Update, past year's experiences with the Turbo/Built S2K
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Registered User
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 811
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From: Tampa
Well, since y'all have been bugging me and I think that it's finally time to share my secret, here we go. 
Edit: Cliffs Notes
Bought motor.
Shipped motor to Golden Eagle.
Got screwed by GE, sent motor to Mike Simon.
Put motor in car, made 400 hp at 17 psi, expect well into 500s at 25+ psi.
Head gasket blown.
Sorry for the verbosity, I had a lot to say.
About a year ago, I saw a used block for sale on the boards. I thought that it'd be a great way to get started down the path to a monster. I bought the block and had it shipped to Golden Eagle for work. This was May of 2002. I spoke with Ted there, and was told that the shop was pretty busy and it'd be a few weeks before they had everything cleared out. I told him about what I was doing and was extremely impressed with Ted's knowledge and suggestions. I made a payment of approxmately $3500 dollars.
Three months later, I called Ted to inquire about how everything was going. He seemed surprised, as I believe he felt that I just wanted to store the block there until I had more concrete plans for it. Since I never submitted anything to GE in writing, Ted never moved on anything. I asked to see if we could get everything moving, as I was all set to put the motor in the car, having lined up a local mechanic.
In the following month or two, I called Ted several times to check up on the car. I usually got through about 5-10% of the time, the other times his secretary answered and told me that Ted was in the shop and would return my call. In all of approximately 15-20 calls I received not one call back. During the times that I did get in touch with him, I was given various stories about why the block was not complete, or what stage they were in, or parts they were waiting on. One common "problem" that we dealt with was a delay with the custom pistons from JE. JE was taking their sweet time, and so, being as frustrated as I was, decided to try to move the ball. I called JE and was told that no outstanding orders from GE were in place, and in fact, he had three boxes of s2000 pistons in the shop, if I'd like to buy one they could overnight it. I called Ted to confront him, and he got outright snappy with me. "Don't get smart with me, you little.." I think were his exact words. The day and this phone call in particular (I can even tell you where I was: in a parking lot picking up my girlfriend for lunch) stand out for me because here I am, the curteous customer who had prepaid more than three thousand dollars, getting told to not get any sort of attitude with him. Hopefully some of you can understand my frustration.
Around this time I got in touch with Mike Simon. Mike seemed extremely knowledgable about the F20C, and offered me a fantastic deal on a fully built race motor.
Also around the same time, I decided to leave my local mechanic (more of a DIY type person, with a decided lack of experience with the S2K) for small jobs that had been poorly done. A bent shift knob (tried to put the tranny back into the car without aligning the knob, it was pressing on the underside while he was forcing the tranny up), a crooked steering wheel (he reconnected the knuckle without aligning the wheel first), a damaged panel under the passenger side door (the lift arm was carelessly banged into the car), amongst other personal reasons all led me to decide on having the work done elsewhere.
All of this led me to contact GE and have them ship the motor and whatever parts they had to Mike, who would finish the job. Mike finished in an unbelievable amount of time (literally days) and shipped the motor to Dwight from Stage 6 (originally of Speedcraft). Dwight put the motor in the car and upgraded the fuel system for me amongst other things. Around this time I got my check (after threatened legal action) back from Golden Eagle. The date of the check? February 10th, 2003 (I received it in time to purchase a gift for my mother's birthday, several days later). The total time wasted dealing with Golden Eagle? 9 months.
While I think that the work Golden Eagle did was flawless, hopefully some of you can appreciate the resentment I hold personally towards Ted and GE. Lack of any reasonable amount of good natured business practices force me to share this story in the hopes that some of you may choose a different path. Mike Simon had the remainder of the work on the short block done with Benson, and I cannot stress this enough. If you build your motor, do it with Mike Simon and avoid Golden Eagle at all costs. The money you save (if any at all) will pale in comparison to the potential headache you will deal with.
Ok, so now that I've gotten all that crap out of the way, let's get to the good stuff. Enough of this
and more of this 
. I got the car back about a month ago, stock injectors and ECU, to break in the motor. It was tricky, without a missing link on the map sensor: the car would die anytime it was in positive boost (the stock ECU obviously isn't prepared for boost). I drove it about 500 miles, changed the oil and started to take it apart. I replaced the ECU, upgraded the injectors, installed a new map sensor and boost controller, all myself. I was pretty pleased. For a rough idea of what I went through:
https://www.s2ki.com/forums/showthread.php?...threadid=124653
I got the AEM EMS running pretty well. Josh @ AEM has been a fantastic support, and there's just too much to go into here that I've dealt with getting the EMS to work with a turbo S2K. If anyone has any questions or anything they want to know about the EMS, I'd be more than happy to share info. My only request is that you post it as a general question and PM me the link (instead of just PMing me). I get several of the same questions and it becomes harder to remember everything when I'm doing it 3 times a day. The fuel maps and ignition maps though absolutely must be tuned on a dyno, preferably one with a load bearing option. Which brings me to a few days ago.
I brought my car to a shop here in Sarasota called Fast Forward Motorwerks and was absolutely blown away. Typically in the car performance world, you have people who are interested in cars first and interested in business second. What ends up happening is you have a shop that's (to varying degrees) unprofessional or sloppy. This is the first shop I've been to that I've been absolutely stunned at what they do. The little things about a shop really make a difference. Laying a towel over the side just so the vacuum lines running to the dyno wouldn't brush against the paint of the car.. All of the tools and utilities neatly organized and hung on the wall. A professional bunch of guys who really continued to impress me. They had 2 Porsches in the shop, one of which was a fully built motec system, a car that runs 9s (I believe). There was a nice black Ferrari under a cover nearby. I really can't say enough good things about the shop.
The dyno is a high-tech piece of equipment that can actually measure your boost levels, rpms, wideband AFRs, etc, and plot it on the graph. Maybe some of you have had the dynojet experience where the bottom has MPH or you can't quite tell where the boost kicks in ("Did the boost come in at about 4500? err.. I think so?"). The software for this particular kind of dyno (I've forgotten the name of it) lets you plot anything in real time while comparing it to any number of previous graphs. It's kind of hard to explain, you'll see from my dynos (as soon as I get them scanned) what I'm talking about.. It's amazing, and when we did our timing tuning it was absolutely invaluable. In my opinion, there is NO other way to tune a car, it's just a waste of time.
Anyway, sorry, off my soapbox. We dynoed the car (close to 50 pulls, some for fuel, some for ignition tuning, some for boost checks) and got all of the maps and timing up to 17 psi. As we got the base maps setup (and a good VTEC setup), we started rasing the boost, from 14 to 17, one psi at a time. From what I understand, a good sign of effeciency in the head is responsiveness to timing and rich/lean mixtures. The head (that Mike Simon did) responded VERY well. 1 degree of timing yielded 10-15 horsepower. Just a little bit of AFR yielded similar results. Raising the boost by 1 psi at a time yielded about 15 horsepower to the wheels. The end result? 400 hp to the wheels at 17 psi. Dyno-estimated (apparently usually very close to stock specifications) hp of 513. We were planning on taking it up to about 20 psi (as that is going to be my pump gas target), and estimating about 430-450 horse to the wheels on pump gas, and well into the 500s on race fuel.
We were having some strange issues with the static fuel pressure, however, and we think that it may be either the AEM FPR, the 2nd fuel pump (which is currently setup to come on while under boost), or a small return line. We're going to change this around a little bit, either going to one big fuel pump, or both of the existing pumps wired together (to be on all the time). Tuning with static fuel pressure jumping around is difficult and not necessarily reliable (you lean out the computer when the fuel pressure jumps up to give you the same amount of fuel.. for whatever reason, if the pressure doesn't jump up once, you've got a tremendously lean condition, a veritable time bomb on a short fuse).
I drove it home because it was getting late, 8 or 9 hours of straight tuning (50 pulls!). On the way home, white smoke started flowing out the butt. The car sounded sickly when I turned it over, so I backed off immediately, and checked the battery voltage (EMS was great in diagnosing here). It was fine, and so I pulled the plugs at a gas station and my fears were confirmed. The number 2 and 3 cylinders were leaking, and water was on the plugs. I had it towed to the shop (at 2 in the morning), called Joe (the mechanic there) and went home. At 9 in the morning, I called them intending to leave a message, and being impressed yet again, they had already pulled it apart and verified that it was a head gasket leak.
We're pulling it apart right now just to check out the internals and put it back together. The unfortunate thing is that if the head or block has any warpage, I may need to ship the block out to be re-milled, but we're keeping our fingers crossed that it was simply a gasket or o-ring failure, and no internals are damaged. The compression test pushed water out of the radiator which indicated that the pistons might be sealing properly still (no holes in the pistons). The engine should be taken apart and if everything goes well, put back together and be back on the dyno in a couple weeks.
Mike Simon has been really helpful over the phone, and the guys at Fast Forward Motorwerks have also been extremely helpful.. I have some pictures of the car, the dynos, and the shop I wanted to post but I left my camera in the car, so they'll have to wait a couple days.
I just have to say thanks in particular to Pappy (Nick), as he's helped me out ENORMOUSLY in all kinds of ways. Red Blur, too. I also have to thank cjb80 for answering questions and helping me along with the process. cjb knows his stuff and knows how the AEM works, and I stand behind him 100%. Also, naturally, thanks to people who've helped me out with random crap, Wes, xviper, etc. Without s2ki, I couldn't have gotten as far as I have so far. As always, I am more than happy to answer questions you guys might have about the process, and hopefully better than before, I'll do my best to keep y'all informed of the progress. We're almost there!
ChrisD
Edit: Cliffs Notes
Bought motor.
Shipped motor to Golden Eagle.
Got screwed by GE, sent motor to Mike Simon.
Put motor in car, made 400 hp at 17 psi, expect well into 500s at 25+ psi.
Head gasket blown.
Sorry for the verbosity, I had a lot to say.
About a year ago, I saw a used block for sale on the boards. I thought that it'd be a great way to get started down the path to a monster. I bought the block and had it shipped to Golden Eagle for work. This was May of 2002. I spoke with Ted there, and was told that the shop was pretty busy and it'd be a few weeks before they had everything cleared out. I told him about what I was doing and was extremely impressed with Ted's knowledge and suggestions. I made a payment of approxmately $3500 dollars.
Three months later, I called Ted to inquire about how everything was going. He seemed surprised, as I believe he felt that I just wanted to store the block there until I had more concrete plans for it. Since I never submitted anything to GE in writing, Ted never moved on anything. I asked to see if we could get everything moving, as I was all set to put the motor in the car, having lined up a local mechanic.
In the following month or two, I called Ted several times to check up on the car. I usually got through about 5-10% of the time, the other times his secretary answered and told me that Ted was in the shop and would return my call. In all of approximately 15-20 calls I received not one call back. During the times that I did get in touch with him, I was given various stories about why the block was not complete, or what stage they were in, or parts they were waiting on. One common "problem" that we dealt with was a delay with the custom pistons from JE. JE was taking their sweet time, and so, being as frustrated as I was, decided to try to move the ball. I called JE and was told that no outstanding orders from GE were in place, and in fact, he had three boxes of s2000 pistons in the shop, if I'd like to buy one they could overnight it. I called Ted to confront him, and he got outright snappy with me. "Don't get smart with me, you little.." I think were his exact words. The day and this phone call in particular (I can even tell you where I was: in a parking lot picking up my girlfriend for lunch) stand out for me because here I am, the curteous customer who had prepaid more than three thousand dollars, getting told to not get any sort of attitude with him. Hopefully some of you can understand my frustration.
Around this time I got in touch with Mike Simon. Mike seemed extremely knowledgable about the F20C, and offered me a fantastic deal on a fully built race motor.
Also around the same time, I decided to leave my local mechanic (more of a DIY type person, with a decided lack of experience with the S2K) for small jobs that had been poorly done. A bent shift knob (tried to put the tranny back into the car without aligning the knob, it was pressing on the underside while he was forcing the tranny up), a crooked steering wheel (he reconnected the knuckle without aligning the wheel first), a damaged panel under the passenger side door (the lift arm was carelessly banged into the car), amongst other personal reasons all led me to decide on having the work done elsewhere.
All of this led me to contact GE and have them ship the motor and whatever parts they had to Mike, who would finish the job. Mike finished in an unbelievable amount of time (literally days) and shipped the motor to Dwight from Stage 6 (originally of Speedcraft). Dwight put the motor in the car and upgraded the fuel system for me amongst other things. Around this time I got my check (after threatened legal action) back from Golden Eagle. The date of the check? February 10th, 2003 (I received it in time to purchase a gift for my mother's birthday, several days later). The total time wasted dealing with Golden Eagle? 9 months.
While I think that the work Golden Eagle did was flawless, hopefully some of you can appreciate the resentment I hold personally towards Ted and GE. Lack of any reasonable amount of good natured business practices force me to share this story in the hopes that some of you may choose a different path. Mike Simon had the remainder of the work on the short block done with Benson, and I cannot stress this enough. If you build your motor, do it with Mike Simon and avoid Golden Eagle at all costs. The money you save (if any at all) will pale in comparison to the potential headache you will deal with.
Ok, so now that I've gotten all that crap out of the way, let's get to the good stuff. Enough of this
and more of this . I got the car back about a month ago, stock injectors and ECU, to break in the motor. It was tricky, without a missing link on the map sensor: the car would die anytime it was in positive boost (the stock ECU obviously isn't prepared for boost). I drove it about 500 miles, changed the oil and started to take it apart. I replaced the ECU, upgraded the injectors, installed a new map sensor and boost controller, all myself. I was pretty pleased. For a rough idea of what I went through:https://www.s2ki.com/forums/showthread.php?...threadid=124653
I got the AEM EMS running pretty well. Josh @ AEM has been a fantastic support, and there's just too much to go into here that I've dealt with getting the EMS to work with a turbo S2K. If anyone has any questions or anything they want to know about the EMS, I'd be more than happy to share info. My only request is that you post it as a general question and PM me the link (instead of just PMing me). I get several of the same questions and it becomes harder to remember everything when I'm doing it 3 times a day.
The fuel maps and ignition maps though absolutely must be tuned on a dyno, preferably one with a load bearing option. Which brings me to a few days ago.I brought my car to a shop here in Sarasota called Fast Forward Motorwerks and was absolutely blown away. Typically in the car performance world, you have people who are interested in cars first and interested in business second. What ends up happening is you have a shop that's (to varying degrees) unprofessional or sloppy. This is the first shop I've been to that I've been absolutely stunned at what they do. The little things about a shop really make a difference. Laying a towel over the side just so the vacuum lines running to the dyno wouldn't brush against the paint of the car.. All of the tools and utilities neatly organized and hung on the wall. A professional bunch of guys who really continued to impress me. They had 2 Porsches in the shop, one of which was a fully built motec system, a car that runs 9s (I believe). There was a nice black Ferrari under a cover nearby. I really can't say enough good things about the shop.
The dyno is a high-tech piece of equipment that can actually measure your boost levels, rpms, wideband AFRs, etc, and plot it on the graph. Maybe some of you have had the dynojet experience where the bottom has MPH or you can't quite tell where the boost kicks in ("Did the boost come in at about 4500? err.. I think so?"). The software for this particular kind of dyno (I've forgotten the name of it) lets you plot anything in real time while comparing it to any number of previous graphs. It's kind of hard to explain, you'll see from my dynos (as soon as I get them scanned) what I'm talking about.. It's amazing, and when we did our timing tuning it was absolutely invaluable. In my opinion, there is NO other way to tune a car, it's just a waste of time.
Anyway, sorry, off my soapbox. We dynoed the car (close to 50 pulls, some for fuel, some for ignition tuning, some for boost checks) and got all of the maps and timing up to 17 psi. As we got the base maps setup (and a good VTEC setup), we started rasing the boost, from 14 to 17, one psi at a time. From what I understand, a good sign of effeciency in the head is responsiveness to timing and rich/lean mixtures. The head (that Mike Simon did) responded VERY well. 1 degree of timing yielded 10-15 horsepower. Just a little bit of AFR yielded similar results. Raising the boost by 1 psi at a time yielded about 15 horsepower to the wheels. The end result? 400 hp to the wheels at 17 psi. Dyno-estimated (apparently usually very close to stock specifications) hp of 513. We were planning on taking it up to about 20 psi (as that is going to be my pump gas target), and estimating about 430-450 horse to the wheels on pump gas, and well into the 500s on race fuel.
We were having some strange issues with the static fuel pressure, however, and we think that it may be either the AEM FPR, the 2nd fuel pump (which is currently setup to come on while under boost), or a small return line. We're going to change this around a little bit, either going to one big fuel pump, or both of the existing pumps wired together (to be on all the time). Tuning with static fuel pressure jumping around is difficult and not necessarily reliable (you lean out the computer when the fuel pressure jumps up to give you the same amount of fuel.. for whatever reason, if the pressure doesn't jump up once, you've got a tremendously lean condition, a veritable time bomb on a short fuse).
I drove it home because it was getting late, 8 or 9 hours of straight tuning (50 pulls!). On the way home, white smoke started flowing out the butt. The car sounded sickly when I turned it over, so I backed off immediately, and checked the battery voltage (EMS was great in diagnosing here). It was fine, and so I pulled the plugs at a gas station and my fears were confirmed. The number 2 and 3 cylinders were leaking, and water was on the plugs. I had it towed to the shop (at 2 in the morning), called Joe (the mechanic there) and went home. At 9 in the morning, I called them intending to leave a message, and being impressed yet again, they had already pulled it apart and verified that it was a head gasket leak.
We're pulling it apart right now just to check out the internals and put it back together. The unfortunate thing is that if the head or block has any warpage, I may need to ship the block out to be re-milled, but we're keeping our fingers crossed that it was simply a gasket or o-ring failure, and no internals are damaged. The compression test pushed water out of the radiator which indicated that the pistons might be sealing properly still (no holes in the pistons). The engine should be taken apart and if everything goes well, put back together and be back on the dyno in a couple weeks.
Mike Simon has been really helpful over the phone, and the guys at Fast Forward Motorwerks have also been extremely helpful.. I have some pictures of the car, the dynos, and the shop I wanted to post but I left my camera in the car, so they'll have to wait a couple days.
I just have to say thanks in particular to Pappy (Nick), as he's helped me out ENORMOUSLY in all kinds of ways. Red Blur, too.
I also have to thank cjb80 for answering questions and helping me along with the process. cjb knows his stuff and knows how the AEM works, and I stand behind him 100%. Also, naturally, thanks to people who've helped me out with random crap, Wes, xviper, etc. Without s2ki, I couldn't have gotten as far as I have so far. As always, I am more than happy to answer questions you guys might have about the process, and hopefully better than before, I'll do my best to keep y'all informed of the progress. We're almost there! ChrisD
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Joined: Oct 2000
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From: Tampa
A project like this is always an adventure, if not because of the money involved, but because of the trailblazing that sometimes need to be done, and the inevitable meeting of a few indians along the way.
