, the hot restart issue became much worse to the point I couldn't trust shutting off the engine if I drove it somewhere. I replaced the crank sensor to no avail. A week or two later and the car wouldn't start at all.
I had been in touch with the shop a few times, but was fed up at this point. To their credit, they sent a truck and trailer out to pick up the car from my house to bring it back to diagnose free of charge.
Ultimately, they found that there is significant interference in the crank sensor signal only during cranking, and also tell me it's not their fault. Through a long, painful series of events, they ultimately replaced the starter, battery cables, experimented with both the tune and megasquirt hardware. Nothing made any difference and they ultimately had no ideas beyond converting to a hall sensor. I called it quits at that point and paid them to drop it off at my house again. Here it sits, immobile in the driveway...
I'm not far off from ripping out the Megasquirt and putting in a new ecu that is a little less DIY and a lot more familiar to tuners around here.
I've tried disconnecting just about every component (coils, alternator, flex fuel sensor, fuel pressure sender, IAT, knock sensors, IAC, boost solenoid) in the engine bay trying to eliminate the interference and haven't had any luck. No voltage drop issue at ECU during cranking. No voltage drop issue on grounds during cranking. Sensor ground is isolated from other grounds. Rewired the crank sensor in a shielded twisted pair separate from the rest of the harness to physically distance it.
I figure I have about one more day's worth of patience for diagnosing this. Interested if anyone has ideas. Keep in mind this isn't a new setup that didn't work... this ecu and harness has been together for 5 years without any issue starting until this summer.
My wife and I bought a new house and sold our old house (and garage) in March. On the day we closed on the new house, I drove the 242 90 miles to drop it off at Kelly Moss Road & Race (a renowned Porsche shop with a rather successful race team) for dyno tuning.
I'm missing the old garage quite a bit right now. The plan for the new house is to build a garage that will be a significant upgrade from what I had at the old house. The goal was to have the garage built by now, but we've had a hell of a time finding someone to take on the job. Here's a general idea of what I'm planning... 40x30 2 story shop tall enough for full-height lifts on the first floor.
The last two things I did before bringing the car in were to install a flex fuel sensor and finally ditch the dumb little battery for an original size battery, including retrofitting a factory battery bracket and tray back into the car (which had been shaved long ago). This was seriously one of the better decisions I've made on this car in a while.
With that ready to go, I drove the car to our house closing appointment, signed a couple papers, and then dropped the car off at the shop just before a snow storm hit.
Initially, they had the car for a month because of some delays and issues they ran into to complete tuning. They ended up installing a new wastegate, fuel pressure sender, fuel pump, and rewired the fuel pump, in addition to allegedly thorough tuning on the dyno over the course of multiple days including flex tuning to allow the car to run on any percentage of ethanol.
Okay, so the interesting part--dyno results.
The baseline tune when I brought it in showed 274whp 282tq. The car was around 16psi on the street when I brought it in, some I'm guessing it was around there for this run, but who knows.
They did a series of runs with different levels of ethanol. With straight E85 in the tank, the car put down 366whp 381tq. The boost control is pretty laggy and needs a lot of work, frankly, but the boost peaks around 21psi, if I recall correctly (haven't driven the car in months now).
They went pretty conservative with the tune, which was okay with me because I've gone through enough engines in this car already... I'm fine with taking it slow.
The torque is pretty intoxicating with E85 in the tank, but the car feels pretty anemic with pump gas in the tank. I'm attributing the majority of this to the lazy boost control calibration they did, but also some is probably just the stark difference that E85 provides.
Fast forward a couple months later... the 242 won't start, Kelly Moss couldn't figure out why, and they have left a very large hole in my wallet. My hopes were high, taking the car to them because they are one of the most reputable shops around and have an incredible facility. Yet at the end of the day I am incredibly disappointed at the outcome. I learned my lesson in having other people work on this car.
The first sign of disillusionment with the work they did was seeing how hastily they installed the external wastegate. They claimed they just did some of it as temporary installation knowing that I would want to make things nicer, but the carelessness was apparent. Thankfully, they ended up fixing the powdercoat and firewall issues later on.
They bent up the hardlines to force them to fit and cobbled a braided line to extend one line.
In doing so, they jammed those hardlines into the firewall which did a nice job of scratching the firewall up and bunching up the reflective insulation.
Scratched powder coat (minor, but the engine bay was pretty spotless and keep in mind this isn't paint... doesn't scratch easily)
When I initially got the car back, it ran great aside from a slight hot restart issue, which they told me was the crank sensor needing replacement. I was living it up for a few days. The car was properly quick and was feeling sorted all around.
Then the fuel pump relay died one day while driving. It obviously had gotten very hot.
I fixed the vacuum lines that they made a mess of with new stainless tubing. This is always so gratifying to do...
Over the next week, the hot restart issue became much worse to the point I couldn't trust shutting off the engine if I drove it somewhere. I replaced the crank sensor to no avail. A week or two later and the car wouldn't start at all.
I had been in touch with the shop a few times, but was fed up at this point. To their credit, they sent a truck and trailer out to pick up the car from my house to bring it back to diagnose free of charge.
Ultimately, they found that there is significant interference in the crank sensor signal only during cranking, and also tell me it's not their fault. Through a long, painful series of events, they ultimately replaced the starter, battery cables, experimented with both the tune and megasquirt hardware. Nothing made any difference and they ultimately had no ideas beyond converting to a hall sensor. I called it quits at that point and paid them to drop it off at my house again. Here it sits, immobile in the driveway...
I'm not far off from ripping out the Megasquirt and putting in a new ecu that is a little less DIY and a lot more familiar to tuners around here.
I've tried disconnecting just about every component (coils, alternator, flex fuel sensor, fuel pressure sender, IAT, knock sensors, IAC, boost solenoid) in the engine bay trying to eliminate the interference and haven't had any luck. No voltage drop issue at ECU during cranking. No voltage drop issue on grounds during cranking. Sensor ground is isolated from other grounds. Rewired the crank sensor in a shielded twisted pair separate from the rest of the harness to physically distance it.
I figure I have about one more day's worth of patience for diagnosing this. Interested if anyone has ideas. Keep in mind this isn't a new setup that didn't work... this ecu and harness has been together for 5 years without any issue starting until this summer.
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this is 100% on my short list.
