I don't know why but I have been holding off on tuning my car until "as soon as I get X installed". I have realistically run out of "X" as of today with the installation of my WMW mild street camshaft. I was tormented which camshaft to buy, mostly between one of the Catcam choices, Shrick or RMW Dominator but descriptions and information on most every W11 camshaft seems lacking. I'm pretty sure, at least ECS Tuning lists duration and valve lift but I guess I don't know how to pick a camshaft. All I know is I wanted more power, remain emissions complaint and not melt my catalyst. When I saw "mild street" in the description and a dyno sheet from a shop that installed that camshaft, I decided that is good enough for my needs on a daily driver that hits the track a few times per year. I bought the camshaft and then decided I would like a new set of rockers to wear together with my new camshaft.

I had in my garage for a couple years a wideband AFR gauge that I wanted to install, so to stop my procrastination in installing it, I denied myself the installation of the new cam until the AFR gauge was installed. My logic was that the AFR gauge would allow me to make sure I'm not going melt my engine with lean combustion with all these mods on a stock tune. I saw that the stock tune seems to handle it just fine in terms of at WOT I would see 11.3 - 12.3 (safely rich?) on my gauge. I got the AFR gauge installed a couple of months ago and with a lot going on, it was hard to pin down a Saturday to get the cam in and then I decided I could squeeze in the install on Saturday of Memorial Day weekend.

As I installed this engine 4 years and a little over 20k miles ago, I was curious how it would look under the valve cover. My original engine looked amazingly clean inside when I pulled its valve cover around 150k miles but one of the intake valve lobes was worn pretty badly. The engine in my car now has about 95k miles on it and was also very clean inside and I was happy to see no unusual camshaft wear like my original engine had.

This camshaft has a lot more duration than stock and it seems it closes the intake valves more slowly. The best I could get trying to measure lift for comparison vs stock was a little under a millimeter on both (intake and exhaust) lobes. Mod Mini on YouTube installed this cam and measured it. He said it's about 1mm more lift so, we'll go with that.

This is a good view showing the difference in duration. The lobe is more "D" shaped than the stock lobe on the left.





The W11 is a pretty simple engine being SOHC, no VVT or DI, so the camshaft was out in about 90 minutes. I have read comments and saw a video about denting the spark plug tubes for clearance from cam lobes on performance camshafts, so I laid the cam in the head and rotated it by hand. The exhaust lobes come very close to the spark plug tubes. I have no idea how much expansion from heat on a hot engine would close that gap, so I measured it with feeler gauges. I found that a feeler gauge of 0.25mm would prevent the cam from rotating and 0.20mm let the lobe pass easily, so actual clearance must have been around 0.23mm or so. With no idea what safe clearances are, I decided to carefully dent the tubes and give the lobe more room, while at the same time, not denting the tube to the point that a spark plug socket will no longer go in the hole.

After marking the spark plug tube where the lobe is closest to it, I tried about 3-4 taps with a ball peen hammer and measured. That got me to 0.30mm. I stuck my spark plug socket in the hole to verify there were no issues with that an then I tapped more and got each tube to 0.40mm clearance. If I were smart, I would have measured the clearance the stock camshaft runs with but I decided a 0.40mm gap was sufficient. At 0.40mm, the lobe would gently brush against my feeler gauge as it passed. It was a little more loose than I use when checking and setting valve clearances.

Here are my feeler gauges checking clearance.


This is 0.40mm clearance:


Satisfied with the cam lobe clearance, I remembered I had to swap my new rocker arms onto the rocker shafts. I hadn't done that before, but it wasn't too hard to figure out how it goes. Here is the stock cam with the rockers laid out:


Since the intake side has more parts, I swapped the rockers on that shaft first, using assembly lube to pre-lube everything. With all the rockers on the shaft, I flipped it over to lube the lash adjusters and got an unexpected and unhappy surprise:


One of my brand new, genuine MINI rockers was missing the cap that contacts the top of the valve! As each rocker was in its own bag, I checked all the bags for the bright yellow piece but all bags were empty. I check the floor around me. Nothing. So really? My brand new rocker was bagged without the cap? I thought I heard they were removable, so I thought I could transfer one from one of the old rockers to my new rocker. I got it off pretty easily but could not get it to fit the new rocker. As I need to drive the car today, the option of pushing the car outside and dealing with FCP Euro was not an option I was going to choose. I simply took a rocker that was already on the engine and used it. My OCD didn't like that much but pushing the car outside and waiting to complete this job some other time was not going to work for me today.

I got the exhaust rockers swapped and now my engine can truly begin going back together. Setting the intake rocker shaft on the head is something of a pain. Patience and a gentle touch finally got all the rockers where they belong. Exhaust side was much easier. Time to carefully tighten the rocker shaft bolts.


It's pretty easy to see here which rocker has about 95k miles on it.

Getting the cam gear back on took patience and carefully rotating the crank to give me slack to get the gear lined up with the dowel on the end of the camshaft. Getting the chain tensioner back in was easy but getting a tool on the 19mm cap for it was really frustrating. Apparently, you can leave the tensioner compressed and it will pop as soon as you crank the engine. I would rather pop it before I crank the engine, so I was looking for how to do that. Luckily, I decided that because the chain was not on the chain guide properly. It was off track from my getting the chain onto the cam gear, so again I had to carefully rotate the crank to get slack on that run of the chain so that I could get the chain on the chain guide properly. I imagine if I had cranked the engine with the chain off the guide the way it was, it might had jumped time. So with the chain where it belongs, I slowing rotated the engine clockwise and I think I heard the tensioner pop. Good enough for me. I installed a new valve cover gasket and proceeded to finish the job.

The engine started right up and sounded not much different through my Milltek header and exhaust than before. I took it easy on the drive home but I did indulge in 2 pulls to see if I could feel anything. On a flat street, pulling through second gear, my car certainly felt stronger. My AFR was reading a little more lean at WOT than the stock cam (about 12.3). Between that and idling at stop lights with A/C running, I need a tune soon.

On the stock cam, while idling at stop lights, occasionally I would see my gauge go lean and the idle go rough. A blip of the throttle would settle that. Now, it does that at most stop lights and after I blip the throttle, it goes back to the rough idle. Off idle, the car is just fine. I've only got less than 30 miles, so I will reserve final thoughts on this job until my car is tuned and more miles on it. I'll report back then.

 

Wow - Quite the adventure you've taken us on!
Lots of great detailed information and insight along the process.

I might assume you'll be back in there after you resolve and receive the missing tappet cap form FCP?

Looking forward to your follow-up and impressions on performance.

 

Awesome write-up!!! Nice work. Dam, out in 1.5 hours? Convinces me to swap my cam even more so. I have a shrick cam in my car. I want a catcam 469. Truthfully, for the lopey/chop idle. Looking forward to your thoughts after tune and more miles.

 

Nice work! And honestly, I'm blown away with how straight forward a camshaft swap is on these cars.

 

So today was completely unexpected. I contacted Adrian to schedule a tune and he said he had time right now to do it if I was ready. I guess I was ready. After maybe 2 hours, he was done. Just like that from across the globe, my car is running like it never has before. All done before wife was even awake, although I can't believe the 3 idle-to-6000 RPM revs didn't wake her.

Prior to the tune, I really did not enjoy driving my car in the summer because the little 1.6L W11 struggles to drive both the supercharger and A/C compressor. After the tune, my car is much better to drive with the A/C on. Adrian even tuned my A/C compressor to shut off at WOT after asking how my car was after my first drive. He specifically wanted the air/fuel ratio my AFR gauge was reporting, and he asked if that was with the compressor running. I told him I shut if off whenever I'm going to run the car hard. That's when he mentioned he could tune the car to do that for me. Since I am in Arizona, he also set my cooling fan to come on sooner, as it now comes on at about 220 degrees. I also asked him to permanently disable my brake pad wear sensor system since I do not use those and my efforts to trick the system only works about 75% of the time. My car would go weeks without the warning light on, then it will come on for a few weeks before it would shut itself off. My car was currently in a "light on" cycle, so it was fresh in my mind while we were tweaking my car.

I drove the car maybe 15 miles after the tune was fully completed, both on freeway cruising and surface streets. I only did one WOT pull on the freeway on-ramp, intentionally leaving the A/C button on for it, and the car was fantastic. The whole drive was just great! I could not believe I was actually enjoying driving my car and I had the A/C running, because driving with the A/C on before was more like "tolerating" the drive than enjoying it.

My car certainly feels healthy and strong and just better in every way. It will take my time and miles for me to fully take it all in. Just wow.

It seems everyone who gets tuned by Adrian says the same thing: he is very efficient, easy to follow instructions and the results are superb. Add me to the list of satisfied customers. Now I need to wash my car so it can look as good as it runs!

I not planning on going back in there to replace 1 rocker arm. I'm not sure what I want regarding that. I know the mechanic should check his parts prior to starting the job because things like this happen from time to time. When the parts arrived, I opened the box, took a quick look and set the box aside until install day came and I got burned this time. Luckily, I had 4 other rockers I could use so I can drive my car while I figure out what to do about it long term.

During this job, I also noticed the passenger side engine mount/pad was broken. Silly me, months ago when I bought my header, I also ordered new mounts and polyurethane inserts to make sure the powertrain movement would be controlled as possible so that I don't break my expensive (Milltek) header from the engine movement. I have installed the Powerflex bushing on the lower torque rod and I put the inserts on the bushing that mounts on the passenger side strut tower, but I haven't got to the transmission mount insert yet (more work to get that one) and just straight forgot that I had that engine pad until I checked my FCP account and saw I received it months ago. It was home in my garage. I was working in the shop at my work.

I am normally pretty organized when it comes to collecting parts prior to a job, but I was pressed for time over the fall when I installed the header and then some things in my life happened that I forgot that I hadn't "completed" the header job in terms of replacing all the mounts. So I'll have to get back and do that.


The Catcam 469 will give that chop at idle? I would really like that too, but I hear there may be some driveability concerns in street driving with a cam like that. I also wonder how that does with the OBD system and catalytic converter? Although I do get some regular track time, my car is primarily a street car, so I try to temper my desire to build a max effort R53.

How do you like the Schrick cam? How long have you had it? What other mods to your car?

This gets me to thinking: is there a cam discussion thread here where those who want to upgrade their cam can go to get reviews on all the cams available for our cars? I searched some while I was cam shopping but cam discussions seemed to pop up here and there. It would be nice to consolidate that information.

Also, my engine mods:

- DDM Works cold air intake
- larger throttle body (from a BMW V12, I believe)*
- silicone hose from DDM airbox to larger throttle body
- ported supercharger inlet pipe*
- ported supercharger with 11% pulley from Stiegemeier
- ported horn from supercharger*
- GRS Motorsport intercooler
- ported intercooler to intake manifold pipe*
- ported intake manifold*
- 380cc Audi fuel injectors
- Detroit Tuned BPV
- WMW Mild Street cam
- Milltek header (gasket port matched) with high flow catalytic converter (wrapped) and extra bung for wideband oxygen sensor
- Milltek resonated cat-back exhaust

* These parts I bought from @MiniManAdam . I believe he did the work himself. I tweaked the supercharger inlet pipe a bit to more closely match the throttle body.

A couple of years ago, I had (almost) free access to a dyno but my car wasn't modded like it is now. I could have done a baseline run but never got around to it and that shop is now closed. I guess now I could visit a dyno to put a number on where my car is now in terms of power. Wife is a little grumpy about the money I have spent on this car and I told her I would pause for a while, so I don't see her being excited about me bringing home a dyno slip.

Next on my list of mods would be a LSD, lighter wheels and BVH. It will be a while until I get to these though. I am very happy with my car as it is now, so I think that will help me be patient before I get back to the mod list.