QuickSilver said:
^Not sure which 'all' knows what happened, it was either before my time here or I missed it. Did it get expensive?
I have been up front and repeatedly explained that I hydro locked my engine when I ran out of methanol and switched to 100% denatured alcohol. I was attempting to get logs of what was happening to A/F at lower RPM levels. It is impossible to hold our tranny in first & 2nd, even with the paddles. It will shift up, so when it shifted up to 3rd I flipped it back into second, which meant I was spraying at less than 2K. Everything seemed fine, but when I got off the interstate and came to an idle at a stoplight, I got an engine light an a misfire. It went away above 2,500 rpm, but came back after a 10 or more second idle. I thought it was an injector issue. I even did a compression check and found the #1 cyl could only hold 30 lbs when turning over and not starting. Still, it seemed that a DI injector that was stuck open could cause this as they inject directly into the cylinder head. After all, engine seemed to run just as strong when above 2,500 RPM. I scoped the pistons and all looked good from the top. Completely de-modded everything except mufflers and H & R's and cosmetic items - headed to my selling dealer. Two days later they started accusing me of tuning and told me I had 3 damaged pistons and one slightly bent rod. Also told me ECM had been flashed approximately 100 times and the last flash had occurred 12 key turns before they pulled all the ECM data and sent it to Ford. Asked me to come in and see damage.. Also informed me Ford wouldn't pay for it, and that it needed a new (re-mfg) long block kit. We ultimately negotiated a $4,100. price on long block and total with fluids alignment,6% tax etc. cost $8,400.
That happened in early April 2012 at 35,000 mi. I now have 68,000 mi on vehicle and it runs better than ever. Ford dealer mechanic was really good.. personal car - a Volvo Turbo! The middle cyl on firewall side had the slightly bent rod. That cyl and the pass side rear cyl had the ringland fractures ( chunks of missing metal between the two sets of rings). The #6 cyl had ringland cracks but all metal was still there.
A couple weeks before this happened, my Flex was dyno'd on a Dynojet Linksys II ( identical to Livernois dyno and one of about 12 at that time) at Naples Motorsports. I showed 369 hp and 409 lbs Torque. My numbers were achieved at relatively high RPM's. Dyno operator was the one who said the numbers would have been considerably higher if my A/F hadn't been quite rich below 4,000. Above that he said the Torrie tunes couldn't have been better.
The reality of all this was that I caused this trying to fix something that really wasn't an issue on the street or at the strip.
Summarizing, my vehicle was running rich up to around 4K, and then perfect. That's better than running lean, which if one's controller would accidentally cause that, could be more serious than my slightly rich conditions. What I did by lugging my vehicle purposely would never happen in normal driving. Anytime you add devices that increase power, you are making tuning more complex, and adding risks.
If Torrie and I had started logging my denatured alcohol spraying and increased various tuning components till we got the power levels near max, this would never have happened. It was completely my fault.
