Well as some of you know, I've had some pretty bad experiences with my car not running right since I went to Stage 2. Every time we seemed to find something (boost leak, hole in pipe, BOV leaking, oil leak) it would run good for a few days and then degrade again. Well I finally came up to Topspeed to get a pro-tune on my Cobb unit... the car ran like crap on the way up and was breaking up... no reason at all and I'd finally decided to take Delette's advice and get a good tune on it and see if that worked itself out. Doug strapped my wagon to the Dyno as the 3rd car of the day for him, and almost immediately we started to have issues with it. Doug was saying that the MAF signal was way out of spec... we did various tests to see if we could isolate the fault, but couldn't find anything and deduced that the car just wanted to run like that. Just as I was getting to the point where I was going to tell him to just get the car safe to drive home, Doug re-wrote the fuel trims and the MAF map and managed to get a strong pull in... thought it was actually a mistake because the numbers were a lot higher than we expected. But he was able to make repeated pulls with the same results. Car runs well... better than it's run since I got it back from my parents last year... think that there were a couple of reflashes done by the dealer that my dad was taking it to. One of the only things that I can think of is that since it's an early wagon, that the ECU was a different spec than the later production cars, so by adding the Cobb and the OTS maps the car was running worse and worse. Doug is the man! He took the car, and even as far out of spec as everythign was, was able to reverse engineer working fuel trims and MAF table values and getting the car running right. Takes someone who really knows his stuff to do that... so I can wholeheartedly recommend Topspeed and Doug's tuning to everyone. The car just rocks now... and is pretty darn quick. Thanks Doug...
That's the stock turbo. Here's my full power mods list. -Perrin Catless Downpipe. -Mad Dad Duel Tip Catless exhaust -ERZ Uppipe -Stock AirBox with a K&N panel filter. -GM Boost Control Solinoid. -Cobb AP V2.
Doug was dumbfounded by what he had to do with this car. He had to scale it with 300cc injectors. WTF? He said he has seen everything in his day but this was a new one for him. Heh he's the master and he tamed this beast. Another friend of mine, Jason, bought BelvinAWD's old white 2004 WRX and got tuned with all of us as well. It has VF39 turbo and all the same other mods WolfSong has except for my old Blitz Nur Spec R exhaust. Here's Jason's graph.... Well we played on the way home and Derek and Jason line up for a friendly romp. Derek jumps Jason immediately and it wasn't until 5 gear that Jason barely inched Derek by a car. Pretty STRONG for a wimpy stock td04 turbo vs a VF39 eh?
I hav an '05 Wrx w/ essentially the same mods as your forester but hav not had a professional tune and put down: Max power =237.42 , Max torque = 233.70 at the past dyno day. I am wondering what your base factory rated Horsepower is and also if a professional tune for my car would increase my #s? Impressive #s!!!!! Congrats on a successful tune!
Oh man... does my car actually look Foresterish? It's an '02 WRX wagon. I bought it back in the day while the WRX was going to be limited to a 10K unit production run. I bough my wagon out of the first run of wagons.
My bad. I was just trying to figure where the discrepancy between your car and my car was at. I litterally have the same list of mods minus the boost control solenoid and a professional tune. So I am guessing it's bout time to get a professional tune; or possibly a boost control solenoid. What is a boost control solenoid anyway?
Is it custom tuned? Maybe you need to let Doug make some sweet love to it. You see the VF39 chart I posted above that was tuned on the same day as us?
Tune will make a tremendous difference... if you're running someone's off the shelf map then you're running a compromise, because there seems to be a big discrepancy of what works on these engines. Some of them like timing, some of them don't, some like running more boost than others. The off the shelf map will have to take all this into account... whereas once you get a tuner working with the map, he can watch the data being output from the car and custom-tailor the map to what your particular engine likes/dislikes. The ECU does control boost on the WRX/STi... it uses a solinoid to open and close the wastegate so it determines how quickly the boost is built, and what boost levels are maintained. If you upgrade your solinoid, you'll have to get the car tuned to use it, so it's a good mod when you get professionally tuned. Adding this mod without tuning is pretty dangerous since the wastegate cannot be accurately controlled. Also keep in mind, these are just numbers, and subject to discrepancy due to weather conditions, heat, and dyno setup... so you can only really do comparisons if the runs were done on the same day in similar conditions.
I have the perrin EBCS. It was hot when it was tunned but cold when dynoed The car is smooth and safe. I made as much power as Alex's STI on that dyno and same day. I just want the bragging numbers.