RD Motorsportz

Discussion in 'Forum News and Announcements' started by CMajor, Aug 22, 2016.

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  1. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    RD Motorsportz is banned from a few Facebook groups now, for improper tunes, and having a few cars catch on fire. Please Spread the word!

    Here's my personal experiences with RD.

    As far as I know RD Motorsportz isn’t active on any of the forums anymore but this is to warn any unsuspecting newbies not get any sort of work done there period. I want to mention this, why in the world would you purposefully spell “Motorsports” with a z in the name of your business. That honestly should have been my first clue but anyways.

    A little background to start off. I bought my ’13 Speed 3 a little over a year ago, new to turbos and really modifying my car. I was soon introduced to OMS (Ohio Mazdaspeeds) the facebook group, which where I made the connections with RD Motorsportz. I’m thinking to myself, “This is great, a shop specializing in Mazdaspeeds that is less than an hour from my house”. I’ve always wanted to learn more about working on cars so I decided to help out around the shop from time to time. I can’t deny that I had fun hanging out with them from time to time and I did learn quite a bit about these cars at their shop. I went from basically a stock car to a fully bolted k04 in merely a few months. Since I hadn’t really worked on cars before but eager to learn I paid RD to install my parts while I helped. I did install my turboback and coilovers by myself :p.
    Now these are just some instances that come to mind that kind of made me question the work that I had done at this “shop”. I specifically remember getting my front mount (tr8) and JMF IM installed by them and Ron was getting frustrated with the piping that he rigged up. Basically took the piping and threw it down on the ground in front of me, I was a little off put by this. I mean I know it’s just a piece of metal, it was more the fact that he did it and just looked at me like what are you gonna do about it. At least that’s how I interpreted it. I was busy pulling my headlights apart to paint them black so I just let it go. (Side note, pulling apart a gen 2 paid of headlights is a pain in the ass. I would recommend paying someone to do it lol). So we get to my actual front mount core and I didn’t have an aftermarket crash bar so he had to cut mine up. I honestly don’t remember if I knew this going into it but I agreed to hacking the crash bar up. [​IMG]
    So that part was fine but I found out way later that he used basically 1mm piece of sheet metal and bent it in the shape of a bracket. The bracket had to of rusted the second moisture touched it because it’s covered in rust and extremely flimsy from being made of sheet metal. Same sheet metal was used to block off my EGR which is now rusted.
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    I’m sure it’s fine, again it’s the principal of not doing it properly. Everything was installed with the help of some other locals. I don’t think Ron even touched my JMF so I can’t really blame him per se but my car was in his shop and I paid him for a service. The next day on my first WOT pull, I was on my way to work and suddenly my car starts bogging down. I slow down, look to my AP and see my AFRs are crazy high in the 20s just partial throttle. I immediately pull off the road, to try and figure out what’s going on. I was really low on gas and I thought maybe I had run out of gas and it was starving the fuel pump so I go to the nearest gas station (about a mile away) to find they don’t have any gas jugs, le sigh. Now that I have back tracked to my car and walked another couple of miles to a gas station. Got gas and some very nice person in a van picked me up and dropped me off at my car. (I wondered if they were going to keep going past my car, the van didn’t really give off a rape vibe so I offered them some money for their troubles but they didn’t accept) Added the gas to my car and start my car, AFRs still crazy high. I start inspecting my engine bay and wouldn’t you know it. One of my meth bungs lost a plug so all sorts of unmetered air was getting in.
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    I checked the other three that were still there and none of them were tight. I searched for the missing plug but no luck. Ran to advanced auto to see if they had something to plug the hole but no luck there either. A co-worker saw me and picked me up so I left my car on the side of the road. Later had my girlfriend come get me from work and ran to Lowes. Got something that just slid in the hole and wrapped it with thread lock. I just limped it to work which was only another minute down the road. Overnighted a plug from Howerton Engineering which they were great on getting it me over the weekend. Got the car back from work in a couple of days. All was fine and dandy, the car ran fine over the winter on that setup. I was on a 33% e mix making about 330HP/370TQ which I was pretty happy with at the time and I don’t recall noticing any issues. I knew how to perform a MAF cal and that was about the extent of my tuning knowledge. Since then I’ve done my homework. I can’t say I know how to tune well but I know how to tune better than RD. In all honesty, I’m pretty sure you don’t need to look at anything else because the rest was left OTS. To answer your question because I know you will wonder, yes I did pay for this tune. I believe it was $75 for the 93 and $75 for the e33 tune, not 100% sure but I believe that’s it. Incoming pictures of my e33 tune on the stock turbo fully bolted. As you can see it’s Rondiculous. The timing table alone is enough to make you cringe. Past MBT? I think so. Was any sort of math or reasoning used? I think not. If you think this is good wait till you see my BT tune, it’s pretty much the same LOL. I was talking with someone recently and he asked me how did you get traction. Pretty much was nonexistent in 1st-3rd on my K04 e tune. It makes sense now after seeing the tune that I had.
    Pics from my e85 (33%) tune on the K04:
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    Now on to the BT install. I purchased a 5858 dual ball bearing turbo with .62 AR in plans of going built motor eventually. Received it in the mail on February 26th and the install day was March 6th to give you a time line. Got all the supporting mods CP-E EM, Kozmic downpipe and dump tube, 44mm Tial EWG, 4” RamFab intake (Rambo did a great job btw). Now on to the install day, I’m still on a stock block and stock clutch so you know. Day one was pretty much getting the K04, OEM EM and Ultimate racing DP out. We may have gotten the turbo behind the motor but not bolted up yet to the EM, I don’t remember exactly. I ended up sleeping over at their house that night due to running so late which was nice of them. I did quite a bit of the disassembly of things while Ron was working on something else. I believe it was the shop car. Once everything was out I was more assisting the rest of the install rather than doing a majority of the work. I held things up while they were tightening from the top pretty much. We had some issues with my FJ performance underrouted piping kit but based on the interaction with Matt, the way Ron had my core mounted caused the issue. The core sat up higher than what they designed the kit for so I guess there's really no one to blame there. Ron had to cut my new piping on the cold side and extend it with a coupler to get everything to fit on that side. He had to use a larger 90* pipe on the hot side to get it to work with a longer coupler coming off the compressor housing of the turbo. I was little annoyed the piping had to be cut but it was whatever that was the last thing we had to do to get it up and running. We got the car going and really everything was fine mechanically or so I thought it was. I’ll get to that in a bit after going through the tune. Now on the tune below, I paid to have my car dyno tuned so I want to say revision 10 was after the dyno and my car made 387HP/352TQ. He made two more revisions on the street and we had a dyno day, my car made 392HP/368TQ. There is no doubt my car was fast but was it safe? Based on this tune, no. 22* of timing up top on a BT car is ridiculous on top of being on a stock block. Again way passed MBT and my EGT had to be insanely high. At the time I didn’t know how bad it was. I always looked at the tune he sent but never really second guessed it. You can see a trend with the KR sensor being turned off past 5750. Every tune that he has out is like that and that’s an OTS value. I have talked to several people that are tuned by him and all have had their KR sensor turn off at 5750. Absolutely zero interpolation was done in the map and I’m sure everything was Shift ++ for the changes that were made. Like I said above, I’m going to attach the whole tune but you probably don’t need to look at anything else because the rest has OTS values. I mean he didn’t even read Alibor’s or Bucker’s tuning guide, with those you could get a decent and safe tune. At least from looking at the tune, it doesn’t look like he read anything. The tune was my main beef with RD until I decided to go bigger which leads to part 3 of this extensive story.

    Here's my e85 (33%) tune on my 5858, with a stock block and stock clutch. Obviously other supporting mods.
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    The car seemingly ran fine and I had a trip planned in the spring to go to ENM. Little did I know this is where my eyes would be opened. April 22nd rolled along, I packed my things and headed down to TN with a buddy of mine following. I had been talking with some of the NEO (North East Ohio) guys for a while just on facebook and had never met them in person. Immediately meeting Sho, Kevin and Patrick it was like we’d been friends for years (which was awesome). We met up talked cars, drank a bit, had fun on some back roads. Kevin and I probably should have been arrested hahah. (We lined up in Mexico and went flying by a cop going about 120). He didn’t have time to turn around before we found a side road. Anyways, after meeting them I was just talking about cars in general but tuning came up in one of those conversations. It really made me start doubting the work that was being done on my car. A month or so went by after ENM and I started reading some more on tuning on MSF. Just trying to learn up really and I started seeing all of the things not to do in a tune which made me question everything even more. I would also like to point out that on multiple occasions I have talked to Ron about tuning and he told me he’s talked to Justin(Freek) about his tunes. I don’t by any means want to drag more people into this but I was told by someone who contacted Justin that he did not talk to Ron about his tunes that he was putting out. I’m not exactly sure if Ron was lying or if he misunderstood a conversation that he had with Justin. So that’s generally why I was like okay if Justin said it’s okay then it’s probably solid. I was in contact with now my current tuner, Mark Gibson, and basically sent him my tune to look over. I was messaged pretty much the next day by one of my friends to not boost at all (sad face). I worked with a couple of guys up north to get off my RD tune and on to something safe. I loaded up a spring pressure map and everything was solid. I was obviously making less power but I would take a safe tune conservative tune over a dangerous high powered tune any day of the week. I stopped showing up at Ron’s other than to pick up my stuff from his shop and word got around that I wasn’t on his tune anymore. He never said anything to me but I saw him at a car meet after that and he basically ignored me. Oh well lol. Over the next month or so I tuned myself, I started with the spring pressure map and worked my way up. I got my car up in the mid-350s which I was happy with on 93. Once I lined up getting tuned by Mark, he sent me a base map and that was literally the best thing that’s ever happened to my car. The drivability improved 10 fold. I was extremely pleased and really shocked that my car felt so much different, in a good way. Basically since ENM I had been talking to Kevin about getting a 6th port setup and that if I drove from Cinci up to Cleveland that he would help me install everything. Well as time passed I saved up the money purchased everything on my list and wouldn’t you know a turbo went up for sale. I hopped on a gen 2 6266 so I brought all my stuff up with me. This is where it gets even more interesting. Remember that I said it appeared to be all mechanically sound? Well here’s what we found wrong with my car when we started tearing it apart to install everything.

    (Copied from a facebook post)

    “The turbo wasn’t tight on the manifold
    The manifold wasn’t tight on the head
    The oil drain line was stretched to its limits
    The oil drain line bolts were stripped (So bad the turbo needed to be removed to get the bolts out)
    The coolant hardline was left in the car after a BT install causing the 4” intake pipe to be bent to shit because the pipe wouldn’t fit right with the hardline
    The coupler on the turbo wasn’t tight
    The wastegate vacuum fittings were loose
    All of the vacuum lines going to the 3 port were bottle necked
    The intercooler looked like it was held on with scrap he found behind his house all nasty and rusty
    Skipping some stuff in the post …
    And I saved this for the best for the last kicker!!!
    He left the secondary O2 sensor plugged in and dangling there rubbing and touching things because there was no bung for it in the downpipe… No big deal, a lot of people don’t run secondary )2 sensors because without a cat it’s pointless to have… But for those of you that don’t know exactly how O2 sensors work let me explain how scary this is… O2 sensors have a heater circuit in them so they heat up and get extremely hot to where the tip turns cherry red so carbon cannot build up on them so they can read correctly.
    Now let’s think… A cherry red hot piece of steel is dangling somewhere under the car where gas lines run, brake lines run, and where the oil return is…. This car could have went up in flames in a split second and he wouldn’t have expected it because he paid for “quality” work…
    No wonder he’s had more than one car go up in flames….”

    It’s kind of hard to show “proof” on some of these things especially that things weren’t tight so I guess you have to take our word for that. It wasn’t really on my mind that I would be making this so I didn’t take pictures but the couplers on the various parts mentioned above were black from not being tight if that tells you anything. We may have thrown it away but I may be able to get a picture showing how short the drain line was if it’s really necessary. The only thing that I can say I knew about was the hardline, Ron didn’t say anything about it but a friend asked me about it but I had no clue it would cause issues down the road. To kind of sum up the items on my car, I feel like I was misled in pretty much every avenue due to my inexperience with the platform at the time. If you take one thing from my post, it should be to do your own research and make sure things are done correctly. I took for granted that I was paying someone to work on my car and it turned out to be a real shoddy job.
    With all of that being said, Kevin, Sho, Evan and Jake all helped get my car straightened out. I am now on my 6266 and dialing in the 6th port. I really do want to thank them again for helping me through all of this and answering my many questions over facebook. I am happy that 95% of anything RD did on my car is now been redone and triple checked.



    I wish that I other had the happy ending that I had but several other people came out said they've had issues with their car since they had work done at RD.

    Brendan’s ZZB tune:
    Brendan’s mod list- AT HPFP upgraded internals, Cobb SRI and TIH, CP-E TMIC and downpipe, step colder plugs and a sure rmm.
    He was partially into boost when he went ZZB on his third revision. The map was a 93 tune and tuned by Ron at RD. Brendan said that on his second revision he was hitting fuel cut really bad so he informed Ron. Ron sent him his third revision and blew up the same day. I have attached his map and a 3rd gear logs to this post but here are some of the highlights of the tune.

    Here's Brendan's 93 tune:
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    I believe I got everyone's tune in there if you want to dig deeper into it. Hope this helps with making your decision on where to take your car or where not to take your car.

    Saved the best for last, this was a RD built car...
    [​IMG]
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    Attached Files:

    Last edited: Aug 23, 2016
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  2. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    Here's another gentleman who asked to not be named that received "work" done by RD. Supposedly he had his valve cleaned too...

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  3. CmdrShepard

    CmdrShepard Greenie Member

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    This should be stickied so everyone can be aware of this

    Sent from my Nexus 6P
     
    CmdrShepard, via a mobile device, Aug 22, 2016
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  4. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    I agree, there are so many more issues. Really too many to list. Apparently they have been on the radar of a couple of the facebook groups for awhile for putting out shoddy work. I had no idea when I went to them in the first place.
     
  5. Redline

    Redline I done fucked up for the last time. BANNED Greenie Member

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    Thanks for getting the word out, y'all. Looking at many of those tables, I cringe as someone who self-tuned for years.Those timing levels and the complete disabling of the knock sensor >5,750 rpms are HUGE red flags. I hope permanent damage wasn't done on the OP's engine.

    For comparison, I'm only ~17-17.5 degrees timing at redline on my BNR S3 (nowhere even CLOSE to 22 degrees) and I'm running E28 + 100 % methanol with a CM10 on top of it to keep things extra cool and very high octane. And jumping up 5 or 6 degrees of timing in just 500rpms in the O/L section of the timing tables?!? o.0

    Dang. You should use this as proof of MZR stoutness too, LOL. Thanks for sharing this very important info with the community. I hope your Speed has a long, healthy life :)
     
    Last edited: Aug 23, 2016
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  6. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    Yeah I just wish I would of known sooner. All of his tunes have the knock sensor turned off > 5750. I've checked more than just the tunes that I posted. I don't think there's any issues with my motor. I'm actually kinda scared to do a compression check after everything it went through lol. I don't have any issues with blow by so I assume the rings are fine. I don't really know what running that high of timing would do to the motor over time.

    I started reading more about tuning and I was like um that's not okay haha.
     
    CMajor, via an iPhone, Aug 23, 2016
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  7. Raider

    Raider Administraider Administrator Platinum Member

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    i am considering moving this to the General Population. I want everyone to be aware. Just need an idea where to have it.

    Thanks for posting the warning. Seems we have just a few shitty companies amongst the great ones.
     
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  8. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    There could be a new category made under the approved vendors that is something almong the lines of not approved vendors. Just a thought.

    Or title it. "These Vendors Like to Kick Cats". I know some of the forum regulars are fond of cats. Surely that will get people's attention.
     
    CMajor, via an iPhone, Aug 23, 2016
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  9. Redline

    Redline I done fucked up for the last time. BANNED Greenie Member

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    What about "These vendors punch babies"?
     
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  10. Raider

    Raider Administraider Administrator Platinum Member

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    I do not want to dirty the quality vendors section, either.
     
  11. VTMongoose

    VTMongoose John/MD1032 Greenie Member

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    Damn @Enki Dramatune's got nothing on this guy.
     
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  12. Enki

    Enki Motorhead Platinum Member

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    Yeah it's bad, but I don't think RD has nuthuggers like drama does.
     
  13. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    There's a couple of guys that will swear Ron is God but a lot of people jumped ship when this all came out.
     
    CMajor, via an iPhone, Aug 23, 2016
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  14. Raider

    Raider Administraider Administrator Platinum Member

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    Oh they do, just not as obnoxious.
     
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  15. Enki

    Enki Motorhead Platinum Member

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    Yeah see when I posted the drama shit on the local Facebook, they latched on to his nuts like rabid leeches. At least one tried to infiltrate my friends list, probably for contact information (that isn't there) for trolling.
     
  16. CMajor

    CMajor Greenie Member

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    Except Danny, he's annoying AF
    Oh wow, I didn't have anything like that. That's pretty relentless
     
  17. Enki

    Enki Motorhead Platinum Member

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    Honestly I was anticipating worse.
     
  18. Redline

    Redline I done fucked up for the last time. BANNED Greenie Member

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    But what about that awesome clutch they sell for a great price? Is that still a valid option, or are we going torch and pitchfork them completely? The Act 6-puck is proven, but has a known-short service life. Southbends are really nice, but expensive. And I think the jury is still divided on Clutchmasters... sigh.
     
  19. Sho

    Sho Silver Member

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    There's quite a few people running that custom clutch. And AFAIK, a lot of them are having issues with it. @CMajor can probably speak more to that
     
    Sho, via a mobile device, Aug 23, 2016
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  20. VTMongoose

    VTMongoose John/MD1032 Greenie Member

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    You mean the one that supposedly lasts forever?
     
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