[Dezoris]

Originally Posted by regal

Great thread. Pure honesty that's what we need.

Its obvious that going FI you wanted OEM quality and reliability which is smart. I understand choosing a supercharger over a turbo kit to retain the linear throttle response. But I don't remember any OEM ever using a centrifugal supercharger, they always use a positive displacement charger so kind of surprised by your decision to go this route.

Intercoolers were developed for OEM's originally where the compression ratio was low enough to allow 15-20 psi boost. With this high compression engine and only boosting 5-7psi, an intercooler probably is a good selling point but does it really do much? Proper tuning and an efficient <+40hp supercharger without an intercooler has a lot less complexity and issues retrofitting.

If these cars keep selling in a few years there with be a simple reliable positive displacement OEM+ like kit. For now its faster than a 944 which is fine for me. I could care less that minivans and family sedans are faster in a straight line. . Good luck and thanks for taking the time to give truthful information and reinforcing my decision to wait a few years before adding FI.

Well, the options were rather limited when I bought this, it had already had development time. In terms of actual performance it is very "OEM" like. Including the torque dip the DI injector SAE data showed from Toyota.

The install on the other hand is nothing like what pos dis setups would be like from an OEM. I knew some of this going in. For me it was a project, I approached it that way. Do I know something thousands of others have done before me? Certainly not. Vortech is the biggest Supercharger company for the most part, which means in terms of development they should have gotten it right. Thats why I wanted to test this one.

Originally Posted by charged86

I seriously thought I was watching a movie. I dont know what you do for a living but it should be just that. Do you have any inclination to come to 86 nationals

Thanks man, I would like to go probably just to network meet some other owners. The drag/drift scene is not really my thing. I wished there was some track autox too.

I saw P&L signed up which is a local tuner here. I hope they get into this car.

Originally Posted by jamesm

This whole review just makes me happy that I live near rev works. I just dropped the car off and picked it up finished. I wouldn't have done FI yet if I had to do the install at home. I used to enjoy that stuff, now I'm more of a 'pay someone else' kinda guy lol.

I would have paid for sure, then it would have been their issue and Vortechs to figure out. Same thing when post install problems popped up.

Originally Posted by Foobar

I have roughly the same mods and I'm very happy that I didn't encounter some of then issues encountered here. The bent tube, trouble with the belt, and placing of the air box to cite some examples.

I also did my job completely unassisted in my driveway.

That said, I do agree with several of his points. The washer fluid reservoir design is a hack job and placement puts pressure on the plastic underbody piece that then forces against the bumper. I'm sure this contributes to making the bumper a pain in the ass the line back up with the fender on the driver side. The hood prop is another pain point but I avoided it with my GrimmSpeed hood struts. Being at the mercy of your tuner is a valid point as well but true even without an FI kit. I'm not sure why Perrin couldn't address the timing problem or why he didn't offer to do a remote dyno session. I use Visconti's Vortech tune without issues.

At the end of the day, I think the OP encountered a lot of issues that are representative of the worst case scenario but its great that he was able to document it so that others can see what they could expect if things don't go smoothly, but to be fair, a lot of us have done this without professional (or any) assistance or shop tools and had a smoother experience.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

Some of it is worst case like the ODB2 connector problem. And of course some of these issues are universal to the install while others some can just gloss over.

Remote dyno session would have been nice for sure. Don't think Perrin has that kind of time running a shop.

Originally Posted by Foobar

Admittedly, the instructions are not the best and I could see how someone could run into issues with it. That said, I've messed around with cars as an amateur for the past 30 years and I've already done a bunch of stuff to the BRZ for the past year, so I used the instructions more as a guideline than as gospel.

I deal with this every day at work, non existent documentation. We all do.
But for this type of thing when you spend as much as 35% of the value of the car on after market parts, I expect more. And coming from the "biggest guys" in the industry I certainly am not going to make excuses for them namely when it comes to documentation for something like this.