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Who does decent B%244T5 swap tunes?

2K views 16 replies 7 participants last post by  Noosy Cricket 
#1 · (Edited)
Who does decent B5244T5 swap tunes?

So, it turns out, the Internet lied, and you do need a tune when you do a 2.4 engine swap. Or at least, I do. Had been fighting a surging issue at anything over 14-15psi boost, and on a whim threw in half a tank of CAM2. Now it runs right on up to 18 pounds super smooth and clean like it should.

The weird thing is, it ran on 87 just fine with the stock engine, but now it is unhappy with 93 with the 2.4.

I understand Contrast is on vacation or super busy, I get that. Plus I guess he requires a smart phone to tether to a laptop and homey don't play dat. Does anyone else do a decent tune? I am not looking for "more power" necessarily, and I do NOT want any safeties disabled. Car is a daily driver commuter device that I also use for towing.

I'm also contemplating just going with a Snow Performance set up and tapping it in to the washer fluid reservoir.
 
#3 ·
It should not need a tune, is it possible you got your vac lines mixed up when doing the swap?

I recommend Hilton, great response time and never left me hanging unlike others


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#4 · (Edited)
Boost is properly controlled, and is the same as when it was completely stock, so no.


What I find interesting is that, besides not fitting the car (rear O2 sensor was pointed at the driveshaft) the ipd downpipe also cut pressure from 2150hpa to 2050hpa. Putting the stock downpipe and failed cat back on brought the pressure back.
 
#5 ·
Are you running stock turbo and was the car ever tuned before? 18 PSI sounds high on a stock K24


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#6 · (Edited)
Are you running stock turbo and was the car ever tuned before? 18 PSI sounds high on a stock K24

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It's 15psi if you roll into the throttle, 18psi if you stab the throttle and let the transmission kick down a gear or three. Then it holds 18psi with the usual momentary spike on upshifts, I am not sure for how long because I do enjoy having a driver's license. Highly unlikely to have been tuned, it was a fleet lease vehicle that was then owned by a very nice older gentleman who left the car completely stock yet well maintained, with a nice thick fat stack of records.

This is the other reason I am actually leaning towards water injection, I have had to deal with a lot of very bad tunes professionally. Personally i'd almost want to deal with it myself, but I also am getting old and lazy and don't feel like investing in the hardware and software, or the learning curve for a new engine management system.
 
#7 ·
The weird thing is, it ran on 87 just fine with the stock engine, but now it is unhappy with 93 with the 2.4.
It didn't. May have felt like that but no no that's knock city. Maybe the reason you now have a 2.4 T5 instead of the original motor.

Stock boost is 15 psi. No more, certainly less in the lower gears and autos.

Wastegate should be set to 7-8 psi max.

An ecu reset is highly recommended. Adaptations can get screwy when fuel is changed.

In terms of hardware being changed.....it really didn't. Same head. Same injectors. Same MAF. Same manifolds. Same turbo. Same exhaust. Same compression ratio. You've lost 4.8% displacement. That's not causing surging.
 
#8 · (Edited)
It didn't. May have felt like that but no no that's knock city. Maybe the reason you now have a 2.4 T5 instead of the original motor.
The minimum octane is 87. Fuel economy is slightly higher on 87 so I would run 87 on long all-highway trips in flat areas. (Have seen almost 30mpg on a trip average!) For sure, any time I am towing or doing city driving, it always got fed 92 minimum.

The 2.5 got pulled after an ignition coil died while I was three hours from home, towing a trailer, in a blizzard. Three hours of pulling a trailer in sub-freezing weather with cylinder 4 with a dead miss resulted in a really, REALLY big crack in the cylinder head. Went straight through from one of the exhaust seats to one of the passages in the deck. Thermal shock is a bitch.

Stock boost is 15 psi. No more, certainly less in the lower gears and autos.
6 speed autos were not torque limited, which is why I held out for a clean '06-07 in the first place.

In terms of hardware being changed.....it really didn't. Same head. Same injectors. Same MAF. Same manifolds. Same turbo. Same exhaust. Same compression ratio. You've lost 4.8% displacement. That's not causing surging.
Again, I have never played with Motronic. But I assume that it calculates ignition timing based off of air mass per cylinder cycle like every other MAF computer I have played with. The way the math works, a smaller cylinder will result in running with more ignition advance, because for the same manifold pressure, the air mass is going to be lower. That's something that should be easily fixable.
 
#9 ·
If I'm not mistaken most tuners have proved that the 6 speed is indeed limited, just not as aggressive as the Aw55?

I'm in agreement with Scottish here, your hardware is very close to the same and it is likely you have some other issue going on, I would go through all the basics first before throwing a tune or meth at it (which you really shouldn't need at stock power levels even with stock IC)

Also regarding the injectors? You did swap the greens over right? The stock T5 injectors that come on the motor are blues.
 
#10 · (Edited)
Run =/= perform properly or even as designed.

Don’t run 87 in your R. Ever.

The TF80 is absolutely limited. Less limited but still limited. Also not as indestructible as the internet might lead you to believe.

Try shell 93 for fuel. Verify all the vacuum lines. Smoke test for leaks. Its not an ecu “tune” issue.
 
#11 · (Edited)
The TF80 is absolutely limited. Less limited but still limited. Also not as indestructible as the internet might lead you to believe.
Next time I have the scan tool in it, I'll log the turbo solenoid duty cycles. By recollection it was the same percentage in whichever gear, but it's been a long time. For sure, the throttle position stayed at 100% (or whatever the actual max that it could read is, 99.2%?)

And yes, not indestructible. I discovered that when I did some hard cornering with the engine near redline, and the torque converter bushing siezed to the torque converter and wrecked the pump. THEN I found out that one should run the trans a little overfull so the pump doesn't suck air in hard corners. Oops. On the other hand, everything else inside the transmission looked like new at 200k (the guy said the frictions he pulled still had the printing on them legible) so we slapped it back together with a new pump, and I had the converter gone through and loosened up a bit.

That is where I did discover a limitation: Throttle is limited with the brake applied when stopped. With the old converter, you could brake torque the engine and the turbo would spool up and overpower the brakes. (Crappy pads that were worthless cold, first thing I threw away!) With the looser converter, it won't build boost. Same throttle position at 1200-1500rpm higher means no spoolup. I never bothered to datalog because I have zero interest in drag racing, it's just one of those things that I noted was a curiosity and didn't give a second thought.

Try shell 93 for fuel. Verify all the vacuum lines. Smoke test for leaks. Its not an ecu "tune" issue.
Had been running all sorts of different fuels. Have already smoke tested several times. All adaptives are right on the money.
 
#15 ·
I put a 2.4 T5 engine in my last R with stock tune and turbo and it ran absolutely perfect for a year until I sold it. I really doubt it's the displacement that's the issue.
 
#16 ·
You have another issue.

Been using a 2.4 since 2011 on stock tune with FMIC, downpipe, and LWFW.

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#17 ·
Well, i never updated this because I had no news to update. It started doing the weird hiccup/stutter/DSG-fart thing even on 100 octane, so at that point I knew it was not detonation. And then before I could start testing it (like, the next week) the ambient temps dropped from a constant 90F to the 70s and the issue went away. If it's not acting up, can't see what is happening wrong, so I tabled the issue until it started acting up again.

In the time between then and now, it spit out one of the new cam seals, so I got to buy new seals and a timing belt for literally the fifth time this year. At least the P2 chassis is super easy to work on for that sort of thing. And I can probably clock the cam pulleys in my sleep now!

Should be noted that this engine as received from Erie Vo-Vo (top notch service, would recommend to anyone) had a TON of carbon in the intake ports. I have NEVER seen that before, they were always squeaky clean on mine and customers' cars. So I figured that the engine came out of a real obaa-san's car, never did much more than idle, and the rings were probably stuck, and under full boost it had so much blowby that it was pumping oil into the inlet tract? Who knows. Did many low-interval oil changes and the oil was NASTY with carbon gunk. Reminded me of when I first got my S40.

A couple weeks ago, it started doing it again when it started snowing. Well, ok, now we can look at things. Everything looked normal, as far as I could tell with an x.431 clone scan tool. I had to take the car down for a bit to replace the passenger side axle and bracket, so at that time I figured that I may as well throw in a new set of Volvo-packaged plugs and coils, because contrast insists on those. "Old" plugs were new Densos installed at same time as engine.

Problem is, to the best of my knowledge from full boost a-holing around for the past thousand miles, GONE.

Now, what was happening? Note I had a coil failure that led to the demise of the 2.5 engine. Swapped it with a Delphi unit, because I needed a coil NOW. With the engine chugging coolant and pressurizing the system, I began driving it with the boost solenoid unplugged until I could replace the engine. In the time between then and the 2.4, another coil died, so it got another Delphi. So I had two Delphi coils and three unknowns.

Theory: Under higher boost, the ECM turns up the coil saturation for a nice big spark. The Delphi coils did not like that, and were either overloading and firing early (an issue with some coil driver hardware on GM LS coils) or they were drawing so much current that it was pulling down the voltage on that power circuit and causing everything to shut off momentarily. And I do stress that it was a shutoff, and when bad enough would sound like an Audi with DSG cutting ignition on an upshift.

A hardware problem would also easily explain why scan data always looked great.

I did note that I make 15psi in first gear by 3000rpm 😄
 
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