Blow Off Valves on Shamal

I'm starting to wish that I'd arranged some sort of royalty deal with Forge now... only kidding, since it's great to see people adopting these valves for their Maserati Bi-turbos. They're now making their debut on the superb V8 engine Shamal that you can see pictured above.

Thanks for the picture Mark!

More Blow Off Valves

It's nice to see that my blow off valves are being adopted by other Ghibli owners. Here's a picture of another Ghibli with the valves fitted, this time by another owner (Mark) in the Netherlands and fitted by Jorrit at Auto Forza.


Mark seems pretty happy with them, particularly with the distinctive noise!

If anyone else is interested in fitting these valves then drop me an email and I'll be more than happy to give you the details!

Blow off valves on Enrico's pages

I got mentioned twice recently on Enrico's Maserati Pages! It certainly feels good to think that I'm giving something back having been helped so much by the Maserati community.

First of all... good to see that Yannick and I (and Jarle in Norway, who has something similar fitted to his 224) are in agreement with racing teams as to the proper location of the blow off valves! The picture below from Enrico's pages shows what appears to be a racing version of the Open Cup, with blow off valves located on the underside of the inlet piping leading to the throttle body.


But what drew my eye is that on this Open Cup, the boost control solenoid valve has also been replaced? It looks like it's that blue part to the right of the intake manifold? This suggests to me that, as I suspect, the OEM solenoid is not that reliable and perhaps is a bit lacking in performance. This replacement solenoid appears to have a screw adjustment on top of it... perhaps to control the boost setting, indicating that this solenoid is mechanically adjusted, which seems a bit odd for a racer?

Of course, I could well be talking rubbish, but it would be nice to find out!

On the Mov'it side, the new components are set to arrive next week. This is unfortunate since I'll be away on business next week, so the earliest possibility to fit the brakes will be the following week... I just hope the cold weather holds off until then, otherwise it's going to be early next year before I get to fit them!

Blow off valves (BOV) for Ghibli

 
About a year ago I installed a pair of blow off valves on the Ghibli. I have an MY92 Ghibli with a 2.0l bi-turbo engine that did not come with recirculating type blow off valves that were fitted to the later MY94 cars. Therefore, every time I changed gear, the turbos would stall as the pressure on the inlet side of the engine backed down to the compressors.

This effectively increased the spool up time when accellerating after each gear change, making the car feel momentarily sluggish. But worse than this, it was putting unnecessary wear and tear on the turbos as they were constantly being accellerated and decellerated, which effectively decreased the longevity of the turbos.

To remedy this problem, I got help from the guys at Forge motorsport in the UK. After measuring the dimensions of the aluminium intake pipes prior to the throttle body, I asked the guys at Forge if they could weld the blow off valves directly onto some new pipe sections. These were then direct replacements for the existing pipes.

The location of these valves is pretty good, since they're located close to the throttle body, which means that they bleed off pressure pretty quickly without the entire inlet system pressuring up. The control line for the two blow off valves is teed together before connecting to the back of the plenum chamber; Jorrit at Auto Forza drilled a hole, tapped it and installed a push fit connector on the back of the plenum chamber for me. The control lines are blue in the picture above, but I've since replaced them with black hoses and fed them beneath the plenum chamber so that they now look like they were fitted by Maserati.

In action, the valves work very well. The car feels more lively when driving hard and feels like it's more poised and ready to go when accelerating hard through the gears. And of course, it makes a great sound as the valves vent off into the engine bay with each gear change. It's not too loud though; since I have two valves fitted, the air is not rushing out with as much vigour as it would with just a single valve. It's still loud enough to scare a few people walking in the street though.

I'd definitely recommend anyone with a pre MY94 Ghibli with no factory fitted blow out valves fitting these valves.