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Building a 400bhp+ 2.5 ltr 944 Turbo
- Thread starter PSH
- Start date
PSH
PCGB Member
I'm pretty sure that Rick's was a 75 like Mark's....there are many 2.5's with a lot more than 400 bhp out there although not many here in the UK and yes the higher figures will have adjusted timing to suit but if the fuel is set up by someone who knows the car 400 bhp is very doable with factory ignition settings. If you recall when my car was set up at it's last big update it ran 368 bhp using the standard IC and exhaust, this was also a conservative setting running on 95 RON fuel and was where I asked Wayne to leave it for safety, it had more to give even then. Today she is a different beast altogether, plus she now runs on 98 RON only, I have no doubt that she's giving 400 BHP on her current very conservative settings. I have 16 images supplied by John on the chip to get the best out of the car even without custom mapping on a dyno , only 3 of them are for 55 lb injectors, the others all for 80 lb's among these there are a number with adjusted timing, from light to very aggressive settings. I will only go to these when the bigger injectors are fitted but more importantly the new V-knock system by Vitesse is also fitted. Of course most will know that one can easily adjust their ignition with the FQS switch as fitted by Porsche, John does gives examples of why and when you may wish to use these and what setting to use, I will leave mine at 0 as the car is running just fine as she is. The plan for the future is to fit the 80's and V-knock, track down Wayne and book a days tuning on the dyno experimenting with more aggressive ignition until we detect any signs of knock and then dial it back a bit...this is a long way in the future though....I have spent enough money on the old girl for now...around another 10k on this incarnation alone....gulp.... PeteORIGINAL: TTM Rick had I think a LR65. But anyway, 400 hp is probably doable on a 2.5 but without adjusting the timing I am curious how. Looking forward to hearing more of your progress, it sounds like this is going to be a great running engine.
blade7
Well-known member
Gulp indeed, add the price a good standard turbo can make today to the cost of making around 400 bhp reliably and you aren't far from 996tt or Audi TTRS money, both would most likely see off a 944 on damp surfaces.ORIGINAL: PSH I have spent enough money on the old girl for now...around another 10k on this incarnation alone....gulp.... Pete
PSH
PCGB Member
update on car after it's rebuild....first off a confession.... yep i broke down last night and was stumped for a while...had spark and fuel and compression as there was no change in cranking speed, however i was growing concerned that the standard gates belt may not have been up to the extra power even though it seemed to have compression, worse still in the fading light I could have sworn that there was no belt on the cam pulley... so I called the breakdown service and had the car shipped back home. After a sleepless night I got up early to take a closer look, in the light of day i could see the cam belt, deep sigh of relief which left me the rota-arm as a possible cause. Took the distributor cap off and heard something hit the undertray which was a very welcome sound, as suspected the rota-arm bolt had come loose and fallen out as i took the cap off. My worried face from the previous evening now had a grin on it as what could have been a bill for many thousands turned out to cost nothing.....thank god for that....
Car running report
No dyno run yet, will do that after the breaking in process is finished...i then need to get the 80lb injectors and Vitesse's new V-knock monitoring system before letting the car loose on the rollers. This may have to wait a while though as it's not cheap and according to my wife I have spent far too much on the car, she probably has a point... I can say that she has far more power now than ever before, easily over 400bhp and that's with the small injectors still fitted, she's very responsive, minimal lag when using the APEXI duty at a higher level although doing so increases boost over my settings....I was surprised to record the boost at over 1.7 BAR the other evening when trying more than 80% throttle, I had the map switched to 1 BAR and the overboost for the ECU at 1.5 BAR so not quite sure how I reached 1.7, I guess the boost must have peaked just as i lifted off and thus no overboost kicked in?...the thing it's once it begins to boost it then builds rapidly, very rapidly with the needle going crazy so I need to do a little road testing with the laptop and set things up a little to get a better understanding of what the engine is actually doing, one thing's for sure, she made the 1.7 ( and was still climbing) with no fuss whatsoever...all with no fuel or ignition mods ( which are currently set at zero) just relying on john's new chip image for the 55 lber's .......impressed the hell out of me.. Now then so much has been changed on the car this time around that's it's difficult to work out what's improving things the most...dyno when last set up by Wayne was 368 bhp, confirmed on two separate dyno's, I did have some loss of power issues later but the reasons were discovered during the rebuild so all sorted now..So it's probably worth listing for those who are travelling along a similar path what has been changed since Wayne....new stuff is the Vitesse V-MAF+, stage 1 intercooler, IASA full race piston's, 930 clutch, crank scraper, rebore to 101mm, 60 thou cometic HG (capacity now approx 2576cc) new bearings all round including rod wrist pins, raceware studs/bolts for head,main and rods, larger 60mm intake pipework, wastegate rebuilt with new diaphragm and spring, also I machined up a 4.5mm internal shim to increase spring pressure but not loose valve travel as you do with LR shims, large high flow K&N filter fitted inside the passenger's wing with 3" intake pipework to the turbo, 70mm airduct pipe from front bumper slots direct to airfilter for extra cool air at speed, wastegate banjo connection moved from hot side of IC pipe to cool side just before throttle body, also fitted with large bore silicone hose to wastegate, throttle body rebuilt with new seals using the thicker type as used for race/track, custom built 3" exhaust system including the turbo downpipe.. I'm sure that I've forgotten a few bits but I think you get the general idea, still got more to do, larger vac lines, leather covers for dash and center console, gear gaiter and a complete set of LED's to replace all interior bulbs, i have already done the headlights, sides and fogs which has made a massive difference for dark country roads....anyway let's just say that I am very happy with how the car is running even if not set up for max power yet, I can floor it in all gears with no hesitation felt, not been to red line in 4th or 5th (naturally) but 1st, 2nd, and 3rd it fly's and shall we say is very exciting to drive. I still have a small coolant leak which is from the small hose from the coolant bleed housing to the pipe(hose is breaking down), part has been ordered and due here Monday...so far since changing to the Millers oil zero has been used ( 500 miles) which is a welcome change, before the rebuild i seemed to be using more oil than petrol...lol with the mineral oil the first fill used a small amount, just below the max mark probably as the rings bed in, later mineral oil changes used nothing........no smoke from the exhaust even under high load, no more black crap all over the back of the car either...happy days.... One picture tonight although not much has changed that can be seen, the obvious thing being the larger bore vac line from the IC pipe banjo, I will increase most of the vac lines to this size later, also we may drill and tap another hole into the inlet manifold to get a better response still, currently there are 3 boost lines from the one connection including the KLR pipe so we are thinking that this could be a bottleneck so by splitting these it should only improve things better, we shall see..a little more R&D is always good fun....
PSH
PCGB Member
Well we've had another busy day, this time sorting out a small bit of welding needed near the drivers side torsion bar mount...took care of a number of other items too or should I say my son Richard did... another set of plugs ( yes I know I've just fitted a new set but some damn fool put diesel in his car?...yep you read it right...diesel....the car is fine but i'm not so sure about it's driver...too many mistakes of late....in my defence I had no idea that you could buy V-Power+ nitro diesel, it was late and after a long drive so i was tired...lol) new rubber boots for the magnecor HT leads as they were damaged and arcing, replaced the leaking coolant hose mentioned before, renewed the Cv joint boots and adjusted the handbrake. after all of that was done we got down to the serious stuff as in then welding...i took a number of pictures so will let them do the talking....
First up Richard is seen here putting the car on the ramp at his place.
New CV gaiters
After removing the plastic sill extensions we checked the condition of the sill welds on both sides and brushed them clean with the air drill and wire brush..I have to say that it was a very pleasent surprise to see just how good these parts were..picture of drivers side near the front.
and now for the bad bit.... the drivers side torsion mount and rear arch...we have already removed some of the rotted steel ready for deciding how to tackle this particular job...it looks worse than it is..
This view looks square on from the torsion bar mount bracket, for those familiar with this part you'll notice that the rear of the mount has rotted away along with a section of the inner sill behind it, the rest of the mount is solid with just some surface rust which was good news meaning the joint was still strong and with no possibility of it moving out of line. Now the inner sill is clearly in need of being replaced, the question was how far would we need to cut back to find good metal, actually not as far as it may look. Looking at this picture as reference I'll explain what we decided to do, we needed 4 pieces of steel, a large section to replace the missing inner sill section, the bottom section to go from the inner sill part to the bottom of the outer sill, a small section for the rear where the drain hole and rubber bung sit and a thicker 1/8th piece to replace the missing section of the torsion bar mount itself, this by the way is a lot smaller than it may look as it has a large hole in it and the bottom edge is only about an 1" wide. To the left of the picture you may notice a nut and bolt, this is holding a jacking sleeve in what I assume is the chassis jig mount, the inner sill isn't welded to the back of this which made it easy to cut a shape that would extend behind this jig mount to good solid steel the other end, the steel section was also cut to go up to the floor pan, all bad metal seen hear was cut away.
Here we see the rear section cut ready for new metal, the bottom dip is where the drain hole is. The inner sill has been pushed up for cutting using an air saw, the bottom of the outer sill has already been removed.
It was now time to cut templates ready to be transferred onto some galvanised steel ready for cutting out using a nibbler.picture shows Luis (Richard's body man) working out the templates.
Next picture shows 3 of the sections having been prepared ready for welding, the holes in the inner sill section are there in place of using a spot welder, the bottom section behind is held in place with the clamp and will be welded through the holes first and then fully seam welded after. Note that the inner sill runs behind the jig mount until we meet the good metal, also you may note the 1/8th thicker section for repairing the torsion bar mount, as noted before this isn't a solid section and has a large hole cut into it, the upper section of this hole was good metal so in fact all we needed to replace was the lower half of the hole, hopefully you can see this in the picture, the bad sectionc at the rear of the mount were all cut away to good metal. Oh and all sections have been etched with Upol welding primer.
closer view..
at last the boys get busy with the welder
as things begin to get hot we use air from above to cool things down, mainly the thick underseal that Porsche used. all welding was done from underneath, including the top of the inner sill which could be reached through the rear section that was put on last.
with the welding finished it was time to underseal the effected area's....for this side we did the entire length of the inner/outer sill joint along with the repair at the back. Note the drain hole at the bottom and also that we haven't drilled the viewing hole yet, this will be done later when we waxyol the interior parts of the sills.
Next we got the car ready for spraying the stone chip..
Lastly the stone chip has been sprayed along the entire sill joint and repair for the drivers side and in two parts on the passenger side that need some protection, no welding needed on this side for now, there is some corrosion on the bottom of the front passenger wing but we won't touch this until we repaint the whole car as it would look awful driving around with some grey primer in view.....
So in all it was a very successful day and took far less time than we had allowed, also we didn't have to remove the torsion bar as first suspected and we could do a permanent job whereas we had at first planned to just do a temporary repair believing that it was worse than it actually was and that we would only be able to do a proper repair by removing the outer sill first..So i'm happy again.... again that is after messing up putting 62 ltr's of diesel into the tank...lol My other son (Peter) who came out to our rescue was an angel though, we pumped all of the diesel out into his car, having first pumped out the contaminated petrol into a 20 ltr jerry can and then the remaining diesel into 4 petrol cans. Naturally the car still has a little contamination in it's fuel due to the small amounts of diesel that we couldn't get at and the lamba sensor is toast and is being replaced but all should be back to normal after a few fresh tanks of V-Power petrol has run through the system and the new lamba sensor has been fitted.
I'll try not to make anymore silly mistakes.....
Pete
PSH
PCGB Member
Morning chaps.... I made a mistake when telling John at Vitesse what I wanted to be put on the chip, I only asked for standard mapping for the 55lb injectors as I was using these for running in...in hindsight i should have asked for an image for the new MAF enhancements to also be included for the 55's rather than just the bigger 80's which I haven't bought yet...I'm itching to see just how fast this beast really is now that it's run in. Still never mind I'll have something very nice to look forward to when the time comes,,,need to get a few things out of the way first before I spend more money on the car...son's wedding this weekend and my daughters son's christening in a few months time to name but two. In the meantime I have now put Wayne's map file back onto the piggyback ( with a few tweaks lower rev range) as I was running lean in high gear on high load. Well that certainly did the trick...I can floor it in each gear now with no hesitation felt or should I say up to around 80%...I really don't need to use anymore throttle than that to be hanging on for dear life( rarely going above 50%)..isn't it a fun stage when you still haven't got used to the extra power before wanting more...
I was out for a drive yesterday minding my own business when I noticed a black 911 come up close behind on the A41 approaching a roundabout....i knew what was going to happen here... So this particular roundabout had a slip road which I took at speed, well faster than normal, no where on the limit, a very easy way to outpace a rear engined car.. waited to see if he was going to play which he did, he started to accelerate and I responded by pushing a little harder resulting in him being rapidly left behind. I think he was in shock as he pulled up alongside, window open and just said 'nice car'.......well his car was nice too, just a tad slow. It was the look on his face that I wish I had captured, seemed like a nice guy though.....
I checked the Apexi to see how hard I had actually pushed the car...64.09% throttle and 1.17 BAR boost....I think it's safe to say that I had an awful lot more in reserve, plenty more throttle and boost overide is currently set at 1.59 BAR so an awful lot more boost to play with too..
It's nice to have the old girl back, my wife even like's it, says I've become more like my old self again, not sure if that is a good thing or not....
Pete
PSH
PCGB Member
Pete
blade7
Well-known member
PSH
PCGB Member
Lot's to do still but them again isn't there always something to do on a classic car..
Pete
PSH
PCGB Member
robwright
New member
Are you going to share this nugget with us Pete? I have shimmed mine with beer can metal. Obviously I had to experiment to find the correct tin to use. It takes out some of the side to side slop and it is better but it doesn't get it all.PSH said:i found by mistake on youtube a neat way of eliminating the slack that is often felt on the gear lever pin, very cheap too, 1x M10 bolt and locking nut and two M10 thrust washers and around 10 minutes work...I have sourced the thrust washers and my son is bound to have the bolt/nut...I may try it when the car is with him one evening this week if we have time.
PSH
PCGB Member
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