Gentlemens!

I went whole hog and bought the V Switch tuner, both upper and lower pulleys, and the upgraded heat exchanger from Eurotoys. This thread will chronicle the installation and evaluation of these products in hopes that this info will be of some use to someone down the road. However, I'm not going to do a step by step DIY on how to install them. This is unsolicited, and I'll be sharing the good as well as any bad as I see it. Any issues that come up will be worked through with Mike before I post about them. I'll be editing this first post as I make progress so that anyone searching can find everything in one post rather than reading through an entire thread to get bits and pieces here and there. I will get BEFORE and AFTER dyno runs to validate actual gains rather than just saying "it feels faster."

Prior to purchase, Mike patiently and thoroughly answered all my questions via both email and over the phone. I can get a pretty good read on someone over the phone and have talked with plenty of wanna-be's and phonies over the years, and no question about it- Mike is the real deal.

08DEC2017.
The pulleys and tuner arrived today. Mike did a great job of packing things so they didn't get damaged in shipment. Included along with the lower pulley was a new Gates supercharger belt and a new tensioner pulley. The upper pulley comes with a fitment gauge you use to make sure the supercharger snout won't interfere with the new upper pulley. The installation instructions he provides are very concise and should answer any questions someone of average competence may have. The quality of the pulleys is as good as it gets- flawless machining and anodizing. The tuner is... well, it's a tuner; you use it once or twice and then it lives in the back of your tool box until you sell the car. The graphics are a step below our infotainment screen, and the touch screen of the tuner takes a bit more pressure than a phone. BUT... it's sole purpose is to extract the stock file from your car, upload it to your computer, then download the new file from your computer and load it into your car, and it does that very well. Because you're pretty much done with it after you do that, I'm OK with it being somewhat clunky. Yes, it can read fault codes, but I prefer my Foxwell NT510.

I extracted the file from my car and emailed it off to Mike, but I don't expect to get the new one until Monday. I will be uploading just the tune first before any pulleys go in so that I can evaluate how the tune alone changes the behavior of the car, particularly the throttle response and transmission if the tranny programming is part of what's massaged. When the pulleys and heat exchanger go in, I'll upload a new tune to account for the extra boost.

Speaking of boost, the stock drive ratio is 1:2.1 and results in 9 PSI on a standard day at sea level. The Eurotoys pulleys provide a 1:2.77 drive ratio and 18 PSI. Note: Your results will vary due to density altitude. As an example, I saw as little as 5 PSI this past summer on a hot day when up in the mountains, and as much as 9 PSI this morning when it was 22°F. At 18 PSI, that's a pressure ratio of 2.2 (14.7 + 18 PSI boost = 32.7 / 14.7 = 2.2PR). According to the Eaton compressor map, that's pretty much at the upper limit of these blowers.



Like engines, blowers have maximum RPM limits, and those are generally dictated by the bearings in the unit. In stock form, our blowers spin 13,650 RPM when the engine is at redline (6500*2.1=13,650). With the Eurotoys pulleys, it'll be spinning at 18,005 RPM at engine redline. While this is 500 RPM beyond what's shown on the map above, it's not necessarily beyond the limits of the bearings. The Chevy LSA guys spin these things at least that fast without any issues, so I'm not worried in the least. I'm confident that if it were an issue, Mike wouldn't be selling these parts.

The heat exchanger is drop shipped from England, and while I didn't ask Mike this, I'm guessing it's the Paragon unit. It's on backorder right now due to a material shortage, so I place absolutely no blame for that on Mike.

In addition to these parts, I will be installing a 14" Derale pusher fan in front of the heat exchanger and will wire it up so that it's on whenever the intercooler pump is on. It's part number 18214 and can be found anywhere online, but as I have yet to actually install it, I can't say if it will fit or not. It should based on my measurements, but don't buy one before I can confirm fitment. It's a two speed fan, so I may wire it to run on its lower speed all the time and use a thermoswitch in the return pipe from the intercoolers to trigger the higher speed once the IC coolant reaches a certain temp.

Anyway, that's all I have for now. Ask questions, and I'll do my best to answer. Otherwise, my next update will be Monday evening.

 

Waiting for good data before I do anything at all with mine.

 

How about sharing cost and labor time to install. Good luck and have fun.

 

GL with everything...and please don't JVIII it!

 

Cool, thanks doing this, as well as providing some technical information. I had some good correspondence with Mike and received my upper pulley and VSwitch on the same day as you, but won't have time to mess with it at all until at least Tuesday. I'm not sure when I'll be able to do the pulley, so I'm debating installing a tune without the pulley first. Winter hasn't really hit here yet, and I don't want to take the car out of service to do the pulley before it does. It shouldn't take long, but there's a chance that I'll run into some difficulty. I'm hoping to at least get some Torque Pro before and after data, but I don't know how conclusive that will be.

 

I'm doing the work myself, so I won't be able to comment on install cost. But as for time, I'm going to guess 4-6 hours going slow and enjoying the process.

 

Mandrake, you and I combined will have a "Before and After Road Dyno". Just something to keep in mind........

 

Very true. And as it just so happens, Mike sent over the no pulley tune this morning. I'll be loading it when I get home from work and will post up about it this evening.

I'm pretty stoked.

 

Damnit, it won't let me edit the original post. If a mod is reading this, is there any way for me to edit my original post? If not, can you please add this to it:

11DEC2017.
Tune uploaded and about 100 miles driven, a mix of around town and highway.

If I recall, the tune is advertised as +50 HP/40TQ. I believe it. The difference was remarkable. Smoother throttle response, more linear, more accessible power, and a much smoother idle. I have to give it a little gas to get out of my fairly steep driveway, and it used to buck and hesitate right at tip in, but doesn't with the tune. It even fixed an occasional misfire hiccup I had at idle. Highway pulls make me giggle again and traction was not improved. When maintaining highway speed, the AFR is right at 14.7, and going WOT puts it at 12.0. Just where I like them. I can't tell you about mileage change yet, but it'll definitely go down due to my foot always being in it. The transmission behavior was unchanged, though. If you're looking for a little more nip to remind you of what it first felt like to drive it but want to leave it mechanically stock, this tune is worth the money.

 

Are you planning to add the X-pipe in the exhaust?

 

Try quoting your original post, then insert your new text into that quoted text in bold or color to distinguish it from the original text.

You'll have a new post date to reflect the changes.

 

You aren't allowed to edit your post, i'll check in from time to time and add the new updated posts to the original if you want?

 

If you wouldn't mind adding what I typed above to the original post and make the date from the 8th bold to better define the entries, I'd greatly appreciate it.

 

I just took a drive in Mandrake's now-tuned kitty. There is definitely something extra with the tune. Such a shame though that his car is so quiet...

 

Thanks for letting me drive your car, CJ! It definitely sold me on the x pipe.

To somewhat sort of quantify the improvement just the tune made over stock, luck had me lined up next to a new V10 Audi R8 this past Friday evening. We rolled up to about 40 mph and then hit it. Once I found traction, he stopped pulling away and I was able to hang with him until we called it off. A quick Wikipedia search shows it as being about 200 lbs lighter and about 40-45 hp more than where I think I'm at with this tune. He had a passenger and I was solo with a nearly empty tank, so that may have been enough to offset the power to weight difference. From a dig, his AWD would have made it no contest though.

I'm sure if I had the pulleys in, I'd still be out there looking for traction. Either way, it was pretty neat to not be entirely shut down by an exotic, knowing that there's still about 70 hp yet to be installed.

 

4.2 or 5.0?

 

5.0L.

 

The XKR-S GT gets absolutely annihilated in the 1/4 mile against the v10 audi (121mph vs 127mph) however by the end of the mile run it starts to claw it's way back and reduce the deficient to a mere 3mph

Would be interesting to see how a 600hp xkr would fare against it.

 

Found another xkrs vs v10 Audi

Apparently this one has a ecu tune and performance exhaust

Results speak for themselves !!!

 

The thing is though.... I MUCH rather be a tad bit slower than have to SUFFER ENDLESSLY with an (ech) Audity. Vile cars. Usually driven by douchebags or wanna-bes.