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First time import driver reporting in

4K views 20 replies 4 participants last post by  T-Town_Show-Down 
#1 ·
Hello all,

I bought a ‘15 Forte5 SX Manual sight unseen the other day (I have 7 days after I take delivery to change my mind) but haven’t been able to take delivery because of the winter storms. I’ve been pacing by the window waiting for the snow to melt. You’ll probably primarily see me in the performance forum. My goal is to get 250 to the wheels and since I come from RWD I’d like to get the steering closer to neutral. In the past I’ve driven a V6 Mustang and a Chrysler 300.
 
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#2 ·
Can be done although would require some heavier mods - FMIC, intake, larger turbo, maybe exhaust. Tune of course :)
The car is relatively light, so I would suggest to wait and let you find out how much more you need.

From my personal experience - even the "stock" tune changed the car drastically.
 
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#3 ·
Holy crap you weren’t kidding on the weight thing. I forgot how heavy my 300 was. North of 3800lbs. And the Mustang was like 3400. First time I’ll have owned a sub 3k lb car. Still, my monkey brain craves a low to mid 5 second 0-60. What do you make of the lap 3 ECU tune? (Not the Uncle Chip) They have a dyno showing 255 with FMIC, intake, full exhaust, and their tune, no mods to the turbo or block:
Second dyno on that page. I don’t have a windows laptop and I’d prefer to have a spare for warranty work so I think it’d be more practical for me than just sending mine off. But I have no idea if those numbers are reliable or how they compare to other tuners.
 
#4 ·
It shouldn't take that much. Get a new midpipe or at least gut the second cat. Then get a hold of sxth about a tune. With just an intake, midpipe, and a tune your torque to the wheels could be in that 250 range pretty easily I bet. I think I've seen it said that their current stage 0 tune can put down 230-240 wtq.

As far as more neutral handling you have a few options. I would get a rear torsion bar and either koni yellow shocks for the rear or coilovers. I have the torsion bar and konis. They are adjustable to if you really want to experiment you can increase their stiffness and increase rear tire pressure in relation to the front. Just be careful and do it in small increments. Full stiffness rear shocks and 10psi over the front in the rear tires might make it too tail happy to be safe.

Your goal is 250 whp. But are you planning on racing? (drag, street, autocross, etc?) And how much do you want to spend?
What PLP said and maybe some wmi and a downpipe you could break 300whp. Of course there are costs with that.
 
#5 ·
It shouldn't take that much. Get a new midpipe or at least gut the second cat. Then get a hold of sxth about a tune. With just an intake, midpipe, and a tune your torque to the wheels could be in that 250 range pretty easily I bet. I think I've seen it said that their current stage 0 tune can put down 230-240 wtq.

As far as more neutral handling you have a few options. I would get a rear torsion bar and either koni yellow shocks for the rear or coilovers. I have the torsion bar and konis. They are adjustable to if you really want to experiment you can increase their stiffness and increase rear tire pressure in relation to the front. Just be careful and do it in small increments. Full stiffness rear shocks and 10psi over the front in the rear tires might make it too tail happy to be safe.

Your goal is 250 whp. But are you planning on racing? (drag, street, autocross, etc?) And how much do you want to spend?
What PLP said and maybe some wmi and a downpipe you could break 300whp. Of course there are costs with that.
Is removing the cat to gut something I can do without grinding? If not I’ll probably just shell out for a mid pipe. This will be my first FWD car besides my wife’s Prius so it’ll be interesting to learn how it responds. I felt like my Mustang was too loose in the rear but it didn’t have traction control or stability control.

Plan is to daily with occasional midnight drags at the local strip and occasional spirited driving on local curvy roads.

I’d like to get 1/4 mile down to 13.x and it’d be extra nice to get the 0-60 down to 5.1, but I don’t want to have to build the engine or transmission so if that’s not realistic I’ll ask for your estimate on what’s possible with that constraint. Is the water/meth injection street legal? If I did that I’d probably have to invest in a windows laptop so I could flash between the meth tune and the ran-out-of-meth tune, unless there’s a built in failuresafe of some kind. Spending goal is as little as possible 😂 Every $ saved is money for the next project
By the way thank you both Phoenix and PLP for helping me get my bearings on this new car. I’m excited for it! Delayed because of the storms...I have to wait 2 more weeks.
 
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#6 ·
No problem at all. Glad to share any knowledge I have.

So if you were going to set your car up for racing other than in a straight line you would probably find that being front wheel drive is not as much of a detractor as you might think. You just have to set it up properly. With coilovers this would be easiest because you should be able to set up the weight balance more like what you would want. But, thats a lot of money and not what you are doing so...

First thing first, proper maintenance. How many miles does it have? You probably will want to change the oil. Go with something that is SN plus rated and an oem oil filter. If you are 50k+ miles then consider new spark plugs and ignition coils. Ignition coils you will just want the same ones you have stock but new genuine oem ones. For spark plugs, if you are going to get a tune beyond sxth stage 0 get hks m45xl. If you are going to get a stage 0 tune or stay stock go for the m40xls instead. If you dont plan on getting a tune right away then you might be able to skimp on the plugs and coils for now.

So as far as upgrades go. The best thing you can do is get a lighter set of wheels and better tires. These will improved everything about your car. Acceleration, braking, handling. Of course that won't increase horsepower and a new cheaper lightweight set with summer tires will cost you $1200 at least.
If you don't want to get wheels then consider better tires at least (not sure what the car currently has).

For intake, I've experimented with a few things. What I'm currently running now, and what is my preference, is a modified stock system.
The stock intake on our cars is 4.25" which is 0.75" bigger than the biggest aftermarket intake. That 0.75" is actually a TON of area. I bought a new oem lower intake box online from a kia parts store for $25 and cut out the fender side of the airbox below where the filter sits. This is a similar idea to removing the snorkle from the front of the airbox but if you do that then the airbox is just sucking in heated air from behind the intercooler. I also added a drop-in air filter.

As far as intercooler piping goes. Just get a hotpipe rather than the resonator delete. Its worth it and not that expensive. If you go with the modded intake above then you can reallocate the funds from a new intake to buying a hotpipe.

For the midpipe. I got mine done by a local shop for $100 out the door. That is cheap and it wont last as long as a quality piece but I'm ok with it. If you dont want to do that or pay to get one from evilla, get under the car, remove the front of the midpipe (2 bolts), and chip out the 2nd cat with a long screwdriver. There's writeups for that floating around. I haven't done it but its supposed to be very easy. Just make sure to wear eye protection and a mask might not hurt. No grinding necessary at all.

You don't need a tune for water/methanol injection. Whether its legal or not where you are I don't know. The ecu will adjust to the cooler IAT's and should add more ignition timing. What the limit on this is and what exactly you can gain I don't know. Supposedly you could get 3-5* more timing which could be 20+ whp. At least that's whats reported by the veloster guys.

The rear end on these cars is a common complaint. Get a rear torsion bar minimally. If that's not enough get new shocks or coilovers.

One other item which I havent tried is a new wastegate solenoid. It wont necessarily add peak power but it will hold boost better. Or at least thats whats reported. So power delivery is more stable and the car will be faster, maybe.

So,
oil change - regular maintenance cost
hks spark plus - $120
ignition coils - $200
intake - $300?
modded stock intake - $75
midpipe - $300?
gutted cat - free $
rear torsion bar - $200?
wheels and tires - $1200
wmi - $600
tune - $400

As far as your goals, 250whp and 13.x's is doable. Not sure about 5.1 0-60.

I would start with the oil change, if you need tires do those, gut the cat or find a local exhaust shop to make a midpipe for you, mod the intake, get a hotpipe, and get a torsion bar.

That is less than $400. With similar mods I logged my car for a few runs and had a tuner estimate my whp. They said probably around 190+. Which is about 10-15% over stock.
With a tune, depending on which tune and from where, 220-250whp easy. Maybe higher if they push it. With wmi and/or a fmic, another 20whp should be attainable.
 
#7 ·
Going below 6 sec 0-60 is hard. Not only grip limited on the beginning, but it requires much more power than 250 HP to the wheels, and very fast shifting. You are talking about two shifts and while 1-2 is quick, 2-3 will take time. Sure, it is 0.2 second, but it matters a lot.
Besides, each shift makes the turbo to vent, unless you invest in more pieces to keep the pressure.
Yet still, 250 HP is not enough. Maybe you can get to 5.8 or so.


see here. You need about 300 HP to get close to 5.1 area. Golf R has 2.0 T. It is known VW underrates their engines.
 
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#8 ·
Update: took delivery of the car on 3/2 and was having a blast. Then the clutch died on the 8th.....it's in the shop now waiting for parts to arrive (I ordered Clutchmasters FX350 and lightweight flywheel from Tork). The tech recommended to replace the clutch master and slave cylinders as well so I have KIA genuine parts on order for those. I've been trying to find as much info as possible on the clutches in these cars and in the course of doing so I saw a couple threads talking about a delay valve that supposedly leads to premature failure. Word on the street is there's one that you can get under the hood by replacing a line and another in the slave cylinder. Does anyone know how I could go about completely eliminating the one in the slave cylinder? As I understand it the transmission has to be open to replace the slave cylinder so as long as it's open anyway I'd like to go ahead and knock that out. Or if this is a terrible idea someone please stop me before I destroy my new car 😅 If having the transmission open for service makes it easier to do the other one too lmk, if it makes sense I don't even mind just throwing some more money at the shop to get the whole package done all at once.
 
#9 ·
What did you do to this poor clutch? :)

Anyway, the clutch delay valve is a known thing among many cars.
I had done it on 2004 Elantra. Then I had 2009 model and the most recently 2015 Forte5 SX. Again, all of them reportedly had the delay valve.
I could see improvement in 2004 Elantra. I did not do anything in 2009 Elantra as I could not really say if the valve was doing anything. Maybe a tiny bit, but nothing like 2004 had.
Even less noticeable was in Forte.
Hence in the end - I did not touch it at all.

Some say it is a huge improvement.
I cannot say anything. I can say, though, that I was happy with OEM setup of the clutch master cylinder. Maybe, there is a chance, the previous owner removed the valve... hence my good experience.

What you need to do is to look into the master cylinder (this is the thingy that pushes the brake fluid from your clutch pedal to operate the clutch).
Transmission does not need to be open. I do not see a connection here. Unless I am talking about something else.
I could be wrong... I have been wrong before, so who knows.
Regardless, there should be a valve that limits backflow from the slave cylinder what results in "slower" clutch release. Hence, one may not be able to very quickly dump the clutch.
How it looks like - I am not sure. Old Elantra had a spring loaded valve.

There is a chance this sits on the slave cylinder... but it would not really make much sense as you want limit the flow at the end of the path to not cause "depressurized" areas when the clutch pedal is released.


You understand operation of it, right?
It is a hydraulic system. There are two cylinders. Master on the top and slave on the clutch. Master is operated from clutch pedal and it pushes via hydraulic fluid onto the slave.
You push, it will lift the clutch. You let the pedal go - spring will help to bring it back up and clutch is released. The fluid flows back, but there is a flow limiting valve that does not allow for too sudden movement.

I could drop the clutch, burn tires... all was fine.
Nothing bad will happen if you remove the valve. Only your operation can destroy the clutch. With the valve in, inexperienced driver will be able to mess it up anyway.
 
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#11 ·
Clutch install went peachy once the parts arrived from Tork. Shop was impressed with the Clutch Masters clutch and the pedal effort feels fine like I could do a very long drive and not be sore in my quads and glutes lol. Bummer is the CEL light came on and there's some rattling when accelerating and if I dump the throttle. Code P2261 Turbo Bypass Valve. From talking to the shop they made it sound like the "electronic boost control" solenoid but frankly I'm new to turbos and there was a lot of jargon so I'm not 100% positive it's not the RCV solenoid. He said it "sits on top of the turbo", can someone more experienced than me help me figure out which one I need? Also, they said it's fine to drive the car in the meantime but the rattling skeeves me out. Is it really okay to drive?

Btw thank you @Fortepro1 for the warm welcome. Everyone has been so helpful and I'm really glad there's such a supportive community for these cars. TIA

also tagging:
@PLP
@lephoenix
 
#12 ·
Okay, so I talked to one of the guys at Tork and he more or less told me he the shop is full of crap and/or incompetent. He said the code is almost definitely related to the blowoff valve (not the wastegate) and that the rattling is likely an engine mount (specifically a “dogbone”). Taking it to the Kia dealer that’s K900 certified on Wednesday, it’s the earliest they could get me in...at least the car is drivable in the meantime so I can just enjoy being in it for a bit. As an aside, if anyone has a “turbo components and functions for dummies” read or vid link I’ll take it. I understand superchargers but this has felt orders of magnitude more complex...or else I’ve just gotten dumber 😂
 
#13 ·
The bypass (blowoff) valve gets torn occasionally. They aren't too expensive to replace.
They think there is a rattling because your dogbone mount is broken?? Wow. Thats the first I have heard of that on this car. Those aren't too expensive either. Actually you can get the mount from an elantra n-line which might be a bit stiffer than ours. OEM parts to replace both should be under $200.
 
#15 ·
They think there is a rattling because your dogbone mount is broken?? Wow. Thats the first I have heard of that on this car.
Mine was actually loose... the previous owner must have been doing something with it. Maybe it had inserts that were removed before the sale...
If it was cracked/broken, the noise would be terrible and the engine would jump like crazy.
 
#14 ·
Dog bone - easy to inspect. Just crawl under the car.
The code is a relatively common thing here.
Search for it on this forum
For example
 
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#18 ·
You know where the intercooler is? BOV is on the top of that. :) go figure, huh?
Look for the 1" pipe or so coming into the intake, after the air filter.
It is connected to BOV. If you disconnect the pipe from the intake tube (cap the opening on the intake) you might be able to hear if there is a turbo leak (it might create a hissing noise or so under load). Of course it will "pshhh" when you let off the gas.

As for the dogbone. It is easy one.
Look this picture and find the part on the back of the engine.
All bolts must be very tight.
Tool Bicycle part Auto part Font Cylinder
 
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#19 ·
The pic will be a HUGE help, thank you. As for the BOV, I don't know where the intercooler is. I know the front-mount is a popular mod but I don't know where the stock one is. I do at least know that it should look kind of like a radiator but smaller. Your hand-holding is greatly appreciated 😂 I tried searching "forte 1.6t engine diagram" on Google and got a bunch of stuff for other Kias, none of which were the veloster turbo that, if I understand correctly, shares our engine.
 
#20 · (Edited)
uhm, I think the easiest way is to follow the air pipes. Either on the top of engine, but it might be a bit trickier. From the bottom you will see only hot pipe (if I recall correctly). The air flow direction is from the back of the engine (the turbo is between the rear of the engine and the firewall) to the front, where you have the intercooler. So follow the pipe, from metal it becomes rubber hose that goes directly to the intercooler which sits in the drivers side.

Edit.
Here is a site from KIA.
years ago it was free.
If you know how to download/print it (not scrambled) into PDF, you may get yourself schematics.

There is also option on eBay
Kia forte repair manual
About 10 USD - problem is that it is not clear if 1.6 T-GDI is covered and how well organised the printout is.
 
#21 ·
Welp, went in to the dealer Wednesday. Of course the CEL was still lit up Tuesday night but turned off Wednesday morning so that didn't get addressed. I was there for well over 6 hours, they ended up telling me the rattling was "definitely" because of history of bad fuel and charged me $180 for "fuel induction service" which SilverRock didn't cover since they said it was maintenance. It's still rattling, the service writer told me to let it go all the way through the next tank of gas and then it should be gone. The rattling is best heard in 4th, 5th, and 6th gear between ~1750-3000rpm. TBH I'm not holding my breath for it to stop without more work. Would it be possible for improper clutch install to create this problem? I would think I'd hear it in every gear if that was it but wanted to ask. Still haven't had a chance to get under the car to check out the dogbone; I use my BIL's garage and he's been sick so I haven't been over in a bit. CEL came back on the very next day with the same code, P2261 turbo bypass valve mechanical. UVO diag fails on startup, when run manually it says "engine control system". I welcome any advice.

PS thanks @PLP for the link. Unfortunately it demands payment, but I'll probably try signing up and if I can download stuff I'll make a new post with a magnet or download link.

16554
 
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