Tuning and Blowing Up
First off, tuning is the single most important factor in the longevity of your engine. Period. Everything else in a turbo/SC build is just pieces and parts. For the most part, they are just pieces of plastic, metal etc. Yes they can fail and ruin your engine, but you assume that they won’t no different than you assume your tire isn’t going to explode while drive on the freeway. For the most part a turbo/SC kit will work or will not work (because it has a flaw.) If there is a design flaw, chances are you probably never heard of it because it disappeared from the market. But if it is a reputable brand, then chances are it is a proven design. People often will mention names like Comptech, SOS, LoveFab, because they are all proven designs. While there is no doubt there are slight quality differences between each system and some are probably more efficient than others, for the most part they are all proven designs. As I mentioned in a previous post, a lot of these kits use the same main components; same turbos, blow off valves, waste gates etc. the major variable being the design and the welds of the interconnecting piping. Like I said, one system might be more efficient than another, but really are you going to notice the difference between 425 whp and 435 whp because one person’s kit is 2-3% more efficient design? Also keep in mind a bad weld or failing part (unless it involved fuel or meth delivery), will usually not cause a detonation. That is not to say that a failing part, shoddy kit, or poor installation will not cause detonation, they certainly can and have. However, if you are buying a proven reputable kit, and installed by a reputable installer, you have to assume that for the most part it will not be the cause of an engine blowing up. Far and away, the biggest culprit in engine detonation is tune OR staying (or rather not staying) within the limits of your build.
So first let’s just look at just the tune. The reason the tune is so important is it unlike a part which might fail. For the most part, when you put in a part, like a rod, or fuel pump, you assume it’s going to not fail. However and parts do fail and if a rod or fuel pump failed, it could be catastrophic. But for the most part, you assume that they won’t or you assume it will take a very long time for it to eventually fail. A tune is different in that if you have a bad tune and are setting up bad air/fuel ratios or bad timing or whatever, it’s not that you hope that it won’t fail, it WILL fail. A bad tune is a guarantee your engine will detonate. It’s not a question of “IF”, it is a question of “WHEN” and chances are it will be much sooner than later. So understanding that a bad tune is a sure fire way to blow up your engine, you can see why people say tunes are so critical.
The second culprit also deals with the tune, but is more about pushing the limits of the engine. I’ve twice blown up my engine pushing the limits of it. Pushing the limits is like adding FI to your engine. There is no direct one to one correlation to how far you can push the engine, to when it will fail, to how badly it will fail. You just increase those odds. Anytime you start increasing the boost, or advancing the timing, or start to get more aggressive A/F ratios, you just keep cutting away at that margin of error. The closer you run towards the limits of the engine setup the more temperature fluctuations, increased intake air temperatures, poor fuel octane etc. will have a greater chance of blowing up your engine. Not a guarantee, but your margin for safety gets slimmer and slimmer. But therein lies the black magic of it all. So say you have a turbo setup that is very aggressive and therefore has a harder time maintaining inlet and outlet temperatures. At the same time, you have a tune that is so aggressive that has very little margin for variance in the engine conditions. So around town on just 1 or 2 hard street pulls it will run fine all day. Then one day on the track after some aggressive driving, inlet temperatures start to fluctuate and then BAM, the engine blows. So who’s fault is it? Is it the tuner for having an aggressive tune, which would have been fine for street driving. Or is it the turbo kit that didn’t adequate regulate temperatures? That is why you’ll see so many arguments regarding blown engines and finger pointing because most of the time when an engine blows, it is hard to identify a single sole cause of the detonation. A clear design flaw or a clearly bad tune are easy to diagnose and point out, but most of the time that is not the case. It is a combination of factors between the build and tune that contribute to an overall failure. An NSX is going to see a wide varying set of conditions and it is impossible to predict them all. All you can do is give yourself enough safety factor to protect and buffer yourself from all these different conditions. However, by the very fact someone is increasing the power by adding FI, you are already cutting into that safety factor. By going more aggressive, it’s just further reducing that safety factor. It is up to you how close to the limit you feel comfortable pushing it. If you wanted to be safe don’t do anything to the car; keep it stock. But face it, if you didn’t want to push that limit at all then you wouldn’t have boosted your car in the first place.
The bottom line is as I have stated from the start, you need to be prepared and understand that any time you start to push the limits and increase the power levels, you are just increasing the odds of blowing up your engine and it is often because of the addition of multiple additional points of failure.
