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After the install, ChrisK told me that my boost gauge did not work. He never mentioned this when he first received the car. I asked him if he remembered it working when he got the car, and he swore to me that it did not work right when he got it. I told him that it had always worked fine and that it worked fine when I sent it there. He insisted that it never worked correctly when he got it, but I knew better. He probably messed it up accidentally during the install.
When I got the car back I noticed that it had very noticeable valve tick and it had a bad stutter around 3000rpm and just felt like it fell on its face. I took it to the track to try to run some logs and tune the car better, even though ChrisK promised me that he had broken the car in properly on the dyno and spent several days tuning it. I immediately noticed in my logs that my IAT was at like -20* the entire time and did not change. Either the IAT sensor was broken or not plugged in. I told ChrisK about it and he said that it was definitely plugged in and working when the car was shipped back to me and that it must have been removed during shipping, and that it was not his fault.
I thought to myself, yeah the pesky shippers must have figured out how to open the engine lid, undo all of the intercooler piping and removed the throttle body just to unplug the IAT sensor and then put everything else back in place. Boy those shipping guys are hilarious, what a good practical joke.... Hmmmm, or maybe ChrisK just forgot to plug it in and was trying to blame it on someone else as usual.
I ended up finding the IAT plug tucked nicely behind the fuse box. Probably where he put it while he was removing the engine. How he tuned the car without the IAT sensor is beyond me. I have the Nemesis and it is a Speed-Density system. You need to know the Intake Temperatures to know the Density of the air.
So after seeing that, I though I would test the Boost Gauge to see if it was really broken or if ChrisK messed something else up. I hooked my MityVac vacuum/pressure pump directly to the boost gauge and it worked properly. I knew ChrisK was lying when he said that it didn’t work when he first got the car. I figured he probably broke one of the lines that go to the gauge. So I hooked the boost gauge back up and went to the line in the engine compartment and it worked fine. I then looked at how he had the vacuum lines run and realized he made a really big mistake. He had the intake manifold, valve cover, fuel pressure regulator, and boost gauge all hooked up together using several T’s. How can you create pressure in the line when it is hooked up the valve cover which has PCV hose!? That got me a little nervous, because the FPR needs to see the changes in vacuum and pressure in order to always be at the right pressure. When I started the engine and blipped the throttle, the fuel pressure did not change! That’s not good.
So I fixed the vacuum hoses. Once I did this, the boost gauge started working correctly and the FPR worked correctly. This brought up another major concern. How the hell did ChrisK tune the car properly if the fuel pressure was not accounting for the changes in vacuum or pressure in the intake manifold? His map had to be completely messed up after I plugged in the IAT sensor and fixed the vacuum lines and FPR. I asked him several times about this but said that it should be fine, and he never really answered any of my questions. I did not feel comfortable with the way the car ran on ChrisK’s map after I plugged in the IAT and fixed the FPR, so I used NoShoes’s map from before since the engine should still have the same VE.
Chris did not even refund the $500 he charged me for ‘tuning’ my car.
Moral of the story is that ChrisK may have had a good reputation on this board a few years ago, but he can no longer be trusted. He will not honor his word and he will point fingers and try to blame anyone but himself so he does not have to take responsibility.
Why this is, I do not know, but I do think that it happened roughly the same time that he opened up his own shop, bought all that expensive equipment, and hired full time employees. Maybe the pressure and expenses of his new shop was too much. Either way, I would not recommend him any more, and I would stay as far away from him as possible. This should also be evident by the fact that he is no longer a board vendor due to the way he has treated board members recently. There are several credible board vendors that can build high performance engines.
-Scott
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