BrandonspecB

Time to have some fun with this thing!

Haha, nope. Was tuning a friends drift car. We were in a rush getting it ready for an event in Sonoma. All the safety equipment needed to be updated and a brand new engine needed to be tuned and broken in. We got the engine in and running before we got the harnesses in. I took it out for a spin around our shop to get some data to work with. Got into a dusty spot of pavement in a tight spot where we keep our heavy equipment. Wasn't at 100% throttle, but enough to break the tires loose and put it into a loader. I don't remember anything. I'm just repeating what my friends told me happened. Not only did I not have a harness on, but I didn't have a helmet on in a car with a cage. Hit my head on it. Really lucky to not be in a coma or dead. Huge tough lesson to learn to always, always wear a seat belt in a car. Doesn't matter what you're doing. Low speed in a parking lot, put your damn belt on. Also broke the screen on my laptop. It was really creepy to get it charged up and connected to a monitor with an HDMI cable and to have the fuel map I was working on still sitting there. My friends took the steering wheel and gave it to me as a Christmas gift. I was holding on damn tight!

Appreciate it! So little update. Got the car running after the bent valves. Switched to ethanol. Made the rolling launch quite a bit less aggressive thinking that the high, pulsating exhaust pressure from the antilag is what kept the exhaust valves from closing in time or popping them open at the wrong time. Went out and tested the rolling launch and bent the exhaust valves in cylinder 4 again. Damnit. Pic shows one of the wonderful advantages of individual EGT. You know immediately which cylinder is the problem. I got some info from the HPA forums that it probably is a weak valve spring issue since I had been using stationary and rolling launch for a few years without issue. So, pulled engine again, new exhaust valves in cylinder 4, new Supertech valve springs, got engine back together, and then broke my leg in a car accident before I could get the engine in. Leg is healing well, but I'm off my feet for at least 6 weeks, probably 8. Engine will be in as soon as I can work on it and then I want to get the boost up and to a dyno ASAP. Injector Dynamics fuel calculator shows I've got enough injector for 25 psi boost on E60. I plan on using all of it. Here's to no more bent valves and no more oil pressure or trigger issues on the way to 700 WHP.

That's a good question that I'm not sure about. I never data logged oil pressure when I had an EJ. I can tell you I had an 11mm pump, killer bee oil pan and baffle, and it seemed like oil pressure at higher rpm was on the bypass at 90psi but I never watched it all the way through a pull to 8000 rpm. When I tore that engine down the main bearings were perfect and the rod bearings had a lightly polished spot at about 1 o'clock. This was after 3 years and 30-40000 miles making over 500 whp and turning to 8k.

I had looked into doing that. An Accusump works great for oil slosh, especially with a solenoid valve controlled by an ecu. You have complete control over when it discharges. I set up a friend's drift car this way and it works amazing. But it doesn't help with oil pressure/flow issues from a pump that is cavitating or can't flow enough. So for the slosh issue I've been having I'm going to give the baffle a shot. I'm betting it will help a lot for those oil pressure dips from accel because the rear of the stock pan has a nice ramp to it. The high rpm pressure is a separate issue that I'm just going to have see how things hold up, especially at higher power.

I have been noticing a bit of an oil pressure drop when I accelerate hard in lower gears. This is a quick drop and then recovers, so I'm thinking it's the oil sloshing under hard acceleration. Found this baffle from a New Zealand company called Possum Bourne Motorsports that builds EZ30s. Going to throw that in and see if it helps. I've been pretty anti social media for a while, but started an Instagram because I want to reach out a bit more and tune more cars. I'll be prioritizing updates to the car there. I hope to get it dynoed soon with some ethanol and high boost. Hope it survives. Instagram is @brandonspecb

That is probably the perfect size for this engine. I've thought about swapping to one about that size. Bit of an update. Got an ethanol content sensor installed. Car is true flex fuel now. I still have the meth injection system and can enable it if the ethanol content is below 20%.

What turbo and how much power are you looking for?

Don't mind the questions at all. So this is going back a ways, but if I remember right the machine shop ended up calling King and asking them what size journal and big end the bearings were made for. They ended up not opening up the rods but had to turn the journals down on the crank. As far as clearances that first engine had 0.0015" main and rod clearances and failed from the smashed pan blocking the pickup. 2nd engine was opened up to 0.002" main and rod because they thought that the clearances may have been too tight. I hadn't yet figured out why the first engine failed. 0.002" is way too big. The Outfront engine sheet doesn't give me exact clearance, but a range. Mains are 0.001-0.0015 and rods are 0.0015-0.002. My personal opinion is keep them on the large side of factory spec for power. I think 0.001 for the mains and 0.0015 for rods is where they should be. The factory spec for mains is 0.0004"-0.0012" and rods is 0.0006"-0.0017". Larger clearance gives more room for components to flex under power. That's usually the reason clearances are opened up a bit for engines that are built to make power. There's quite a bit more to it though. Lots of good articles online from trustworthy publications that go into more detail.

Been a few months since I updated this. Had a few things happen. Some good, some bad. My biggest issues with this engine have been oil pressure and triggering problems. I've spent the last few months getting these things worked out as best I can. I've managed to get oil pressure to stay steady 70 psi and a slow drop to 60 at 7300 RPM at 205F oil temp. This is probably the very best this oil pump can do. I think it was sized with no headroom for a stock spec engine and once you open up bearing clearances, add a turbo and oil cooler, it just doesn't have the volume to maintain pressure at high RPM. It may well be that a high power EZ just can't keep bearings alive for long periods of time. I'm definitely going to find out though. I already have a plan to run an external oil pump if need be. What I've done to the oil system is reduce as many losses on the suction side as I can. Suction side restrictions contribute most to pump cavitation. I removed the pickup screen, rounded every corner in every passage on the way to the pump, put an extremely thin coating of RTV on the oil pump front cover to prevent any leakage, and bought a brand new oil pump which includes the entire rear timing cover, gears, and front cover. Not cheap. I also use Redline 5w50 oil. Trigger issues were caused by the cam signal dropping out under heavy load conditions. I would get engine position errors around 25 psi boost or anytime I used anti-lag for stationary or rolling launch. I still don't know why the cam signal drops out. Haltech doesn't know either, but they have a work around. Instead of setting the triggers up to use a cam signal all the time, they have a mode for cars with very powerful, noisy ignition systems that uses the cam signal for 8 engine cycles to sync with the crank signal and then it ignores the cam signal and runs full sequential off the crank signal only. So far it works beautifully. It works so well that I was out having an absolute blast with the car. Rolling launch is one of the funnest things. It lets the engine get into boost in low gears at engine speeds that it normally can't. Then when you let go of the button it's full power immediately. I ended up having it set a bit too aggressively and popped some exhaust valves open into a piston. Damnit. So, the heads on the car have already been machined a bunch and my best option for getting the car running again was buying a used engine and swapping heads. So that's what I did. That brings me to today. I went and bought a drum of VP X85 and converted the car over to ethanol. E60 to be exact. The Haltech fuel control is sooooo good and it was a shame having to run open loop with meth injection. I decided I wanted all my fuel going through the injectors, so the fuel control can maintain a perfect AFR under all conditions, all the time. So, that's where I'm at. I made my YouTube videos public again. I got over my paranoia and figured I'd share what I built. Here's my ethanol update vid: Ethanol Conversion Update Hopefully this weekend I'll get out and get some rolling launch vids. I made it less aggressive so it won't bend any valves again.

I took my post down because I don't want to clutter your thread. I apologize for being a bit harsh and disrespectful. This is your thread and I won't put any of my bullshit in it. I'm on a path with my car that almost no one in the Subaru community has been down. I'm very aware of sorting things out in custom applications. Almost nothing with my car has been bolt on. I've also helped build, wire and tune a handful of drift cars with various engine, turbo, and ECU combinations. Will be doing a C5 with an LS3 swap and Holley EFI here pretty soon. But this is your thread. I want to see what you're building.

Funny you bring this up. I use that same fuel pump with my stand alone. With a low side drive the duty cycle is backwards of what you'd expect. 100% is off. . Haltech let's me switch it to high side drive and it works how I want it to.

I have a 12lb ACT Prolite flywheel for mine. Very snappy. Blips for downshifts are effortless. Free Rev

He removed the part about spending 150k. Also, I don't believe that turbo will make almost 900 whp. Lots of things that don't add up.

I'm a little confused on the cost as well. Has to include labor but still seems excessive. I have kept excellent records of everything I have spent on my spec.b. I haven't exceeded 60k and that includes what I paid for the car 10 years ago.

That's the knock light. Picked up some noise after the shift.

Well, thanks! For your kind words, here's a video of some part throttle acceleration getting on the freeway. I was going to make a video of me going out and ripping on the thing, but something on the camera mount was vibrating and it totally ruins the sound. This is one of the only clean clips. Part Throttle High RPM Accel

Whenever you're around here let me know.

The start of round three. Engine runs and the car drives again. It was a massive pain in the ass though, thanks to Subaru and a typo in the service manual. Car wouldn't start because the main engine relay wasn't turning on. After hours of trying to figure out what was wrong I found that the service manual has the color of the wire wrong for the 2.5L turbo diagram. It labels the output for that relay as Lg, which is light green. This is the color of wire I wired to the Haltech to control that relay. If you look at the 2.5L non turbo and 3.0L diagrams, their main relay output wire is LG or blue with a green stripe. Once I figured this out I had to open up the wiring harness, find the blue with green stripe wire, and wire it up to the ECR output in the Haltech. And then it fired right up. It was really nice to drive it again. The steering, clutch, and shifter feel so good. The power between idle and 3000 RPM is so much better than my daily. And it sounds way better than the daily too. As much as I like driving it, I'm a little burned out. Probably take a few weeks away from it and then start tinkering again.

Car should run tomorrow. Only a handful of things left to do.

Ran into some issues with the upper oil pan. Pulled the oil gallery plugs out of it to clean it and pulled the threads out of one of them. I won't have a new pan until probably next week. There is still a lot to do. Been getting the wiring harness all laid out. Need some extra loom to finish it. Put a black intake manifold on it. I like the red, but it gets dull and dirty real quick. One of the things that I believe has been causing trigger issues is the movement in the crank trigger wheel. I made a video showing it HERE. The engine is exactly at TDC on cylinder 1. There is a mark on the crank sensor and I'm thinking the trigger wheel needs to be bolted down when the tooth is exactly centered on that mark. I sent this to Haltech to see what they think.

Almost 319,000 on my daily. Original auto and, as far as I can tell, engine. When I first got it, it had a massive oil leak. I pulled the engine and put all new gaskets in it including head gaskets. The cylinder walls were damn near like glass. Probably the most worn cylinders I've seen. Drives fine and pulls good. Did a dragy test on it and it went 90 mph in the 1/4 mile at 4200'. Uses 1 qt every 1k miles. I figure that's not too bad since Toyota considers 1 qt every 1200 miles to be ok for a new engine. I have had pretty good luck with the EJs I've had, but I have seen the issues that are pretty common to them. My brother's 2007 Forester XT burned an exhaust valve at around 95,000 miles. A friend's 2014 WRX rod knocked at around 100,000 miles. I fixed both those cars. There is a reason why people joke that Subaru regular maintenance includes a 100k mile engine change.

The wiring diagram I used was out of the factory service manual. Click Here If you have any specific questions let me know. Today I got the cylinder heads on. I was hoping to do more, but had some stuff come up. The 12mm studs are beefy. I was wondering if I was going to have to machine the heads to get them to fit, but the 12mm part is just the threads in the block. Everything above that is the same diameter as the 10.5mm studs. There is one issue that with the larger studs. They have to be installed before the dowels are pounded in. I didn't know this and pounded the dowels in first and then had to pull them back out. It's interesting installing dowels with the studs already threaded in. I must say I am very impressed with Outfront's quality. I purchased a used case from them, but all the hardware on it is brand new. They included brand new cylinder head and trans alingnment dowels and a new crank key.

Wiring project is finished! That was a lot of work, but worth it. Now I get to start on assembling the engine. It really looks great. Outfront built it with all new hardware. They included new dowels for the trans and heads as well as a key for the crank.

It looked like the LCD display that shows mileage comes off the circuit board. It's clipped in and there's a ribbon that attaches it to the board. I undid the clips but didn't try and remove the connector from the board. I was worried about ruining it. If the mileage is stored there then just swapping that display might make gauge cluster swaps easier.