Mistakes made with lessons learned!

[getdowngranny]

I would like to start a thread on the mistakes we have made on our Turbo Buick's that have led to lessons learned. Caused by either lack of knowledge, lack of patience, or just plain stupidity. Ill go ahead and start.
My first GN over 12 years ago. I wanted to go faster, knew nothing about Turbo Buicks other than it was my dream car. I decided to put an adjustable boost controler and turn the boost up untill I saw knock on the scanmaster. Red 93 street chip, exhaust, CAI, and nothing else. Well, 17 psi no knock, 18 no knock, 19 nothing, 20 nothing. I thought I was golden at 20 with no knock. I knew nothing about turbo buicks and i did not care. I was ripping the streets. Ran ther car hard for a few months until i mushroomed a rod bearing. One bearing looked like it was put in an extrmely powerful press and smushed to hell. When I took the motor out............ The knock sensor was disconnected the whole time.

 

[HUMBLE-U2]

experience is the mother of all inventions.remember taken all youre toys apart and putting them back together if theres no extra parts and it works you did it right. then there are some that took stuff apart and could not. these days the ones who cant theres Google!

 

[casper]

.I feel your pain. I was putting the engine back in the race car and in a hurry to get to nationals , yacking on the fuel rails etc to get the engine to line up. Car ran fine at idle but after a pass injectors where lose and up in FLAMES.

 

[NY Twin Turbo]

I had the old Speed-Pro engine management system. It didn't have torque converter lock-up in the software. I still had a lock-up converter in my 200. So I bought and installed a B&M lock-up controller......even though I was told not to. It controls lock-up based on MPH. Not accounting for load, TPS, and steady state RPM. I could disable it with a switch. But who remembers to do that every time you lay into the throttle?

Low and behold, after using it and having the converter lock-up with a hard hit a couple of hundred times, I beat the thrust bearing pretty bad until........well, you know. The motor was done.