Turbo Boost Zero: Conclusion

Well, I got my car back together and everything went pretty much as planned. The turbo does reach full boost now (about 18-24 psi as measured by my VDO boost gauge, known to read about 4 psi high). The first day the car was a little peppier, nothing too noticeable. But after a couple of day, there was a very noticeable difference! I now remember that the air/fuel mapping is adaptive. Since the turbo probably has been having issues for at least a year now, the ECU probably remapped in order to compensate for the lack of boost (in an attempt to maximize power and minimize smoke, with what is available). Over the course of 3-4 days, I noticed the car became really zippy again, and seems to smoke a lot less in general (don't worry, it still has the "anti-tailgating" feature if you stand on it for a few seconds).

So in the end, a 50 cent retaining clip was all that was needed, but because of what it took to get to it, along with other issues I noticed while I was in there, I probably spent close 8 hours working on it. However, it's worth mentioning that I also got around to doing some important things on my list. Most importantly, I finally replaced the glow plugs and harness, which (probably the harness) has/have been throwing an engine code for literally years now. Unless I've forgotten, I'm pretty sure the glow plugs were the original ones the car came with. After I changed them, I cleared the MIL code, and the light has stayed off for weeks now. Easily the first time in 3-4 years.

Hopefully the car will have an easier time starting this winter. Can't wait to find out...

Okay, I take that back.

Comments

Reaper, Linux, and the Behringer X-Air - Complete Studio Solution, Part 1

Introduction and Rationale This is part one of a major effort to document my experiences with recreating my home studio, entirely using Linux. Without getting into too many of the specifics, a few months ago I decided that I was unhappy with Windows' shenanigans - to the point that I was ready to make a serious attempt to leave it behind. For most in this situation, the obvious choice is to switch to Mac OS. With its proven track record, support, and options for multimedia production, it is naturally the first alternative to consider if your goal is to simply use something other than Windows. For me the choice was not so simple. I despise Mac OS and, in general, the goals and philosophies put forth by Apple in an effort to ostensibly provide users with an "easy" working environment. It does not help that I have also failed to find any aspect of the Mac OS UI intuitive, but I realize that this is a subjective matter. With my IT background and user-control* f...

An Alternative Take on AI Doom and Gloom

I've purposely held my tongue until now on commenting about "AI" (or, more specifically as has come to be known, GAN or Generative Adversarial Networks). It seems like it is very in-style to complain about how it has made a real mess of things, it is displacing jobs, the product it creates lacks soul, it's going to get smart and kill us all, etc. etc. But I'm not here to do any of that. Rather I am going to remind everyone of how amazing a phenomenon it is to watch a disruptive technology becoming democratized From the time of its (seeming) introduction to the public at large, around November of 2022, to late 2023, the growth and adoption rate has been nothing short of explosive. It features the fastest adoption rate of any new technology ever, by a broad margin. To give a reference, the adoption rate for AI image and text generation, real-world uses, in just 12 months is comparable to all of that of the another disruptive technology, the World Wide Web, takin...

RANT TIME: Why do replies to a message I sent go to my spam folder?

Despite what one would think/hope, sending a message to a given address does not inherently give Google a high confidence that a reply from this address is expected (and, for example, that it should bypass spam checks). I have confirmed with Google's tech support that there is no way to automatically have this happen. The user can do the following: 1. Add the address to your contacts list in Gmail. 2. Check spam folder for replies, and mark it as "not spam" if something ends up there, which should influence the fate of future replies received. I can also approve an address at the domain level, i.e. if it is a big vendor or similar. I've had to do this with several of our Chinese vendors. I regularly ask engineering and purchasing to give me a list of the supplies we deal with, so I can approve them as a preventative measure. For what it's worth, all of the false positive instances of reply -> spam we have experienced have involved the sender's email server ...

Scamwagon

Search This Blog