Hey Fellas

Driving my S the other day I started hearing some clicking/chattering/ticking coming from under the hood when at full throttle between 4000-5000 RPM. It was more noticeable in the higher gears.

I was worried that it was the head, but I've been babying the hell out of the motor because I'm waiting for a re-tune at Church Automotove. So I took my car into my mechanic (Tony Fuchs) and he said that driving the car he heard what I was referring to but didn't think it was the head. He removed the blower belt and now the noise is gone.

I'll be trying to contact Vortech but their customer service is horrible, so I don't know if that will bear any fruit.

Has anybody had a problem with blower chatter before? What did you do to remedy the situation? Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Best thing would have been to use a mechanic's stethoscope to pinpoint the noise. Removing the belt may have eliminated the blower, but it could have also eliminated the tensioner pulley and the crank pulley.

 

Thank you for the reply. I will share your thoughts with my mechanic although I'm not sure if we'll be able to hear anything using a stethoscope while the car is stationary because the noise only occurs while driving under load.

Maybe I need to get it onto a dyno to see what where the noise is coming from with a stethoscope.

 

Could be detonation, how loud is the noise?

 

In my situation it was a mild case, if there is such a thing, of detonation near redline. It sounded like faint ticking or pins dropping on glass. My remedy was to ditch the FMU and black box and go with EMS.

I just re-read your post and saw you have EMS. You could run some data logs and see what your timing/fuel/af ratios are.

 

I just installed my vortech kit and having the same problem from the 1st start-up. The chattering seems to be coming from inside the actual blower, like the fins are bouncing of the housing around them. I tried loosening the belt assuming I may have tightened the tension too much, but still having the same problem. Also my motor isn't running smoothly (mild jitters) because I'm running bigger injectors with the stock ECU for the time being just to get the car started and do a final check on the installation to check for leaks, etc. until I find a proper basemap for my aem ems. I will be calling vortech tomorrow and hopefully once connected, I can get some answers to the problem. Goodluck

 

Thanks for the feedback Fellas.

I drove the car without the blower belt and heard no noise. My mechanic thinks that it could be a pulley, so now I need to figure out how to fix the pulley.

I love the power of the blower, but up to this point the reliability has not been what I expected. This may be due to the fact that my car has 100K+ miles on it and the car, the blower, and the EMS box were all bought used.

I'm thinking about pulling the blower off, having it fixed, and selling it. It's been fun but I really need reliable transportation as I commute about 350 miles a week.

Time to try to get ahold of Vortech...