Finally getting supercharged !!!
Posted: Sat Aug 29, 2009 8:36 pm
So the whole intention from the start of my EP3's build was to have it supercharged...... engine was built with custom made lower compression pistons to help control detonation once the extra boost was there, but for one reason or another we never got around to actually fitting the supercharger......
Well that's about to change and although I know others have a supercharger already I figured there's a fair few that haven't and might be interested in what's required and just how easy it is to achieve. I'm going to try and take pictures as we go and of course will post before and after dyno plots so we've got some comparisons.
Had a good look at the Gruppe M intake kit and I really didn't like it even though it's the psuedo standard for EP3's so I thought I'd try something else which I think will fill out the engine bay just as well, be a bit different and work just as effectively from a performance perspective and overall ended up cheaper too.
Haven't finished that side of things yet, but shouldn't be too far away and I'll post some pics and info. For now here's some strip down and build up pics of things as we progressed. STM is Speedtech Motorsport http://www.speedtechnz.com . They're really good friends and I've been working with them on my cars since 2001 ish.
The owner Andre Simons is also the owner of "DOCILE" the 1400HP + EVO drag car which I believe is one of the fastest in the world. He's also the tuner of Reece MacGregors GTR which is the fastest GTR in the world at the moment and is some 1700HP ........ so he's capable enough.
Supercharger kit was supplied by someone you'll all know in Guy from CPL......... what a totally nice bloke.....
Obviously the first step was to remove parts needed to accommodate the new supercharger kit. Off came the intake pipe, fuel rail, injectors, throttle body, intake manifold, drive belt & tensioner.
What came in the box from CPL.
The next step was to remove material from the back of the auto tensioner mount to clear the S/C plenum. The intake ports were taped up & the motor covered to prevent any of the aluminum swarf getting in any where it shouldn't.
The instructions were just as well thought out as the kit itself.
Once I had that right it was time to bolt the S/C plenum & supercharger to the motor. Fraser already had a Gizzmo Intake gasket fitted & as this was still in good condition it was decided to re-use it. It was cleaned down & sealant applied.
Torquing the plenum on.
The throttle body adapter was next to go on. Loctite was applied to the cap screws & fitted.
The factory throttle body was cleaned & bolted straight up to the adapter. The water lines & throttle cable both went on without modification.
The new manual belt tensioner was bolted in place of the auto tensioner. Anti-sieze was applied to the supercharger pulley shaft to prevent the pulley siezing on over time.
The pulley was fitted along with the nut, torqued up, belt fitted & tensioned.
The Map sensor is mounted on the throttle. As the supercharger is fitted after the throttle body the Map sensor will not see any boost. A special adapter was supplied which houses the factory Map sensor in the factory location. It blanks off the port into the throttle body itself & has a hose nipple which is plumbed up to the plenum solving the problem.
The new RC Engineering injector O-rings were lubed & slid into the fuel rail.
The new injectors call for new injector plugs. As with everything else, it was supplied in the kit.
The kit installed (minus an intake pipe)
An upgraded clutch was installed during the Civics stay to handle the extra power output. So here is the freshly machined flywheel.
Here is the Exedy 3 puk clutch & heavy duty cover.
With the gearbox back in & wheels on I had some fuelling pulled to allow me to run the car & bleed the cooling system. Once this was all done & everything checked over the car was given to Andre to get bolted onto the dyno.
Andre was kind enough to do a little write up of the process after physical install and what's required to get it ready for dyno tuning.
"Fraser’s civic was previously equipped with a Hondata K PRO ecu which we had mapped when the engine was still naturally aspirated. We had ended up with 155 kw (208 HP) atw in this form which was up from the 143 kw (192HP) atw base run when the car came into the country. Considering we built the motor with lower compression than stock to suit the supercharger, this is a pretty typical result and shows just how good these motors are. It wasn’t that long ago that achieving 74kw (100HP) per litre or more from a naturally aspirated motor was only for all out race engines!
Getting the engine up and running on the JRSC kit was very straight forward. First the injector scaling needs to be changed to suit the 650cc RC engineering injectors. Critical to this is entering the correct injector latency values which RC don’t actually include in their specs for some reason? After these adjustments the engine started up just like a stocker.
After initial checks for leaks etc and bleeding up the cooling system, the car was bolted up to our Dynapack chassis dyno. For tuning it is critical to set the ecu in openloop mode, otherwise in closed loop the ecu will be correcting for any difference between the target AFR and the actual. While this might not seem important, we try and make the ecu’s job easy by keeping the trims small. This means the tune will be more accurate and the driveability will be improved.
After warming up the engine and making some basic changes to get the fuelling where I wanted it, we could perform some base runs. The K PRO can be a bit of a nightmare to tune if you don’t have a strategy to approach it with. Not only are there high cam and low cam maps for both fuel and ignition, we also have 6 maps available for the intake cam position. To make matters worse the intake cam position can be set to any position at any combination of rpm and load. On the plus side, with a competent tuner on an accurate dyno it is possible to optimise torque at every point in the map. On the other hand it is equally possible to tune the engine into a dog that performs poorly with terrible driveability and fuel consumption.
We start by choosing a cam position and fixing it all the way through the rev range. We then perform some runs and optimise just that cam angle. Once this cam angle is optimised we then switch the position to the next cam angle and repeat the whole process. Once all the cam angles have been optimised we should end up with 6 dyno plots which intersect. By choosing the cam angle that corresponds to the peak torque at each point through the rev range we can build up a map of target cam angle. This should provide a perfect map with the maximum amount of torque shown everywhere on the dyno plot.
Optimising the VTEC point is pretty easy in comparison. We normally do a run with the change point set very low, and another with it set very high. The point where the resulting plots intersect is the ideal change over point. Mapping the cam angle at part throttle is a little trickier, but the principle is the same.
The first thing that was obvious was that the boosted motor now wanted to operate over a much narrower range of cam angle. While in NA form the cam angle at full load wanted to move between 20 degrees and 50 degrees, with 5 psi boost from the supercharger the cam angle only wanted to be moved between 40 and 50 degrees.
The second issue that became apparent was that we weren’t seeing the sort of boost we were expecting. While the kit should have given us 8 psi of boost, we only saw a peak of just over 5 psi. This resulted in our somewhat uninspiring 198 kw (265 HP) atw result when we were expecting 220 kw (295 HP) atw. Some digging from Fraser showed the crank pulley to be responsible for the low boost. We are in the midst of getting a larger pulley onto the car with the aim of 8-9 psi. Then it will be back on the dyno for a touch-up to suit.
Cheers,
Andre"
Well that's about to change and although I know others have a supercharger already I figured there's a fair few that haven't and might be interested in what's required and just how easy it is to achieve. I'm going to try and take pictures as we go and of course will post before and after dyno plots so we've got some comparisons.
Had a good look at the Gruppe M intake kit and I really didn't like it even though it's the psuedo standard for EP3's so I thought I'd try something else which I think will fill out the engine bay just as well, be a bit different and work just as effectively from a performance perspective and overall ended up cheaper too.
Haven't finished that side of things yet, but shouldn't be too far away and I'll post some pics and info. For now here's some strip down and build up pics of things as we progressed. STM is Speedtech Motorsport http://www.speedtechnz.com . They're really good friends and I've been working with them on my cars since 2001 ish.
The owner Andre Simons is also the owner of "DOCILE" the 1400HP + EVO drag car which I believe is one of the fastest in the world. He's also the tuner of Reece MacGregors GTR which is the fastest GTR in the world at the moment and is some 1700HP ........ so he's capable enough.
Supercharger kit was supplied by someone you'll all know in Guy from CPL......... what a totally nice bloke.....
Obviously the first step was to remove parts needed to accommodate the new supercharger kit. Off came the intake pipe, fuel rail, injectors, throttle body, intake manifold, drive belt & tensioner.
What came in the box from CPL.
The next step was to remove material from the back of the auto tensioner mount to clear the S/C plenum. The intake ports were taped up & the motor covered to prevent any of the aluminum swarf getting in any where it shouldn't.
The instructions were just as well thought out as the kit itself.
Once I had that right it was time to bolt the S/C plenum & supercharger to the motor. Fraser already had a Gizzmo Intake gasket fitted & as this was still in good condition it was decided to re-use it. It was cleaned down & sealant applied.
Torquing the plenum on.
The throttle body adapter was next to go on. Loctite was applied to the cap screws & fitted.
The factory throttle body was cleaned & bolted straight up to the adapter. The water lines & throttle cable both went on without modification.
The new manual belt tensioner was bolted in place of the auto tensioner. Anti-sieze was applied to the supercharger pulley shaft to prevent the pulley siezing on over time.
The pulley was fitted along with the nut, torqued up, belt fitted & tensioned.
The Map sensor is mounted on the throttle. As the supercharger is fitted after the throttle body the Map sensor will not see any boost. A special adapter was supplied which houses the factory Map sensor in the factory location. It blanks off the port into the throttle body itself & has a hose nipple which is plumbed up to the plenum solving the problem.
The new RC Engineering injector O-rings were lubed & slid into the fuel rail.
The new injectors call for new injector plugs. As with everything else, it was supplied in the kit.
The kit installed (minus an intake pipe)
An upgraded clutch was installed during the Civics stay to handle the extra power output. So here is the freshly machined flywheel.
Here is the Exedy 3 puk clutch & heavy duty cover.
With the gearbox back in & wheels on I had some fuelling pulled to allow me to run the car & bleed the cooling system. Once this was all done & everything checked over the car was given to Andre to get bolted onto the dyno.
Andre was kind enough to do a little write up of the process after physical install and what's required to get it ready for dyno tuning.
"Fraser’s civic was previously equipped with a Hondata K PRO ecu which we had mapped when the engine was still naturally aspirated. We had ended up with 155 kw (208 HP) atw in this form which was up from the 143 kw (192HP) atw base run when the car came into the country. Considering we built the motor with lower compression than stock to suit the supercharger, this is a pretty typical result and shows just how good these motors are. It wasn’t that long ago that achieving 74kw (100HP) per litre or more from a naturally aspirated motor was only for all out race engines!
Getting the engine up and running on the JRSC kit was very straight forward. First the injector scaling needs to be changed to suit the 650cc RC engineering injectors. Critical to this is entering the correct injector latency values which RC don’t actually include in their specs for some reason? After these adjustments the engine started up just like a stocker.
After initial checks for leaks etc and bleeding up the cooling system, the car was bolted up to our Dynapack chassis dyno. For tuning it is critical to set the ecu in openloop mode, otherwise in closed loop the ecu will be correcting for any difference between the target AFR and the actual. While this might not seem important, we try and make the ecu’s job easy by keeping the trims small. This means the tune will be more accurate and the driveability will be improved.
After warming up the engine and making some basic changes to get the fuelling where I wanted it, we could perform some base runs. The K PRO can be a bit of a nightmare to tune if you don’t have a strategy to approach it with. Not only are there high cam and low cam maps for both fuel and ignition, we also have 6 maps available for the intake cam position. To make matters worse the intake cam position can be set to any position at any combination of rpm and load. On the plus side, with a competent tuner on an accurate dyno it is possible to optimise torque at every point in the map. On the other hand it is equally possible to tune the engine into a dog that performs poorly with terrible driveability and fuel consumption.
We start by choosing a cam position and fixing it all the way through the rev range. We then perform some runs and optimise just that cam angle. Once this cam angle is optimised we then switch the position to the next cam angle and repeat the whole process. Once all the cam angles have been optimised we should end up with 6 dyno plots which intersect. By choosing the cam angle that corresponds to the peak torque at each point through the rev range we can build up a map of target cam angle. This should provide a perfect map with the maximum amount of torque shown everywhere on the dyno plot.
Optimising the VTEC point is pretty easy in comparison. We normally do a run with the change point set very low, and another with it set very high. The point where the resulting plots intersect is the ideal change over point. Mapping the cam angle at part throttle is a little trickier, but the principle is the same.
The first thing that was obvious was that the boosted motor now wanted to operate over a much narrower range of cam angle. While in NA form the cam angle at full load wanted to move between 20 degrees and 50 degrees, with 5 psi boost from the supercharger the cam angle only wanted to be moved between 40 and 50 degrees.
The second issue that became apparent was that we weren’t seeing the sort of boost we were expecting. While the kit should have given us 8 psi of boost, we only saw a peak of just over 5 psi. This resulted in our somewhat uninspiring 198 kw (265 HP) atw result when we were expecting 220 kw (295 HP) atw. Some digging from Fraser showed the crank pulley to be responsible for the low boost. We are in the midst of getting a larger pulley onto the car with the aim of 8-9 psi. Then it will be back on the dyno for a touch-up to suit.
Cheers,
Andre"
That is awesome bodywork indeed :cooldude: :cooldude:
) it's going to be bloody awesome........... I think you'll love it, but for the GB spec cars I'd say getting an LSD is essential. I'd never consider it without after driving a UK spec car and my JDM spec car in NA form is still quicker I reckon in real world situations due to out and out grip.
I think there's a couple of other GTR and CTR owners on here.
