Sorry... this is kind of long, but worth all the info.
It has been a rough couple of weeks, business has been crazy busy and my mom passed away suddenly so I had to take off a lot of personal time... it took me a long time to get caught up on orders and start doing any testing. I am finally getting back into the swing of things, we are finally caught up with orders so I am back to doing what I love... expect lots of testing/results over the next few months.
We had a customer recently ask for a full refund because he was not happy with his brand new stage 2. He said it ran hot and under performed (even when idling). I tried helping him figure out what was wrong but he insisted it was the turbo and ended up sending the turbo back and asked for a full refund. On top of that we were out of stage 3 comp wheels for a while and a customer really needed one so I pulled the stage 3 off my truck and sent it to him. That gave me the perfect opportunity to try out this "defective" stage 2 turbo. Turbo performed flawlessly on my truck.
The stage 2 turbo is so fun to drive around town. It just hits harder and spools faster down low in comparison to the stage 3. The only downside is you can feel the power start to fall off up top where the stage 3 just keeps pulling.
We have been working with a few tuners to produce better tuning for our turbos. We have been working on theories/experiments for over a year and one of them finally worked. I have to give a HUGE SHOUTOUT to Cory and Chris @ Diesels and More. One night while talking turbos at their shop theorizing about how to fix the 6.0 tuning they came up with a KEY component to help solve the tuning problem. I cannot go into super great detail on the specifics... but basically we are able to squeeze more consistent top end power/boost out of these turbos. We are basically working around some of the "flaws" in the 6.0 SCT tuning so our turbos can reach their full potential.
We are able to squeeze about 10psi more out of the turbos on the top end.
The stage 2 turbo consistently hits 40-45psi of boost and HOLDS (before it could hit 40psi, but sometimes the vanes would open and boost would drop down to about 30-35psi after a few seconds)
The stage 3 turbo consistently hits 45-50psi of boost and HOLDS (before it could hit 40-45psi, but sometimes the vanes would open and boost would drop down to about 30-35 after a few seconds, some other tunes we tested could hit 55-60psi of boost but had NO POWER and crazy EBP numbers)
Here are the dyno results:
We tested the truck loaded and un-loaded on the dyno. Up until now I have always tested the trucks "un-loaded" which produces lower results because it does not load up the turbo enough to reach full boost like you can when actually driving the truck. Now that we have our own dyno with and eddy, we can load up the trucks better.
KC 64mm stage 2 turbo with 205/30s
Loaded dyno results
653 hp
1206 tq
By next week we should have numbers for the stage 3 turbo, but I think we are going to have to bump up the injectors to reach the full potential of the turbo.
Here is a screenshot of the stage 2 dyno graph. This is loaded vs unloaded. It is interesting to see how much more power you can squeeze out of the truck when you actually load up the dyno.
