Jump to content
SAU Community

  

266 members have voted

You do not have permission to vote in this poll, or see the poll results. Please sign in or register to vote in this poll.

Recommended Posts

I start mine and let it idle for a couple of minutes if possible.. mainly because it drives like a pig on cold start about 50% of the time. But if i'm rushed I start it, wait 30 seconds then drive. Either way I stay under 3000rpm and don't boost it until it's warm.

It's a waste of time to idle the car up to temperature though.. the prolonged operation at low temperature and low oil pressure wouldn't be good for it. Also, if you idle it then the engine eventually warms up but your transmission is still stone cold so caning off after that will hurt your gearbox/diff.

30seconds idling + driving moderately is the best way to warm up a car IMO.

B/C on idle, the mixtures are rich and are washing the oil off your cylinder chambers, causing more engine wear.

7yphon has the right idea, that is the best way to prolong engine life.

I usually wait until the oil pressure goes up before driving, so it is after 10 seconds or so.

Just drive off, and take it easy. You gearbox and diff need to circulate oil too you know

Thanks I never knew that.

I might stop warming her up for 5-10mins heh I thought I was doing the good thing.

YEah well if i have time i give mine a little bit of time... But otherwise yeah baby her until she is warm... But i spoil my girl - she is getting old - too scared that if i fang her when she is cold or treat her bad she'll die on me... But then again - when her heart dies i can get a new engine cant i???? hmmmmmmm *ponders thoughts of turbos in the sleeper...*

yea fore sure

you should always warm your car up. If its your daily driver let it idle for a minute or so and then drive it off taking it slowly untill the temperature gauge gets off C. If you idle it for more than a minute or so say 5-10 minutes your are wasting time and also causing unnecessary polution.

remember the drivetrain needs to get warm too not just the engine!

I don't let me car warm up as i'd be waking the family / neighbours. I just wait a few seconds for it to gain some oil pressure, and drive off boost & below 3000rpm for the first few minutes of my drive.

However, I don't "baby" like driving fifth gear at 60km/hr, more cruise at 2500rpm or so... wouldn't driving at low revs / high gear under load put lots of stress on the engine and if it's cold, do more damage than good?

yeah i would think so... I was blessed with a long down hill st at my old place, so i used to just cruise down the road and that gave her the warm up she needed... I just get frustrated at ppl that start up straight away and then drive like the car is at op temp.... My flat mate does that (poor old car)...

Yeah everytime without fail. Always warm up until the revs drop a bit, giving the oil a chance to circulate. Don't spend a ludacris time though as idling the car for long periods can be bad(unspent fuel slips past the rings and goes into the sump, decreasing the oils viscousity). 2-3 minutes idle is ok. Then i drive like a granny not revving over 2500rpm, this warms up the gearbox, diff and brakes without putting strain while the oil is cold. When stopping the car i ALWAYS go off boost for the last say 5 minutes of the trip to use air to cool the oils and fluids. Then i idle it for 30 seconds or so. Can't stand people who thrash their car then leave it idling for 10 minutes and think they've made up for the damage.

I always start my car, wait for oil pressure, usually a few seconds, then drive.

I try to keep the revs under 4000 until its up to full operating temp.

But it will warm up quicker by driving it straight away, then just letting it sit there idling.

While its cold sitting there you will cause more damage and wear then getting it up to temp as soon as possible.

Either way, todays oils are very good at all temps. So just start and drive.

Anyone that sat there car and didnt drive it until the temp was up would be a true fruitcake.

Just drive straight off and don't boost or rev too much for the first 5 miuntes!!

If you idle for longer thatn 20 seconds you are:

1. Wasting fuel

2. Increasing pollution

3. Wasting some of your life

4. NOT doing your car any favours.

These are modern cars. They are made to be driven straight off.

CASE CLOSED

However, I don't "baby" like driving fifth gear at 60km/hr, more cruise at 2500rpm or so... wouldn't driving at low revs / high gear under load put lots of stress on the engine and if it's cold, do more damage than good?

I normally give the car a couple of mins at idle after starting her. Then I drive below boost till the water temp is around 75degrees.

Yep tommo, I noticed that the knock level increases if under 2000rpm and in 5th gear than if at higher revs and 4th gear. So I guess it's bad to put the car under any load (even low in the rev range) when it's cold.

Under light load the rings/pistons will tend to sit more central and run up and down the bores more evenly then when the motor is under load as then they will be harder against one side of the bore then the other. (This is why new motors need to be put under good load to bed the rings)

So i guess light to moderate load is more important then revs alone.

I asked my engine builder this question as I run forged pistons etc.

He told me to start it, put the seat belt on etc, this is around 30secs of idling max, then drive it but drive it soft with low rev's but not too low as to make it labour.

In other words, change up at around 2500-3000rpm with a light foot.

Do this until the oil pressure is down, in other words oil temp is up.

Ignore the water temp as oil is not up to operating temp for approx 6-7minutes after water temp reaches operating temp.

The idea is you want as little time as possible running a rich mixture as running rich washes the oil from the bores in turn glazing them up causing the car to have poor ring seal, it also gives the forged pistons less time to slap as it only takes 7minutes of light driving to get everything up to temp.

Simply idling alone will not bring piston temps up enough within 5-10minutes so they don't slap.

It also wastes fuel by letting the car idle. From memory its around half a litre for every 30minutes or was it 1hr idling, one of them. :)

So in short. I idle the car for around 20-30secs then drive lightly.

Waiting for the car to warm up is a waste of time, fuel and engine life.

Yep tommo, I noticed that the knock level increases if under 2000rpm and in 5th gear than if at higher revs and 4th gear. So I guess it's bad to put the car under any load (even low in the rev range) when it's cold.

That will be the ign map, nothing to do with engine vibrations as they are a different frequency.

After getting into the car I spend about 2-3 minutes fiddling with everything so I guess that is more than enough warm up time.

Besides, its pretty much stock so I'll wait till there is some serious gear in there before I take this warming up business for real.

I like one of the previous posts about the Turbo Timer

Go set it for 10 mins and lock the car.

Jump in and set to go!

Got me looking now for one.

Be worth the $120 to be able to have a nicely warmed motor.

Particularly after a night shift when I'm straight out the door and into city traffic and duckin' weavin'

No time for warm ups there!

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



  • Similar Content

  • Latest Posts

    • The other problem was one of those "oh shit we are going to die moments". Basically the high spec Q50s have a full electric steering rack, and the povo ones had a regular hydraulic rack with an electric pump.  So couple of laps into session 5 as I came into turn 2 (big run off now, happily), the dash turned into a christmas tree and the steering became super heavy and I went well off. I assumed it was a tyre failure so limped to the pits, but everything was OK. But....the master warning light was still on so I checked the DTCs and saw – C13E6 “Heat Protection”. Yes, that bloody steering rack computer sitting where the oil cooler should be has its own sensors and error logic, and decided I was using the steering wheel too much. I really appreciated the helpful information in the manual (my bold) POSSIBLE CAUSE • Continuing the overloading steering (Sports driving in the circuit etc,) “DATA MONITOR” >> “C/M TEMPERATURE”. The rise of steering force motor internal temperature caused the protection function to operate. This is not a system malfunction. INSPECTION END So, basically the electric motor in the steering rack got to 150c, and it decided to shut down without warning for my safety. Didn't feel safe. Short term I'll see if I can duct some air to that motor (the engine bay is sealed pretty tight). Long term, depending on how often this happens, I'll look into swapping the povo spec electric/hydraulic rack in. While the rack should be fine the power supply to the pump will be a pain and might be best to deal with it when I add a PDM.
    • And finally, 2 problems I really need to sort.  Firstly as Matt said the auto trans is not happy as it gets hot - I couldn't log the temps but the gauge showed 90o. On the first day I took it out back in Feb, because the coolant was getting hot I never got to any auto trans issues; but on this day by late session 3 and then really clearly in 4 and 5 as it got hotter it just would not shift up. You can hear the issue really clearly at 12:55 and 16:20 on the vid. So the good news is, literally this week Ecutek finally released tuning for the jatco 7 speed. I'll have a chat to Racebox and see what they can do electrically to keep it cooler and to get the gears, if anything. That will likely take some R&D and can only really happen on track as it never gets even warm with road use. I've also picked up some eye wateringly expensive Redline D6 ATF to try, it had the highest viscosity I could find at 100o so we will see if that helps (just waiting for some oil pan gaskets so I can change it properly). If neither of those work I need to remove the coolant/trans interwarmer and the radiator cooler and go to an external cooler....somewhere.....(goodbye washer reservoir?), and if that fails give up on this mad idea and wait for Nissan to release the manual 400R
    • So, what else.... Power. I don't know what it is making because I haven't done a post tune dyno run yet; I will when I get a chance. It was 240rwkw dead stock. Conclusion from the day....it does not need a single kw more until I sort some other stuff. It comes on so hard that I could hear the twin N1 turbos on the R32 crying, and I just can't use what it has around a tight track with the current setup. Brakes. They are perfect. Hit them hard all day and they never felt like having an issue; you can see in the video we were making ground on much lighter cars on better tyres under brakes. They are standard (red sport) calipers, standard size discs in DBA5000 2 piece, Winmax pads and Motul RBF600 fluid, all from Matty at Racebrakes Sydney. Keeping in mind the car is more powerful than my R32 and weighs 1780, he clearly knows his shit. Suspension. This is one of the first areas I need to change. It has electronically controlled dampers from factory, but everything is just way too soft for track work even on the hardest setting (it is nice when hustling on country roads though). In particular it rolls into oversteer mid corner and pitches too much under hard braking so it becomes unstable eg in the turn 1 kink I need to brake early, turn through the kink then brake again so I don't pirouette like an AE86. I need to get some decent shocks with matched springs and sway bars ASAP, even if it is just a v1 setup until I work out a proper race/rally setup later. Tyres. I am running Yoko A052 in 235/45/18 all round, because that was what I could get in approximately the right height on wheels I had in the shed (Rays/Nismo 18x8 off the old Leaf actually!). As track tyres they are pretty poor; I note GTSBoy recently posted a porker comparo video including them where they were about the same as AD09.....that is nothing like a top line track tyre. I'll start getting that sorted but realistically I should get proper sized wheels first (likely 9.5 +38 front and 11 +55 at the rear, so a custom order, and I can't rotate them like the R32), then work out what the best tyre option is. BTW on that, Targa Tas had gone to road tyres instead of semi slicks now so that is a whole other world of choices to sort. Diff. This is the other thing that urgently needs to be addressed. It left massive 1s out of the fish hook all day, even when I was trying not too (you can also hear it reving on the video, and see the RPM rising too fast compared to speed in the data). It has an open diff that Infiniti optimistically called a B-LSD for "Brake Limited Slip Diff". It does good straight line standing start 11s but it is woeful on the track. Nismo seem to make a 2 way for it.
    • Also, I logged some data from the ECU for each session (mostly oil pressures and various temps, but also speed, revs etc, can't believe I forgot accelerator position). The Ecutek data loads nicely to datazap, I got good data from sessions 2, 3 and 4: https://datazap.me/u/duncanhandleyhgeconsultingcomau/250813-wakefield-session-2?log=0&data=7 https://datazap.me/u/duncanhandleyhgeconsultingcomau/250813-wakefield-session-3?log=0&data=6 https://datazap.me/u/duncanhandleyhgeconsultingcomau/250813-wakefield-session-4?log=0&data=6 Each session is cut into 3 files but loaded together, you can change between them in the top left. As the test sessions are mostly about the car, not me, I basically start by checking the oil pressure (good, or at least consistent all day). These have an electrically controlled oil pump which targets 25psi(!) at low load and 50 at high. I'm running a much thicker oil than recommended by nissan (they said 0w20, I'm running 10w40) so its a little higher. The main thing is that it doesn't drop too far, eg in the long left hand fish hook, or under brakes so I know I'm not getting oil surge. Good start. Then Oil and Coolant temp, plus intercooler and intake temps, like this: Keeping in mind ambient was about 5o at session 2, I'd say the oil temp is good. The coolant temp as OK but a big worry for hot days (it was getting to 110 back in Feb when it was 35o) so I need to keep addressing that. The water to air intercooler is working totally backwards where we get 5o air in the intake, squish/warm it in the turbos (unknown temp) then run it through the intercoolers which are say 65o max in this case, then the result is 20o air into the engine......the day was too atypical to draw a conclusion on that I think, in the united states of freedom they do a lot of upsizing the intercooler and heat exchanger cores to get those temps down but they were OK this time. The other interesting (but not concerning) part for me was the turbo speed vs boost graph: I circled an example from the main straight. With the tune boost peaks at around 18psi but it deliberately drops to about 14psi at redline because the turbos are tiny - they choke at high revs and just create more heat than power if you run them hard all the way. But you can also see the turbo speed at the same time; it raises from about 180,000rpm to 210,000rpm which the boost falls....imagine the turbine speed if they held 18psi to redline. The wastegates are electrically controlled so there is a heap of logic about boost target, actual boost, delta etc etc but it all seems to work well
    • hahah when youtube subscribers are faster than my updates here. Yes some vid from the day is up, here:  Note that as with all track day videos it is boring watching after the bloopers at the start.  The off was a genuine surprise to me, I've literally done a thousand laps around the place and I've never had instability there; basically it rolled into oversteer, slipped, gripped and spat me out. On the way off I mowed down one of the instructor's cones and it sat there all day looking at me with accusing cone eyes as I drove past. 1:13:20 was my fastest lap, and it was in the second session, 3rd lap.  It (or me!) got slower throughout the day as it got hotter.      
×
×
  • Create New...