The Crazy Taxi - Fg F6 / Tr6060 Powered Ba Futura

[luke187]

thought it would be flopping around and dangling if that snapped? Hopefully ill have a geeze during the day

[barnz]

Spythe did one just the other day, same symptoms, went up high near cv and wasn't immediately obvious

[luke187]

Didnt get the car up on the hoist but had a quick look under its definitely the diff. Tailshaft is solid as are the driveshafts, can see the tailshaft spinning but no action past that, also looks like the diff bolt is bent. Car has 0 drive ever, so cant think of whats broken... my experience with smashed gears is theres usually a point where it picks up again. Regardless its a little disappointing to happen so quick, but I guess its a quick lesson in why the diff bushes should have been swapped. One thing for certain I'll definitely vouch for the grip of the s1 evo2's.

[luke187]

OK have a bit of an update. Havent had a whole lot of time driving the car as a few bugs have popped up, some have popped up a few times. First issue we had was just 3-4 days after we got it running. I ran the tank low on fuel just to see if theres any starvation issues and after going for a cruise to the gold coast the car started to drop power on the highway then quite quickly lost all power.

Car looking filthy as it hadnt been washed since it was built at this time.

Put 20l of fuel in on the side of the highway thinking it was a pickup issue but no cigar so had to wait for a tow truck. Turns out it was an issue with the fuel line we ran for the pump. We decided on running a 360deg bend off the top of the

pump using submergable fuel line - a temporary solution as we didnt have the flexible pvc hose and couldnt break any free to use again without damaging it.

Heres the offending bend hose. The sharp bend above the hose wasnt there originally and is like that because the hose split on the other side. Turns out all I had to do was run 70mm of hose directly to the pump, duh. Sometimes under pressure you miss the most obvious solutions. Lucky it broke just cruising on the highway

The blown diff turned out to just be the driveshaft or cv rather. Havent had a look at the shaft to see if its damaged but when we cut the CV boot open this part of the ball race dropped out. I thought it was pretty cool

Heres a terrificly boring video of the offending shaft. Nobody likes an offensive shaft!

http://vid28.photobucket.com/albums/c228/lukep187/WP_20141013_001_zpsv0wvjokz.mp4

The bent diff bolt was actually a loose diff bolt, and was likely to be a contributor to the blown shaft as the diff was now moving more than it should have been. I tightened up the diff bolt and all seemed good but only a half days driving a loud clunk could be heard from the rear which again was the diff bolt. At this point I figured I didnt have enough leverage when doing it up, so we got a breaker bar to nip it up tight but it quickly became evident that the problem is it wont do up at all. The bolt thread was either damaged from being loose or the thread is stripped and needs a helicoil. Unfortunately this means diff cradle out, and if that comes out it also means bushes etc as the jelly OEM ones dont cut the mustard - in fact I find it difficult to believe they come out from the factory like this.

Right now im hating this IRS, which is something I thought I'd never say. Whats crossing my mind is this - Broken shaft, with an engine that is making 200whp less than the one that's getting ready to go in, on street tyres, on the street. No clutch popping, no burnouts just a gear change under power. Im not going crazy but when we were waiting for a tow truck to come after the driveshaft broke I heard a voice saying PUT A FOOOOUR LIIIIIINK INNNNNN, but then a good voice jumped back in and said "Noo you said you'd stick with the iiirrssss. Fiiiix it". So we are, and hopefully we can forget about it. Will have some pics up soon - cradle is probably coming out today or the weekend.

The most exciting thing to come though is this

Really excited about this and have already got in and tidied up a few things. The original tune was done buy a highly regarded shop on the gold coast, gotta say its pretty disappointing. Clearly a cut and paste job run it on the dyno and that'll do, and a lot of very basic things either over looked or were done but shouldnt've been done that way. Seems the torque demand system falcons run is too much of a headache for a lot of places to learn properly.

[MattyP]

Wow

Exciting times for you mate

How's the studying going for the tuning?

It seems a little complex for me

[luke187]

Its been a while since ive done anything, past tuning was my race bike which even though its a bike was still a 4 banger running 14.7:1 compression on pump 98 and making 168rwhp with a requirement of it being trashed non stop but boosted is a whole other thing.

The system is super complex, for what we use it for id say its so complex it starts to become in-efficient. The whole torque demand system IMO is terrific for OEM requirements as you can do all sorts of things to reduce warranty claims, reduce car abuse, meet steep emission requirements but for what we use its totally unnecessary. Not saying you cant get them to run great - clearly you can and any OEM ecu that can run 2000cc injectors on alcohol and 1000+whp is an amazing piece of gear. I'll probably look at aftermarket units later on, I dont plan on sticking with the stock F6 engine once we swap that in, its just another stepping stone and would like some other features that id have but arent an OEM requirement.

At the moment ive just pulled some timing out of it under high load points, then once I find the right data I'll re-calibrate the injectors and work on the low speed/part throttle stuff where the tune is the worst. Even though it seems common I find it sort of weird that a street driven car would have all of this overlooked. I have an MTX-L I'll hook up once I get the rear sorted then will work through the fuel side of things. The way the old tune was done was a sort of hack way which negates any ability for the factory knock sensors to pull any timing if needed. Hasnt caused any issues with the car but id rather have some allowance for changes in fuel, higher intake temps or whatever else may happen on a daily driver.

[MattyP]

I've got a celica project car which I'm tuning myself and the software is incredibly easy to use and plenty of features like launch control and the fuel/ignition tables are simple and easy to play around with.

I took 2 seconds to look at the falcon software and just walked away

[luke187]

Saw that celica - love it btw. How do you find the 3540 with the kinugawa wheel? Is it 11 or 6 blade and .7 cover? Do you remember the inducer size. When do you see 20psi?

The turbo on the F6 engine has a billet wheel and are hoping it'll be a bit more responsive than what my car is now... having said that it does have a couple of big restrictions in it.

[MattyP]

Thanks man

The spool is great considering it's still in the .5 cover

I hit 20psi pretty early and hold it all the way to the red line.

I think it's a 61.3 inducer.. I think

It's an 11 blade and the turbo will be going 450+ soon with the built box

[luke187]

Got the car up on the hoist today to sort this rear end out. Saw the first real issue straight away:

Loose bolt is loose! Luckily the spare wheel well kept it in for me and didnt spit it out at an unsuspecting commodore!

Since the diff is out we thought it was a good time to swap over to the driveshaft and diff from the second xr6t. The driveshaft from that is much beefier and the diff I was told by the previous owner was rebuilt by mal wood not long before it was crashed, although finding out details from them is hard unless I post them a suitcase of cash. The diff itself just looks like a standard rebuild with a bigger companion flange for the driveshaft, unfortunately inspecing it today there seems to be lot of lash in it so rotating the flange back and forth causes a decent knock. A little disappointing.

Heres the new diff and flange, from memory it was around 102mm.

Looks like rebuilt with a dana traclok which from what I figure is the OEM LSD. Will have a quick look in the one I removed to double check. Either way its not a truetrac or something tough like that but it'll do nicely!

Comparison of the 2 driveshafts. Much bigger uni and im going to assume chromoly or something tube. The new shaft is literally new, and was apparently only rebalanced and sorted 3 days before the second car was written off. Got to feel for the guy.

More flange, comparing the size difference

Once again the diff cradle is out. This time its stripped down and the last few rubber bushes will be replaced in the suspension too. Im really hoping not to do this again in the near future.

Once we lowered the cradle we found that the diff bolt wasnt actually loose, it was sad:

Whammo. Didnt take long to break. Definitely a lesson in leaving crappy oem diff bushes in. 1 broken driveshaft, 1 broken bolt, 1 week. No damage to the diff hat luckily but will have to attack the left over bolt with an easy-out tomorrow

The car was always designed to hit the track a bit so rather than dick around with bushes and pay $700 for nolathane/cat600 jobbies which might not be ok once we step up the power a couple levels, ive bitten the bullet and bought these

This isnt going to be everyone (or anyones) solution but solid mounting the diff is going to be ours. After doing some research on american forums and websites on the few similar cars over there that run IRS, they all have the same solution between them - solid mounting. The cradle isnt going back to bushes so rather than spend big making proper aluminium bushings that can be removed again, these will be welded into place to remove the bushes all together... for some reason if I ever end up reverting it back I can just pickup another cradle as there's piles of them sitting at most wreckers ive been to. Id rather live with the NVH and eliminate this as an issue from the get-go and to be honest im a weirdo like that as I love the mechanical sounds of cars so long as it isnt too obnoxious.

Probably total overkill for now but the f6 engine was making just under 600whp as it was and that's not going to staying in for too long either, as I said going for cat600/nolathane diff bushes alone was going to set me back close to $700 and at what point was this going to become an issue again? No question they work well, but all of the cars running real quick times are autos and the few manuals have been utes/4 link conversions so doing it this way should eliminate a lot of issues and only introduce the noise.

The car is already what some people would call noisy so im not aiming to have an OEM feeling car. Gearbox rattles, clutch rattles, clutch shudders, suspension is firm and it was always built to see its fair share of track work. Blowing a driveshaft and snapping a diff bolt on the street, with street tyres with a nearly stock ba turbo engine at 12psi making just 300rwkw with no burnouts, clutch popping, or abuse outside of accelerating was a bit of an eye opener so let the games begin. Hopefully I can take a picture on friday of 2 long, black, solid, tramp-free lines and post a video so everyone can laugh how noisy the diff sounds lol.

Edited 22/10/14 10:31 AM by luke187