This is the external wastegate and dump tube I bought. Cheap eBay special, but it’ll do the job fine.

Don’t ask about the airfilter, it’s a long story, and it’s temporary. Yes, it’s an eBay turbo, we’ll see how long it lasts. I got it dirt cheap, so I’m happy that it works. This picture was mostly to show off the route I took with the oil feed line, it’s -4an, comes out the back of the head, up under and around the back of the cold side of the turbo. Nice and simple route. I’m hoping that since I’m tapping off the back of the head, I won’t be feeding too much oil into the turbo, I know these eBay turbos have weak seals and work best with a restrictor inline.

This is the intercooler I used last year, “small Isuzu NPR” intercooler. It worked great, and you can see I finally got around to installing temp sensors in each end of it. Sadly, I think I’m going to go a different route this year. You might remember the really long and exotic intercooler plumbing I had to do last year. I think I’m just going to sell this and buy an intercooler with the inlets and outlets on the same side. But for the time being, this intercooler is installed in the car, albeit not hooked up.

I was fed up with my 75lb monster radiator I had had custom made for this car for way too much money. So I replaced it with this dirt cheap (like $65 shipped) aluminum “Honda Civic” radiator from China, it’s nice and thick so it should cool well. Hose routing was problematic, as you can see the area around the intake runners is very crowded, but I managed to pull it off. I wanted to have the radiator customized, but between not wanting to take the time to have it done, and not wanted to spend more on the customization than I did on the radiator itself, I decided to just fudge it. :) The lower hose lines up great, and the upper hose is a lot less of a fudge than what I had to do with the lower hose in my van, so I guess it isn’t that bad.

This is just a temporary trans cooler, temporary, because it’s smaller than the one I plan to run, eventually. For now, it’s better than nothing. I was lazy and just screwed it to the side of the radiator for the time being.

That’s about it for the pictures this time around. I had more, but I went on vacation last week, and needed an empty SD card for the camera.. heh, oops. :) I don’t think there was anything truly important that got lost. I had several interesting adventures getting this car running.

First was that I jumpered the wrong pins on the MS2 CPU for the extra two injector outputs, so I had trouble with one of the injectors squirting twice as much fuel as the rest. But I also had a failed injector get stuck open and hydrolock the motor! That wasn’t fun at all. I was cranking away, and suddenly the starter locked up. After trying several times to get it to crank more, on a hunch, I pulled the plugs out and asked my wife to watch for fuel coming out when I cranked the engine over.. Yeah, I soaked my wife in ethanol. That was great (errr..). So after I saw that I really was hydrolocked, I pulled the fuel rail, and injector #4 was stuck wide open. That’s real annoying. I swapped out the nice 100lb injectors for a tired old set of 33lb injectors I had laying around in my junk drawer. They squirted just fine (aside from the jumper problem I hadn’t detected yet at this point).

The next problem I had was getting a consistent sync with the trigger wheel on the crankshaft. This is an ’03 motor, so it’s got the “NGC” trigger pattern, first time I’ve dealt with this wheel pattern, so I wasn’t totally sure I had built everything right for it, even though I should know better, it works the same, as far as MS mods are concerned. Anyways, I was able to start the motor up with just the fuel that was left in the intake manifold (injectors all unplugged), it ran for a good 5-6 seconds before it finally used up all the fuel in the manifold. Then I plugged the injectors in and it fired right up and ran GREAT. So I shut it down (no water in the motor yet, didn’t want to run it too long) and grabbed the video camera. I then proceded to spend the next half hour trying to get the thing to detect RPM (sync up) while cranking. No luck, so long as I had the video camera running, it wouldn’t play nice. I changed the wiring going to the crank sensor, changed the plug, changed the mods done inside the MS, fixed that injector jumper.. Nothing I could do would get it to sync up that evening. Next day, first try it fired up. Luckily I had the camera rolling.

 

Notice how it revs (aside from the cold hesitation) really fast, RPM’s shoot up really fast and drop instantly.. That’s because there was ZERO load on the motor. Not even a crankshaft pulley. Just a flexplate with nothing bolted to it. In the end, that turned out to be the reason it wouldn’t sync up consistantly. The engine RPM’s during cranking were so inconsistant that the MS was getting confused on the gaps between teeth/the teeth themselves. Strangest damn problem, I’ve NEVER heard of anyone else having this problem, but once I put the crankshaft pulley on and ran the belt to the alternator, the problem got a whole lot better. Once I bolted up the torque converter, it went away completely. But it did make for a cool video, having a motor that revs like an F1 car. :)

After I solved this problem, I did the radiator, which we already covered. Only thing worth noting on that is that the crappy chinese radiator came with a radiator cap that just flat didn’t work at all. But a quick visit to the autoparts store solved that problem. I’d prefer the radiator not have a cap at all, since the engine has a cap on it, but oh well. :)

Next up was to get the car mobile. So I needed to get a new trans pan (junkyard punches a hole in the pan, and I’ve learned in the past I can’t weld well enough to seal that hole), a trans filter, a whole bunch of really expensive ATF+4, and another driver’s side axle.

The trans pan was easy enough, Autozone stocks them, for only $25.. And the pan they sell has a drain plug! I used some neodymium magnets I snagged from old hard drives. I figure they’ll catch metal particles even better than the original magnets could, they’re extremely strong magnets.

So I got the filter installed, new pan on (the filter at Autozone comes with a nice rubber gasket, no need for that nasty RTV!), and I poured in 5 quarts to start with. I reached in the car and started it up, then walked back to the engine bay.... To find it SPRAYING oil out the front of the trans. I ran back and shut it off wondering WTF. By the time I made it back, I had remembered WTF.. I kept intending to install the hose from the transmission to the trans cooler, but I never actually did it. So now I had about two quarts of ATF all over the driveway. I installed the lines, and added the last quart I had on hand. Started the car back up and let it idle for a bit. Checked the fluid level, pretty much not even on the dipstick. I tried out the gears, with the tires in the air. Reverse, nothing. Drive, nothing. Reverse again, tap the gas, THUD! Into reverse and the tires started spinning. Tried drive, same deal, had to give it some gas. So I called it a night. That brings us to today. I put another quart into the trans, and fired up the motor. Checked the level and it was still too low to read. One more quart brought it up to about the right area. I tried out the gears and it went in properly without having to rev and get a thud.

That’s where I’m at for now. I drove the car around the block, the trans only has 2nd gear (and reverse) until I wire up the MegaShift. So that’s definitely on my to-do list. The MegaSquirt that is running the motor right now is a friend’s MS2 unit. I intend to run this car off an MS3 eventually, but they’re still not readily available in stores, so this will do for now. The MS that I had in this car last year, I sold, because I really expected MS3’s to be available by May at the latest.. Now I’m predicting Christmas.. ;)

So the next update will probably be about the trans controller. Stay tuned. :)