OK guys, any help with this is really appreciated.I'm not making the power I should be, and I'm clearly messing this up on my own, so I'm looking for a bit of guidance here before I blow this poor thing up.

I have a '93 with a 1.6 with the below engine mods:

• Head shaved to ~10:5:1 compression
• 264° I+E cams @ 9mm lift with SUBs and adjustable gears
• DIY light smoothing/port job
• ITBs off of a AE86 using the T3 adapter
• Bosch EV14 330cc injectors
• Toyota COPs
• Coolant reroute

The car felt a little under-powered and I found aidandj's thread on adding VSS to a 1.6 car so I figured I'd give it a try so I could run a virtual dyno. Here's the result of a 4th gear pull. My car likely weighs under 2100 at this point, but I figured it was a safe bet.



This looked way too low for the mods I have. I know it's just a virtual dyno, but I've read they're fairly accurate and I figured it was worth doing a health check.

I ran a compression test and got ~180/180/180/190 hot

Here are the plugs starting with the closest to the firewall (#4)










Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like I have some pretty bad detonation. Otherwise it looks like the heat range is OK (maybe a bit cold?) and the deposits besides the det look acceptable.

Am I just running way too much spark? (I guess so from the det, but it feels sluggish otherwise)
Are my cams maybe set completely wrong?
Are my WOT AFRs too rich? (I think perhaps)

.msq and .msl are attached. Here are screenshots of fuel/spark.

 

Plugs are hammered with detonation, really bad. Way too much timing. You need to check your base timing, my guess is if you lock the timing to 10* in TunerStudio, then check it with a timing light, it's at more than 10*. Probably like 15* or more. Fix that, and then put a safe timing map on the car. And new plugs, and go from there.

 

Thank you for the input. Base timing has been confirmed at 10 deg with two different timing lights. I'll just start dialing everything way the hell back. Damn...

 

Late update on this. I installed new plugs and dialed back spark even more, no det heard or seen on plugs.I worked my way back up to the original timing map over time, checking plugs/listening and I'm not seeing any more det.

I got a couple of pulls on a dyno the other day and actually picked up almost 10% WHP at the 7800 RPM with more spark (still no det). Car read 140whp/110wtq corrected for altitude (I'm at 4,200ft).

I have no idea what happened, but apparently the det is gone...

 

Fuel filter or fuel pump needing replacement can cause intermittent or consistent leaning towards the higher RPMs, causing detonation.

 

I've had some other odd issues (weird idle AFRs) that I was speculating may be FP related. I'll throw another filter on and start poking around there. Thanks for the tip.

 

Fuel pump suction sock has given me intermittent det issues before, def don't buy a non-oem sock, they are garbage and you'll be replacing it again shortly when it collapses and plugs off.