warning (of sort)

[twilightprotege]

i'd recommend staying away from the kasmankk cam gears. there are 3 fundamental problems with them.

1. the cam sensor pick ups move when you adjust the cam gear. this is bad because they should remain fixed. adjusting cam gears are for adjusting the cam, not the cam *and* the sensor pick ups. this is why the tripoint cam gears are basically remanufactured stock ones.

2. the cam pickups are not the same size as the stock ones. they essentially do not work with a microtech ems, not only because the size of the bolts are bigger than the stock ones (giving the unit a longer signal than expected), but the distance between the 2 bolts is smaller than the stock distance.

3. incorrect signals. the signal should be like an off-on-off signal. with the centre of the bolt being down, the signal is off-on-juston-on-off.

these cam gears therefore give constant reference errors with a microtech unit, and i'm sure they wont be great with the stock units or other aftermarket units.

that is all (still deciding if i'll get active on this forum again...)

 

[Keno1542]

is your motor at risk of blowing because of this? can the ecu be tuned around this with a piggyback?

 

[twilightprotege]

my motor is fine, but i guess it is possible - if the ems gets the wrong signal and fires the injector too late it could be possible to go lean.

ecu might be able to be tuned around problems 1 and 2 - highly unlikely. best bet would be to make the bolts solid to start off with (aka fill it in with weld, or change the type of bolt), however it still does not tackle the no 1 problem.

 

[LordWorm]

I've reported the potential problem to the mod team for some guidance. I was with andrew when this problem was discovered, but i will stress at this stage it is theory (sound theory, but theory none-the-less).

I urge people not to post vendor verdicts here, and keep this thread factual, until I get some guidence about its future from the mod team.

Cheers guys.

 

[jimmysuite]

sub for solutions as these are in my car, which tenatively will be starting up on Friday from a long downtime. Should i push back firing up the car until this is resolved? I definately dont want to damage something now....

After thinking about this alittle more, problem 1 is only a problem so far as you cant adjust the exhaust cam. You can still advance or retard the intake cam. Problems one and two seem easily fixable buy replacing the pickup bolts.

Twilight, (welcome back, seriously hope you do decide to be active again) if your motor is fine how would mine be any worse off?

 

[twilightprotege]

yeah, problem one means you cant adjust the exhaust cam - so why get it in the first place? problem 2 and 3 might be able to be fixed by better pickups. i have tripoint cam gears and have since the beginning. i was just working on a car with these cam gears and worked out the issues

 

[Keno1542]

is there anywhere i can still get the tripoint cam gears?

 

[twilightprotege]

no idea

 

[jimmysuite]

yeah, problem one means you cant adjust the exhaust cam - so why get it in the first place? problem 2 and 3 might be able to be fixed by better pickups. i have tripoint cam gears and have since the beginning. i was just working on a car with these cam gears and worked out the issues

So how did you work out the issues? I will be running microtech standalone in the near future, so any help/input would be very benificial. Is there any way to modify the gear so only the cam is moved and not the cam sensor? (I dont have it in front of me)


Also we should note that the problem with these gears will only occur when installed on cars with a cam position sensor (obviously)


check out the SRmotorsports design....

http://srmotorsports.com/Protege_2.0_Camgears.jpg

it looks like they use better pickup bolts (no hole in the middle) but it also looks as though the CPS will move when advancing/retarding the exhaust cam.

Also, it looks like if you really wanted to you could machine the kasmankk gears to solve problem 1

 

[twilightprotege]

those srm ones would have the same problem.

to work out the issue - we're going back to the stock exhaust cam gear.

in relation to the cam moving and not the sensors, they'll need to be completely redesigned, i cant see a way to fix them safely. i wouldnt want to machine much of them as you could risk making them unbalanced and/or weak.

i guess there are reasons why the remanufactured cam gears were the only option for so damn long

 

[jimmysuite]

^^^ I think there are quite a few people using the srmotorsports/kasmankk ones. I cant believe this is just surfacing now. Are ppl get adj cam gears and not adjusting them at all? I dont think youd have to machine much even if you got a few dergees movement it would be beter than nothing.

Would you suggest I put the stock gear back on or would i be able to get away with the kasmankk gears for a while. I am currently running mp3 ecu and a set of your cams from the group buy. I wasnt planning on adjusting the gears until i could get to a dyno anyway.... I'm assuming AusOrion is running Microtech with the gears and the car wasn't running well?

For NA purposes is it more benificial to be able to adjust the intake or exhaust?

Sorry for the 100 questions and thanks for answering.

 

[twilightprotege]

yeah i'd put the stock exhaust cam gear in. when the engine management expects the timing indicators at particular times and it doesnt get it (remember the cam turns half the speed of the crank, so 2 degrees difference at the cam is really 4 degrees of crank movement) who knows what will happen - as we found the microtech gets constant reference errors and has big time troubles trying to maintain an idle

 

[jimmysuite]

For NA purposes is it more benificial to be able to adjust the intake or exhaust? how much have you adjusted from the stock twiggy cam position on your car? (I&E)

 

[jamesk]

twilight, where the **** have you been? good to see you posting.

where do they sell these cam gears, i have never heard of them?

 

[jimmysuite]

here on the forums...

 

[twilightprotege]

probably more to be gained/tuned out of the exhaust cam on NA, mainly because we use the exhaust system so heavily, but then again it all depends on mods.

jamesk - just taking time away. still racing naturally, and i've gone to the dark side, well kinda. i've got a small n2o shot for drag racing now. highly likely i'll regain the fastest non-turbo protege in may at the next event. i would have taken the title back at the start of the month - i did a 14.242 at only 91mph - i backed off at the end of the track a fair bit to not break out, but i still did. i would have been well into the 14.0's i reckon if i didnt back off, prob not quite 13's, but damn close. i was doing high 96mph all meet

 

[jamesk]

damn, great job.

i think a intake cam would also be in great need if you threw out the old intake manifold a swapped it out for a 626 manifold or a short ram manifold. alone with a 626 manifold i felt a power increase, i could not imagine tunning the intake cam with that.

 

[niky]

Darn it... what part here is the thingamajiggy that tickles the sensor?

I'm having stock gears remanufactured at a local machine shop, and it would such if they were done wrong...

RE: Kasmank... he's a Malaysian guy... he uses his own products and apparently doesn't have any issues with it on his turbocharged car. He was offering this stuff to us before when he was designing it. I do sincerely hope this is a quirk with the Microtech - cam gear combo and not a problem that'll carry over to other set-ups.

 

[jimmysuite]

last question, Was the car acting up even when at a zero degree setting or did the problem only occur when trying to adjust away from zero? (- or +)

 

[LordWorm]

There was an issue on the stock management system at 0 - 0, a stutter/stammer at 2500ish rpm (same rpm that the reference pickup error occurs on the microtech). I recall one guy who was using these gears to turn FI cams back into NA cams and couldn't get the thing to start. Solution was swapping back to stocko cam gear on the exhaust side. To revert the cams, there is some MAJOR adjustment to the exhaust and intake cams required, and this lends some credence to the argument that moving the pickups several degrees away from where they should be causes hassles with the ecu.

On 0-0, the car still starts, and runs, but it stammers and there is a ref problem on the MT. Its not a large enough problem to stop things working, however it does cause some problems (base timing seems to be out by 4 degrees at the crank as a result).

Andrew: I don't believe this problem has ANYTHING to do with the gears i don't think. The idle issue is more to do with the stock idle control system trying to assert itself while we have the throttle butterfly opened. I've heard that the stock idle control has enough "play" it it to learn around a 600 to 700 rpm increase in idle speed. Its just trying to pin it down. I've got an idea about clamping the idle control to lock the idle at a higher speed...i'll discuss this with you tomorrow. If it were a problem, the idle a) would have been screwy on stock ecu, and 2) would have been screwy when we adjusted it while the engine was running (idle problem only occured after shut down and restart).

Anyway....if you are concerned about it, swap back to the stock exhaust cam gear. If you are not concerned, you can always suck it and see. Its not going to be a problem that is limited to the microtech. Any ECU that is using both the crank position and the cam position to determine home/ref signals will be impacted if the theory on this issue is correct. I'm going to Andrew's tomorrow night to drop the stock exhaust gear back in the offending car and either he or I will report back on what the story is once we've done that.

Niky: the part that "tickles" the sensors is the 2 hex bolts on one side of the exhaust gear, and the single hex bolt on the opposite side of the same gear. As i've said before, running at 0-0 (or probably even a few degrees of adjustment), the problem will exist, but it will probably be so minor that MOST people will not even care about it. The issue may become a problem if you start doing major adjustments and pushing the TDC reference on the cam gears out beyond any level of give that whatever management you are using will allow. essentially, it will read off the crank sensor that something is at top dead centre, but wont know what cylinder is. Then it will read that a cylinder is at TDC via the cam sensor, but not have a corresponding reading with the crank sensor.

One reason why people may not have seen the issue is that heaps of people put cam gears in to future proof themselves, but never get around to moving them from 0-0 (looking at Twilightprotege here - he's had adjustable cam gears for as long as i've known him, and appart from a little experimentation, has never shifted them off 0-0 in that entire time)