I was told that I might have oil pressure issues during my tune. To confirm this I picked up a dual purpose Oil Pressure/Oil Temperature gauge from Innovate. My buddy Adam Davis works there and hooked me up and gave me some solid. He said not to mount the pressure sensor directly on the engine, because the vibrations will kill the sensor fast. He suggested I relocate the sensor using an oil line. He then gave me an oil feed line to use for that set up, which made it very simple to do. Big thanks Adam!
Then it was just a matter of hooking it all up to the block using a sandwich plate. I elected to go with the glowshift plate because the ports go all the way through without any obstructions for the Oil Temperature sensor.
Once everything was installed all that was left to do was to mount the pressure sensor to the firewall and wire everything up according to the instructions provided. It was very simple.
Here is a very blurry picture of the gauge set up. Sorry for the glare.
The track event yesterday did not go so well. I was battling power issues heavily. Vtec was cutting in and out and even bogging the car in most cases. Sometimes vtec would bogg and then kick on at 8k. It was really really weird. I assumed prior to installing the gauge that it was because I was losing oil pressure or something. This was not the case, because the gauge was reading solid pressures each time this happened. I was stumped as to what the issue was...until the drive home. More on that in a second.
The first issue I had was with my transmission not wanting to go in to gear again. In fact, it gets stuck in reverse and I have to apply a ton of force to get it out of gear. This same issue happens in 3rd gear a lot on track. Up shifting and down shifting in to 3rd kills me. We thought this was because my clutch had two popped springs, which is partially was last time. However, it has a brand new clutch this time and has the same issues. This just means it is time to buy a Type R tranny sooner than I had planned.
The next issue I was faced with was my catch can overflowing again. It is filling up entirely too fast to be blow by. Also, the oil going in to the cans in fresh looking. To temporarily fix the issue for the day I did some GABA racers modifications.
I left the valve cover port hooked up to the original catch can, because practically nothing is coming out of that line. The issue is with the breather box on the back of the block. For some reason it rushed right past that. I hooked that line to its own "catch can", which was made out of a 1 quart oil bottle and zip ties.
As you can see, oil even sloshed out of that. My entire bay and under my car is soaked in oil. There is no way in hell this is blow by. Especially because my compression is good. The car also isn't smoke on track. It smokes a little on start up, but once I am out of the hot pits the smoking is gone. I believe the issue stems from the breather box I am using, which is off of a civic. I opted for this one, because It didn't have the PCV on the box... I am starting to think that it is not baffled, or not baffled well. To correct this I will be switching back to the Integra box and hoping for the best.
The power issues were by far the most annoying part of the day. It felt like I was down 50hp once vtec hit. It was bogging the car heavily. So much so that it was having trouble keeping up with stock miatas and some old ass volvo on the straights. I noticed that each time it would jerk/cut power the rpm would bounce. This confused me for a while, because I knew it couldn't be my distributor, because I just replaced it...Well, I was wrong. On the way home I was faced with this:
Shortly after taking this video, the car started jerking more than normal and then the RPM dropped to 0. I knew instantly that it was the dizzy. Luckily I always bring my spare china distributor with me. 5 minutes to swap distributors later and I was back on the road. The car runs night and day better with the dizzy change. The power cutting issues are gone and I couldn't be happier. Obviously, the china dizzy won't hold up long so I will be rebuilding the ITR dizzy and swapping it out before the next event. It didn't click until later that night that I only starting getting the power cut issues on track until after I swapped to that distributor. Hopefully now it will have power on track again...
Katman was so gracious enough to let me borrow his Aim Solo for the day. Very impressive device. I have to have one now...
Unfortunately I wasn't able to get it to help me out, because the power just wasn't there. I could deal with the tranny issues. Not going in to gear sometimes does slow me down, but the power is what is killing my times. I did not let the day go to waste though. I took donut's advice and stopped trying to set a fast time and decided to practice my heel toe and rev matching. Really was able to clean up my techniques quite a bit since I wasn't trying to go fast. I think I will be installing some wider pedal covers though, especially on the gas pedal, because it is a little hard to get a good bite on it.
bummer. I hate when something goes wrong, and trouble shooting when the problem isnt in your face. Glad to hear you figured out the power loss. Now to figure out about the breather box.
Catch can baffles have nothing to do with how much oil is going in to the catch can. It is an insane amount flowing out of the breather chamber box. Way too much for it to be blowby.
Dude I just rebuilt Mr.Gurley's when I did his motor with a BWD coil and his car rolls out just fine. I've also done mine and the car just made 409.9whp on it two weekends ago, so say what you will but I have no issues with it. Hell I just did another one on my new project integra for that matter as well with the same Duralast ignitor and BWD coil.
If you already ordered them, that's cool though. If you need the ignitor, Part# JA179 at Autozone is only $49.99 and it works like a champ for what it's worth.
Thats all fine for you guys who daily and thats it. This car will be doing 9k+ rpm for 20 minutes at a time. Not going to trust that to autozone dizzy. They work, never said they didnt, but the fail fast, especially when you track.