Murray_Calavera

Should I be logging ecu voltage or battery?

I haven't logged any data yet, but I wanted to bounce this off everyone while I'm waiting to take the car out for a proper run. So the car was very hard to start this morning, finally fired and I took it to Supercheap to test the battery. Turns out the battery was low on voltage (can't remember the exact figure) and down about 250cca from where it should have been. Even though their simple battery tester said the battery was "fine, just needs a charge" they replaced it under warranty, pretty happy with that. Could a failing battery be the cause of the pump failing to keep up? The pump is pretty hungry, it pulls something like 20 amps from memory but I don't know how much this all matters when the car is actually up and running and the alternator is doing its thing.

Very nice On the plus side, it isn't too hard to hook up the power you have if your prepared to use semi slicks on the road... But then you'll be back to chasing more power so maybe don't get sticky tyres lol.

I wish our beer was subsidised the way our wine is lol.

Oh you sweet summer child. It might be easier to look at this from the Euro scene, in this case a Golf Gti. A super quick google... https://www.mountune.com.au/products/m52-golf-gti-stage-1-power-upgrade-mk7-5-only $1,175 for a "stage 1" tune. https://www.vagparts.com.au/products/volkswagen-golf-gti-mk7-tuning Oh it's on sale! $800 for a "stage 1" tune. So, in these instances the car never sees the dyno, no mechanic ever sees the car, no tuner touches the car. You hand over a large sum of money and you get a copy paste flash tune uploaded to your ecu. So much of the tuning industry is like this. Why would a tuner, turn down the opportunity to extract a minimum of $1,000 from you? It's an easier pill to swallow for the average customer when they sell it as a "full tune". Oh I'm sure they'll happily bill you for more if you want something special done on top, but the price of admission will always be for a "full tune". I really hate to be so cynical about this but it's reality. The obvious solution is to tune the car yourself.

This is a pretty good visual for what we are talking about

Big no vote from me. I like being able to stop when it's raining.

It would be worth getting in contact with Supertech, they do 4032 pistons. Would also be worth contacting the big players in the forged piston game. The modern coatings used on the piston skirts allow for tighter piston to cylinder wall clearance, you might find that your happy to run a 2618 piston with a modern coating. Also, how much power do you expect to make and what fuel will you run?

Sounds good. So I don't need to do anything extreme like attack them with a pry bar to see if there is a mm of travel or anything like that?

Slightly off topic question, but this jogged my memory - Is there anything special you need to do to inspect the spherical bushes / is it obvious when they become worn? I also do the some poly, some spherical and it might be the case that I've had some spherical bushes for maybe 5 years? without any thought/maintenance/they haven't been touched since installed.... I've always associated worn bushes with clunking noises, so no clunk, no issue, but I'm guessing this isn't actually best practice lol.

Having moved from NSW to QLD, I can tell you that QLD rego is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy easier to sort. It's not even close. My R33 is mod plated, everything is listed, I couldn't believe how easy and pain free the process was compared to the NSW engineering process (which I have also gone through previously and is not a fun experience).

Heaps of ways you could do it. Lets assume its not just zero f's given. Plan out the route with a mate. Have your mate drive in front of you, say about 1km ahead. If they spot a RBT site/defect station/highway patrol hiding by the side of the road, your mate calls you. You see the call come in and you pull over straight away. Find a side street to turn off or do a U-turn etc. If your super paranoid have a car follow behind to spot any highway cars on approach so you can quickly turn into a side street etc. For sure he would have enough mates/community resources to be able to pull this off with ease. Having said that, what I think is actually happening is, he knows the areas he is driving in. He knows there are never RBT sites set up there and just keeps an eye out for police/highway cars and picks his moments for when he is going to do a pull.

Yeah, that harness really does scream, please defect me! For anyone wondering, you can use a harness on the road but it needs to automatically retract the same way the stock seatbelt retracts (and I'm assuming its a quality harness that is installed correctly). Still needs to be signed off by an engineer, but it would be easy to get signed off on (this is for NSW in any case).

Umm I suppose technically you don't "need" one. I wouldn't even consider running a car without one though. Also if you get a decent ECU, you'll want to use the wideband o2 settings and engine protection. Also in this day and age, I would only use a CAN based wideband.

Hmm... looks like this is an unpopular opinion but it's what I did. I don't see any issue with tuning the car yourself. So, from base map to 99% sorted, all by yourself with tuning on road. Then once you're happy you can't improve the tune any further, take the car to the dyno and get the timing dialled in. You'll probably only need to pay for an hour of dyno time and the car will be amazing. My primary method of learning to tune was from Evans Performance Academy. They are nice enough to hand out all of their content for $50USD, can't beat that value. If there were any knowledge gaps, I'd see if there was a HP academy webinar coving the topic, if I was still stuck I'd hit up Haltech and their amazing tech's would help me get it sorted (I fkn love Haltech and their tech guys). I think you'll know pretty quick if this is something you want to do/want to learn to do. If you are keen to learn and are sensible in your approach, I don't think there is any risk with doing all the tuning on your car yourself.

Are you doing this solely as a cost saving measure? I imagine future you will be rather annoyed saving a whole $1,000 on pistons when you find yourself wanting more power in future. The engine build won't be cheap regardless of the pistons used so it seems silly not to just do it properly first go.

@[SKYHI] Did you log any data?

You might find that even if you jump through all of these hoops, spend a mountain of cash to un-turbo your car, that you still get defected/ticketed by the cops anyway. The system shows your car is a prohibited vehicle. They aren't mechanics, they are police. You telling them "I know its a turbo skyline, but trust me officer, I took the turbo off". Probably won't get you very far. If your unlucky, now you've got a very expensive ticket to fight at court. Say you take it to court, the magistrate asks you, is the vehicle you were driving on the list of prohibited vehicles? You see where I'm going with this....

Going off GTS and the website, seems like the dwell times are a close enough of match that they will run. When the PRP site says, "to maximise performance use the dwell data that can be found on our web page" so I guess they are admitting that the factory ECU dwell settings aren't 100% match for what the coils want but yeah, it seems that its close enough that the car will run. At the end of the day, sounds like you need coils and I can almost 100% guarantee that at some stage in the future you will want an aftermarket ECU.... So, its fine either way? You'll end up buying both at some stage lol.

https://www.platinumracingproducts.com/products/rb-r35-vr38-coil-bracket-kit-rb20-rb25-rb26?variant=37826663874728 From what I can see - No coils, $771 Coils included, $1477

Would something like this fit under the driver/passenger seat? Might not need to worry about a standalone amp this way as well. Just run the speakers from the headunit and the sub is self powered. https://mm.jbl.com/car-subwoofers/BASSPRO+SL2-.html

With all your Haltech sensors, I'm guessing you also have a Haltech ECU? Grab the right software for your ECU from here. https://www.haltech.com/downloads/ Here is a nice little quick start guide. When you setup the data logger, you can just log every channel to keep things easy.

I was hoping you were going to say you have an aftermarket ECU. So, personally I wouldn't buy a R35 coil kit without already having an aftermarket ECU. I would be concerned about dwell time settings that the R35 coils want, might not match up with the original coils dwell time. With the aftermarket ECU you can set the dwell times so happy days. Stock ECU... not so much. I don't know how many people out there would be running $1000 worth of coil kit on a stock ECU, so dunno if anyone can personally confirm that it runs well on the stock ECU?

What ECU are you using?

You could go for a drive, plug in a laptop and log data. If you upload the data here, that would answer a lot of questions.