New owner blows up car! RANT!

[bigBADbenny]

If you’re reading between the lines regarding the op’s post,
I’m suggesting that without taking the correct approach to the mods,

the car will blow up.

Knowing how to eg read a learning view is a good start.

Just today I met a new owner, 170k car, you’ll know the one, he’s $7k into a stock rebuild already!
And that car was totally stock!
In 10 years I’ve seen it many, many times. I got onto the fundamentals early and no rebuild yet.

I reckon it’s the unicorn out of sunbury probably. All that work and he still has cel codes!

With which I’ll be helping of course! (system too lean).


Yes I reserve the right to redact, edit and move my posts here, at will.
This is for clarity and accuracy, if this gets in the way of your replies, I apologise.
Feel free to quote me, and hold me accountable to what I have written.
I’m already hard at the edits!

[bigBADbenny]

So if you’re a new owner, used Liberty, turbo and h6 models especially, please don’t assume that even if it has no lights on the dash, and drives reasonably well, that the state of tune is ok.

In my experience, sorry no list of examples just yet, this is especially applicable to my08 and postfl 2.5t GT’s.
Its almost as if the stock tune is so emissions focused, plus other engine specific issues, that it’s prone to knocking itself to bits.

So this is another post I hope will save new owners their funds & sanity. :bow:

[BMCracer]

This warning is all good, but when you know your factory-stock H6 is knocking itself to bits ( because the IAM is always never higher than 0.25 ) and you can see it pulling all the timing out ( on BtSsm ) in a vain attempt to save itself, then you read about all the ones that have blown up after being "tuned" by "professionals", what do you do? Seems like you are damned if you do, and damned if you don't. I put half a bottle of NF Octane booster in it once and that improved it, but not all the way, it wanted the full bottle But at $45 a bottle, I can't afford to be putting in a bottle every tank, especially when I run it on 98 anyway!!

[bigBADbenny]

Yeah detune it of course.

You can ask your tuner to tune it the way you want it to be tuned.

The actual story of the car I mentioned above beggars belief.

And it’s not quite resolved yet, but at least I got to intervene.

[Stifull]

Personally I think the issue with tuning is not the fault of the tuner but the fault of the owner who wants to drag every KW possible out of their car whether newish or 200,000klm plus. Maybe not so much in the LIB circle but in the rex world, big bangs on the rollers is not uncommon. Some people just cant understand the simple term "safe tune" .. All our cars a making between 180 and 204 on either 15 or 16 lb.. and a couple of them have been doing that for 10 years + without touching them.. including track days and the drags. We could easily get 220-240 by winding them up to 19-20lb but at what price.. I suspect they wouldn't last 12 months.. Telling the tuner you recon it could easily make 210kwts because bla bla bla .. so they shouldn't complain when it goes bang. Also the state of the car when it turns up for a tune.. Does it have new cold plugs, has it had an engine clean inside and out, has it had upper cylinder and intake manifold cleaning done.. Is the engine in as good a condition as it can possibly be in before they run it out to max revs maybe 40-50 times and holding it there while adjusting things.. In a LOT of cases the answer is "NO".... No wonder the tuners always get you to sign a disclaimer..