Dave b's VXR Powered Gsi Diary

[DavebGsi]

I started the strip down to asses the damage. Before I started I turned on the fuel pump and found fuel coming from the rail! On closer inspection I found the fuel rail bolt half hanging out and the injector had come out of the rail. So at least I had found the origin of the leak. The full diagnosis it turns out is that the injectors are slightly too long for the rail to sit onto its mounting posts on the inlet manifold, as a result, when the rail is bolted down, it tries to squeeze the injectors and put the rail under tension which should deffo not be the case! It turns out it had actually ripped the thread out of the manifold because of the tension! So I know the full route of the cause which is the very important so it doesn't happen again!

The rail will be refitted with a washer between the mount and rail which will space it enough that it clamps the injectors but with no tension!

strip down

Tried a few different things, panel wipe, brake cleaner, sponge etc. I then got the acetone out and this stuff was magic!! Tried it on the boost pipe and strut brace...

Mint!

Quick look at the bay

You can see

loom charred at the back and engine loom
hoses discoloured
powdercoat tarnish
paint black
header tanks black
powder hiding around

So I set to work with the Acetone and quick detailer after and this was the result

Pretty god damn good in my opinion!!! I am a very lucky and happy boy! The only things that wouldn't clean up are the header tank and brake fluid res.

Also, seems like the slam panel and bonnet in the same area were super heated and it melted the paint!

Deffo not the worst thing in the world, I can repaint the scuttle in winter and I actually wanted to repaint the bonnet anyway because there is a dent in it. Do that in winter too

So the rebuild began, fuel rail cleaned up, Injector were flow tested, no issues, new o rings fitted. This time, the saftey clips for the injectors were lockwired to the rail to stop them coming out if the rail every came loose again!

I forgot to take a photo, but the fuel rail is now drill n tapped from M5 to M6, it is now nut and bolted and the bolts are lock wired together! This rail is never coming loose again

Inlet cleaned and refitted. Acetone is a miracle worker!

New air filter and the whole car is back together the night before VBOA rally!

I warmed it up, gave it a foot full to the roundabout and back. Test drive done. The next day I very nervously drove it 100 miles to Sywell Aerodrome for the VBOA rally, the manifold wrap was smoking for a good 70 miles of that, made me very nervous. But she made it!!!

I am a VERY VERY lucky boy and all I can say to everyone on the club is, GET A FIRE EXTINGUISHER IN YOUR CAR! having one on me, although it didn't keep the fire out, it did enough to hold back the flames until help arrived and saved my car. Best 20 quid I ever spent in halfords.

 

[Kev_mk3]

Happy to help mate and so glad it wasnt anything that bad in the end. Very lucky boy.

I need a fire extinguisher. Best get a mount fabricated up lol

 

[harvey]

Bejesus DavebGsi one very very lucky boy indeed!
I had a mooch around your car at VBOA and it's looking good, even though it was char grilled

 

[DavebGsi]

Bejesus DavebGsi one very very lucky boy indeed!
I had a mooch around your car at VBOA and it's looking good, even though it was char grilled

Thanks buddy

 

[DavebGsi]

So It was rolling road day and the results were very surprising but also didn't disappoint!

So first of all when I rebuilt this engine, I had the idea of trying to make the same power, but I also figured, I will try and make the same power as easily as possible, reducing the boost level and making the power with less strain on everything.
So to do this, i choose the piper ultimate road cams and ported the head out both things means flow would be better.

Well it turns out I may have gone a little far, or maybe not!

The 2 guys carrying out the mapping spent the first hour or hour and half going through the entire may, they sorted out the idle, cold start, air temp correction, then did steady state mapping by holding the rpm on the rollers and working through the load axis. After a fair while of doing all the slow stuff, he took it down to idle and then did a ramp run on base boost.
Now before, base boost was 330bhp on the old engine and Jamsport map.... This time she made 370bhp, first ramp run! the mapper couldn't believe how easily it had made the power and after a quick ignition tweak, 2nd run made 380bhp on 14/15psi ish....
Pretty incredible that basically the same spec engine freshly built by myself but better parts, high lift cams and a ported head had got me 50bhp increase on the same boost level! Amazing! As the graph shows, the rev limit is now 7250rpm and the car is still making power easily!

We raised the boost level a little bit to 17psi and a ramp run showed a final figure of 392bhp which I was mega pleased with. 392bhp on 17psi means the turbo and engine are barely even working! However it does show a loss of nearly 150LBFT if jamsports rollers can be believe, showing the engine spec really is now BHP based not torque based!
Now initially I was a little disappointed to of not made the magic 400bhp number, but lets be honest, I can round it up to that anyways but also the drop in torque means the car doesn't really make sensational 'pub figures', It's only when you drive it you realise that with the lower torque, it is much more sorted to a lighter car on smaller wheel I.E, I can now floor it in 3rd and instead of it just lighting up the wheels, the car will actually hold traction and just rips round the revs all the way to 7k! SO even though the figures don't read aswell, the car is hell of a lot quicker and the lower torque has stopped it torque steering all over the road!

I'm well chuffed. Pretty proud moment to have built an engine myself from scratch from the block up and a car from the shell up and finally get to this point.

 

[joycey]

Fire is literally my worst nightmare so glad you got it under control before it was too late. Not a nice experience for you to go through especially so far from home!

Great power figures there also! I'd be more than happy with that personally

 

[DavebGsi]

So a bit to report! Not done much to the car since the mapping, just been driving it loads and enjoying the poowwwweerrrrr

She made it over 200k finally without me noticing

But i did notice the other week she has started to smoke from cold.... now I have a very bad history with engines and either smoking, or leaking oil! This build has been good so far, but this did start to worry me a bit and I want to nip it in the bud quickly so I thought I would give the engine a full health check.

Symptoms are when you start the car from cold, after 2 or 3 mins the car starts to smoke, pretty damn smokey too, but once up to tempreture, the smoke goes and doesn't come back. When hot, if you leave the car to idle for 5 mins then give it a big rev, you get a tiny amount of smoke.
If it was rings, it would smoke all the time, not just on start up. If it was stem seals it would smoke instantly on start up. This is like the oil has to get hot to start burning, so i'm thinking exhaust side of the turbo, running down into the exhaust?

I got one of those little cameras you can get for you phone and stuck that inside the engine down the spark plug hole, everything looked good!

So next I took a look at the turbo...

intake side

exhaust side

Now exhaust side, you can't 100% tell if that is oil behind the wheel or not, but inlet side is oily. The turbo inlet has always been 100% clean so to see oil all around the wheel rings obvious alarm bells, so diagnosis is the seal have gone in the turbo and its leaking oil when cold and parked up.

Now this is gonna be an expensive repair, which sucks, but

A. The turbo is 10 years old
B. The turbo had a hard life during the fire and the intake side was full of powder, may be a contribution but obviously getting the car mapped and turning up the power was the last straw for the old girl. Only smokes for the first few mins, so she will be ok untill the winter months when I can deal with it. I'm not too upset, just means the missis is gettin heinz beans for christmas
C. Thank **** it's not engine related!!

As part of the winter reprep it will be gettin a service, but as usual, because I have removed the spark plugs and it cracked the porcelin. So I need new plugs now lol. Bloody things have only done 2000 miles!

 

[djwilde69]

You getting a bigger more fancy turbo then? Treat the missis to a kfc

 

[DavebGsi]

You getting a bigger more fancy turbo then? Treat the missis to a kfc

Nah i'll stick with what I have lol, my turbo is big enough and fancy enough, just needs a rebuild. TBH the gtx28 is perfect, good spool and good top end power, i'll get the mapped checked with the new turbo fitted just to make sure nothing has changed. I have a big list of things I want to get sorted over the winter and dare say I have forgotten some aswell.

I have spray painting to do, but i'll leave that until next year I think and do the fun mechanical stuff first!

 

[DavebGsi]

Blimey, It has definatly been a while since I updated this! I would say poor show on my part, but then not alot has happened to be be honest!
New suspension, turbo rebuild, bit of a tody up! It's taken me the best part of 7 month to do it but 2023 has been a VERY busy year! Between having the missis move in with her little girl, decorating stuff for that, BTCC season started with testing in march and along side my shift pattern change in 2023 which now means I worked every other weekend , with BTCC taking the other weekend from me, I didn't have a weekend off from march to july! By July, I was ready for a holiday by this point, but in the mean time, I had been collecting parts and getting things sorted.

First off, I ordered some new coilovers. After finding that I only has 10mm of suspension travel at my ride height, I decided to buy some brand new coilovers. This time some KW competition Coilovers. These had many advatantages including

1. Custom damper length specified by me in conjuntion with KW to maximise suspension travel. This means these is less thread than the Gaz Golds I had before, but this doesn't matter when you know what you ride height is and you won't ever move too much from that.
2. Custom spring rates matched to my vehicle corner weights supplied by me
3. Bump and Rebound damping adjustment are seperate. Most single adjuster coilovers only adjust the rebound and bump is set along side spring rate.

With these new Coilovers, I am hoping to get a Mk3 which ride more like a modern car over the country lanes too and from my house. These are the main roads that I like to drive fast down and if I can have a car which rides the bumps better, I will love this car even more!


So lets get cracking, got myself some brand new OE drive flanges for my new coilovers

Got these zinc coated, brand new OE wheel bearings and fitted into these sexy items!

sexy stuff, can't wait to get these fitted!

Next up, was time to try and clean up an old header tank, My brand new OE tank is now scorched on one side from the fire and annoyingly, these are now no longer avaliable from vauxhall, I blame PSA for that!

Bought myself the strongest bleech I could buy on the internet

filled the tank up and left it for a few weeks, worked a treat to be fair!

 

[DavebGsi]

Next up, towards the end pf the winter, the turbo had started smoking. a camera down the bores and in the turbo housing and exhaust confirmed this. Dry in the bores, wet in the inlet and exhaust!

So I removed the turbo

Look at the state of it! Amazing how corrosive that fire extinguisher powder is! Terrible. My guessing is some of the powder made it into the inlet and killed it off.
Oil in the inlet of the turbo is very obvious, untill now, this has been bone dry and clean sicne I bought it 10 years ago!
Turbo removed

So this got taken off the manifold, actuator and fittings removed and sent for a rebuild to a friend of a friend, Bernie Blowers...... what a cracking name!

2 Weeks later, the turbo returned looking a fresh as you like! Inlet and exhaust housings had been aqua blasted, new seals and uprated ceramic bearings and also a new shaft complete with exhaust turbine. Turned out mine was bent! ( those of you on the ball, will remember when I first bought this turbo and it fell apart and I sent it back and it got rebuilt, would appear the shaft was bent and never replaced!)

I then immediatly took the exhust housing back off the turbo to be sent away with the exhaust manifold to Zircotec for ceramic coating!!!

 

[DavebGsi]

While I was waiting for those to come back, I stripped checked cleaned and rebuilt the gaz golds for them to go off to their new owner Andy_Mk3

Got a brand new engine mount for the early XE type aux belt which is what I run for the z20leh to fit in the hole. I currently run the harry hockly mount which I bought brand new, however it does give alot of engine vibration so a part of me is thinking of swapping it out for the brand new OE mount to make it a nicer drive, and also to see if it is indeed the moutn causing the vibration!

I also took apart my brand new depo lights to do the same projector mod I did before. These depo units, although being after market, have all the same mounting brackets as the OE lamps, however the advantage they give which I wanted is these have manual adjusters! I cut all the wiring out for the electronic headlamp adjusters so they are of no use to me and i'll never have the car heavily loaded. So binning off the motors gives me a bigger range of adjustment. I could never get the first lot to aim down low enough no matter what i did. I have fitted these and adjusted them to the minimum and they are pointing at the floor! Loads of adjustment!

Lovely a new looking compared to the second hand unit I bought first time. If anyone wants to buy them let me know lol.

Brand new oil feed line, the old one had been stripped of all it's zinc in the fire and is gettin on, so better safe than sorry!

Cleaned up all the arches calipers, shafts, subframes and wishbones etc ready for the shiny new suspension!

I made this mod which i stumbled across on the internet one day! Instead of bolting the ball joint in the middle of the arm as normal, you bolt the balljoint on top of the arm. Bought some ally plate to take the place of the balljoint inside the arm and bolt it all up.
This has the effect of dropping the arm downwards which is how all OE ride height arms are. The reason for this is if the arm points downwards as it should, during the compression of the suspension ( being the outside wheel when going round a corner) the wheel will gain camber, therefore increasing the tyre foot print as sideways loads if put on the tyre.

I have had a chance to check how well this had worked, but its bound to help!

 

[DavebGsi]

After not very long at all, maybe 2 weeks, my zircocoated manifold and turbo housing arrived, these have been ceramic coated in the best grade coating possible to keep the heat inside the maniold and turbo housing, helping to reduce engine bay temps. Fingers crossed!

New AN water lines going on with heatsleeve protection

Bolted things up with all new studs and nuts, I wrapped the manifold in cling film in an attempt to keep it clean and mint during fitment!

Managed to get it fitted pretty much without any visible dirt or marks! I did have to grind some of the coating off where the clearance is so tight for the bottom of the manifold to the ridge on the top of the engine block! Annoying as it was a **** to get in and out lol. Polished down pipe finished to make it all look sexy in there!

Engine bay all back together and looking fresh!

Only thing that could do with improvement is the brake fluid resiviour which is still scortched, needs a new one! But that is a pain so i'll leave it for now lol

 

[DavebGsi]

Doing the final touches on fitting up the calipers and sensors, the track rod does now have a nut on it haha incase your wondering

Went to fit the abs sensor to the passenger side and it still has the pin from the previous abd bracket in it!! nightmare. Luckil the hole goes all the way through so I could send it through with a punch!

So i setup the flat patch, dropped the car down on the scales to see how much it weighed no driver and no fuel

Actually heavier than I thought tbh, bet it was alot lighter before the restoration was done

So I put 25L of fuel in it and 85kg in the drivers seat and set about setting everything up. ride height same as before, equal side to side, Max caster, 2.1 degrees of camber and toe in 1mm across the front, that should hopefully help it stay in a straight line!

and then once this was done, a few turns on the platforms gave me a ride height that was 1mm higher side to side on the rear and 2mm different side to side on the front, very impressive it takes so little to get a perfect split on the car!

That's it! down on the wheels

 

[Kev_mk3]

top right they mk3 discs at all?

https://www.mk3oc.com/forum/media/20221124_144420-jpg.4545/full

Amazing stuff dave, I bet the motorsport work hasnt half helped in development but I spotted the lower rear coilover and thought thats close to the fuel filler but once down i bet its not.

Is the coating on the manifold dear? I really need to do something on the swift to reduce temps and thinking thats the way to go

 

[DavebGsi]

top right they mk3 discs at all?

https://www.mk3oc.com/forum/media/20221124_144420-jpg.4545/full

Amazing stuff dave, I bet the motorsport work hasnt half helped in development but I spotted the lower rear coilover and thought thats close to the fuel filler but once down i bet its not.

Is the coating on the manifold dear? I really need to do something on the swift to reduce temps and thinking thats the way to go

Yea their my Alcon discs for my astra!
When I first them I had the same thought as you, but luckily once on the floor the bottom spring platform goes clear of the fillet neck! It was bloody close though!

The coating is very very expensive lol, pm if you want to know how much!
But the wrap on the manifold rots everything so I don't like that, and I woukd rather keep things cooler!

 

[Sean Mooney]

Love reading this thread, keep up the good work.

 

[DavebGsi]

Hello! Just a small update today, nothing too major has been going on with the astra, it has sat in the garage not driven for a while cause of the shite weather, but I have taken it to work on the odd day.

Goin back to the coversation of many moon ago about damper travel, this will interest AndyB-Redtop .

My original GAZ shocks had next to no travel at ride height...

The new KW suspension has a shorter damper body length which should allow me more travel, i fitted them and never really looked at it tbh but the change is ride quality wasn't that noticeable, which sucked cause they are expensive lol.
Well it turns out they have a huge long bump stop on them! Never really thought anything of it at the time.

As you can see, there is a sort of bump stop with in build dust cover for the threads or the damper body, the problem is the bump rubber is so big it needs cutting down to give me more travel, a job for winter. So i checked the travel, very hard to tell in situ what it is.

Hard to tell as the top cup is resessed, but it's deffo a little mbit more than before. A winter project it to take this apart, cut the bump rubber down and see what I can get.

Either way after taking these photo's I decided to wind the ride height up 2 turns and see what it looked like, it actually improved the ride a bit, and the ride of the car still looks perfect.

winter is here for sure! do love this thing though.

Noticed something strange on the way home though, the oil pressure light glowing dimly.... this would normally be pretty scary but luckily for I have an oil pressure gauge fitted, so I know that the oil pressure is fine. I'll get a replacement switch over the winter see if that fixes it.

So need to sort the suspension travel
fit a new oil pressure switch
I still have a massive knocked/cracking noise low speed, full lock, like reversing into a space or forwards... no idea. hoping to have a look at it saturday. I have another MOT saturday. Its not due but I am annoyed at doing things to the car over the winter and then not being able to road test it because it has no MOT! So really the best time is winter to have a test when it has already been on the road for months! Hopefully be able to check things over on the shaker plates!

 

[j1sgo]

That ride height looks perfect IMO , cars looking sweet mate

 

[raid]

Great work!