I've been driving the car fairly infrequently for the past month because it's hard to find an excuse to leave the house while working from home. When I do leave, it usually involves bringing my dog or a third person so I take the subaru.
I've done a few things though.
I checked and adjusted my front toe because even though I had the car aligned a few years ago but I still get terrible toe wear. Measuring tape showed a 1/2" difference between front and back of the tire, measured at ~4:00 and ~8:00 on the tire.
I evened it out and now the car doesn't seem to want to fling me into a ditch on the highway.
I picked up a spare hood to modify - Trying to cut an airway around the rear of the hood seal to vent some air without a big jesus hole in the hood, and didn't want to ruin the stock hood to try things out. It's probably likely that there's a high pressure region in front of the windscreen, but I hope that if I keep the cuts close enough to the corners, air will exit. Might tape some streamers on here and go for a drive to see how it looks.
I wanted to install a MAP, and there's already a port on the plastic adapter of the turkey neck on the M50 manifold, so all the intake side came off and I reopened that hole for a GM 3 BAR MAP sensor. The first sensor I bought from amazon was super fake, didn't read right, broke apart when I tried to remove the hose, and the connector was trash so I eventually bought a genuine Delphi unit from rockauto.
I'm still plagued with this trash weatherpack connector and its limp dick pins... Oh, and the bayonet on the connector that came with the knockoff MAP was wrong, so it didn't even plug into the genuine one. Should've just bought a bosch sensor from the start, but I'm invested in this one now...
Initial mounting idea - it didn't stay this way.
When I cleaned up this longblock, I turned the engine upside down and scrubbed out the ports with a brush. 5 years later they're still clean. Only ran the CCV setup for a year before I went to an atmosphere vent for the turbo setup though.
Added two pins back to the ecu for signal and GND. It was like 45 deg in the car because of the heatwave we had, I've never been so hot in my life.
Same day I did the MAP install, I also rewrapped my downpipe with 50' of titanium lava wrap to try to reduce underhood temps. Wrapped the downpipe with ~15' of it.
Swapped Wastegate spring again to 7.25lb to see if I could lower my boost spike.
I swapped to NGK BKR7E plugs (one step colder than the BKR6E). I think I gapped them to 0.025"
All original Bremi coilpacks still kicking.
Old plugs, not sure how to "read" plugs but if you want to drop the knowledge, go for it. (sorry for not cropping these, flickr refuses to edit them without mirroring and stretching the hell out of them)
Polished the heat shield a bit because it was getting nasty
I replaced the batteries on my SI board. Took forever to get the batteries because they came from Norway, but it was easy to desolder/resolder.
Of course, while I was in there, I wanted to get fancy. I tried to integrate a wideband gauge into my cluster where the check light goes, so I ordered the APSX G1 to retrofit (a la Eurogarage's youtube video) but I didn't understand that it takes a serial input instead of 0-5V analog like any other gauge. I spent two days mucking about with an arduino and still couldn't get it to work.
Plenty of information out there on what specific signal it supposedly wants, but it refused to work with anything I fed it. Probably going to just gut my LC-1 gauge like I planned in the beginning.
Some sort of error that they don't bother mentioning in their manuals. Likely just "ready but no signal"
Updated to a new version of MS41.3, should have faster logging and should let me use aldldroid to log with my phone.
Still having knock issues, Still likely fuel/compression ratio related. Maybe carbon buildup. Maybe false knock from engine mounts or something loose.
Stock knock tables are aggressive, so I could relax them if it is false.
I think my way forward is to spend another few revisions seeing if timing/fuel can reduce the knock at all, and if not, spike my fuel with a jug of xylene to bump the octane rating and see if the knock goes away.
I've done a few things though.
I checked and adjusted my front toe because even though I had the car aligned a few years ago but I still get terrible toe wear. Measuring tape showed a 1/2" difference between front and back of the tire, measured at ~4:00 and ~8:00 on the tire.
I evened it out and now the car doesn't seem to want to fling me into a ditch on the highway.
I picked up a spare hood to modify - Trying to cut an airway around the rear of the hood seal to vent some air without a big jesus hole in the hood, and didn't want to ruin the stock hood to try things out. It's probably likely that there's a high pressure region in front of the windscreen, but I hope that if I keep the cuts close enough to the corners, air will exit. Might tape some streamers on here and go for a drive to see how it looks.
I wanted to install a MAP, and there's already a port on the plastic adapter of the turkey neck on the M50 manifold, so all the intake side came off and I reopened that hole for a GM 3 BAR MAP sensor. The first sensor I bought from amazon was super fake, didn't read right, broke apart when I tried to remove the hose, and the connector was trash so I eventually bought a genuine Delphi unit from rockauto.
I'm still plagued with this trash weatherpack connector and its limp dick pins... Oh, and the bayonet on the connector that came with the knockoff MAP was wrong, so it didn't even plug into the genuine one. Should've just bought a bosch sensor from the start, but I'm invested in this one now...
Initial mounting idea - it didn't stay this way.
When I cleaned up this longblock, I turned the engine upside down and scrubbed out the ports with a brush. 5 years later they're still clean. Only ran the CCV setup for a year before I went to an atmosphere vent for the turbo setup though.
Added two pins back to the ecu for signal and GND. It was like 45 deg in the car because of the heatwave we had, I've never been so hot in my life.
Same day I did the MAP install, I also rewrapped my downpipe with 50' of titanium lava wrap to try to reduce underhood temps. Wrapped the downpipe with ~15' of it.
Swapped Wastegate spring again to 7.25lb to see if I could lower my boost spike.
I swapped to NGK BKR7E plugs (one step colder than the BKR6E). I think I gapped them to 0.025"
All original Bremi coilpacks still kicking.
Old plugs, not sure how to "read" plugs but if you want to drop the knowledge, go for it. (sorry for not cropping these, flickr refuses to edit them without mirroring and stretching the hell out of them)
Polished the heat shield a bit because it was getting nasty
I replaced the batteries on my SI board. Took forever to get the batteries because they came from Norway, but it was easy to desolder/resolder.
Of course, while I was in there, I wanted to get fancy. I tried to integrate a wideband gauge into my cluster where the check light goes, so I ordered the APSX G1 to retrofit (a la Eurogarage's youtube video) but I didn't understand that it takes a serial input instead of 0-5V analog like any other gauge. I spent two days mucking about with an arduino and still couldn't get it to work.
Plenty of information out there on what specific signal it supposedly wants, but it refused to work with anything I fed it. Probably going to just gut my LC-1 gauge like I planned in the beginning.
Some sort of error that they don't bother mentioning in their manuals. Likely just "ready but no signal"
Updated to a new version of MS41.3, should have faster logging and should let me use aldldroid to log with my phone.
Still having knock issues, Still likely fuel/compression ratio related. Maybe carbon buildup. Maybe false knock from engine mounts or something loose.
Stock knock tables are aggressive, so I could relax them if it is false.
I think my way forward is to spend another few revisions seeing if timing/fuel can reduce the knock at all, and if not, spike my fuel with a jug of xylene to bump the octane rating and see if the knock goes away.
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