DIY'ers, read this!

[scheides]

When doing stuff on your car yourself, it is *really* easy to do it once and then check it off a list and say that you did it....then never do it again. I have done I think 4 boost leak tests this year. One in Jan, one in march sometime, one about 4 weeks ago, and after tuning my car on my self-installed LC-1 (with much frustration), I decided to get the car on the dyno. Car is scheduled to go on tomorrow @ DB.

Well, today (after picking my my iPhone 3G woot!) the car starts to run like crap on the way home. Won't boost past 20psi on pump, 25psi on my alky map. WTF. A million thoughts race through my mind, but it's the wife's birthday so I let them slide away. I tucked her into bed and got a little QT with the evo before its dyno appointment tomorrow. What did I find? A MASSIVE 2" TEAR in the line connecting my IX BOV to my UICP. GAH! All of the frustrations I'd been having on my alky tune are due to this.

The car would NOT lean out at all, I was running literally 17's on my map to get the car to run high 11's on the wideband. Now that this is fixed, the car jumped to running 13:1 AFR's!!! So not only was I wasting my time, maybe hurting my turbo by overspinning it (stock IX turbo on a VIII), my tune was uber unsafe. So, a few quick rips and I got AFR's dialed back in to where I want to start them on the dyno tomorrow.

Moral: Boost leak test: DIY and DO IT AGAIN! AND AGAIN! Amazingly, stuff can go wrong, even if you didn't touch it!