Clarity and chaos

Well, day 2 saw the horrific discovery that the reason why the WB02 wasnt working was that it wasnt plugged in!

Starting had been a problem so I swiped a cranking VE table from a modified tune on www.holdencrazy.com. Starting is now fairly good, a couple of turns and its away rather than protracted cranking and throttle use being required to get it started.

Once started things got real messy, the idle was hunting up and down pretty badly. I recalled some comments regarding idle spark control and an investigation of tables B5934 -> B5936 showed that up to 25 deg was being pulled on startup. This showed me where the 9 deg total timing was coming from. Once warm it settled down and spark was running what I had set it to in the base spark table. So some big chops to these tables were made, basically 50% off each overspeed table. Underspeed was left as is. This seemed to make a good difference as well as generally reducing the cracker values overall. I had dialed my desired airflow in fairly well on day 1 so just a small amount of extra air was required.

I should mention that my baseline tune was a 2004 HSV GTS converted to efilive custom OS3.

Low level VE cells needed to be reduced a little, nothing more than 5-10%. Some higher end cells have gone up by around 7%. Im going to compare with a tuned VE table shortly to see where the gains, if any are.

I still have some low speed coming to a stop issues and when fan and power steer load goes on it can stall. I will add some more air for the fans and look at cracker and follower for idle transition stalling at low speed. All in all its come a fair way so far.

Spark is fairly close to stock a little less in parts. Compression is a full point up and spark at idle needs to be around 8 deg more than stock cam. A few more weeks of tweaking and it will be off to the dyno.

I wish I could have got a larger cam, but this one has a very wide powerband, I seem not to have lost any low down power except the car will surge in 1st gear crawling along the road with no throttle, so I guess no surprise there. Basically exactly my requirements. I have to meet emissions standards so it was 224 or less sized cam. I chose 220 for a safety margin. The car pulls well into the 6000rpm range. Im guessing Ive added power over around 3500 rpm to redline. Not sure how much yet. Its not like night and day which is what I was expecting.

Mr Dyno will tell all.