ECU hardware issues
Posted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 12:14 pm
I'll tell the story from the start so you have all the details in chronological order.
A customer/friend of mine has a 2005 Civic SI. He installed a used Greddy turbo kit on the car shortly after purchasing it. Unfortunately, the used kit did not have any heat wrap provided. The net result is that he burned his wiring harness. After that happened, he decided to swap to a k20a2 motor because it would come with a new engine harness. He purchased one from a reputable dealer and had it professionally installed and tuned by a shop in Baltimore. The shop's dynapack (hub dyno) showed only 186hp on a car that had full bolton modifications (cold air, dc race header, exhaust).
The car was brought to me for the installation of skunk2 stage I cams & pro valve train. After doing the install as I was doing some street tuning, the CAMCMD was moving based on the maps, but the CAM (actual) value was reporting as 0. We replaced the main VTC system sensors (cam phase, VTC solenoid) hoping that was the cause. The problem persisted. In order to determine if the wiring was bad or the ECU was bad, I took a risk and plugged in the k-pro from my own ep3 into his car. With my k-pro the car worked perfectly with one exception. During one of the street tuning pulls, the cam angle failed to advance until about 6000rpm when it resumed normal operation up to redline. On the other 50-60 pulls and during normal driving, the cam angle issue did not show itself.
Now my question is this, it seems clear to me that the ECU is damaged with the possibility of damage to the wiring harness inside the car (causing the single cam angle glitch observed with my ECU in the car). I do not believe that the k-pro components are damaged as I did not have any issues with data logging or calibration upload.
Does Hondata repair any of the board components on the ECU itself? If the customer provides another donor ecu, could Hondata replace the ECU main board on the damaged k-pro unit? We're looking for the most cost effective solution as the purchase of a new k-pro unit (or even used) is something we'd like to avoid.
Thanks!
A customer/friend of mine has a 2005 Civic SI. He installed a used Greddy turbo kit on the car shortly after purchasing it. Unfortunately, the used kit did not have any heat wrap provided. The net result is that he burned his wiring harness. After that happened, he decided to swap to a k20a2 motor because it would come with a new engine harness. He purchased one from a reputable dealer and had it professionally installed and tuned by a shop in Baltimore. The shop's dynapack (hub dyno) showed only 186hp on a car that had full bolton modifications (cold air, dc race header, exhaust).
The car was brought to me for the installation of skunk2 stage I cams & pro valve train. After doing the install as I was doing some street tuning, the CAMCMD was moving based on the maps, but the CAM (actual) value was reporting as 0. We replaced the main VTC system sensors (cam phase, VTC solenoid) hoping that was the cause. The problem persisted. In order to determine if the wiring was bad or the ECU was bad, I took a risk and plugged in the k-pro from my own ep3 into his car. With my k-pro the car worked perfectly with one exception. During one of the street tuning pulls, the cam angle failed to advance until about 6000rpm when it resumed normal operation up to redline. On the other 50-60 pulls and during normal driving, the cam angle issue did not show itself.
Now my question is this, it seems clear to me that the ECU is damaged with the possibility of damage to the wiring harness inside the car (causing the single cam angle glitch observed with my ECU in the car). I do not believe that the k-pro components are damaged as I did not have any issues with data logging or calibration upload.
Does Hondata repair any of the board components on the ECU itself? If the customer provides another donor ecu, could Hondata replace the ECU main board on the damaged k-pro unit? We're looking for the most cost effective solution as the purchase of a new k-pro unit (or even used) is something we'd like to avoid.
Thanks!