P0234 Solved on our 10th Gen Honda Civic Si | Wastegate Recalibration

so we were having an over boost condition that was a hard ignition cut at 5,000 RPM ended up being our wastegate actuator calibration uh if you are having an issue similar to that this video might be for [Music] you all right so what we were experiencing was an ignition cut uh or and or a boost cut or uh it was definitely having to do with ignition for sure at 5,000 RPM you'd be going all the way you know wide open throttle all the way into boost and at 5,000 RPM it just you know just hard stops

right there doesn't let you go any further um and we are getting a p0234 code for an over boost condition um now if you know this is our process of how we figured out how to fix it I scoured the internet to find out what we needed to do to fix this because we honestly really weren't sure there wasn't a ton of information out there to uh to grasp on to and and learn about this so we wanted to make this video to help those of you that might be experiencing the same thing if uh if you are not expe

riencing that same thing you know this video might just be a little bit boring and and you know uh not interesting for you and if it is that's that's totally fine if if it is interesting to you uh if it does help you with the same problem make sure you hit the like And subscribe buttons that will tell YouTube that hey people that are searching for this solution or this uh problem um we'll definitely find a good answer on this video so make sure you hit those buttons but uh but yeah I couldn't fi

nd a whole lot of info so this is how we went about fixing it um the idea came about when alen our tuner he actually had a customer that was experiencing the same thing he had a 271 turbo that he had just installed and he was getting a an ignition cut at 5,000 RPM um and Allan suggested that he recalibrated the waste gate and it fixed the issue however we didn't actually tell him how to recalibrate the wastegate um he just did that on his own uh through whatever means I think maybe he took it to

a shop I really don't know um but when we experienced the issue Allen had that same idea like hey let's try to recalibrate the wastegate and when we went searching for the answer I think we probably stumbled Upon A lot of the same uh you know resource that you might stumble upon if you're trying to figure out this issue by the way another another common issue for the the wastegate calibration issue is if you get P 003a or p0046 I think are the two codes and those have to do with like a wastegat

e range issue or wastegate out of out of calibration issue uh where the ECU is not communicating properly with the wastegate and the waste what the wastegate wants to do is not or what the EC wants to do with the wastegate is not happening so it throws all sorts of check engine lights on the dash so it's like a Christmas tree it's not just a check engine light it's saying everything's off you know uh you got to fix this to move on what I ended up discovering is like full race has a has a a how-t

o on their website which is very well laid out and it's very specific very technical and looks very helpful and it's for a Type R I also found a video on YouTube that basically explained like the exact same thing that full race was explaining in their um fixed tutorial however my experience was not even close to what they were describing um and I've spent hours on this so anyway um I kind of just did a bunch of trial and error uh things that allowed me to kind of understand what the car was tryi

ng to do what the wastegate was trying to do how to read what I was changing and how it affected how the EC was reading it and uh and and I'm kind of just going to tell you my method uh that I stumbled upon that fixed our issue that uh allowed me to just take it out for a drive as soon as it was figured out and uh boost all the way through uh high RPM all the way through Redline in third and fourth gear and high load gears so um just fine what we are trying to do is recalibrate the wastegate tha

t's the number one goal here cuz that's going to fix probably all three of the issues that I described earlier so if you come down here to where the turbo wastegate is located obviously it's electronic so you're looking at the electronic wastegate right here this is the plug for that wastegate here's the entire wastegate arm assembly and it's attached to the kind of swing arm here that controls the wastegate door the flapper door on the inside of the turbo so as this moves back back and forth th

e wastegate door on the inside of the turbo opens uh you know opens up and closes so what we're essentially trying to do is just recalibrate this get this thing back to a baseline setting that the ECU can recognize like hey I'm in my Baseline settings successfully we can continue to drive now so the first thing you should try if your waste gate is out of calibration if you're experiencing one of those three codes is go inside the car turn the car on engine off so ignition on engine off come out

of the car come over here make sure before you start make sure this plastic piece is off you'll need to take this off to access this plug take that off unplug the wastegate right so just unplug it just like that once you do that it'll take all power away from the actuator itself take this swing arm the end of this swing arm obviously make sure it's not too hot if your car's been running don't do this with your bare hands pull this all the way towards you I'm putting a lot of pressure on it right

now ours is currently closed so there's not a lot of pressure we actually you can see you can move it just like that so just go all the way closed you will be able to close it with the power off of it plug it back in the power does not re uh it doesn't like you know repow the actuator once you've unplugged it with the ignition on go back to the car and and take uh and and take the the power off like ignition off turn everything off then turn the car back on and start it up um at that point you'

ll still have codes it'll still have those codes in memory because the car technically hasn't in reinitialized from like what it knew was wrong before so go drive and you know it takes probably like a quar mile or an eighth of a mile for it to go okay yeah uh we're good now like all of our settings The Sweep of the wastegate are in line with what it's supposed to be and it it might be totally okay that would be like best case scenario if your waste gate was was uh not calibrated correctly so tha

t's like try number one right that's the easiest way the second way involves more kind of mechanical work simple but uh kind of tedious now what we're going to do is take a 10 mm wrench uh as small as you can or as short as you can because it's kind of a tight area come in here to where the wastegate arm is you'll notice that ours right here is probably a little bit different looking than yours right now and it's because this little kind of bent um attachment here that attaches this blue uh stra

ight arm to the wastegate actuator rod itself is bent so that you can access this nut right here this is over on the top from the factory in in order to have full range access to it and a lot easier access you need to flip this around so what you need to do is take this cder pin out of here crack loose this 10 mm nut right here now you'll have to take your wrench and kind of dip it all the way down in the engine bay hold your hand down here and get on it from underneath um like this now this is

really hard to make adjustments from down here but all you need to do is get on it like this and then just crack it loose once you crack it Loose you can then just take your finger and move it back and forth really really easily take the nut off be very careful not to drop it into the engine bay you know hold your hand underneath here as best as you can to try to catch that thing take it off and then this whole assembly will come off this arm right here will come off flip it around put the cotte

r pin back on put the 10 millim nut back on and it's going to perform the same function we've already ran this like this and and there's no issue with flipping it around it just creates easier access so that's probably like the first thing you want to do if you don't do that you're going to be just like you know trying to take a a wrench and and make tiny little movements and it's going to be hard to uh to get to that nut so that's maybe my first suggestion one of the reasons why I had to go thr

ough this process is because through trial and error I had I had moved the actuator arm all the way into the rod and all the way out and monitored the voltage by back probing this connector right here some of the instructions out there including full races instructions will tell you to back probe uh the third and the fourth wire which on this 2017 SI is the middle gray wire which is uh you can use the ground on and then you can use your red probe uh on this green and mostly yellow and green stri

pe wire positions three and four to monitor the voltage now this is why that wasn't working for me me which led me down this path of all this trial and error because when when I monitored voltage all the way out and all the way in the only differences the only voltages that I observed was anywhere from 3.96 volts all the way to 4.18 volts well some of these guides out here including full races say it needs to be with the key on ignit or with the ignition on engine off it needs to be at 1.26 to 1

.43 Vol that's not what I was getting like not even close uh maybe I was doing something wrong honestly I'm not a diag guy I'm not like a Certified mechanic I've never done that for a living worked on other people's cars um so this is not a process that I go through all the time I'm like a lot of you guys watching this video I kind of troubleshoot stuff myself um with a lot of various resources out there so I was just going through resources the best that I could um and I just was not seeing the

the same voltage range like not even close and I would even try to adjust it with the car on I would turn the car off adjust it turn the car back on and I would see the same voltage readings way off I was just super confused and honestly really frustrated probably like some of you guys might have gotten uh so anyway the one thing to remember right here is that what I ended up finding out is a lot of these turbos come shipped with about two to three threads Shi you'll see that actually this nut

is on the tip of the actuator rod so that is an acceptable place for the nut to be what I've found out at least for our car if it's 2 to 3 millim in on the actuator rod that's probably an acceptable range too what we ended up finding out is that the there's this nut can be in a handful of places although a small range it can be within a small range and the the the ECU recalibrates the wastegate on its own when you tell it to it to to need a new calibration by unplugging this so this doesn't need

to be in an exact spot but it does need to like if you are trying to fine tune while the car is on where this wastegate needs to sit very very tiny movements back and forth will change the voltage readings uh and they'll change the length if your monitor the length using Hond data which we'll get into later uh very very minute uh movements of this nut will change that for you so that's when this is helpful is when you are already really really close to that range and you need to get it dialed i

n and then recalibrate again but anyway that's just kind of like an explanation of all the stuff that I've kind of stumbled upon and figured out through this process so uh the next part that I'm going to go through with you is using ha data I ended up using Han data to verify if I had it fixed or not and I kind of stumbled upon this information when the nut is tightened down and everything is secure and fastened when you recalibrate the ECU will send the measurement on the wastegate sensor to 8.

00 millimet that is where it wants to be when you first start up the car and it recalibrates itself and sends it to the correct position it needs to be at 8. mm how I figured this out is I I made all these adjustments and it just happened to like be in an acceptable place for it to be able to reach that 8 mm successfully and also sweep the whole wastegate which is kind of what it does like on Startup um it set it to 8.0 M 8.00 millimeters I had seen anywhere from like you know 5.24 millimet to s

ix something or another millimeters and I finally just like set it in a place where I knew that it came from the factory pretty close and it went straight to 8.00 M millim I knew that I didn't nail that setting just coincidentally I knew I was within an acceptable range and it picked that location so 8.00 millim is what you're looking for on that full race uh diagram or on that full race instruction sheet they reference a millimeter range on the waste gate and the wastegate command like actual a

nd command well on the SI on ours I didn't see in the sensor menu on the Hond data flash Pro I did not see a measurement for the wastegate command I saw like a duty cycle it said like 5% or something or 8% I can't remember so you couldn't you couldn't like adjust it to be within range of another measurement of the commanded measurement you couldn't do that on ours because it showed two different ways and maybe that's a setting that I just don't know understand how to use in the Hond ATA flash Pr

o I don't know but uh but anyway 8.00 millimeters is what you're what you're searching for so we're going to show you in Honda and now what you need to see when you recalibrate the wastegate and it's successful what you need to see in there when you start it up the next time I have my laptop out here I'm connected to the hondata flash Pro I'm connected to OBD2 all that stuff so um what you're going to find is that if it's calibrated correctly and you've pulled the plug out you've kind of done th

at reset procedure I explained for you should see a wastegate value it's named WG in your sensors window of 8.00 millim now the reason why I point this out is because if if you do the recalibration procedure and that doesn't say 8.0 that means that your adjustment nut is so far off that it can't even reach that point so what you need to do is you need to adjust it to a point where it can reach that 8.0 millimeters if you've already reached that point whenever you've touched that nut just make su

re that that thing is on there super super tight um it it just needs to be snug pretty pretty well because any tiny vibrations that move the nut off uh first of all I mean if it if it's enough vibration to move the nut off it's eventually going to fall off but uh regardless you know besides that even Point 1 mm is going to throw off everything and it's going to throw a Christmas tree light setup in your dash like it did to me and it'll start beeping at you and it won't stop beeping at you until

you fix it so this is just kind of a verification that you're within an acceptable range you can adjust it from here and you can see the changes while the car is running or while the car is on without running uh you should be able to see the changes that you make through the adjustment nut in here it'll be like you know it'll fluctuate like 03 millimet in here it's very very sensitive so you want it to be 8. mm upon recalibration without touching anything it needs to be at 8.0 and that should be

the fix for the issues however you go about clearing the codes whether it's clearing them through through Hond data or whatever tuning software you're using um or driving down the road and making sure that the car can recalibrate itself and recognize that everything is okay uh you can you can do either one of those things um just know that if it's off and you clear the codes the codes are going to come back on almost immediately if you go drive so anyway um that's about it honestly uh it took m

e a lot of work to get to this point a lot of just observation trial and error you know setting the wastegate up completely completely off to monitor what it was doing and I'm not a tuner actually Allen is our tuner he's not here which is why I kind of had to do this this is my laptop I had to download Hond data and and do this on my computer which I'm not used to I'm not familiar with with tuning on Han data so I kind of just had to pull up the bare minimum to figure out you know where the wast

egate was at and that's what I did here so some of you guys might even know hondata a lot better than me but this is the minimum that you need to be able to see in order for you to fix this so okay we are all done hopefully our 6 to eight hours worth of work figuring all this out and being frustrated helps you do it in a much uh shorter amount of time if you got value out of this video If this video helped you uh even if it didn't fix an issue that you might have had but you just learned somethi

ng you know um and especially if it fixed your issue make sure you like And subscribe to our channel from this video because it'll tell YouTube to tell other people that are searching for fixes to this same issue uh that this video might be valuable put in the comments any questions that you have any comments if there's something else you know that about doing this that makes it EAS even easier or anything else that you know about this that I might not please put them in the comments we'd be hap

py to know that and share that with other people as well um obviously we can't diagnose your car from YouTube comments but uh we will be happy to answer any questions that uh that you have the best that we can so anyway thanks for watching have fun out there with your 10th gen we'll see you on the next video