Alright... time for an update!!!
After having friends from out of town in for the weekend, I spent the majority of the weekend entertaining and not horsing around with the car... but once they left on sunday, I went at it!
Prior to this weekend, I spent some time running the vacuum lines. To keep with the red theme, I sources some various sized red silicone hosing and ran almost all the lines.
Vac lines running to the Ib ECU/Boost Gauge/Zientrix Wideband controller
And how the engine bay looks right now:
This didn't take too too long, but I have a few more things to feed... like a line to the BOV as well as the Elec Boost controller. Also, I need to hook up the wastegate. I'm not sure where to put the vac line that goes to the bottom of the wastegate... can anyone tell me if I can hook it up here:
The empty bottom port. I can't remember if I could use that as a vac port or not, and the bentley isn't really too helpful in this department. I'll probably end up making a new thread to ask this question though so it gets a lil mroe attention.
After I got the vac lines done, next on the list was to get the transmission mounts into the car and the subframe bolted up so the car could sit on its own 4 wheels again!
First off, I had to swap in the new AL subframe bushings I picked up from the bilzcat fire sale. I started by cutting the top off the original bushing and then beating the piss out of it w/ a large screwdriver to push it out
by the 3rd one I was REALLY good at getting these out w/ minimal cutting and only a few whacks with the hammer 8)
here is the subframe with everything installed and waiting for me to shimmy under the car and get it installed:
And, as usual... NOTHING can go easy. When I went to initially install the damn thing into the car I couldn't get the damn pass side tranny mount to line up with the arm on the tranny. It was off by ~1/4" :frustrated: :frustrated: So I pulled the subframe BACK down again and oblonged the holes where the mount bolted to the subframe. With a bit of fighting, I was able to get it all together... but not without a full scentence of nothing but :curses:
Also, while the subframe was out I had to adress another issue
When I had first dropped the subframe back in August when pulling the original JT motor, I noticed that there was a non-OEM bolt in the back driver's side subframe bolt. It was a standard thread, and a bit shorter than it should have been. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but knew I needed to address it before putting everything back together.
At first, I wanted to just retap the hole and see if that did the trick. Unfortunately, the more I looked at the hole, the more and more it looked really fishy
here's what the hole looked like from the underside:
Yeah, def did NOT look right, and no matter what I drilled or tapped, something kept moving in the hole. Only thing left to do was some surgery :curses:
So I pulled out the wire wheel on the drill and the dremel tool and cut myself an access hole in the driver's side fender well near the subframe bolt... and found this:
Mind you, there's no bolt in the hole... yup... PO must have sheered the bolt off, and instead of drilling it out... they decided to drill INTO IT
can you say... NOT SAFE!!! I was a bit pissed off at this point in time, but not much I could do about it... I had to make this right.
In order to fix this issue, I drilled a 1/2" hole through the existing metal block in the frame, then proceeded to cut a large slot in it. I then trimmed down a nut to fit in the slot...
and after many attemtps, and a $hit load of ugly welds you get this:
Not pretty at all, but what have you. I basically torqued down on the bolt to pull the nut into the slot and then torqued it to spec. Once it was secure, I tacked it in place, then released the bolt and removed it... then proceeded to cake on weld so it didn't try to pop out next time I pull the subframe (which I hope is never
)
From there, I had to then seal up the hole I made in the frame rail. This is what it looked like once everything was bent back into place:
Then started the welding... I'm still getting used to this welder, so these aren't the prettiest of welds... but they worked just fine:
the undercoating def did NOT like the heat of the welder... as you can see by the smoke coming off it in the pic. I had to stop many a time to slap out the fire that started from the heat
Went out easily, so no worries for sure.
After a treatment from the wire brush to clean up the slag and oxidation from welding (and some touch up welding to hit spots I missed originally) I threw on a coat of 3m underbody coating to protect the metal:
was a bit of an ordeal and a royal PITA, but I fixed it the right way this time and didn't half ass it. Kinda pissed I had to do this, but whatever... I won't have to worry about it again at least
Next in line was to make a new hard coolant line so I could incorporate the turbo afterrun pump into the car... which meant mating these two lines:
after some eyeballing and cutting...
and then some more eyeballing and welding... this is the final product:
At this point, I was :slap: myself for cutting the hose that went from this flange to the afterrun pump on the donor car... so I have to either make myself one or go find another one... I'll figure it out as I go though... but this is now ready to go back into the car. Was really easy for the most part, and I was glad to see that the pipe was steal so I could weld it myself
After getting all the small stuff done, I put the wheels back on and then lifted the car completely off the ground in prep for....... exhaust!!!
I'm going with a full 3" downpipe back exhaust on this puppy... and being that the originaly exhaust was 2.25" max, this def took a bit of shoehorning!
From the downpipe it will go as follows: 3" flex joint to 3" high flow metallic catalytic converter to straight pipe (room for a resonator if I feel its too loud basically) to mandrel bend OVER the axle to 3" xlerator muffler to dual tips in OEM position.
Here's a pic of the resonator area:
It took a LOT of finagling to get the bit over the axle to fall in line and not hit anything... this is def a tight fit, but I didn't want to give up any ground clearance by putting it under the rear diff... so this was my only option.
Here is the rear muffler mocked in place awaiting me to weld in some supports to the OEM exhaust mounts:
After a lot of tweaking, I got it all to fit in really nicely. I need to pick up one more 3" band clamp inorder to meet the piping that goes from the resonator area over the rear axle to the rear muffler. This is all sectional because that's the only way I can get it in/out from the area over the rear axle...
here are all the pieces I made:
They are now all welded up solid. I got pretty good making the welds look pretty how, and they seem pretty strong. I'm going to pick up that band clamp I need then reintall everything permanently into the car. Then I'll start screwing with the tips I need to make. I'm going to basically take pieces from the donor car's exhaust tip (dual 3") and make them into my own new tip.
Turned out really good IMHO... not bad for my first custom exhaust
Only casualty was me lighting the back of my hair on fire when welding on the one support bracket to the over the axle piece :tard: One of the hot ambers fell back and must have landed enough on my hair to spark it up! lol No harm done though, and I only can tell it did something cuz of that tell tale smell of burned hair :barf:
Once I get the exhaust all buttoned up I'm going to get to plumbing the intercooler! I got the pipe in on friday, so *hopefully* I can get it all plumbed up this coming weekend. Not sure I'll get any time during the week to work on it, so we'll see what happens.
So that's it for this little update. Hope ya enjoyed the show 8)
