Thursday, October 22, 2009

Fighting

Jz finish my most anticipated movie of the year, Fighting, which talks bout Shawn MacArthur, a low life who fight his way up to being somebody in the underground fighting scene of New York.





















At first when the movie starts it sorta givs me the feeling of Rocky...they both start off with the same atmosphere, lower society, classical music....and the movie itself portrayed how ugly fighting can be, no rules, money is on the line, not ur face not ur ego, and not what u think, cuz no one givs a damn, theres absolutely nothing beautiful about it and the movie tells it straight. Compare to Never Back Down (another kick boxing/muay thai/freestyle themed movie) the camera work could have been better...and theres no fancy move and flying around Jet Li kinda style work here, its more about who givs out more punches, not how well u can punch, and thats exactly what street fighting is all about. Overall the stories are good, it gives out its point well, and the acting is top notch for Terrance Howard, i think he made the most impact than any other else....Channing Tatum's acting was strong, but at some occasions can be abit dull...

I giv this movie a 9/10, with the camera work could've been better....

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Saga of the 180SX continues~

One of our classmate's Nissan Silvia RPS13 or 180SX has been very sick.......massive fuel unburned and wasted in the exhaust pipes, while the spark plug condition shows that the air fuel mixture, LEAN. What could possibly be happening?? As the Silvia has a Trust Greddy E-Manage in it, piggybacking its ECU, our teacher think that may be the main culprit.

Nowadays car has a inbuild computer call ECU (Engine or Electronic Control Unit), its basically a computer that takes input signal from different sensors in a car and outputs a signal to something to do the job...example Air Flow Sensor wil pick up how much air is coming in to the engine, translate it into a signal, sends it to this ECU, then this ECU will recalibrate the fuel injector's duty cycle to spray more fuel in it to cope with the incoming air........as in an engine, more air = more fuel^^

So what happen is if u wanna fine tune ur car u can choose to change the prefixed OEM settings. Original settings normally look after reliability, fuel consumption, and drivability (is it easy to drive or not) and then performance...Of course if its performance type vehicle they will look after for more performance thn maybe fuel consumption....anyway...the original ECU is prefixed, means u canot change them cuz only the manufacturer can do that....so what happen is the E-Manage has the ability to rewrite and correct the input signal as much as u want, meaning if u are a sporty person u like to drive ur car fast, u might want get more fuel into ur engine as early as possible...but we can't change that in a original ECU, so heres where the E-Manage does its stuff.

Well instead of the usual Input - ECU - Output, the E-Manage systems intercepts the Input signal first, while allowing u freedom of changing the value of the signal itself, and then put the signal back into the orignal ECU.....which will then reads to the 'modified' signal that we change and makes a different output signal according to that.....so in this case, is Input - E-Manage - ECU - Output ^^ so basically what is does is it bluffs the ECU, yup, its a liar~

So now the E-Manage has got some very wrong mapping going on and therefore make my friend's car has bad bad fuel consumption, and possibly, will ruined the engine as well...
So what we can do is, we hook the E-Manage with a laptop, put the car on a dyno machine to simulate driving conditions, then use the laptop to change the value itself again to get the base map running smoothly and properly first.....

We first do that by keeping a real time monitoring on all aspect we can, Air Flow Meter Voltage Output, RPM, Throttle Position, Ignition Timing and so on~, since we can't do real time adjusting because the E-Manage doesn't have live adjusting options, we gotta first extract the map out of the E-Manage, put in our specified value and thn sends it back again, we call this Import and Export, you Import the data to ur comp and you Export it back to the E-Manage. And if done, the engine will run according to the new map that we Exported it back, but unfortunately, somethings wrong with the version compatibility between the software and the hardware itself, so we can extract information, change it, but we can't put it back in.................which means we're good for nothing, since we can't make any changes, we call it a day~

Our teacher speculates that the massive amount of Hydrocarbon (HC) which is fuel in the engine oil (!) is the result of overflowing from the injectors into the cylinder, which leads to the HC dropping into the crankcase from the piston rings. The exact problem is still very much hard to understand as we'll get more into it on next class hopefully....but today i've learn quite alot on E-Manage and the importance of value adding or decreasing and the amount of choices and functions of a, be it a

Stand-alone ECU (Input - Standalone ECU - Output.)
(which unlike the E-Manage, piggybacking the original ECU, replaces THE original ECU to become the sole ECU in the car.)
Example, Apexi Power FC, MoTeC

or

Piggyback ECU (Input - Piggyback Device - original ECU - Output. )
(the one we work on today.)
Example, Trust Greddy E-Manage, HKS F-Con V Pro

actually matters alot, as today already we felt our hands tighten up due to the limitation of the info we can get....

The car itself on the dyno...
















Hooking up the car to a safety belt..
















Analyzing the exhaust gas...
















Alrite, this is the result of the exhaust gas coming out of the car, 250 PPM (parts per million) means that in 1 million air, there are 250 of Hydrocarbon (HC) which is fuel or unburned fuel, and thats bad, really bad, optimum ratings should be at 50 PPM....while 2.231% of the gas is Carbon Monoxide....which is bad, we want that to be as low as possible...and 0.984 is the Lambda rating, with 1 being 14.7:1 air fuel mixture, 0.9 suggest slight rich condition, and which during testing the richness reach about 0.6-0.7, it should be LEAN which is approx 1 or 1.2 during cruising...
















Put ur leg down, out comes minced meat ^^
















Houston~We have a problem....

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Winton Raceway Track Day

Remember that Celica that was undergoing some dyno tuning in our school? Well apparently he's going to a track day at Winton Raceway, so nonetheless we wanted to go as well, so gathered everyone and decided to hit the freeway~~and freeway......more freeway........f-r-e-e-w-a-y........
The thing is, no one tell us that the track resided in 271Km away from our place! Boy oh boy we ended up in the car for almost 2 hour before arriving, although seen alot of cool scenery, scenery where u can't possibly see or dream of in M'sia...
Finally arriving after a while.......a long long while.....didnt take the pics for the entrance cuz was too excited, we were like humans trying to look for water in a dessert......
Some of the cars entering first corner..
















Lotus or Caterham?
















And a Shelby Cobra...will cover this later..

















The track is quite big..as u can see...this is the last corner, thn a straight connected to the first corner from the first pic
















A kit car?
















The side that is facing the track...
















Lotus Elise

















Old cars BUT with roll-cages and their not really that obeyed to emission and noise level laws too...
















A Yellow Elise series 1 i think...not a big techie on Lotus car..
















But this i do~ a Porsche 911 GT3 RS
















Another Caterham..
















neck to neck...

















Lan Evo 4 ^^ put to good use, kudos!
















A Integra Type-R DC2, a real Type-R, being imported directly from Japan stock, clean as hell, with just minor modification but beefed up with roll cage, and learn a new thing on DC2 today ^^ not keen to sharing blakkk
















And lots of Alfa Romeo hatchbacks..
















Nuff tracks, lets proceed to some 'Autoshow' of ours...hehe like this sky blue old Toyota/Datsun...(dun noe the name but.......)
















Its powered by a Turbocharged-4A-GZE, and notice the vertical engine layout?















Yes its FR, and seeing those custom fabricated struts+chasis+suspension? All in one yeh? haha love how he customed all those brackets, linkage all together...with the back differential at bay...and the radiator is also mounted at there, at the back...see those two box like thingy?















A Miata MX-5...
















with carbon hardtop
















The Porsche 911 GT3 RS
















And the Lotus 7, there are like 5 of them on the track today, and all of them are piloted by season drivers i suppose, all are mayb at their 50's...
















AE86 Levin
















Watanabe offset rims with A048, u think?
















And this SR20DE (NA~) belongs to this Sunny that was hell fast on the track, guess we noe why, hyper big intake manifold, direct ignition.....perfect ~

































The JDM Integra Type-R...notice the 4 holes instead of the 5 holes on the tires? hehe this IS REALLY a Type-R ya im not joking...
















B18C
















Perfectly clean...not a dust...well mayb some dust..
















Lan Evo 4...
















The Shelby Cobra, this car was rebuilt from scratch and take the driver a good 6 years to finish, its completed in 1999, and almost 10 years this car has been rolling with him, talk bout engineering! It still is in pristine condition...



















































And a GT-R.....heard from a guy GT-R is common in Perth, well in Melbourne, its mainly GT-T T.T
















RB26 ya~



































The "Kit Car"
















The new Impreza, although is not the STi version, it looks fine with the gold Grams Light wheels^^ white always goes with gold ya~

































Then we saw a FC rumbling past, but without a bumper (!) duno why....anyway no chance for any 'pop-the-hood' action so no engine pics...T.T
















Finally, this Mustang reminds me of SS Works of Japan, due to the similarity of the Elf's blue stripes haha
















The people over there have been nothing but absolutely friendly, just a look in the eye is enough for them to say 'How r u' or 'Howdy~~' or 'Hot day huh? (haha)', and if u ask them something they wont cuz of we are foreigners giv us 'the eye' or ignore us, they'd be happy to talk to u and chat with u~Thanks for the driver of the Shelby Cobra and the driver of the Integra Type-R for ur info^^~!

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Dyno tuning class~

Well it was just a ordinary day, and nothing special until i notice this...
A old Celica, but with semi slicks tire and racing decal...


















































Well, nothing much, so moving on. As we're told that theres gonna be free lunch of Bacon and Egg with bread on that day, i managed to get two sets haha as im hungry haha..
Look at the queue...















There were bands playing there too..
















Top, PgDori and Sirous are devastated watching the long queue haha
















Well than after we have our free lunch, we caught something wicked........
Our very own 'Allan' Scofied was trying to break in to our class room which is locked~! This guy is wicked..please dun let his Im-a-good-boy look deceive u all!!
















And as our class is progressing, things started to get too boring for others as we're viewing alot and alot of videos that day, i wasn't as those are things that never cross my mind before, i never known that vacuum can be so important to the whole smoothness of the car, and how fuel system can actually be abit confusing...not to mention how the ECU's total operation is actually formed....basically what i or you all may noe bout ECU is probably just 10% of the whole understanding of ECU, its far far more complex than i used to think.....
So during a short break, by coincidence we ran into another class doing a dyno tuning class, and our teacher kind enough to let us hop in too...ooh, and the car that is being tuned? The Celica just now...
Pics of the engine....
































And a vid....do turn down the volume of it as it can be very loud and unclear the sound, but have a look at the extractors, turning red hot ya~~
Before going home..this is the Mustang Mach 1, belong to a teacher of us!

































And a M5 that i saw on the road...

































And finally, a good nite out with Joe, PgDori, Evan, Top, TJ, and TJ's girlfriend Min