But which part is it ?????:icon08:

Who installed the headers/recommended no new tune was needed, for instance. That important bit of information is missing.

That is very true, i was just being facetious.

I know... :)

I'll make an assumption that since he paid dealership prices to keep the third party warranty on the car that the dealership also installed the headers.

If that is the case, and the 3rd party warranty is indeed covering his repairs, then it may turn out that having the stillen kit over the gtm is actually a wise decision, since he will only be out time and not $$$.

wow... I guess the bright side is its being covered under warranty.

If adding headers caused the AFR to run so lean that this happened it seems like the original tune was $hit anyway.

How do you figure this? Maybe it was so perfect the headers threw it off and went too lean? lol such stupid comments.

My headers made me run leaner when i had normal bolt-ons...I can only imagine what it did to that car running a supercharger...

My point was that there should have been some room for fluctuations. Adding a header should not lead to a blown motor. "So perfect"?? Seriously? If it's teetering on the edge of the leaner side of the optimal AFR, changing elevations would mess with it.

OOPS, just saw your sig. You're a stillen guy. My apologies. I saw one of those "so perfect" stillen tuned superchargers up against a GTM on a dyno. People who have installed both speak of the fitment with the stillen and how it makes you fit your car to the kit rather than the other way around.


Either way I feel terribly for the owner but why he would romp on it without a tune is beyond me.

Just goes to show he simply wanted to go fast and didnt have the knowledge. I'm not saying he had to build it himself, but to invest all that money and not understand that he shouldn't get on it until it was properly tuned doesn't add up. It's really his fault. If all he wanted was power then yea, lean it out with the current set-up. But he should have told the tuner to leave it a little on the richer side if he was planning on headers all along.

:iagree: Was the tune right on the edge of being unsafe? Even when I had my UpRev Tune done the tuner eeked out as much power as he could without going to close to being unsafe.

Any forced induction car should always have one of these:

http://speed-eng.com/store/images/AE...and%20UEGO.jpg

+1. And you should be paying it almost as much attention as the road.

http://i36.photobucket.com/albums/e3...0/3043ecb4.jpg

but...but..but...THAT'S NOT WHO WE WANT TO BASH! :mad:

let's just tell everyone it was stillen so we can bash them!

I've been reading a lot of bad things about Stillen products recently. Are they all like that? I hope the Gen 3 intakes are excluded from this bad list since those are the only Stillen products I plan on getting.

Sounds more like bad advice than a product fault from what I'm reading in the article.

It's not the charger. Granted, GTM's is better and easier to install, but it's not the charger. It was running fine prior to the header install, so it seems. My best guess is that the tune was too agressive in terms of AFR and the header leaned it out to a dangerous level at WOT. It's really the fault of whoever told the owner that he didn't need a tune, but the owner is also at fault for not knowing that a tune would be needed.

You shouldn't change anything on the car without modifying the tune. I'm not a Stillen backer in anyway, and have generally been unhappy with how they handled the supercharger deal, but this is owner error. Changing headers certainly changes the tune enough that you should not be driving on it, and definitely not making a pull.


On my S2000, the IP exhaust I had on it separated, causing an exhaust leak. The leak altered my AF readings enough that the car would have done the same thing if I had run it. That's just how FI applications are.

Believe me I know I had that AEM wideband on my WRX the second it was released. Worth its weight in gold. I feel bad for the guy though

+1. I feel like the plug-and-play nature of kits these days has a lot of people feeling nothing can go wrong, and it's not the fault of the guys running the kits, really. If no one tells you how much fire you're playing with, things like this happen.

There is NO substitute for wideband AFR on an FI motor, period. Something as simple as a hose or clamp failure can cost you a motor.

I'm so glad I switched kits before anything happened. Too bad I'll never know if it's done any damage to my engine or not.

You could get a leak-down check done.

Stillen wouldn't take it back? After months of hounding stillen they returned my money minus a bs restocking fee. Who would buy this kit after all the problems people have had with it?

I got nothing, but I wipe the sweat from my brow every time I hear of this happening. Thank the heavens above I went with GTM.... and Sam is my sheppard!!

Ouch, Charlie!

Sad to see this happen.....I'm wondering who claimed that the car doesnt require a tune after adding the headers?

damn!..hope the owner gets this all sorted out..

Maybe it's the same person from Stillen who told me "DETONATION IS NORMAL" lol

Then it was installed incorrectly, should only opened the holes to a tight fitment.

I don't know what you guys are babbling on about.....sounds like a limp mode issue to me :wtf2:

Stillen's kit uses an UpRev canned tune with their "turn-key" kit. UpRev uses the MAF sensors to actually tune the car, just like a factory tune. Think about it, we buy these cars worldwide; different elevation, different gas, different variances.

When you're tuning the vehicle, the MAF sensor is compensating the air, so if you say at full throttle I want to keep it around 11.5 - 11.6, then the MAF will compensate the air/fuel to see as close to those measurements as possible. Why do you think when you go with GTM's turbo turn-key kit, you don't need a custom tune sent to you if you decide to add test pipes, a 3" exhaust or anything else (thanks to the blow-through style MAF setup)? A lot of it has to do with Timing too. If you don't have an aggressive timing, you can get away with extra mods without needing a new tune.

What I think the issues is... the pull-through MAF system. You're not getting an accurate measurement of the air that's reaching the engine because it's being changed when it blows through the charger.

I've done a lot of research on this and there are a couple members I'd like to personally thank that have given me great insight on their review of this kit.

I could be wrong though :stirthepot:

:iagree:

Most ECU's are in open loop at WOT, so there aren't any fuel trims to tweak the tune towards a target AFR.

That said, even if the Z ECU can maintain a target AFR at WOT, under load the change may have happend so fast that the ECU couldn't compensate in time (or pull timing fast enough if it detected knock) so boom.

Can anything out there get a readout from the OEM knock sensor? I know uprev can't.

I suppose folks could try a J&S safeguard.

Yes and you completely missed my point. You were trying to make an argument that the tune is crap because it didnt have room for an unknown amount of leaning out. Not to mention their tunes are, in my opinion, too safe.

Oops, you're too busy trying to be a smartass to understand things. Thanks for the basic-as-bricks tuning lesson and advice.

A good tune should sit at somewhere between rich and lean...where it's supposed to be. An exhaust mod can swing that balance towards lean and blow it up in no time. Yes you do want to tune some margin of safety into your target afr, but loss of power isnt the only downside of running rich. Believe it or not, running rich can also lead to increased cyl pressures which can cause detonation and blow up the motor. Neither extreme is healthy.

Regardless, Its not whether I'm a stillen fan, I haven't really talked to anyone from stillen in months and judging by their lack of presence here, it seems almost as if they have packed their bags. It has nothing to do with that, just trying to add some sense of objective information to this thread that would otherwise be filled with misinformation...

Could it have been the boost? sure. Is it more likely that it was the headers he had just put on the car? sure.

Sorry I picked you to intervene and make a point, nothing personal bud.

Carry on with the torches and pitchforks folks.

Well it's definitely not going to be able to pull timing if it's before the charger because the MAF is thrown off from the get-go. You're throwing an obstacle in-front of another.

If you don't want to go with the HKS knock amp system then the AeroForce Interceptor should, as long as the ECU supports it (which it should).

Wait what...?
Who doesn't tune their car after they get forced induction?
That's really silly...
Can't blame stillen for making a kit sounds like the installation itself was a disaster.

Hey Guys,

Just wanted to drop in here and post up real quick. Obviously seeing as how fresh this is, we're looking into it as well. As it has been mentioned, this kit is intended to run at 8 pounds of boost. Why it was running over 9 psi and then even further, why it went up to 10 psi after the installation of headers is very unusual and we don't have all the answers yet. Many of you will remember that when we developed the supercharger we mentioned that most of the time the addition of headers will lower boost pressure. We have found this to be the case. Now we're curious why boost actually increased after installing headers.

The kit was designed and tuned for 8 psi. We need to know why the car was running over 9 psi and then even bigger question why it went over 10 psi!

10psi. Something that was missed. I bet the owner messed with the boost.

Jordo's right. It doesn't matter who did the tune, at WOT, the ECU is in open loop mode which ignores the O2 sensor(s). It reads the MAF signal and has an internal look-up table to determine how long the injectors are to be open at a given rpm. It's up to the tuner who is manipulating this table to ensure that adequate fuel is present in each cell of the MAF load vs rpm table.

Similarly, there is a second MAF load vs rpm table for ignition timing that the tuner has the ability to adjust.

If you set either of these incorrectly, the car has the potential to detonate either from running lean or from having too aggressive ignition timing.

Also, a good, conservative tune should be able to compensate for slight variations in flow to through the engine. Increased flow from lets say, an exhaust should regester as increased flow through the MAF, which should in turn instruct the injectors to stay open longer. It won't be perfect, but it seems odd that headers alone would move you from conservative/safe to instant failure. I bet the original tune was borderline from the get. Maybe not with respect to AFR, but possibly with timing which is much more challenging to optimize.