After making sure all the fluids I put back into the engine were staying there I decided to crack on with changing the strut top mounts to the LCR ones I have had sat around for a while...
Basically if your strut tops poke out like the pic below then you should be thinking of changing them...
I used the LCR ones as they are stiffer than the std items that the S3 (and all other Mk4 platform VAGs for that matter) use...
Removed the offside strut first to make a start... plenty of guides on here + the interweb so I won't bother with that side of things but both struts came off surprisingly easily....
LCR strut top (right) vs std strut top (left)...
On to the near side strut and discovered that pot holes have struck again destroying the bearing..
...this also damaged the top of the damper...
...and explains the wear mark on the underside of the bonnet where the strut top is...
...damaged bearing (left), off side bearing (top) and new bearing (right)...
...filed the top of the damper as it was only peened over a bit and all was good...
The result of that effort is a strut top that looks like this...
...and a much more positive feel to the steering... difficult to describe if I am honest but it feels much better....
Next we got the car strapped to the dyno and thats where my luck ran out lol....
Finding it difficult to get decent boost control from the MBC at the moment... not sure why but its just not cutting it. Running the stiff spring I get 22psi fully wound in but one turn gave me 26psi!! while 26psi is the goal I would like a little more control than that and its having difficulty holding this boost level tailing off (which it shouldn't and I know it can hold boost better than that!)
For whatever reason the ECU goes rich after 6k killing turbine energy and subsequently boost/power which is visible looking at the graphs... fuelling in general is mid 12's as it should be but the boost request on the map is off the chart and it hitting low 11's after 6k is just plain odd as EGTs (measured from the EGT probe) are too low for EGT protection there but there is still calculated EGT protection in the mapping which could be the cause of this.... either way the map thats in there is so far out of whack (it was faffed about with to account for EGT issues, overcoming unknown at the time pressure drop issues etc etc...) we are going back to the first iteration from when I first had her mapped and we are going to start again from scratch...
Anyhoo... the MBC is set at an indicated 1.5/1.6 bar on my gauge and she pulls like a train... MAF is hitting 292g/s again and generally the car feels so much nicer to drive now that the head is working as it should...
Going to get in touch with the local stealers to see if I can get some coil packs from the recall then its just a case of trying to slot my car in between Bill's busy workload to get dyno time...
I am going to plumb the WMI in at some point but its not a high priority until the engines running fine and producing the power she should be without WMI...
I also plan to try the std throttle body instead of the R32 one as I want to eliminate it as a factor in this... it is possible that there is a mismatch between the R32 TB and the size of the S3 plenum... the std TB may well produce more power ultimately but we shall see soon enough when I fit it back on...
Consider this, Welly made 370bhp on a std TB and std inlet mani... the
Ibiza we did recently made 447bhp with a SEM and a 70mm TB... the R32 TB is 75mm...
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