What's up guys! longtime no post!
Been off the tdigrid for a bit, just needed a break. Posting,reading,replying, people, blah blah blah all gettin to me. Vacation time is nice.
All good things in moderation.
Tuning
Anyways, we had spent about a full month of straight on tuning the car with
Vwmikel and
Biochoppers. Going over to Scott's place and letting him do his magic, seeing how someone who knows what they hear and see, makes a huge difference. I'm sure I was more than incomprehensible and a confusing mess for
Rub87! Having a mechanic communicate to the tuner removes so much headache. Pushing the limit of the car is fun with Scott too, but you gotta just let go sometimes and stop being such a nervous nelly (me).
It's great with
Biochoppers and
Matt-98AHU doing tuning, the people down in Southern California have way more accessibility to tuning and getting their cars where they want em. It was one of the reasons I had to send mine all the way to OHIO! I hope theres more folks who up their cars.
Cars got a nice bit more oomph with the regular tune, and we even have a dynoqueen full fuel tune that we will throw on the rollers. Summers busy for me, so we haven't had time to move forward with the graphs. Surprisingly, the full fuel is still only a dark grey cloud. Not a fog monster like some other cars I've seen.
We were finally able to get the duty cycle to get to 80% correctly, and we even adjusted the rod and stop screw to the right setting. Just couldn't figure it out before, but we got it.
As to the last page of pictures. We (I use that term loosely when I include myself) were doing a tranny rebuild. Had
Whitbread come out, and we put in a DC stage 4 clutch at the same time.
I will say, that I was extremely sceptical about putting this clutch in. 14# flywheel? Those things ARE LOUD as crap. Stage 4 clutch setup? HEAVY pressure plate and I'm too skinny for it. I b*tched and moaned when Scott was telling me all about it.
We got it in (Biochoppers, Whitbread, temporaptor, digital corpus, cfm56, and greg) and the thing made me a believer. Thanks to all the guys that helped out, first time doing the tranny pull.
Flywheel
-Flywheel doesn't make any different noise clutch in or out vs the SBC stage 3 I had in. Its the same low noise. No loud clatter that people ever talk about. I know another car with a real light (<10# maybe?) flywheel and that sucker was a racket. Way noisy, this didn't increase the sound at all.
-Flywheel Scott ground so that I would not ever have any clutch not disengaging issues like some of my previous threads. The thing never grinds in 3rd, or any other gears.
-I couldn't believe it, but it really did allow the car to
spool up faster. Logging up a hill, it would just bog for ages in 4th and we'd have to redo it so many times. Now, it's really making a difference down low. That lump of a 22# was hurting me. I don't totally understand that balanced weight on the crank stuff, but... it just works. I think it's something like taking 325#'s or so off the car... that's what I heard.
clutch setup
-1200 miles into it, clutch holds the power nice and dandy. Even a few hundred in when we went to the San Diego GTG, let a couple guys drive it around and we had no problems of slippage.
-Pedal is just BARELY heavier, requiring a bit more pressure (Hard to quantify it, maybe 10% more). For those of you who met me, I'm fairly skinny, and I was not gonna be happy about pressing that SOB in with all my might in Los Angeles traffic. At this point I don't even realize it. It's real nice.
- If our numbers are correct, I was close to maxing out that stage 3 clutch, so this stage 4 is gonna keep me nice and cushioned.
-There is some chatter off 1st gear. Just need to load it up a bit more, or take it off the line a lot slower and it goes away. Traffic isn't that fun with the AC, but eh.
-Took the DG Short shifter out
-Changed the 5th gear to .681 (but I can't remember what my rpms were with the .658 vs the .681 on this 3.16R&P). Remind me if you can.
Installed one of these, made in the US, and didn't have to spend money at ECS tuning. So double score. (found a thread on tdiclub for a groupbuy but nothing ever happened)
http://www.drainplugmagnets.com/vwandaudi.php
That's it for now, hopefully we'll get to the dyno.
Thanks guys!
Jeremy