My MS6 BNR Stage 3 Install

[qkrthnu2]

2006 Mazdaspeed 6 GT. ~130,000 miles.
Bought it in 2007 with ~25,000 miles.
Prior to this the only mod to the car was a Corksport SRI/TIP, which has been on for several years.

Stock K04 was giving up the ghost, high oil consumption, big cloud of black/brown smoke at or near WOT, oil visible at compressor outlet.

I tested the compression in March after oil consumption increased.
Dry Compression test results:
Cyl 1 - 185
Cyl 2 - 182
Cyl 3 - 183
Cyl 4 - 190
Not bad considering ~130k miles. That made replacing the turbo a much easier decision.

BNR S3 was backordered, finally delivered a couple weeks ago.
Here's my goodies:



BNR Stage 3 Turbo
3" Catless Downpipe (Circuit Werks - Ebay)
Corksport HPFP internals
Accessport V3
AWR Rear Motor Mount
Kozmic Motorsports Primary & Secondary EGR Delete
DIY Boost Tubes silicone pieces and t-bolt clamps

Proof, so it counts:

Start of the swap.

Yeah, it's dirty/rusty....100+miles/day in Cincinnati weather will do that.

Stock K04 vomiting oil:


EGR System.....yeah, that's in my way for sure:


Much better:


Swapping out the HPFP internals:


Lower half of DP removed...that was easy.


Upper half, not so easy.
Removed lower and passenger side motor mounts.


I always like when I get to use my cheapo engine hoist, it makes me feel like I know what I'm doing.


This thing was still a beast to get out.


Finally decided to take off the cowl AFTER I got the upper half of the DP out (only after fighting with it for a couple hours). Removing the DP would have been SOOOOOoooooooo much easier with that out.


Hey, while I have the cowl off I may as well freshen things up a bit.


Those oil drain bolts are a huge PITA! The MS3 guys have it so easy.


Piece of smoking garbage:


Old vs new:


Shiny new BNR S3:


I like the logo'd nut locking plates:




I really wish I would have taken a before pic of the DP flange, there was about an 1/8" step between the turbine flange and the V-band flange. Burned through 4 grinding stones with my Dremel and then it looked much better.


New BNR S3 Turbo and M2 type DP installed. Coated the gaskets in copper RTV, love that stuff.


I was kind of worried about the cheap V-band flange that came with the DP being a problem, but it worked great. I think a lot of people just over-tighten them. It really doesn't need to be super tight to seal. Again, I coated the little flat round gasket in copper RTV and then tightened it down until it looked like it was pulled together enough not to leak. I probably could have tightened it 20 more turns but it most like would have snapped the bolt. Here's a closer pic to give you an idea of how tight it is.


Put the AWR rear mount in place. <sarcasm>That was fun to line back up.</sarcasm>


DP connected to factory cat-back:


All done. AP Tuning time.

[m4tic]

good stuff man... pending compression test i'm debating selling my car or buying another bnr to slap on (recently sold my new s3). I'm at 145k so you give me hope haha.

[TiGraySpeed6]

Wow, pretty nifty for your first post! You'll love the car all over again once you get it tuned up for the new toys!

And I know you're happy with it now, but you might as well start keeping an eye out for a good deal on a Vibrant 1491C vband clamp...

[Bulgsta]

Good job!
I would of taken out the exhaust mani though. Would of made everything a breeze.
Those small bolts that connect the oil return line and the turbo are a bitch with the transfer case in the way. Especially when you have to align a gasket with it too.

did you end up starting the car up?

[ItsNox]

Now thats what I call a first post!! Keep us updated on the progress.

[Cevaes_64]

Good Deal Man, How long did it took the whole process? im about to do the same here

[Mazdazilla6]

Welcome to the ms6 bnr club!

When I had my ebay downpipe *shudders* I never used the gasket in the vband since vbands aren't supposed to use gaskets; my clamp didn't even fit with the gasket in place. Anyway happy to see it worked out for you.

Also your car is amazingly clean for 130k, especially for living up here in the North. I'm at 134k and I could only dream of mine having practically no rust.

[dale_gribble]

All of that oxidation on the aluminum makes me lol. You guys should see a west coast car. They basically still look like they did from the showroom.

The stock TMIC and small intake will be choke points for the power the BNR is capable of. I am interested to see what kind of power your car makes with that configuration if that's how you are keeping it.

What are your power/tuning goals here? Obviously you are going to need to self tune/tune to get the BNR dialed. The BNR isn't a plug and play upgrade. I hope you aren't going to try and run off of OTS maps.

[SamiChicago]

Very nice! I can't wait to install my BNR S3

[qkrthnu2]

Well, I wish I had a good update, but the universe decided to take a big stinky dump on me. I actually submitted this initial post after bad things happened because it was somewhat therapeutic.

This build was completed just over a week ago. I didn't work on it everyday, but it took 5 days to complete. Lots of cussing and searching the boards when I ran into snags.

There were a couple trips to the hardware store for various 8mm & 14mm stuff in hopes of making my life easier, most of which ended up being useless. I pretty much never return a tool once I've bought it though, they'll probably come in handy some day.

I spent some time on the phone with Corksport support making sure I wasn't about to break stuff. I watched their install video and it made it look the stock HPFP internals just fell apart like good rib meat falls off the bone, but it was more like prying a crack rock from a junkies hand. And no way in hell was that tappet going to seat down into the spring retainer just by tapping it with the handle of a screwdriver. I've never been so gentle with a sledge hammer though, lol.

All in all it wasn't too bad of a job. If I would have taken out the cowl from the beginning and had all the tools I needed then I probably could have finished everything in one long day. Taking the exhaust manifold off would certainly have made things easier, but those bolts are unbelievably rusty. Every time I looked at them all I could hear in my head was "Squeeeeaaallllll SNAP", so I was avoiding those like the plague.

Everything started out good. Took my MAF sensor out and cleaned it with a couple shots of electronics cleaner before trying to start the car.

I started with the OTS Stage2+SF+TIH 93 v231 as a base map with the suggested starting MAF values for the Corksport SRI and the Wastegate Duty Cycle table set to all zeros so that I would just get spring pressure.

It started and stalled a couple times even after priming it several times. I'm guessing since the HPFP is mechanical that priming the low pressure pump doesn't really do much, so that's not too surprising. Finally I gave it just a enough throttle after starting to hold it at about 2K RPMs and then gently backed off, it held idle just fine then. Since the car was backed into the garage and our living room shares a wall with the garage my wife got a really good demonstration of how much louder the car was going to be with the new downpipe. She said the doors on the fireplace were rattling like crazy.

It was showing +25% STFT at idle.

All the smoke from the new parts freaked me out. It was so much white smoke I thought for sure I was going to see the turbo spewing coolant but nothing was leaking, so once it was up to operating temp for a while I shut it down.

Went back into AccessTuner and added +20% to the whole MAF table and then the next day I stated MAF tuning.

Removed the EGR codes.
Increased the Knock Retard Active to 7000 RPM.

LTFT was looking good. I was shifting around the breakpoints up/down after each map revision to tighten everything up.

Did some WOT runs which looked really good, 11.6-11.76AFRs and only a 0.35 knock count every once in a while.

Spring pressure on the BNR S3 was opening the wastegate just below 10PSI.

The car felt great, ran smooth and just had a much healthier feel to it than it did with the dying stock turbo.

I was ready to start adding some boost. Added 10% to the WG DC table and took it out, still saw spring pressure. Tried 25%, same thing. Did some searching, found out that the stock turbo had a restrictor pill so I needed to add something in there to reduce the volume of air seen by the wastegate and stock boost control solenoid.

The next day was a Monday. Went to Home Depot during my lunch break from work and picked up a some 0.035 welding tips. I was planning on installing the welding tip later that night and super excited to finally get to turn up the boost.

Left work, picked up my wife from work (we carpool) and headed home. My commute is ~40 miles or so. The car has been running better than it has in years.

A little over a mile from home I turned left from a stop light and after a few hundred yards at ~20% pedal position the car started running really rough like it was missing and I was seeing high knock values on the AP. I hit the button on the AP to start logging. It settled down after a few seconds, but still didn't feel quite right. It wasn't knocking anymore but it still felt like there was a slight miss.

Pulled into the garage and it seemed to be idling fine. I shut it down and went in to look at the log. I had planned on making some more minor MAF corrections anyway since I had just driven ~80 miles.

Looking at the log, even though I also know part throttle knock isn't necessary damaging, I know that it didn't feel good at all and normally you can't feel part throttle knock.

I figured I had to have a bad coil or something.

Decided I would pull the plugs, take a look at everything and do another compression check just for good measure.

Took off the intercooler and pulled the coils and this is what I found.....



Not sure how well you can see that, but there's liquid in the spark plug well. All four were like that. I was immediately thinking that the head gasket blew.

I pulled the liquid out with a hand powered vacuum pump and caught a good portion in a reservoir (vacuum pump was leaking so a lot went all over me).

Smelled rank, but didn't smell like antifreeze. Then I remembered how the Mazda coolant is really dark green, so I doubted this was coolant.

Then I remembered that I had one of those little antifreeze testers to determine the mix ratio, it was still unopened at the bottom of my cabinet in the garage. Opened it up, tested it on the actual coolant in the radiator, then tested it on water from my tap, and finally tested it on the contents of what I pulled from the spark plug wells. It was indeed plain water.

After pulling as much of the water out from around the plugs I put a box fan on top of the motor to dry it out as much as possible before pulling the plugs.

Here's what the coils and plugs looked like when I pulled them out:



Not sure exactly what all the white film is, but it looks like some combination of hard water remnants and aluminum oxidation. I'm no chemist though so I really don't know for sure.

Here's the only explanation I can come up with as to how the water got in there. Also, keep in mind that this was after driving on the highway for over an hour, so there had to have been A LOT MORE water in there when I left work.

There was a brief torrential downpour that afternoon while I was working. My car was parked on a fairly steep incline, with the front end being on the high side.

The only path for water to get in is through the intercooler duct which would then dump right on the intercooler and run straight down onto the valve cover. There's a tiny ass drain hole in the valley for the spark plug wells, but given enough water that would easily be overwhelmed and the water only has to fill up 1/4" or so before it would start running into the spark plug wells.

I'm thinking that the spark plug wells were completely full when I left work, and then it started acting up once enough of the water had evaporated that the tops of the plugs were at the water line and it probably looked like Marty McFly was about to run into the clock tower. Seeing as both Aluminum and dirty water are pretty damn good conductors, I'm thinking that one plug was likely able to spark more than one cylinder occasionally.

To bring a long sad story to an end. Compression now reads:
Cyl 4 - 50
Cyl 3 - 60
Cyl 2 - 70
Cyl 1 - 150
Wet or dry, didn't matter.

I tried to do a leak-down test, but my damn leak-down tester is leaking at the regulator on the input side. I'm able to accurately measure leak differential on the two gauges, but I can't track anything down because I can't hear anything leaking over the tester leak. Regardless, Cyl 4 is leaking at about 80%, the other three were about 90-95% leak.

I'm guessing either cross firing through the water/valve-cover led to massive pre-ignition, or the VVT was fubar'd trying to keep up with phantom knock from all the erratic crackling and the pistons petted the valves like Lenny's puppy.

I'm taking some small amount of solace in that fact that it wasn't a Zoom Zoom Boom, although that would have been a lot more fun. I'm sad that I didn't even get to crank the boost to eleven.....let alone a realistic target.

Not sure what the plan is for the car yet. I'll have to wait and see what the insurance company says.

If you wish to get a glimpse of the last two minutes my motor drew breath I've attached the final log (datalog33), along with a WOT pull from the day before (datalog29).

[Code Monkey]

Meh, get new spark plugs and coils and see how the car feels. My pig is still going strong after having spark plugs submerged in water for 5 weeks.

[cappspeed89]

Bro, I feel for you. That is a rough story. So should I be worried about my compression being around 160 on all four cylinders?

[qkrthnu2]

Out with the old:


Tearing it apart and making a big mess of my garage:


138,000 miles worth of clutch disc dust:


Unpacking my remanufactured engine:


New Water Pump, Idler Pulley, Tensioner, Thermostat/housing, PERM dual PCV plate, new OEM Clutch kit:


Cleaned up the bell housing a bit, installed the new throw-out bearing and greased it up really good:


Mating the transmission back up to the engine was a bit challenging. I ended up buying a transmission jack:


CPE SAFEseal injector seals:


IN WITH THE NEW!!!



It's running. Have a small oil drip in a corner of the oil pan, so I'll probably have to drop that during the first oil change to redo the silicone.

WGDC table is zeroed out. I'm going to be working on tightening up the MAF scaling while breaking in the new engine.

[UnknownSuperhero]

Did you/are you going to do a teardown of the old engine to see what happened?

[spals]

Did you reuse your stock flywheel?

[BlackFlag]

Originally Posted by UnknownSuperhero Did you/are you going to do a teardown of the old engine to see what happened?

Interested as well....


Congrats dude!

[qkrthnu2]

Originally Posted by spals Did you reuse your stock flywheel?

Yeah I reused the flywheel. Looked ok, movement on the dual surface seemed to be within spec and I didn't want to shell out almost a grand for a new one.

[acemanz]

The second set of compression ratios made me all..

But the new engine made me all..

[qkrthnu2]

Originally Posted by UnknownSuperhero Did you/are you going to do a teardown of the old engine to see what happened?

I'm sending the old engine back for the core charge. There wasn't any metal in the oil and the backside of all the valves looked OK, so I'm thinking it must have been the rings.

Here's my theory:

There was a lot of water that poured in from the intercooler inlet and overran the small drain hole in the valve cover and spilled into the spark plug wells.

Cyl 2 & 3 have a shared sparkplug well area.


The dirty water (i.e. conductive) would have made it fairly easy for spark energy to travel between cylinders 2 & 3.

Here's the solution I came up with to prevent this from happening again:
Silicone Baking Sheet from Bed Bath & Beyond.
Any water running in through the intercooler should just run off the sides of the engine. As an added bonus I'm thinking it will help insulate the intercooler from heat soak.

[acemanz]

You saw it here first folks ...Silicone Baking Sheet from Bed Bath & Beyond the new hot mod

GIT EM NOAW!