Pop goes the BRZ. Advice please. UPDATE
 

2013 BRZ
Innovate/Sprintex super charger
E85
Delicious Tune

Went to an AutoX today. The event was 60 miles away at a small oval track. They used a mixture of a couple banked turns and the infield. The car ran great. With the suspension tweaks RCE recommended, it was the best it's ever been.

So I drove 60miles there, drove it hard for 14 runs at 40+ seconds each, then drove it home. Almost. About 2 miles from home, as I pulled up to a stop light the engine shut off and smoke came from under the hood. No CEL, no oil pressure light, no overheating. I push the car out of the intersection and pop the hood. The passenger side floor of the engine bay is covered in oil. I have no idea where it could have come from. I know I didn't throw a rod. Guess I'll find out when the engine is pulled.

So, anyways. Great day turned bad real fast, and at a stop light no less. Go fig. At this point, I'm looking at options.

I don't want a crazilly built engine. I love how the car is set up and how it runs with the twin screw. I don't think it I need forged internals for this, and would rather not deal with the PITA aspects of a forged assembly.

On the other hand, just rebuilding the engine like stock means this could happen again, and that's just not acceptable.

I'm hoping there might be a middle ground; OE ease of care and maintenance, but more durable where it counts.

It'll be a couple weeks at least before I get a solid answer about what went pop. But assuming I'm in for more than just a head, I figure I should work on making the engine a bit more stout since it'll be apart anyways.

Thanks, any recommendations are welcome.

UPDATE:
First pic.

UPDATE #2:
The engine is out and pics of the carnage.

UPDATE #3:
Fully built heads.

I'm not sure what happened, I'm not here to answer that.




But in response to your building dilemma....you want safety, and reliability...then you want forged internals, OR you want to just go back to being bone stock.

I dont know where you heard forged internals are a PITA. the rods are no different functioning then factory rods, they're just stronger. And as far as pistons, if you get 2618 they will have piston slap and burn some oil until they heat up but they handle alot more abuse then 4032...4032 act just as factory pistons and are stonger then factory pistons and are more then enough for most people.

You can get pistons with the same 12.5:1 compression ratio as well so your engine will feel no different then the way it is now, it will just handle the abuse of being boosted much better....and by that I mean you'll have a hard time blowing your engine, unless your tune is junk or your trying to make diesel torque way down low, etc etc.

Hope you figure it out and good luck, sorry to hear about your miss fortune and hopefully it isn't to bad.

According to some other members who have commented on one of my threads, what likely happened is that your cam seal plate sprung a pretty massive leak - which has been reported to be an issue on our car. Teclis recommended I buy an aftermarket plate from Speed Factory or one other company, but I ended up getting one from Torque Solutions for about $50. It's located on the passenger side of the car on the rear of the engine, which is where you said you saw most of the oil. I'd check on that first as you probably didn't blow anything yet - other than a seal.

If the is a forged piston that acts like stock, then I'm all for that. I just don't want the piston slap and frequent rebuild issue that accompany traditonal forged internals. For one thing, I just *barely* get the oil up to temp by the time I get to work. Going with that kind of piston would mean I'd never get to drive it to work on a nice day.

Good to know about that alternative. I'll look into it. Thanks.

I've heard about that leak too. But it didn't appear to come form there, and something in the engine is most definitely damaged.

Very curious to see what it is. How much boost were you running? And do you have an air/fuel gauge to monitor if you're running rich or lean? I had a similar thing happen to me once on a SR20DET I was boosting at 1bar... Did a massive pull on the freeway one day, but although I had the car floored it wasn't going any faster. It eventually slowed to a stop for me to realize I blew my rings lol... Not the best of days - I feel for ya.

It's supercharged so it really can't overboost. I did check the bypass valve and it appeared to be working fine. It's weird that it happened under vacuum, but I guess I must've weakened something during the event and it gave up the ghost on the way home.

It sucks that I'm going to have to wait a couple weeks before I know where that oil came from.

What you want is 4032 forged pistons, they'll be more then strong enough for you. And they wont slap and burn oil like 2618's.

Off the top of my head, you can get arias through full blown in 4032, I believe JE and CP sells 4032 pistons as well. Plenty of options out there.

Those sound great, but I'm not really finding any with the stock compression.

Might have to call and find out. They might make them, but dont advertise as theyre not popular since most people reduce compression ratio.


I'd like to tell you that you wont notice a difference between 10:1 and 12.5:1 but id be lieing if I did. Might be able to do something with timing to achieve close to the same power and response but i dont know that for sure.....easiest thing is to increase boost, but being that your super charged that might not work depending what pulley you have now.

Best I could tell you is to call around and see who is offering 12.5:1 4032 pistons, and if your search fails then call some shops like full blown or element tuning who have built these engines for boost and find out what they suggest you do.

Edit: Full blown and element tuning were just shops off the top of my head that have had success with boosting this engine, thats not to say there aren't other shops you can call.

I know you can't really overboost with a supercharger, but how much boost are you running? 6psi? 10psi?

Why such a long wait to find out what happened?

I'll do some calling around. Hopefully this won't be a big PITA.

With a 70mm pulley I should be around 11.5psi.

The wait is because the mechanic I trust to do what I can't is out of the country.

11.5psi seems like a pretty safe amount with a good tune. Sucks that your mechanic is out of the country. I'm crossing my fingers for ya that there is no significant damage.

Same thing happened to me
Sprintex 210 Intercooled
102 RON
70mm pulley 12PSI
Delicious Tuned

Travelling up a hill at 120 km/h got to the top of the hill and all saw was smoke coming out the rear.
I was fortunately logging the car at the time. Opening up the engine piston 1 & 3 had holes from extreme heat.
I had so many issues with the Sprintex kit from boost leaks to coolant leaking into the manifold.

I can see where coolant leaks could come from the laminova, but howd you get boost leaks?

Someone watched the Powerblock this weekend.

Hard to give any recommendations without knowing more facts. What power level were you running at? Did you do any datalogging recently or at the AutoX to see how the car was running?

Not sure if your being sarcastic or if there was actualy an episode about forged internals on powerblock this weekend.....in which case I have no TV so, no I didn't watch powerblock.

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong with anything I said. I dont want to be spreading false info and its to my understanding that what I said was correct.

JE will make you custom compression pistons (12.5:1) for around 20% more cost than their advertised CR pistons.

+1 as King Tut stated, it is always a good idea to data log when doing some sort of tracking IMO. Even if the cars seems to be running great things can still go wrong.

Sprintex 210, 70mm pulley, E85, Delicious tune. So, close to 300 at the wheels. No log, unfortunately. Wish there was a more convenient way to capture ECUTEK logs.

I wasn't being sarcastic. Technically it is Power Nation now, and it was the Engine Power episode this weekend and they went over the differences between cast aluminum, hypereutectic, and the two different forged piston options. They brought up the cold engine piston slap issues with the forged options like you did, but mostly focusing on the silicon content of each. I record and watch it every weekend religiously. They are the best automotive tech shows on TV and keep the advertisements to a minimum unlike all the other shows.

I would have thought 11.5 psi and E85 would have gotten you over 300 whp. I agree that the Hondata FlashPro I use in my S2000 is much nicer because I don't have to bring a laptop. I just reach over and hit the datalog button on the unit. You would think that since the EcuTek cable is overly expensive they could at least include some memory on it to record datalogs.

Look at the realistic price of what youll be upgrading, factor in labor and what not. Then look at an lsx swap kit :thumbsup:

The real kicker is that the car was absolutely *brilliant* at the event with the new suspension settings. I don't want to change a thing if I have the choice. But if it's not possible to reduce the chance of another failure to a minimum with reasonable money, I may have to consider another car. But I'd so regret selling it...

The wait for answers is going to kill me.

Whats stopping you from doing some prleiminary investigation? Is all the oil drained out? Where does it looks like it came from? Get some friends to roll it up on some ramps or put it on jack stands. The bottom heat shield is pretty eays to get off. Come on dude, inquiring minds want to know!

Then I would ask myself, "Wouldn't I be better off with a Corvette?"

1. I'm at work.
2. It's not at my house.
3. After the rain today, it's probably parked in a puddle.

I may take a peek later this week. I'm also curious as to how it can lose so much oil and not have thrown a rod.

Do u have a lightweight crank pulley by chance? Sounds very similar to my issue but on turbo. Did pulls, fine. Stop to turn around, died

How can you know what your options are without knowing the cause and the problem?

You need to figure out what went wrong before you narrow down your options. To think about what to do at this stage is not only premature, it's the absolute wrong way to go about solving your engine issue.

-alex

Hey, look on the bright side. My motor obliterated a rod and a piston. Didn't leak a drop of oil.

Two people with Delicious tunes on here who both seem to have had the same problem with the same supercharger kit at a reasonable boost level. For the kind of damage to have been done that you both describe, it leads me to believe there was something off on the tune - or that without an upgraded fuel pump (don't know if you have one or not) the engine wasn't getting enough. Plenty of people on this site are running 300+WHP every day on their stock bottom ends, and that Sprintex kit only makes 270HP max according to Sprintex which is a very safe # for that engine.

I asked before, but do you have an air/fuel gauge?

Also did either of you have an oil cooler?

Yes, but I don't see this as being a result of that. Harmonics might be blamed for a spun bearing. But oil loss like this has to be something else.

I'm not narrowing down anything; I'm looking for options, not answers. I'm casting a very wide net so I know what needs to be done when I get the final news. In addition to internals pricing here, I've priced out entire engines, considered swaps, and even going to another car. Knowing more about the options available will help me make a better decision when the time comes. Sitting on my hands while I wait for the engine to be pulled apart isn't going to help anyhing.


I monitor my AFRs with Torque, and I've had Delicious review a couple ECUTek logs and they were happy with them.

For cooling I have the Robispec radiator/oil cooler.

@Draco-REX Just curious. When the engine just shut off at the stop light did you try to restart it?

Not immediately. I got it out of the intersection to take a look before I tried it again. I did eventually fire it up again and it ran, though roughly with a loud ticking. I've heard an EJ with rod knock and it was nowhere near that. It sounded more like valvetrain noise. But this is all just guesses at this point.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and venture my guess to be that you ate a rocker and shot it out of the valve cover. Just a guess. I'm interested to see what the actual verdict is.

Both having our tune isn't much of a coincidence when we've tuned over 100 of these Innovate/Sprintex kits to date, not to mention developing the physical base tune for the Innovate kit when it came out a couple years back. :)

-Zach
Delicious Tuning

Again I think you are going about this the wrong way. From the looks of this, you have not figured out how much you are willing to spend to fix the problem and just want to resolve this by throwing money at it.

If you have a fixed budget or limited financial resources, why the rush to cast a wide net when you can accomplish the same when a preliminary diagnosis is returned?

If you want to learn all there is to know about an engine, specifically this engine in your car, that's fine. But it's counter-productive to figure out a solution when you don't even know a cause.

This is akin to you having a headache and you're trying to figure out what is wrong with your body and worrying about everything from a brain tumor to just a lack of sleep to something unknown, and you haven't even set foot in the doctor's office yet.

Really, don't worry about solutions until you know what the cause is. Or spend your next few days fretting about it. up to you.

-alex

You should easily be able to identify if it is the cam plate (backside of the block on pass side and easily visible or if you threw somethin out of the valvecover. A quick peep and you c an rule them out.

I can't speak for the quality but Skunk2/Kraftwerks also offers forged internals for the FA20. Other and a few honda builds I don't think I've ever head of them being used. Manley performance also has a few offering but there catalogue hasn't been updated in a while.

All Girls Garage is clearly the best wit' they mAd driFtz sPec BRZ! Yo!

LoL I'll have to set the DVR I thought PowerBlock was over, pretty much was for me when the killed Muscle Car and Rick left as I quite really watching at that point.

The problem I see here Zach is that your tune seems to be a "one size fits all" approach, rather than tuning each car independently on a dyno which is how it should be done on EVERY car. When you treat every car as the same and give them all the same "out of the box tune", you're bound to have a few outlying cars that don't fit your algorithm. Thus why my car is being tuned independently by a Subaru master tuner on a dyno via a 6-8 hour long session. There aint no "one size fits all" approach for my ride - I wouldn't take the chance.

Draco is in Ohio and Ryan86 is in South Africa, so I highly doubt that you tuned either of their cars on a dyno in person from California. Likewise Draco doesn't have the knowledge to read his own afr maps, he sent it to your company for review which means he has to take your word for it rather than being able to tell for himself if he was too rich or too lean. He also doesn't appear to have the knowledge to tell what went wrong with his car without consulting a mechanic, whereas I can pretty much rebuild this car in my sleep. It's easy to tell someone who doesn't know much about cars "nope it all looks good to me" as they're none the wiser. So Draco I'd love to see those records you said you sent in for review to Delicious - there are plenty of knowledgeable people on here who could tell you if the tune was the root of your problem. After all - the boost you were running is MORE than safe on this engine.



Don't forget that superchargers rob power from the engine to make power... so the same boost you use on a turbo car is not going to give you as much power with a supercharger. Likewise 12psi on a turbo with a 50 A/R vs a turbo with a 70 A/R is going to make a huge difference. We have no idea what the equivalent A/R is for his supercharger since it's not exactly built like a turbo.

And what do you consider "reasonable" to fix the motor when you spent $5k on a supercharger kit? Forged pistons - $650 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/261384876871...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT), new rods - $1500 (http://www.ebay.com/itm/391067640449...%3AMEBIDX%3AIT)... You could completely rebuild the motor with new internals that can handle 500+ WHP daily for less than you spent on your supercharger. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Yes you would.