Stephenishere

Holy **** sorry for wall of text, I took a vyvanse this morning and i just kept typing everything about my car **** I could think of.. The fixes I'm going to try are bolded near the end..

Hi everyone, my 4door 09 LNF is in need of some loving and now that I've got a good job, I want to put a little money into my car to fix some stuff.

My car has been tuned since about 4k miles to 45k with trifecta, but I recently changed tunes to a local hptuner that seems knowledgable and helped my car make great numbers.

My mods in my sig are a little outdated, I'll fix them after this. The current stuff is ZZP catted DP, ZZP Front and Rear Trans Mounts, TTR Upper Engine Mount, TTR Intercooler, Dejon Hot Side Charge Pipping, ZZP Lower Charge Piping, K&N Typhoon Intake, HPTuned Locally.

I wish I got the ZZP intercooler package in the beginning to match the brands and fitment a little better now that I look back, but oh well. :P It was slowly pieced together with used parts and sales, etc.

Anyways my car had some really annoying issues that started around when I upgraded my DP to the ZZP one, mostly related to boost leaks. With the upgraded intercooler my cars clearance went down and the **** roads I was living on at the time were not friendly.. I ended up breaking part of the lower weld on my TTR intercooler, but was luckily able to get welded incredibly well by some dudes in town for free. Even after I did a boost check and couldn't find **** with a soapy solution on intercooler joints, I was still having **** driving with my trifecta. I got tired of trying to get ahold of trifecta and I wanted a local shop in Austin that's experienced with turbos to help me out. They looked all over and couldn't find any leaks so I decided to get a retune and see if it would fix it. The tuner got some good numbers, ~320whp and ~390wtq, done pretty much all in 3rd gear. After like 12 pulls though he started to have the same damn issue too, during a WOT pull my car would randomly just dump all boost pressure, usually fairly high rpm. Once it did a dump it wouldn't get any boost back until I did a restart of the car. Since I was moving to lubbock with only 91oct and this boost blowoff issue, he toned the tune down and on the dyno it was around 285whp and 330wtq for what I left with. The boost wasn't dumping during dyno pulls and we thought it would be a good temp tune until I moved back to a 93oct town and figured out what was wrong..

Well the boost dump issue started up again pretty quickly with long 3rd/4th pulls but I had already moved and couldn't get a retune for a while. After looking around here some I thought it might be a bad vacuum tank and I decided to remove it to see if it was the problem. My car drove great, I thought everything was finally good to go. A week after the tune I moved back to school in lubbock wasn't able to get back to the shop so I planned to just get retuned for 93octane and fix the drivability when I got back. Even though I was getting good power, I thought the tune was a bit too aggressive on the turbo (REALY fast spooling and spiking a bit too high) and daily driving issues with throttle/PWR demand amounts. Especially 3rd gear vs 2nd, the amount of gas required to have full boost in 3rd was was too little and I started having some shifter issues pretty quick. My third gear became almost impossible to go into for a day, but corrected it self and didn't show up again for a long time. The fifth gear became hard to use after the third kinda corrected, I'd have to jiggle the reverse locker and wiggle it in gear, sometimes missing and dropping to 3rd on the highways.

I decided to go back to stock using the trifecta cable until I could go back and get it straightened out back at the tuners. Thinking that maybe the vacuum tank was the root cause of problems for the trifecta I wanted to test it again too. With it installed it started fairly powerful with low 20s boost. It pretty quickly lowered down though to 15psi and felt like stock except for the last 500rpms or so of the gears, which would spike to close to 20psi. I went back to stock until I could get back to the hptuner in my old town.

I finally got back to the tuners 5-6months later and thought he would have better luck without the vacuum tank. The same problem of the car dumping boost came back and he thought it soundeds like the bpv isn't strong enough and was just popping over. He also thought my gear issues of having problems of occasionally having problems getting into 3rd and 5th were related to the linkage cabling. He also didn't like how the MAP sensor was getting maxed so easily, even though after the initial psi spike we had solid safe readings.

To fix everything I ordered the gms1 MAP sensor for the maxing out during boost spikes. I also ordered the forge BPV, hopefully this will fix the primary issue of boost dumps during wot.

For the shifting issue which has been very intermittent like a month of easy shifting then a month of ****. I was thinking of ordering the STS from billet with their linkage connector and solid bushings. I will also sometime this weekend replace the roller pin in the engine bay and do a transmission oil change, which I've already purchased the OEM oil from CED. I previously flushed my brake fluid with a vacuum system and refilled with dot4 instead. Dot4 seems to be a shitload better and I don't get the mushy clutch feel if I'm hard on my car for an extended period. I'm amazed my stock clutch is still holding, its only slipped when the car was suuuuuper hot and since the dot4 it hasn't happened again.


Besides the long as list of stuff I listed, as long as I don't do full out pulls in 4th or the absolute last few rpms of 3rd, my car drives fine. If I do a pull too long the boost will dump and drive with no boost until I restarted again. The retune dyno I left with was 309whp and 367Wtq, since we dialed it back a little to prevent the boost dumps. The drivability is also great, just had to adjust the demand amount at the lower rpms a little more.


Other maintenance I was planning on doing this next weekend are the following, finding the stupid slow pile leak near the fuel pump, to flush my coolant that's near 4 years old, and to check the bearings/cv joints. The how to section had a good guide for the oil leaks by cleaning the seals and redoing them with RTJ. I'm not sure what's up with my suspension, my alignment is a bit off even after I had some shop look at it and realign it. The guy couldn't figure out what was wrong saying under a little gas it drove perfect straight but with a coast it would pull a little. Very annoying for long drives. I hit a curb a long time ago and that's what started the alignment issue. Anyone knowledge with alignment / suspension want to chime in on what I should look for?



Sorry for super long post, it's a lot of **** that's just been bugging me and now that I have some money and time I want to get it all figured out and fixed once and for all.

m33pm33p

Trifecta or hp tuners doesn't matter, the cars problem is with your car. Both tunes seem like they are having the same issues, although you do say the car ran better on a less aggressive tune.

When you say it will dump boost and drive without boost until restarted does it throw a code? Usually this is called limp mode and will flash yellow indicatores on the dash. This could be anything from a boost leak(check again, could even be your intercooler is still leaking, to all your camps?) to an 02 sensor etc. It will give you a general idea of what is wrong or not working though. Trifecta and hp tuners both have scan tools built into them to check codes.

Shifter issues either sounds like the cables need adjustment or this plastic bits are about to break. A short shifter and new set of cables will cure that(if the cables are bad). You coudl also get away with just adding a bps or twm cable clamp.

It sounds like you have a lot of maintenance to catch up on. Hope all goes well.