Friday, June 25, 2003

Welp, the Turbo GSR is no more. I have traded it in toward a new Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution 8. The Teg was great while I had it and ran perfectly during the time it was turbo charged. I will miss that car a bunch, but times change and I’ve moved on to bigger and better

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

Just a note while I am still remembering to add it to the site. I ran into a problem with the cheapo Home Depot galvanized bolts stripping off into the turbo manifold a couple times, not fun. This happens because these bolts are not made for such high temperatures and they soften when hot. This makes it really easy to strip them when taking them out or putting them back in (after the car was recently driven). I went to an Ace Hardware a few weeks ago to rid myself of this stupid problem forever and bought all stainless steel bolts to hold the turbo to the manifold. Common sense should have led me to do this when I originally installed the turbo but yea, sometimes I am dumb. Now I just need to get stainless bolts to replace the ones holding my downpipe to the turbo.

Saturday, April 12, 2003

Well, today I ran the car for the first time at Bandimere Speedway since the turbo install. It was so packed I only got to run 3 times all day long. I pretty much met my expectations for the car as far as 1/4 mile times goes. I ran a best of 14.570 @ 98mph. I definitely have room for improvement, just need more practice driving. With the way the car sits, 100% street driven and 6psi, I think I could pull low 14′s with enough practice. Stripped interior or couple more psi of boost should get me high 13′s. We’ll see what happens throughout the season. Here are the times from my timeslips. You’ll notice I did not register a 60′ time on the 2nd run. That’s because I botched up the launch really bad

Monday, January 20, 2003

I started taking my car apart last weekend to install my new clutch. As luck would have it, I ran into a pretty nasty snag which kept my car un-driveable until this afternoon. When taking my wastegate off the turbo manifold one of the bolts broke off and got stuck in the wastegate flange. To make a long story short, two broken easy outs (in the bolt), and two machine shops later the broken bolt is finally out of the flange. On to the mods…

Clutch install was quite a bit of work, since I did it almost 100% by myself. You have to remove a lot of parts before actually being able to drop the tranny. Once the tranny is out taking the old clutch out and putting the new on in is pretty simple. Just make sure to torque everything to spec and put red locktite on all the bolts (well I don’t know if the locktite is necessary but I used it). Here are a few pics:

During the downtime I also got a few other things done to the car. I had all my intercooler piping powdercoated chrome silver. Looks pretty good, thanks to MandS Productions for that. The stock radiator fans were also replaced by aftermarket universal fans. I got a pair of Imperial 12″ fans at AutoZone, part #226112. Installation was easy, the fans fit great and free up some much needed room in front of the engine. My turbo compressor housing is no longer jammed up against one of the A/C lines now since the stock fans are gone. Plus, it looks 100% cleaner than the stock units. I also found a website (www.geocities.com/mt3c/) that explains how to change the colors of your stock gauge cluster. So, I thought I would try to find some bulbs that would match my Defi gauges that I had on the pillar. I started by trying the 194R bulbs but they were too red, kinda like an Integra Type-R’s cluster. I tried some 194NA model bulbs after that and they are nearly an exact match. I found the bulbs at AutoZone and Checker auto had them as well. Looks pretty cool and is a super easy install also. Here are some pics as well:

All clutch install pics here.

All other mod pics here.

Tuesday, January 7, 2003

Got a few things done over the weekend and on Monday. Saturday I started off by getting my Christmas gifts installed A Skunk2 short throw shifter, Razo carbon fiber pedals, and a Apexi turbo timer. Everything was simple to install. Monday I went to my welder and had them custom fab an intake pipe for my turbo finally. They had to modify the upper charge pipe and make a new custom intake pipe. It came out really well though I think. Someday I might have the intake pipe made in 3″ size though. Here are some pics:

All the pics here and here.

Saturday, November 30, 2002

Well this weekend was interesting, a disaster day in some sense. Erik and Shaun were over and we started by installing my new Defi oil pressure gauge. I bought another brass T fitting to put in between the oil feed line and the current T fitting that T’s off the oil pressure switch. I also had to get a 1/8npt to 1/8npt union to join the two T fittings. The end result came out really well. The gauge works and I now have a full pillar of gauges finally Here are some pics:

Now the disasters. Erik was changing the brake pads on his car and somehow the calipers piston boot got a hole in it and pissed brake fluid all over the place. We were not able to find a caliper rebuild kit until Monday which meant Erik’s car stayed the night at my house for a couple days. To top things off, Shaun managed to leak ALL his cars oil all over my garage floor and down my entire driveway. Yes, a 10″ wide stream of oil all the way down my driveway into the street *sigh* Turns out the oil filter was not tightened all the way and instead of starting the car in the garage and checking for leaks, Shaun got in the car and drove out of the garage and down the driveway. All the while the engine oil was spewing out of the car…FUN for the whole family!

All the pics here.

Saturday, November 16, 2002

Met up with a friend over the weekend to start tuning my car with a wideband A/F sensor. It took a little bit to get everything wired up in my car and get the wideband o2 sensor out of my friend Jeremy’s car and into mine. We finally got the Hondata hooked up and the o2 sensor hooked up to the Hondata. Talk about a mess of wiring. Anyways, we spent the rest of the afternoon and into the night tuning my car from idle, to part throttle, then to high throttle and WOT. I am pretty happy with how everything came out. We made a ton of progress and got the A/F pretty solid all throughout the RPM range. It’s a good thing too because I was running dangerously lean in boost. We are going to do some more fine tuning again later on, once the weather gets more suitable for driving. I have a couple pics but nothing real special.

All the pics here.

Tuesday, November 5, 2002

Yesterday I went up to the welding shop to have my wastegate dumptube made. They made a custom tube off my wastegate dump flange. It works great but unfortunately I don’t have the mean wail of the open wastegate to enjoy anymore On the bright side, I also have no exhaust fumes in my cabin to inhale I got to datalog the car for the first time too. Talk about cool stuff. I have some piece of mind now knowing that my car is running safe under boost.

All the pics here.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Well, the installation is done and this is the start of my new turbo GSR homepage. I will try to keep updates and things going on with my car here. I’ll also document any troubles or problems and how I resolved them along the way.

So far car is running ok. I’m afraid it might be running a little bit lean. Luckily I have a good Hondata dealer, www.ksmotorsports.com, and Robert over there is burning me a new chip that has adjusted fuel tables according to the input I gave him after driving the car. This should work a little bit better to hold me over until I get my pocket programmer and can get to the dyno for some tuning.