covertrussian

Thanks for the heads up, now I wonder if my RockAuto ones are legitimate or not, and I didn't take any decent pictures before installing them.

Now that they found the issue, I would feel more comfortable, as long as it has the new similar metal harness. I would consider extended warranty though too, but that's because I don't trust CVT's to last in a higher powered 4,500 lbs vehicles.

There is finally a recall for the CVT failures! It's related to dissimilar metals in the transmission harness corroding and increasing sensor resistance. Which led the TCU to believe the pressure was higher then it really was, thus it would reduce the clamping force on the chain causing it to slip. CVT chain slipping would not only score the CVT pressure cones, but would also increase the CVT fluid temp, which can melt the components of the valve body, I believe this is the same issue that high power CVT WRX run into. Full description can be found here: https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/rcl/2019/RCLRPT-19V855-2068.PDF Now the official fix is ECU/TCU tune update. Which seems to make the ECU smarter and more resilient, by either using more then one input to determine the clamping pressure, or by going into failsafe mode to prevent transmission damage. Subaru seems confident in this solution, thus they are not replacing all of the not-yet failed harnesses (ecu re-flash on 77k cars is easier and cheaper for sure). I'm glad they are fixing it, but I'm not sure I would be comfortable buying a used one either though.

Had to dig through my old pictures to find what the 05 LGT oil pan (11109AA131) drain hole looks like: This design causes the oil to shoot in 4 different directions, on top of that if there is foreign material, like pieces of oil filter (seen it on VW...) or chunks of sludge, it will get caught in the small holes and wont drain out. I really wonder what prompted the Subaru engineers to go this route, my 04 FXT had a normal drain plug hole... Fumoto valve (sorry spelled it wrong before) replaces the drain plug, what it does is concentrate the 4 drain holes into 1 so it's much cleaner, but it still doesn't resolve the bigger foreign material from being able to drain out. Another issue with both the older 11109AA131 and especially with Fumoto valve, you loose the ability to use a magnetic drainplug. While it's not THAT big of a deal for most, I do like the idea of seeing any metal buildup in my oil. Also onetime, while doing valve seals on my SR20, I lost a valve keeper, the drain plug magnet should catch something like that

That's the 2005 design, it's the one that has the multi-hole drain plug hole. If you can live with that, it's fine. You can use a fumito valve to help with that, which is what honestly prevented me from ripping mine out still. But between rusting pan and leaking fumito valve, it's time for me to switch to 11109AA151 (which is still used in 2019 STI's)

I actually prefer the lower oil quantity, it's really nice to just buy one 5QT jug to change the oil, especially on a daily. That's why I went with 11109AA15 oil pan and will do a Moroso pickup, more then good enough for daily.

I would recommend switching to 2006+ LGT oil pan setup. It doesn't have the stupid restrictors on the drain plug hole, which makes changing the oil way less messy. They also have a slightly different oil pan baffle design, which I believe the 2006+ is better (with less left over dirty oil per change). 2006 LGT: Oil Pan: 11109AA151 Dipstick: 11140AA150 Oil baffle and Dipstick guide show to be the same part numbers, but for sake of having it in one spot: Baffle: 10915AA010 Dipstick Guide: 15144AA011 Also I would go with aftermarket pickup tube as others have mentioned, especially since OEM 2006+ tend to crack easily. I think 2005's do eventually too but not nearly as much. 2005 Pickup Tube: 15049AA070 2006 Pickup Tube: 15049AA110

Well Subaru seems to have two different tuning strategies when it come to Turbo and NA motors: With Turbo Subarus 93 was required, thus Ignition Advance Multiplier (IAM) has to be at 1.0 (100%), if it's any less then there is an issue with the fuel/tune/car. Adding higher octane fuel does not increase timing, since IAM is already at the highest setting (1.0 or 100%), which in turn higher than 93 octane does not increase torque. With NA Subaru's 87 was the recommended octane, but running 87 would result in IAM being reduced from the optimal 1.0 setting. The only way that I could get my IAM to stay with 1.0, on the stock tune, is to run 93 octane fuel. It's like Subaru built the timing table on 93 and then said: we'll let the IAM and other knock control systems reduce timing until it stops knocking. There is a definite mid-range torque increase from running 93 gas on my and my friend's NA cars (2.5i & 3.0R respectively) That means that NA Subaru's are technically dual octane, since running a higher octane fuel, contrary to popular belief, would indeed increase overall torque. Since the Ascent and the new OXT/LXT are turbo motors, it seems like Subaru stuck their guns and made them single octane (87). Which does also explain why there are no additional power gains from running 93 gas, IAM is simply at it's fullest 1.0 (100%) and it can't logically "go to 11". My first thought was, well they are trying to preserve the transmissions (posts on WRX forums suggest that CVT WRX's cannot go above a certain WTQ). But then I remembered that it's inline with the tuning strategies that they have used for the past two decades.

There are probably other factors too, like 87 tune compatibility and reducing CVT load too. Having a "flat torque curve" was probably a requirement from higher ups, thus down-tuning is an easy win for engineers. Saying that it reaches 277ft-lbs at 2,000rpm and has a "flat curve" sounds a better in reviews then it peaks 350 ft-lbs at 3,000rpm and falls off from there. Where as in the real world, when you compare the graphs the winner is obvious.

Found it and I miss read it a couple days ago. Peak Power gains are about 20whp giving it 240-250whp, but the torque is what it goes over 300wtq! Here's the post, and here is the graph:

I've been following along too, interesting indeed. I wonder if Subaru knew that people would try to crank up the boost, which would compromise the CVT reliability. Cobb posted up a power graph, which I can't seem to find, for their 93 tune (probably with an added boost controller) and it was substantial power increase (from 220wtq to 310ish). Pretty impressive! Update: Found the post and It's WTQ that went way instead of HP, miss-read the graph.

Yup digging it all by hand (well foot) and wheelbarrowing it to other parts of the yard. I'm also translating the grass/topsoil to my kids playground behind the house, something about clay not being nice to land on... I have a lot of people asking me why I didn't rent equipment, most equipment was $500ish and it simply isn't in my budget, but I also sit all day so it's been really good exercise and reduced my chiropractor bills . At this point I am glad I didn't rent anything, because I ran into couple big boulders, one of which I jackhammered, two others are TBD, I would be re-renting the equipment between the jackhammering. To top that off I found my sewer pipe, which had a cleanout that was broken and underground. With heavy equipment I would have crushed the whole sewer pipe and we would have been without indoor plumbing again (it got clogged late last year, which is actually what triggered my "must fix the house" bug ).

Here's what I've been up to, silly me underestimated how much digging needed to be done, because from my standing perspective it doesn't look all that much! Unfortunately cars are more sensitive to big elevation changes, so lots of extra digging to smooth it out. Needless to say I've gained a lot of core strength, which means I'm not going to the chiropractor monthly anymore . I've also been busy with taking down big dying oak trees around the house. Maybe I should start a house build thread in Off Topic. 100% agreed with you, I really don't like that reducer/coupler, but it's mostly Subaru's fault. Now I've seen someone take the 3" coupler and modify it to fit with 2.4", but I'm not sure it helped with flow that much. Now that I'm TGV less, perhaps I could try a 3" housing. Going rotated is too much money for probably minimal gains and I'm starting to max out the stock injectors and/or fuel pump on cold days. I'm also starting to wonder if it's time for a newer car... But don't worry, I first need to afford a new family hauler before I can consider a new toy for myself.

Fair enough and typically I would happy to do another mod, but lately (basically all of 2019) has been occupied with house projects. I've been hand digging a new driveway, so the cars have been getting the bare minimum love .

Can you modify the engine cover to fit the bigger inlets by any chance? As for smaller inlet, I may test 2.5" vs 3.0" on my turbo SR20 in the future. Mostly because I don't need to add BOV ports to that one, so would be easier to do.

I thought about doing that when I first built the intake, but after two years of mostly city driving, I'm not sure it matters. Hot air rises and the intake sits relatively low, so IAT's don't really increase by that much. On the flip side, as soon as you start moving IAT's drop real quickly (compared to stock). Which, now that I think about, is because stock intake is gobbing up air from higher in the engine bay.

Still way too much money for something as simple as the inlet, $ per HP is just not worth it . Inlet & intake should be sold together for $300 ...

Keep in mind that I have a gen 1 Perrin inlet, which I think could be collapsing under my turbo's vacuum. Newer versions seem to have a better metal ribcage to prevent it form collapsing. Now, I'm not fully sure if mine is collapsing, thus increasing the pressure drop, or it's increasing the velocity, which according to the Bernoulli Principle would lower pressure (and in turn increases vacuum & pressure drop). Power wise, it does seem like the Perrin has a slight edge over stock, but since my stock was starting to rip beyond fixing I couldn't really test more. In my opinion, the possible 5-10whp gains are not worth the $250-$300 premium! Now if you need a replacement, since our stock one rips by you looking at it, I would do a hard inlet any day, since it's so easy to install on our plastic manifold EJ's.

It's like an hour or two or work total and $15 elbow . I will say that getting the stock airbox and S bend to fit on this would probably be pretty hard, the bigger radius-ed inside puts it a little forward of the stock inlet. This is why I just stuck to running my 3" CAI. Also the woosh BPV sounds are pretty awesome with this setup

Custom 3in Hard Inlet I've been sitting on this mod far too long because I was getting conflicting data. Turns out my culprit was trying to apply barometric pressure to a turbo car. I was going retest everything, do MPG tests, etc, but at this point it's been almost 2 years and I don't feel like digging in again, so here's the pictures and data... This all started with the Intake Depression (Vacuum) Testing, as part of that testing I noticed that my first gen Perrin inlet had pretty high inlet depression at the turbo. Plus after installing the Custom 3" Cold Air Intake, I wasn't thrilled about going from 3" to 2.75" and wanted it all to be 3". Parts: 3" Aluminum Elbow 2.4" to 3" Offset Silicon adapter (I used Agency Power AP-GDA-174-225, but I don't love it) 1.25" Alumium Pipe (for BOV) PCV/Breather Ports Aluminum Brazing Rods I got the idea for doing a custom 3" inlet back in 2014ish when I had to fix the stock broken inlet. The aluminum 3" L that I had fit so well under the manifold: I didn't get a chance to really put the plan in motion until I did the TGV deletes in 2018. At this point I cut the pipe to fit and made modifications to the manifold/TGV for smoother flow. The TGV housing was digging into the AP coupler quite a bit, I think the coupler could be better molded to avoid this: Here is a before and after grinding the TGV's and manifold: Test fitting a 3" pipe, you can still see the TGV dimple inside the coupler Next issue is with 2005/2006 bypass valve hose butting into the coupler, it needs to be stretched way forward. First I marked off how far inlet pipe went into the silicon coupler, then I drilled a blow off valve hole as close to that line as possible, to reduce BPV hose stretching. Now I don't have the equipment to weld Aluminum, but I did have good success with using Alumiweld like brazing rods. After brazing was done I used a die grinder to expand the BPV hole, this way the brazing rods wouldn't drip inside, plus better flow from BPV. For breathers I quickly drilled and tapped 1/8NPT ports for breathers and pressure drop testing. The sharpie mark up front shows about where I should cut it if I want to use stockish intakes, but since I'm all custom now I left it full length I had to unbolt the BPV hose dragged it out to the front of the manifold and then put it back in place, lets just say it's quite a stretch. I should either do a custom hose or get a 2007+ pipe. All installed, don't mind my "temporary" breather hoses, which have been on there for almost two years now... I hooked up my manometer to the port closest to the turbo (roughly the PCV port location), went for a drive and my jaw draw dropped with how little total pressure drop there was compared to the Perrin inlet (Perrin first, Custom Inlet second). Now I was interested to see what the stock inlet would do like! I dug it out, but since it was partially ripped I had to get creative on attaching it. As you can see above, the inside corner is a sharp 90* instead of a smooth radius bend, this is horrible for airflow along with the accordion style section. The stock inlet HAD to flow worse then the Perrin inlet right? Not according to the manometer, here are all the inlets and the depression measurements plotted: Onto the run data... Here is Engine Load, MAF Voltage, and Mass Airflow graphed. Did anyone ever tell you that you don't need to tune for inlets because they are post MAF? Well they are wrong if you get a good inlet... Finally the street dynos after tuning: like I said in the beginning, at this point I was still trying to apply barometric pressure to my dynos and was also over smoothing the runs, this made the differences be negligible. Since it's a turbo car, no barometric pressure should be applied and smoothing should be left at 1 for most accurate data. Thus for this graph, I only applied the temperature based corrections and weight corrections: First, the Stock Inlet (red line) spikes up at 6k RPM, this is wrong and happens a lot with my logs, which is another reason it can be hard to get good logs. I would say stock inlet is probably 280whp worth. Interestingly enough the stock inlet was knocking Perrin's level of timing, I don't recall reducing timing helping power either. Perrin Inlet (blue line) did VERY good for such high inlet depression, especially compared to stock which has less depression but probably flows worse. Finally the Custom 3in Inlet (green line) saw slightly faster spool but it also wanted around 2* less timing across the whole map. Now while I would love to think that the inlet alone gained 25whp peak, I would say it's probably being optimistic (remember dynos can have up to 5% variation, which is 15whp at my power levels!) Overall the new inlet seems to be a success for not much money!

Timing belt/idlers/water pump is the #1 priority, they are 60k and 8 years overdue.... Then banjo bolt removal, since it's free. After that I would consider the catless up pipe (which requires a resistor patch or tune update). I also echo doing the things dgoodhue mentioned is a must.

That's quite a bit over stock, so I can see why that piece wouldn't last. Either way the new pipe is superior and should flow much better

Just curious, how much boost are you running? Little surprised the pipe didn't fail earlier

I know that a lot of times TYC actually ships Koyo's, but in this case I simply didn't wanna risk it. Plus the Denso STI was only $80, so not worth the hassle. Now if I knew that WRX one would actually have the bigger port, I would have spent the extra $10 to get Denso WRX one instead. I'm a little surprised we are only now seeing it in production cars. Some of our SR20 guys have been running electric water pumps since late 2000's. With those electric pumps, they double as thermostats since they can stay off until the car is warmed up. I heavily considered one myself, reduces rotational weight and water pump replacements are a pita on the FWD SR20's (about the same amount of room as GDs have for spark plugs)

Not exclusively to MPG even. My G20, with a dual core all aluminum radiator, is getting pretty damn good MPG heh. It's similar to why stock Intercooler works so damn well, while aftermarket thicker ones can be worse. While a lower mass intercooler/radiator heats up quicker, it's able to shed the heat much quicker too. Now with the Intercoolers, I noticed that it gets to a certain heat point and it simply doesn't go above that point. The LGT FMIC would then start shedding that heat VERY quickly. When I compared it to my G20's much denser FMIC, it would get to that peak heat point a little slower, but it would also take much more driving around to get it cooled down again. Anyway back to radiators mwiener2 explains it real well in this post: This is also partly why cooler thermostats don't necessarily help, they slow down the warming of the car on cold starts but at full operational temps it doesn't matter. Now it's possible that a cooler thermostat will allow you to supercool the coolant 10-20* below the warmer thermostat, giving you slightly more time before coolant gets hot again, but shortly after you're back to needing a more efficient cooling setup (radiator/fans).