I had a perfomance shop install my turbonetics and during the dyno test my engine block blows a hole through the bottom. He was boosting 18lbs and didnt notice. He said there were 3 wires that went to the aem fic that he wasnt sure were they went. Can anyone shine some light on this? Im still upset so please no wise remarks please.

 

dayum... they paying for it or is it coming out of your pocket?.. just outta curiousity.. but dude that blows.... (no pun intended lol)

 

i signed a waiver so i got to pay for parts, hes gonna hook it up with the labor. I'm still shocked. Ive never see my car in that much pain! I want to get more info cuz the next block im buying is coming build. sleeved 89mm bore so i dont want to blow this one. I cant understand why these still 3 wires after he hooked everything up. He even showed me what is on the AEM DIY website and it doesnt mention anything about those wires.

 

18psi is alot on a stock motor so it kinda doesnt surpirse me it blew lol...i know with my emanage ultimate there were some wires that i didnt hook up so im sure they were irrelevant but someone else chime in and help this guy out.

 

LOL yea come on. Im trying to switch from the engine/drivetrain section to the Force induction section. Show me the love. I don know that much about boosting but im learning the hard way and i dont want to make any other mistakes. So any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

and on ur tranny!! thats a lot of hp for ours...

 

welcome to boosted life haha.....but the gains overweight the problems IMO

 

not all the wires from the fic will be used on our cars....i may be able to look tomorrow and see what wires do hook up though. no offens to you or anything but id look into a different tuner.......ther is no way you should be tuning a car and not notice how much boost your running..

quick question though...are you running a boost controller when it happend and do you have a boost gauge. The tuner should have their own boost gauge (on the pc) that they will hook up to a vac source. really i am appalled that a tuner would not notice 18psi. if you dont have a boost controller im curious how the heck it was able to get to 18psi, only thing i can think of is the kit wasn't installed correctly and the vac source for your wastgate had a huge leak or wasn't hooked up at all. I hit 17psi for a sec cause i was rerunning my vac lines and forgot to check my wastgate vac hose....bone head mistake so it can happen.

my condolences to your engine.

 

Damn, Damn, Damn,.. Yea im still waiting for my boost gauge to come but he told me he could do it without it. Also he ran it once with no problem. He said that some vac hose was off and so he cut out a piece of hose and did something with it. Next run... Bam white smoke pieces of my block roll by my shoe and car blood everywhere. It was pretty bad. I know i should of waited for the boost gauge.

 

did you get a video of it? just askin cuz a lot of people usually tape their tuning sessions!!

what did it sound like!

GOOD LUCK DUDE!

 

please by all means dont let that person touch your ride again.....i really dont want to see what would happen if he installed the engine.....yikes...but yeah the tuner should have spliced into your vac lines in order to hook it up to his computer. it really bites when someone pays top doller for someone to tune them only to get a crappy tune but its worse if they installed the kit and blow the thing up.....im very sorry you had to learn this way, its not fun at all.

 

the fic uses a built in map sensor for tuning purposes which also reads out in BIG numbers on the pc display - although this is in absolute pressure its really easy to convert to boost - just subtract approx 14.7 or to get an exact number see what it reads when the car is off - this is your normal atmospheric pressure - here in ok mines around 14.2-14.3 And man im sorry for the loss but itll be much better once its done ;) And x2 dont let that tuner ever touch your car again Id def raise hell and make some kind of complaint - wether or not you signed a waiver - that guy is a major fawk up and shouldnt be touching anyones car. Oh yeah and as a safety measure - in my fic i run max boost of 9 psi - so i give a 3 psi margin and anything over 12 psi i run -28* timing (max) and 100% fuel trim That way its practically throwing the car into a limp mode if i somehow get a huge boost spike.

 

i dunno man, waivers like that are pretty shady, they should be warrentying stuff...not making you sign stuff that takes liability off of them.

 

dont ever go back there ever again

 

thats a damn good idea, throw the car in limp mode if overboosted. I dont see any problems with it, except i didnt think of that before

 

the shop should pay for it.. he did a faulty install.. keyword "he's not sure of the 3 wires" yet he took the car to its limits and boom.. and no boost gauge? WTH? he can do it realtime on the fic but thats a risk accepting a tuning task with insufficient tools.. most dyno waivers i've read tell that they waive responsibility for damage on the dyno since the car is taken to its limits or something like that unless damage was done due to recklessness and negligence or when tuner is at fault.. in this case possible install error which he did.. not sure how their waivers states though

 

It'unfortunate that your motor gave out on the dyno. But no shop in their right mind would do a dyno pull or dyno tune any vehicle without the customer signing a waiver--it's a standard industry practice. The tuner does not always know the condition of the car or how all the performance parts were put together or install. When you do any type of performance modifications to your car beyond the factory parts, you are taking a risk since you're putting more stress on the car and engine beyond what it was originally designed for.

The dyno waiver protects the shop from liabilities when it comes to tuning or just dyno pulls. The tuning facility is not necessarily the same facility that installed all the parts so they have no way of guaranteeing that there will not be any issues with the tune. As for protecting the customer, it's really up to the customer to shop around for a reputable facility that's knowledgeable with the vehicle and tuning in general. It's no different than shopping around for a doctor. Just because a doctor has a license to practice medicine, does not always mean he's a good doctor or that he will not make a mistake.

As for your motor giving out on the dyno, part of it could be possible negligence on the tuner. There's no reason why your stock motor should be running 18 psi on a turbonetics kit. That is beyond what the stock motor should see--especially for daily driving reliability. The ring lands on the stock piston will usually break before the stock rods bend or break. Since your rod went through the block on a 2az-fe motor, this leads me to believe that the motor detonated--which is a probably a tuning issue. The wires you talk about may have something to do with it, but regardless if that wire controls the ignition timing and the ignition retard wasn't functioning, the engine may have ping and the dyno pull should have been aborted and the issues diagnose before hitting high boost.

Regardless if the customer has a wideband AFR and Boost gauge installed on the vehicle, the tuner should only use it for verification with the dyno's AFR and boost gauge and not use it as the reference for the tune. The wideband AFR unit we use on our dyno cost $1600 and the wideband O2 sensor alone is already over $300. A typical wideband O2 sensor and gauge on a car is less than $300--and they are not always as accurate or react fast enough for tuning purposes. We would never rely on the customers AFR and goost gauges for tuning. If we see that our gauge and the customer gauge readings were way off, something is not right and should be investigated before further tuning is performed.

A knowledgeable tuner should be competent enough to abort a dyno pull when the car overboost beyond the target that he's tuning for. Boost and timing should be added gradually and closely monitor while tuning along with the most important thing of monitoring for knock. This is not to say that a motor will not blow even though all parameters are safe--some motors, especially those with a lot mileage can let go at anytime. But the fact that your stock motor gave out at 18psi is no surprise. As an example, if a customer came to us and ask us to tune his stock tc motor to some unrealistic hp levels, we would try to knock--no pun intended--some sense into him first, and if he's still adamant about it, we would tell him to take it somewhere else because it's a job that we feel is destined for failure. I'm not saying that you asked for your motor to be tuned to the ragged edge. If your tuner promised you he can extract some unrealistic hp out of your car than that's negligence on his part.

Like i've stated many times before, it doesn't matter if you have a built motor later down the road with all the billet and forged components in it, when an engine detonates, it's like a grenade going off inside your cylinders and no components is going to be able to keep it together.

You won't know for sure what happened until the motor is pulled apart, but I recommend checking the plugs for signs of detonation as a first step. Again, the tuner may or may not be at fault, but when you mod your car beyond it's original design, you're the sole risk taker and no shop will guarantee on paper that a tune will be successful unless they're out of their mind or if they did all the installs for all mods on the car.

I hope you get everything resolved.

MrC

 

Do you know where the vaccum hose was attached? also what wastegate are you using... Sounds like he possibly caused a vac leak on the wastegate line which is effectivell what a boost controller is. At any rate, you have a wastegate with a 10 psi spring coupled with a whole in the vac line and now youre running 20 psi... Also depending on what wastegate you have, there may be different vac nipples and changing the location of the vac line or using different combinations of nipples on the wastegate will increase or decrease the amount of boost you're running like for instance the synapse synchronic wastegate... Anyway take some pics of the vaccum lines before the engine is pulled... Maybe we can shed some more light.

PS like everyone else said either don't go back to that shop or if its a good shop dont let that guy touch your car.

 

oh damn Palmdale is 45 mins away from me, what shop did you take the car too. why didn't you just buy the harness to make it easier on the tuner, but then again that still wouldn't solve the problem because he upped the boost too much.

 

im not gonna read what everyone else wrote.
but honestly, you took your car to a tuner and he didnt know what he was doing?

take it somewhere else before he messes your isht up again.