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.

That's what happened with mine and it turned out i spun a crank bearing due to stress with the pulley. The oil tho im not to sure on, but def sounds like u spun a crank bearing

The oil could be as simple as the Robispec oil cooler failing or a line coming loose. The result was the car ran low on oil till eventually damage occurred. Might have nothing to do with the forced induction or the tune.