So...drum roll please...the car is home! Made it back last night. The trip back was mixed with excitement and anxiety. Had fun but kept wondering, after my four year experience, what would go wrong. Nothing was the answer
Met up with Jesus around noon yesterday. Like usual, he had the car out front ready to go. Spent some time going over the car with him ensuring all punch list items were completed. The only issue we have is the powder coated alternator was not ready to go. I asked Jesus to match the alternator with the powder coating on the rest of the car. Unfortunately when the powder coating was applied, something happened to the internals and the alternator does not work. It is now over at the alternator shop being repaired and when it is ready, I'll go back down to swap it out with the one currently on the car. Bought a trick rotary alternator pulley from Pettit that will look nice on the powder coated unit. For now, the temp unit works just fine but looks ugly.
Hooked up with Noel (Salva) from the forum as he came over to check out the car. Nice hanging out with you Noel. We all drove over to Delirium Racing to dyno the car. As background, I obviously haven't driven the car much and the closest thing I've had to drive over the last few years is my wife's Miata, or her "sports car" as she calls it Needless to say, the triple disc carbon clutch in the RX7 is quite different than the Miata's and much to my shame, I stalled twice on the way over to the dyno place. Got a nice smile out of Jesus though.
Speaking of Jesus, major major props to the guy. The car is tuned fantastically and drives very OEM like. It is smooth with no hesitation. Thought I would throw him for a loop by saying "yeah, but how about with the AC on"? No problems as he turned on the AC and the car still runs flawlessly. Jesus is the consummate professional and his ethics are extremely high. He does what he says he is going to do. I highly recommend him to all of you in FL. Call him at Kilo Racing at 407.438.5467 and you will be very impressed. How cool is he? When I left last night, I needed to take several toll roads and he gave me his e-pass so I didn't have to stop at the toll booths. "Just mail it back to me tomorrow" he said. How many people would do this? He also did a ton of extra work on the car that he didn't charge me for. I am very happy to know he is a close drive away.
So back at the dyno, we had to wait about 1.5 hours on a Neon SRT to get off the dyno. Sounded pretty good but come on, waiting for a Neon? This is life I guess. The dyno place did have a trick 3rd gen race car there that was pretty cool. Finally finally got the car on the dyno and strapped down. Here is a link to the engine idling:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYoB2TjF3BA
And here is a link to one of the dyno runs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1_Yrbz_Exg
The results? At 14 PSI and at a max of 6,800 RPMs, the car dyno'd in at 525 WHP and a little over 460 ft. lbs. of torque.
Note on the dyno sheet it says the torque was much higher than 460. That is because the ground clip was not secure and it rattled during the run, throwing off the number. Also, note that HP is a straight line up and doesn't fall off. We'd get higher HP numbers if Jesus continued the run up to higher RPM levels but we stopped there because we weren't comfortable with the AFR readings we were getting. My wideband (brand new) showed AFRs in the low 10s but the shop's wideband was showing AFRs in the low 11s. Our secondary issue was Jesus was not comfortable that he has the Synapse wastegate unit on my car controlled properly. The Synapse unit works differently than a normal unit and has to be hooked up in a particular manner. We have to get back to Synapse on this to verify my Greddy Prospec II unit is controlling the wastegate. Once we do this, I'll be back to the dyno to complete the 14 PSI run and to turn up the boost a little bit more. For now, I'll have to be happy with just 525 WHP
So, that's the end to the saga for now. I'm going to spend the day with "the other woman" as my wife calls it, cleaning and generally pampering the car. I then think I'll go out for a drive!
The home will be completed by May/June of this year though so we'll be moving in over the summer.
Linear Mode
