Took the plunge and bought an autobahn 88 fmic from FlatFour which I've fitted to my 97UK. Couple of things are bugging me which hopefully somebody may be able to help on...

1st issue I have is with the quality of the pipework. The welds around the core feedpipe elbows extend about 5mm into the bores but even worse, the DV feedpipe sticks about 20mm inside the intake feed! Am I being a bit picky here or is it worth while cutting the DV pipe flush with the inside of the main feedpipe, and maybe grinding down the internal welds?

2nd thing I've noticed is a 'muffled whistle/wheezing' noise coming from the intake/turbo area when I get to above 0.5bar. All my connections seem ok but I've got a set of mikalors on the way just in case. Just not sure if I've got a leak or if that's what a TD04+FMIC sounds like. I've retained the oe recirc DV btw but the connecting hose looks a tad crumpled, - been pricing-up a samco to sort that in the near future.

Spool-up is worse (compared to the oe tmic) up to 3000rpm, after that both set-ups have similar boost response except that knock activity has dropped right off , even after heat soaks.
I used to have the odd 'big-det' event (PFC 60+) with the tmic which appear to have been eliminated but if i'm now suffering from 'excessive' pressure-drops in the pipework then I'd like to sort those out before I start splashing out on supporting mods for 320bhp+.

Any advice/comments would be most welcome...

 

1) Improving the flow on the pipe work is a good thing, but i am not sure you will notice any real differece on your set up.

2) There will be a little extra noise with the FMIC


3) spool up will genrally be the same, it just takes a little longer for the air to reach the inelt manifold which results in a little more lag, ultimatly on higher revs the power will increase. The knock will be reduced by the lower charge tems. assuming the intercooler pipes are fitted properly then ideally you need to have the car mapped.

 

Thanks for your comments, - i've replaced the jubilees with some decent mikalors and in the process found that the DV manifold signal had popped off which I think was the root cause of the 'wheezing' sound I was getting. Took some boost response recordings and am much happier with the cars performance now. AFR's look sensible again and it's responding nicely to spark advance at the higher load sites but I think the limiting factor now is the TD04, which is really suffering from surge at 1.25bar from 4000rpm+. 1bar feels ok so I'll leave it at that until I scrape up enough funds for an Andy F hybrid.