After a few more days of driving the car it still feels strong in WOT and we have a few low/half throttle and idle smoothing hickups to work out. Fun trying to deal with the Big MAF, Cams and 800cc injectors all at once.. it is the Perfect storm
Also I talked to Justin at Grimmspeed today and we have this coated bad-boy on the way to hopefully help with that restriction problem we were seeing.
Picked the car up tonight. Don’t really have dyno numbers for everyone yet. After doing the tuning on the Dyno Frank realized it was calibrated for its readings for a 6-speed so the numbers are off.
The car is running strong, good timing, good air/fuel ratios and it pulls like a frieght train. Frank was saying there still just seems to be something that just isn’t right in the flow and there should be some more we can get out of it… But this thing definately pulls MUCH, MUCH more than it did before.
After talking a bit more we figured it is likely the up-pipe or a clogged cat causing a restriction. Looking at the BPM up-pipe Frank said it is really wierd, it totally narrows down in one spot to like an inch and a half and it could be the main restriction in the system.
So the plan is to get the up-pipe swapped out with something better, wrap it and then get the Dyno calibrated properly and we will see what the difference is.
I’m also planning on taking the car back down to Neetronics to do some more pulls to compare apples with apples based on my first baseline pulls.
Stay tuned for more…
Engine is back in the car and will be getting tuned tomorrow… As usual some fun stuff was found when putting it all back together.
– clip on coil pack had broke
– all belts were worn and starting to rot. (Kevlar timing belt was planned)
– Crack in the up-pipe, now welded, fixed and heat wrapped
– Heat shield over new cross-pipe needed to be modified to fit
– O-rings on some of the injectors were not sealing and needed to be replaced
– Tracking down gaskets
Frank will be taking the day tomorrow to do the tune and then I will be picking the car up Wednesday morning. He said it should be good to go at the end of the day tomorrow, but I figured I would give a bit of extra time for more of the usual hickups that happen when doing this type of thing.
So since I didn’t have the car back to do some of my cold air box and engine cover fabrication… I decided to start some work on my other projects..
First I started off with my recessed gauge clock pod. This won’t be like the OEM one that sticks up, but instead is recessed with the hood over it. I still need the car back to check for clearances but I am hopefull that the pod won’t stick up too much at all while still giving me the visibility that I want. This will house three 52mm gauges..
The reason I will be putting the gauges up into the clock pod area is because I will be swapping this:
With this housing for my 7″ touch screen… I had to trim the screen housing and then epoxy it to the OEM trim… Just waiting for it to fully dry before priming and wet sanding.
Then I got looking at my plastic that I have for my engine bay covers and cold air box and got thinking.. I’ll have lots left over so I figured I would maybe experiment with something like this. I think you can get the idea of what it would be used for… it would be one of 4 that would “diffuse” the air
Played around with some more stuff that may find its way onto the vehicle.. These are some canards that would be going on the rear bumper right behind the wheels. They were originally gloss black with an Aerospeed logo on them, so I sanded them down and hit them up with some matt black and then finished them off with a light grey subaru sticker
I also picked up my 1/8 inch plastic for some under the hood applications. Picked up a 4×8 sheet and had them cut it into 24″x48″ sheets. This stuff willl also likely be used for the case I am making for my carputer. Hopefully I’ll get some time this weekend to start making some templates for my under the hood stuff.
Well not as successful as I had hoped… I got into the engine bay and started cleaning things up.. an hour and a half into it, I realized that if I wanted to do a good job of it, it would take me a good 8 hours…
I didn’t want to half a$$ it so I figured the existing blue was better than a crappy gloss black… so I popped the fenders and bumper back on and I will deal with that when I have more time and money to do it right.
I now finally have the car prepped and dropped off at the shop.. I took the side skirts off so that it would be easier to get the front fenders off. Also while I had them off I gave them a good sanding and re-sprayed them so they are looking as good as new.
I also picked up some generic mud flaps for the front that I will be cutting to fit to protect those newly painted side skirts.
Looks like thunderstorms this afternoon so I won’t be cleaning up the engine bay today. Also since we are going to pull the heads, they are being sent off to be cleaned up and machined flat to fit back on nice and snug. Figured while they are off I’ll get a valve job done on them to get them as good as new.
I’ll be back over at the shop tomorrow afternoon to do the engine bay cleanup.
I was able to drop by and see Derek and picked up my Group-A goodness. So I’ve got the majority of the things I need to be able to go and get the work done on Tues-Wed of next week.
The one last thing that I am missing are the fuel rails.. it is taking some time to get the rails from Agency Power.. they went out for anodizing last week and are still on their way. So we will be going ahead with the build on Tuesday with the stock rails for now. Once the new ones come in we’ll pop them on there.
I’m hoping the weather is good for the Tuesday because I want to do the engine bay clean-up when the engine is out of there. I’ll try and take as many pictures as I can during this process as well.
I’ve seen the pictures on the Group-A website and looked at the plain and straight forward packaging for their products but man was I surprised when I opened up the boxes and started looking at their stuff. Holy crap this is nice stuff. You can really tell they put a lot of time and effort in their work. Hopefully the quality of the finish and the overall impression comes across with some of my photos because these things almost look too good to put on the car. Not trying to do a sales pitch here, but I was genuinely impressed with these parts. I’ve seen some of the other stuff out there and a lot of it basically looks like a hunk of aluminum with some bushings on them.
Pulleys: When we looked at my car, my power steering pulley is a pressed on style so we are just leaving that one on there, but I did pick up the Alternator and Crank Pulley
Pitch Stop Mount:
The TMBLER 