EAG, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The fact that mechanical knowledge was not the first thing that comes to mind when I critique the lack of knowledge.. In a response to a question of why so many people are getting 'scammed' on manual conversions.. Is strange.

Like if this was a thread about buying a vintage 60s ferrari then perhaps in that context 'knowledge' would more appropriately be knowledge of how many models, in what spec, which VINs are still around, etc.

There's no possible way one can, under the context of my original post, misconstrue "car knowledge" as something like knowing which model was offered in which colours in which model year.


Look I understand that most people in most hobbies are in it for superficial reasons and that's fine but you have to at least recognise there's a difference between the nuts and bolts of something and surface level info.

I don't think that you need to be a diy guy either to be considered an enthusiast but at the same time... Unless someone's willing to say "yes I like Ferraris just because I'm a superficial basic *****, it's basically my version of women and hermes handbags" then I don't think you can get away with having poor mechanical understanding.

Absolutely no one wants to admit this statement. It feels dirty to say. It feels so dirty in fact that most people manage to convince themselves it's not true.

That's exactly why you get dumb scams/overpriced enthusiast products that are either outright BS or just terrible value perpetuating in hobbies.

The 10,000 hdmi cables, stupid plastic parts on road bikes.

The sad part of the whole EAG thing is that fundamentally the product ISN'T a scam in the way 10,000 hdmi cables are.

The product DID do what it said on the tin.

Sure, whether it was the best option compared to Dr's and whatever is a completely valid debate but it's not like Art was selling fairy dust.

It's just his business practices were so, so, so terrible.

 

Every cloud has a silver lining though. Without $10k HDMI cables, we wouldn't have wathifi.com , arguably one of the greatest blogs of all time.

 

Parts are the problem. The install is a no brain job.

I converted 2 lambo SL cars. I didn't remove the gearbox. I flushed the F1 fluid and replaced it with brake fluid.. a year later the car works perfectly. The seals are the same..as are the bearings and clutch. Those who tell you different are robbing you.

These conversions..are being priced 10k over actual value. The narrative is false, that it is complicated...honestly it's a joke. It could be done in 2 working days, if not less.

 

Are you referring to just the Lamborghinis or the Ferraris as well?


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I’ve never taken apart a lambo clutch slave cylinder, but I confirm that on Ferrari, the F1 uses brown FKM seals, and the manual cars use black EPDM seals. FKM, or its trade name Viton, is not recommended for brake fluid by anyone. In fact the DuPont chemical resistance guide which I use as part of my profession, gives it a score of 4. This is their lowest score and indicates that FKM will swell to absorb the brake fluid, and will eventually break down. Any Ferrari running with FKM seals and using dot 4 brake fluid, will eventually suffer a clutch slave cylinder failure.


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The seals are all blue..now what..

 

They use the same system.

 

The visible inner part/scraper is blue. The actual seal is different material though.

You can see the different material (brown / black) in the replacement kits hills sells.

https://www.hillengineering.co.uk/clutch-related/seals-2/sk-crb-430-f1s

https://www.hillengineering.co.uk/clutch-related/seals-2/sk-crb-430-ms

 

Manual and F1 use different part numbers for TOB seals. Image Unavailable, Please Login Image Unavailable, Please Login

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If you're talking about the soft o-ring rather than the green PTFE support ring, then the blue material is almost certainly a flourosilicone seal.

Flourosilicone also gets a solid 4 on the Dupont Chemical Resistance Guide for compatibility with Brake Fluid. It too will fail eventually.

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Thanks for the information. However if it works, it works. So far so good using the F1 seals with brake fluid. We tried it..with full discussion with the customer. He was happy to try. It worked.

 

you would be wise to take Robin’s advice.

 

Ok thanks..

 

My key takeaway is the fact the 918 is still that close to the modern hybrids is absolutely bonkers



Ferrari's lineup now is a bit weird as there's less direct comparisons avail to it's competitors compared to before

For me it's always been like this

Gallardo vs 360/430
Murci vs 550/575/599

Huracan vs 458/488/F8 vs pretty much all Mclarens
Aventador vs F12/812

These were very natural comparions (there was always the flagship and then the "base" supercar ... mclaren has always been more weird), in the modern model lineup it's a lot less clear.

I'll have to admit that the newest launches from Ferrari are in much better form versus it's natural competition than in years past (296 vs Artura for example).

WIthin the 2000-2020 period though is a place where I think ferrari didn't really do as well competitively.

 

I agree in part with the price which is why the current prices from MMWX reflect that.
However it is a grand overstatement to say that the work you performed on a Lambo can be associated to the work to convert any car. A major service on a Testarossa is not the same as a 512TR, taking an engine out of Murci isn't the same as a Muira. Converting a 575 is easier than a 430 and a 599 is more involved than all. Also when manufacturing parts and developing plus software there is a lot of work and man hours to compensate for.

We have real expensive working knowledge of the different seals being an issue. We installed F1 throwout bearings with the incorrect seals on three cars by accident ..... parts guy mess up.... it happens. Two clients had clutch slipping issues within a few hundred miles the seals essentially mushroomed and you would loose clutch engagement. One thankfully we caught before shipping car back. We ended up having to do the job over again and replace the seals with the correct seals. One we transported the car back and had to buy a new clutch and the other we flew out to Chicago to fix.

Not saying it couldn't work on the lambos you did. I'm not familiar with the internals of that system. But if it is the same system it will eventually have a problem. But hopefully not.

 

"would loose clutch engagement" you kinda lost me here. Did you mean disengagement?

"Two clients had clutch slipping issues within a few hundred miles the seals essentially mushroomed and you would loose clutch engagement." You lost me here also.

The RELEASE bearing has nothing to do with clutch slippage. The clutch grabs because of the pressure plate..not the release bearing. The only job of the release bearing is press on the pressure plate springs, disengaging the clutch from the engine. A bad release bearing would not allow gear engagement, at all, and you would also have zero clutch pedal pressure.

 

Thank you for clarifying how this works I was always wondering.... Sorry if the wording doesn't exactly match the way you'd like it described. But you get the point. And also not attacking you just expressing the real world experience of the seals being a real issue.

 

Twice within that post you stated clutch slippage as a result of RELEASE bearing seals. That is not a wording problem.

 

At the risk of reigniting the preceding three pages of classic '90s Usenet trolling, in a world where tens of millions are driving around in EVs with the belief that their choice in motor vehicles will have a measurable effect on the climate, it's amazing to see someone claiming that Ferrari owners are more susceptible to high priced scams than any other group.

 

I was told my manual 599 would get better gas mileage than the automatic but ... the opposite seems to be the case! Did EAG install a lead gas pedal? Damn it.

 

Can we get an update on EAG bros I am sick of reading the nonsense of our new guest

 

A couple weeks ago I posted about the troubles the guys at the Youtube channel Daily Driven Exotics were having with a pair of 599s running EAG conversion gear. They said they'd have EAG Art visit their LA HQ to fix them. It's been two weeks since DDE posted the follow-up video, featuring Art's 12-hour thrash on the two 599s. To his credit, Art did make it happen.

Throughout the video, Art and DDE Dave completely avoid the recent upheavals at EAG, making it sound as if nothing has changed since Art and an EAG crew flew out to LA to install a conversion kit on DDE's red 599. Art says EAG has produced 135 599 conversion kits, and Art and Dave together give the viewer to understand that EAG continues to be *the* place to send your 599 -- or 360, 430, or 575 -- for this kind of work. At one point Art recites to Dave that 430 conversions were the most popular at first, then it was 360s, and now 575s have become more numerous, as if EAG had, as of mid-April 2024, a number of 575 projects in the production pipeline.

Dave also tells us that Art was available for this one day only, after which Art would be "gone" for a month.

 

I thought he said 35 five nine-nines, not 135.

 

DDE does this annoying thing that some of the more "edgy" automotive Youtubers do, that whenever a person is speaking, they edit out every pause between words, even fractions of a second, such that every sentence is delivered as a series of jump cuts. This technique can make the spoken words hard to understand. In the video with Dave and Art, the relevant exchange starts at about the 1:20 mark, and as you can see if you take a look, every line is a series of jump cuts. You will also see that Art definitely does not say the words "thirty-five" and nothing else. He says either "135," or "at least 35," or "about 35." I originally heard it as "135," but it could be one of the other possibilities. It seems unlikely that there are 135 owners of 599 who would be willing to pay Art $29,750 to $46,750.00 for a cable-actuated gated six conversion. This fact argues in favor of one of the other alternatives. (Are there even 35 such owners?)

In this same conversation Dave says Art "only has one day then he's gone for three months," not one month, as I wrote previously. So that's the EAG update, that Art intends to be tied up doing something or other -- "gone" -- through early July.