I have a 87 turbo 2 that I just put together a little while back and have been fiddling with ever since. It has a J-spec engine in it, lightened flywheel and a haltech along with a lot of other mods. The car idles well at about 1100 rpms (no emissions, light flywheel, it seems about right) but once it gets up in the 1400's it starts to shake a lot. It gets a little better beyond that but I'm not sure what is causing it to shake so much.

I checked my engine mounts, the tranny mounts seem fine. I've zeroed the timing on the car (need to check the notch and see if it's off on the pulley since it was the stock pully for the car, not the engine) but I don't think that's going to cause the problem. I'm using a hitman map for the car. I have not checked compression but the car is pulling a fairly steady vacuum at idle so I don't think it's the problem. Any suggestions?

 

exhaust restriction? how's the boost at that rpm? I don't own a t2 but it seems the turbo adds a lot more to car troubleshooting so that would be good info.

 

No boost at those RPM ranges. The exhaust restriction shouldn't be much, it's got the stock pre cat/dp setup and the rest of it is a 2.5" going to duals.

 

The only time my engine tried to shake itself out of its mounts was when I had a dead injector...Might want to look into that...

 

I'm running 1600 secondaries which wont go online until later and the primary injectors are the stock 550's. I have 2 sets and tried swaping one out for the other and saw no improvement.

Idle mixture is also around 11:1 which is rich. I don't think that's going to make it shake this much though?

 

the only times I've experienced bad engine shake was when:

a. one of the coils was bad

b. one of the side seals was bad

c. one of the apex seals was bad.

Although in ur case I would check for plug fouling. If ur running that rich when not under boost, I hope those stock coils are in top shape to ignite all that fuel . . how about plug heat range, are u running the stock heat range plugs? How about ur fuel map right when the shake happens, u could have a phantom blip in the map where the a/f gets even richer than 11:1, too bad ur not in corvallis because I have a timing light that u could use to verify ur ignition timing with . .

what kind of shaking is it, paint mixer type shaking or just sputtering type shaking.........?

 

OK define shaking.. is it the steering wheel or the whole car?

If it is the steering wheel then it could be a bunch of stuff, from the counter wieght not set correctly to a stuffed seal.

If it is the car.. how bad is it, is it like a roller coaster ride type shaking or are you just noticing it?

Does it get worse the higher you go?

Does it go away once the engine has warmed up?

 

You really need to get that Haltech tuned first...


-Ted