Advice Needed: Cracked Block and Piston Head

[Finnegan]

Originally Posted by dc_wright

It's like they're working on it about an hour a month at the glacier like pace this has been moving at.
When (if?) they're finally done I hope it does turn out to have been a first rate rebuild!

Glaciers may move faster.

I'll second the hope it's first class.

[Arsonism]

Thanks guys, they're telling me two weeks out.

[inTgr8r]

^ fingers crossed for you!!!!

[Arsonism]

Just got word that the car has made a maiden voyage as of yesterday. I called today to see how things were going, and they told me it has been completed as of late last week. The rest of it is just testing. The shop owner wants to put 1,000 miles on it or so before he signs off on it and after what happened last time I'm ok with that.

There's some chatter with the UUC Flywheel (like last time) but apparently you can hear it at speeds as well. They're going to play with some fluids that UUC recommends and see if that helps with the noise there.

I'm putting him back in touch with Randy at Epic so that they can talk about the car and the upgrades that have been done to get all the details perfect and hopefully settle on a strong tune again. Everything should be tidied up shortly after.

Things should be wrapped up before the holidays is what we should expect. (fingers crossed). Now one of my greatest fears is an emissions test.

[inTgr8r]

Wonderful to hear Shane!!!!

[Beedub]

yessss!!!

[StickMon]

Hoping you have a very happy Holiday season!!!

[wdb]

w00t!

[longress]

Congrats!!

[Vanne]

Sweet!!!

Fingers still crossed

[Arsonism]

Thanks for all the warm wishes guys, unfortunately I'm not out of the woods yet.

I went to the shop to drop off the original exhaust manifold mounts (the rear ones) as the shop had torn up the ones from DKF, not a big deal just need to reach out and find some new bolts after everything was said and done. I was really excited to just see the car turn over... but that wasn't the case when I got there.

I feel like I'm about to start on a "Clarkson ...However..." here but... unfortunately mine actually follows the trend of this ordeal.

They told me that the motor was pre-detonating or igniting when it cycled (not sure if that's all the right syntax or not). Essentially that this was causing either slight over pressurization or that it was in turn running to lean/rich too hot/etc. They're noticing some of the evidence at the top of the cylinder head which he observed with a pipe camera and showed me a photo of it.

They first wanted to blame it on the headers and the tune, but I can see absolutely no way that the headers would actually cause something like that. I understand these cars are sensitive and they have very specific settings and sensors for each and every situation, but my car was running without a tune and with blown out stock headers (essentially no cats) prior to everything just fine. Secondly, the set of euro headers that are on the car now had been run on the car previously. The tune however had never been run on the car prior to this shop, and it was done directly by Randy Mueller with Epic.

They want to throw a stock set of headers on the car and flash the tune back, but they haven't done that yet. But more importantly they want to blame the tune now instead of the machine shop which they were sticking with up until this point for the damages on the rebuilt motor. It's a shitty thing to do, but I can't entirely tell if they're right or not... In the mean time they're already writing up a bill for a starter and the crank case vent sensor which blew a solenoid and was stuck open (worked fine before the car went down, so I already have a dispute there).

It's not over yet. Definitely not as happy and easy a holiday as I had been wishing for.

What are y'all's thoughts on the pre-detonation scenario? What do you think could be causing it?

Has anyone been in contact with Randy Mueller at Epic anytime recently? Has anyone else had problems with their tunes/software?

I love being taken for a ride, especially when I haven't been in the driver's seat for over a year and a half.

[Westersund]

A bit of a guess, but an incorrectly installed trigger wheel will cause bad timing (ignition). Can't remember, but the crank shaft is new, right?

[Arsonism]

My original crank was bent somewhere between the first motor and first rebuild. This crank is from the donor motor. So new to the car but not new new.

That's a great guess though, I could bring that up to them if the original software provides the same result. I honestly couldn't think of anything else when they were trying to lay all of it on me.


The other tidbit for all of this is they're saying that if the tune was at fault then they shouldn't have warrantied it the first go around... more or less... to try to get me to come out of pocket for more of the repair. They were attempting to have that discussion with me, I shot that down fast on the spot. In the heated state I was in, I was in no mood to discuss it.

[GuidoK]

Originally Posted by Arsonism

What are y'all's thoughts on the pre-detonation scenario? What do you think could be causing it?

I'm just gonna quote myself from 8 months back:

Originally Posted by GuidoK

It's a strange combination of events this. I hope the shop will keep their end of the deal regarding the warranty and can get it fixed.
First thing I'd do is ditch the tune and go for stock. If the car then runs fine you can always install the tune, but on a newly build engine you'd want to be able to diagnose if anything goes wrong. If you have a tune, that adds a huge uncertainty.

Wont be the first time that predetonation/early timing ruins an engine.
Lots of tuners take great risk with advancing the timing imho....

[longress]

Just throwing this out there but how old is your fuel? Is it the same fuel that was in the tank when this nightmare started?

[Beedub]

omg..... these guys honestly are royal piss takers. your a better man tham me because id have given up ages ago. This is beyond stressful.

i think you may need to have a detailed conversation ith your tuners and get their view as i can see these guys really changing tact with you unless you shut down their new path they are travelling down!

[wdb]

Got to go with guidok here. Get that puppy back to stock EVERYTHING pronto. Figure out the rest later.

[Arsonism]

Originally Posted by longress

Just throwing this out there but how old is your fuel? Is it the same fuel that was in the tank when this nightmare started?

I've actually no idea on what fuel is in the car right now. I put a full tank in it as I was driving home because they left me with it empty after test driving it when it was fixed up the first time. Not sure if that fuel is 10 months old or not.

.. yeah that's how long it took them to fix it the second time around.

Originally Posted by Beedub

omg..... these guys honestly are royal piss takers. your a better man tham me because id have given up ages ago. This is beyond stressful.

i think you may need to have a detailed conversation ith your tuners and get their view as i can see these guys really changing tact with you unless you shut down their new path they are travelling down!

I agree bud, I'm at the end of the rope for all of this.

I've already tried to reach out to Randy but I didn't have much luck. They (the shop) said that their site was shutting down or something another but it seemed fully functional when I visited it. I left two voicemails but I haven't heard anything back. I'm curious if email will work better so I'll shoot him something this evening before I call it a night.

Originally Posted by wdb

Got to go with guidok here. Get that puppy back to stock EVERYTHING pronto. Figure out the rest later.

I'm almost on par with that. I really don't want to ditch the jet coated headers... they're really something that I was looking forward to. However it means the difference between the car running and not running then I'll most certainly sacrifice the small gain and mostly noise contribution. I still want them to go through testing with the new headers on there because A) I've already paid for them B) They're already on the car and C) all it should take is flashing the motor and if the issue is still occurring and the lack of the EGT and primary O2 sensors is what's really causing the issues then we can start to rule that out.

I think my main goal is remaining civil about everything here, but I may be shoving out to Africa early next year but won't know until the first week of January... I'm running out of time and the patience to deal with this.

[inTgr8r]

IIRC the headers are Euros?
they are a BWM OE part, no reason to even consider them as an issue.

[NickyC]

Unreal. I in no way condone insurance fraud behavior, but if that were my car.....let's just say I might not be able to miss the nearest lake on the way home with it.

[Arsonism]

Originally Posted by inTgr8r

IIRC the headers are Euros?
they are a BWM OE part, no reason to even consider them as an issue.

Exactly my thoughts on it. And confirmed with new information below.

Originally Posted by NickyC

Unreal. I in no way condone insurance fraud behavior, but if that were my car.....let's just say I might not be able to miss the nearest lake on the way home with it.

I won't speak on these grounds in fear of some paranormal force watching me.


------

Update?!

Yeah so... Real super hard to get in touch with Randy at Epic Motor Sports, considering he called me back the following fucking day. I'm pretty lit right now so this is going to get into some military worthy language, I'll do my best to censor myself and be reasonable but.......

Randy was kind enough to talk me through all of the things that he thought may have gone around with the tune. I also gave him a heads up that the folks from the shop should be in touch with him, considering they hadn't even fucking tried to reach out to him yet. The software that they claimed was "no longer licensed" is actually just an old fucking version of the real bright gentlemen over there hadn't gotten off their lazy asses to figure that out. After speaking with Randy he told me he would never add more than a degree or two on any of his tunes because the car compensates for it, the ECU maps it out across 4 maps and pre-detonation is not something that they ever see with their tunes, and in fact that there hadn't been any timing added to my tune when he was reviewing the file (yeah the dude is organized and still has all my original tune files). I also informed me of a project a long time ago where they kept taking timing away from the motor on another S54 M3 and it wound up being a DME/ECU issue where they just wound up having to buy a whole new unit for the vehicle (hopefully not the case here) and likely isn't related. He asked for some details of the issues and some photos of what happened to the first motor and the second motor, which is reasonable and I'll have to compile that email for him (which is luckily mostly sorted out through this thread).

So what this all boiled down to was the shop didn't bother to call Randy or even attempt to speak with him and figure out what was going wrong. They also tried to blame the rebuild... both this one and the old one on the tune which was wildly inaccurate and then assaulted me with the accusation that I would have to come out of pocket for everything that has occurred because the tuning should (as it would with BMW) void a warranty. At least that's what I'm deriving from their current escapade into this whole sector and flashing their anger towards yet another external source.

Here's my deal, and the bit that I can't chew, if you're going to try to sell me on something like the dumb blonde at a fucking dealership, get you god damn research done and tell me that I'm wrong based on an actual reasonable ground. Because if I go back and do the work and or research that you weren't willing to get off your lazy ass to do, it just tells me that much more about your fucking character and how you're trying to exploit a could have been loyal fucking customer.

End result? I have Randy looking out for their call to aid them in getting the software back up and running and returning everything to stock so that they can figure out what timing issue that they're having and finally move forward on the car again... when that's going to happen? No fucking clue.

[dc_wright]

You are a better man than I! At this point there would have been some kind of incident involving incendiary fuels and their shop if that were my vehicle and they were hosing me like this........