joshuaho96

Smog referee checks the ECU in many cases, I would get it to pass with OEM ECU + map. For initial emissions my plan is to use the stock boost control system to get it to 0.9 bar stable and call it a day. Maybe it means OEM boost restrictor, or a completely blocked boost restrictor to run wastegate pressure. Hard to say at this time. Remapping the OEM ECU is dangerous IMO, mostly because the emissions lab tests on CA certification fuel, not Japanese pump gas. It will very likely knock itself to death on CA 91 AKI, which is like Japanese 95-96 RON. You really don't want to deviate from stock if you can help it.

If you’re after better midrange definitely go for the smallest turbos, there’s no free lunch here. I personally don’t like the idea of using another controller for boost control. It seems popular in the Japanese tuner market but I really want OEM levels of integration so I want a single ECU running everything. A boost controller would also be a major red flag for smog tests. I did a lot of research into all the ECUs on the market and pretty much every stand-alone is speed density only. If you want MAF based load on a Motec you need to write your own firmware. I already write enough code at my day job, I don’t want to be doing more of it in my free time. Basically the only vendor that even tries to support stock ECU functionality is Haltech. I’ll see what I can do about getting a halfway decent ECU tune on an Elite 2500. That remains one of the big unknowns for me.

My choice for the GT3-SS was basically purely a gamble that it would do better in mid-range power than -7s or -9s for the relatively low boost I'm targeting (18-20 psi tops). The original HKS GT-SS are actually just Garrett -9s which HKS got some kind of exclusivity deal on for quite some time. I figure I'll just take the leap and post back results so others don't have to suffer through the general decision paralysis I did. The plan is OEM ECU + OEM map, the entire car is stock other than the turbos. The one big question for me right now is what will happen with OEM boost control hooked up to a turbo with a stronger wastegate spring. I'm pretty sure that the ECU is just dumb and uses a fixed duty cycle on the solenoid. It might go to wastegate pressure if knock is detected like the 300ZX TT but that's probably it. If the stock boost restrictor doesn't cause wild overboost (more than 1 bar) I'll leave it, otherwise I have to start figuring out what size restrictor to use to get it to not overboost. After registration I'm probably going to toss a Haltech at it to be able to adjust fueling/timing and to run a more intelligent boost control strategy.

Also forgot to mention but there is definitely a lot of skepticism around the new HKS turbos. Do your research, don't just go by the marketing literature.

I'm working to get my car emissions certified with the GT3-SS turbo. On paper it shouldn't matter. In practice I'm not as sure. We will have to see.

I'm in the US, I think you can still buy one in Canada.

If you put in a wideband sensor you can run the car slightly leaner on boost, pretty sure the stock map is like 10.5:1 AFR or something hilarious like that. You can lean it out a bit and avoid running into excessive rich/retard if you turn up the boost. Generally cleaning up fuel and timing like that will improve fuel economy and response.

Yeah, honestly I would prefer if R33s didn't spike quite as hard in price, I think speculation is driving a lot of the price increase. I still need to find some way of getting my hands on an Autowatch 573, it's been reviewed well and seems to do exactly what I'm looking for: From there I think a Trackmate GPS unit hidden somewhere in the car should work, maybe a tilt sensor too to notify me if the car is getting towed instead of relying purely on geofence. Of course the important part is to actually keep the car in a secured garage but thankfully I won't have trouble with that.

I'm paying much more than that right now to get my R33 restored and with the ridiculous appreciation these cars have seen in just the past 2 years I would probably stand pretty good odds of being able to recover my money if I sold it. Theft protection is tough, my general recommendation is a GPS tracker and a transponder immobilizer.

Your 10k estimate is still current, hard to say how long it'll take. I just learn this stuff so I can make sure I can do what I want to the car, I'm not too interested in getting into engine calibration. The loophole of living in a different state for 1 year then returning was closed, doesn't exist anymore, that was maybe true 7 years ago but definitely not now. You can probably do the front pipe + catback without issues on the stock ECU, just make sure you aren't spiking boost too high.

Cheeky, probably would work too if I'm honest. There are definitely contradictory directives at play here, part of the "fun". I believe remapping the stock ECU in a non-tamperable fashion is ok, they just don't want you to be able to change the engine map at will. And even if you somehow convinced Haltech to make you a special snowflake version of their ECU with some efuses and map integrity/encryption to keep yourself from being able to flash an ECU map I doubt that it would actually satisfy the state referee because it's still not a stock ECU at the end of the day. The ridiculous part is that after initial registration you never see a smog referee again in most cases. And these are OBD1 cars so the only test is a tail sniffer shoved in the exhaust while revving to 2500 rpm in neutral for AWD cars, 15/25 mph roller tests for RWD/FWD.

It's much harder than IM240 because you have to do both a temperature controlled cold start portion of the test, then kill the engine for 10 minutes after the stabilized phase then restart and redo the first 505 seconds of the drive cycle again. A stock RB26 fails the test pretty badly. There's also a shed evap test that the car has to pass. The performance standard is whatever the CARB minimum standard was for the year of production, in this case it's tier 1 which means 0.31 g/mi HC, 4.2 g/mi CO, 0.6 g/mi NOx in the FTP-75 test. It takes a set of two catalytic converters in the front pipe as well as a double catalytic converter where the main cat goes, on top of various little adjustments to things like base timing and weirdness like an fuel filler restrictor to keep people from trying to put leaded gasoline in the tank. I was looking into things like VCAM step 1, secondary air injection on cold start, more modern injectors at higher base pressure, stepper motor controlled wastegates, stuff like that to try and get emissions down but I realized even if I could prove that everything I was doing was to reduce emissions I would never get past the smog referee because you're not going to pass with a standalone.

For the BCNR33 and BNR34 they use a different ECU that doesn't have a Nistune daughterboard available, so you have to use a BNR32 ECU. So it's possible for smog refs to see that you've installed a BNR32 ECU in a BCNR33 and fail you for that alone. This is not a purely hypothetical issue, smog refs have been known to check ECUs, some will overlook it and some will make your life a nightmare: https://honda-tech.com/forums/honda-civic-del-sol-1992-2000-1/yet-another-state-referee-question-1650879/#post22175832 The really "fun" part is that you can fail for silly reasons like this even after getting your certificate of conformance from the emissions lab, which is the actual hard part. So you could put in a Nistune, remap to improve emissions + fuel consumption, pass the FTP-75 drive cycle test, then fail at the referee for a "defeat device". The actual hard part isn't smog referee's emissions test, the hard part is the referee's visual inspection and the emissions lab test which is actually the FTP-75/ADR 37 drive cycle: https://dieselnet.com/standards/cycles/ftp75.php If you call CARB's helpline they will tell you to your face that they don't want you to be importing these cars, which is why it's so painful and expensive to do it.

I don't know if they're going to check the part numbers, last I checked the guy working on the Nistune type 6 board got most of the way there and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

It's not really worth going down the path just to remove later because whatever exhaust the car has when it gets to the emissions testing lab is going to get massacred. The front pipe gets chopped up to put in some booger-welded cats, a new main cat is installed too with comparable quality in welding. The ECU is inspected as a part of the smog referee visit so you don't want to mess with that. I don't think they open it up but if it's clearly the wrong ECU for the car or there's a random USB port in the casing that's going to be a red flag. There's no way you're going to pass the lab emissions test with the hybrid speed density/alpha-N load sensing that the Link uses. My advice is keep it stock and focus on things like making sure your fuel injectors are cleaned up so they have the right spray pattern and even flow, replace stuff like OEM paper throttle body gaskets with metal gaskets, make sure your turbos aren't leaking oil and your engine doesn't have excessive blowby as well. The less you mess with the car, the less pain there will be for CA registration. You can throw a standalone in there and get it tuned as soon as it's CA registered, as long as you don't end up at the smog referee again nobody is going to be checking to make sure you're running the stock ECU, especially if you're passing the tailpipe test by a large margin.

Yeah, you need a Nistune or standalone to do it but I don't think untuned water injection is very good either. If OP wants to run water injection on the stock ECU, my advice is put a very small nozzle just after the intercooler and only activate when IATs suggest heat soak and only inject pure distilled water. If you inject post-IC you don't want large quantities of liquid water making it to the plenum.

If you run it untuned you're going to be limited in how much water you can inject. If you add methanol you're going to run even richer than the already rich stock map. Nostrum energy is the only company that seems to be working on how to make it work properly but I don't think they're going to make something useful for RBs any time soon. I would just run E85, I figure at low boost with decent IATs you can lean it out some with the RB's prehistoric 8.5 CR, or enrich a bit when IATs spike and get the same benefits as water injection with a lot less pain.

I would pass on pods, those don't do much of anything and have been known to damage engines because they aren't very good at filtering out dust/silt. You really just don't want to run more than ~1 bar boost on the stock ECU. So if you're already there you shouldn't try to de-restrict the exhaust more.

You should talk to DCD, he's running a Haltech Elite 2500 on his car: http://www.speedhunters.com/2018/04/project-gt-r-gets-bigger-turbos/ I will say though, my philosophy regarding tuning is different from his. I think modern MAFs make more sense for this engine and I wouldn't get ID1050x injectors, there are better options out there.

https://www.junauto.co.jp/products/camshaft/rb26.en.html I'm guessing the base circle is 30mm instead of 32mm. I don't know that it's wise though, it's explicitly said that it isn't a bolt-on cam.

HKS cams have always seemed completely bizarre to me when I looked into it. If you get their step 1 VCAM going to their smallest cam means the exhaust duration is higher than the intake. They also limit themselves to 8.7mm lift for seemingly no reason, you can go to 9.1mm lift on the cam without clearancing the head or using a smaller base circle cam.

Want to install an autowatch 573 for me when the time comes?

It's a practicality thing. With an I6 it's not that hard to have a single turbo, it actually reduces the amount of intake piping you have. With a V6 unless you want to do a hot V setup and completely re-engineer the engine + transmission a single turbo would have a ridiculous amount of exhaust piping to get to the turbine, like so: Or you can have two parallel turbos and it looks like this:

Just keep a close eye on the coolant temps, if it spikes over boiling coast to a stop immediately and blast the heater, the Mishimotos are notorious for causing overheating.

Be very careful with those Mishimoto radiators, they're garbage.