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Doubling back to post some things that I realized I never posted here.
Here's how the ECU setup turned out. All mounted up under the dash, has the 1500 Elite ECU, a CAN expander and the wideband O2 module mounted together. The jumper box is mounted on the firewall where the stock ECU was mounted and the jumper harness reaches it no problem. I still have some wiring to go through for adding sensors and the larger fuel pump but once all that is done I'll de done with wiring stuff!
The jumper box mount is basically just a sandwich plate that holds the box in place. It all mounts to the dash bar with shaft clamps that have been attached to the base plate. Factory harness is routed the same as with the stock ECU before. WB02 wires run out through the firewall on the far right and plug into the O2 in the downpipe. CAN expander will be used for the WB02, my Aim datalogger, and my boost control knob.
The whole front and rear suspension bushings are now all sphericals. Everything articulates smoothly. I had a friend make me some custom trailing arm bushings to allow the arm to move in the planes that it needs to and not in the ones it doesn't.
Coupled with all of the rest of the sphericals everything moved very smoothly. Very little friction in the system compared to bushings.
I upgraded the rear brakes to an AP caliper setup with some custom brackets I designed.
Brakes are made from 7075 aluminum and anodized black. Hardware is all zinc plated. View from the back on the SSB uprights Things are close but they fit! Uses the stock rotor because the rear rotor doesn't need to be any larger and this keeps running costs lower with the option to upgrade to a 2 piece rotor in the future.
In my never ending pursuit to try and keep the car organized I made a panel to house the headlight leveling switch and cluster dimmer switch into the unused hole in the dash where there used to be an air vent. These were previously zip tied up under the dash.
3D printed from ASA. Should do the job.
I designed a replacement rear trans mount bracket. It's made from billet aluminum to replace the stock cast iron piece. It shaves just over a pound from the stock piece.
Stock is 1lb 14oz. This comes in at just 11oz.
More to come. Progress has been slow as I'm in the middle of moving all my stuff 700 miles down to SC. Should be settled down there in late July/early August. Once I'm settled I'll be hammering hard on the Evo again to get it ready. Good thing about SC is I should be able to get some test days in over Winter
As the years go by its becoming less and less of a "fake" racecar and more and more of a "real" racecar. Looking good brother. I might splurge on that trans mount bracket at some point.
As the years go by its becoming less and less of a "fake" racecar and more and more of a "real" racecar. Looking good brother. I might splurge on that trans mount bracket at some point.
Slowly but surely haha. It'll always wear the moniker tho.
Let me know if you'd like one. We have one beta unit left and those are discounted pretty heavily.
Been spinning myself in circles with this puzzle for the past few days now. I picked up some Brembos off an old NASCAR at auction. They shift my bias a bit less than the Wilwoods did, they're pretty light at right around 5lbs, they use hard anodized aluminum pistons with vented titanium crowns and the bodies are electroless nickel plated which helps them shed heat faster.
Now I have the obstacle of making them fit a rotor for the car. The main reason for switching to these is they use considerably thicker pads that I can get for cheap, which will massively reduce consumable spend on brakes. So with that out of the way here's where I stand, I have 3 routes, none of them are ideal:
1. Stock rotor. My least favorite option due to the amount of work required and how tough it is on wheel clearance. With the custom steering uprights I have the caliper sits too far out to be properly radially centered on the rotor, which means the mounting posts would have to be shaved down but there isn't enough threads left for how far they'd have to be shaved down, so I'd have to swap back to a standard upright and make custom mounting brackets, which isn't a huge deal. The bigger issue is how far in the caliper sits radially. On the 320mm rotor my 18x10.5 +30 NT03 with a 20mm spacer doesn't clear the caliper. I'd have to move to either a 25mm or 30mm spacer to clear the caliper which won't fit under my fenders. These calipers are wiiiide, for reference they're made to use a 30mm pad with a 40mm thick rotor.
2. NASCAR 2 piece 328mm rotor. This comes in at a tough second place because I think it's doable but kind of goes against the main reason for me doing this in the first place, reducing running costs. The rings themselves can be bought for pretty damn cheap ($100/pair) but the supply duration is questionable, I'd have to get custom center hats machined which adds a decent bit of cost, and most annoyingly the bobbin kit alone is almost $500 per pair of rotors. So this is the highest rotor cost option by a good margin, there may only be cheap rings for a limited amount of time, and there's also not much better wheel clearance than the stock rotor. Since I don't have one of these rotors on hand I can only guess as to what that clearance would look like.
3. Stock X rotor. This is my preferred choice because it requires the least amount of modification to the knuckle, leaves my bias within 1% of stock, has plenty of sources for rotors at a wide range of prices, and has plenty of wheel clearance with my existing setup. The one big issue with this is that the caliper is only made to accept up to a 328mm rotor, so in order to use the 350mm X rotor I'd have to machine the caliper. It's not a huge amount of material, but the calipers have internal fluid crossovers so I have no idea how much material is between the inside edge and the crossover passage other than making some educated guessing with calipers. I've reached out to a contact at Brembo to see if they'd be willing to send me a picture of a cross sectional view, but I'm not holding my breath they'll share that. Furthermore I need to find a machine shop that's willing to modify these calipers if this is the route I want to go.
Here's where things sit with the stock 320mm rotor. This is with the caliper resting on the outboard bank of pistons so the caliper would have to be pushed outboard around 5mm to be center, which kills the less than 2mm of clearance that's there right now. So I've got more thinking to do ahead of me
Sexy. And I agree with the above, makes me want to take the time to remove all the undercoating from my wells...
It's a messy job but easy to contain. I just grabbed a gallon of WD40, a spray bottle, a plastic razor blade and some plastic bristle brushes. The WD40 is a solvent for the rubberized undercoating and you can basically just wipe it off with the plastic razor blade after it's soaked for a bit. The bristle brush helps you get in the crevices. Gets rid of all the undercoating and leaves the paint underneath intact. I'm still making up my mind about what coating I'm going to reapply but it'll likely be a hard shell type coating.
for under the car, i turbo washed it first . it removed the ones willing to go without wd40 so less paper towel is needed. coating it this winter
the rear trunk area wasnt fun but still worth it
Nice. I'm leaving the undercoat under the car alone for the time being. Hoping sometime in the next 5 years I'll be able to acid dip the chassis and start with a blank slate and fix all the issues on the underside in one swoop.
A few more updates and things are still coming along. Yesterday I picked up my rear diff and tcase from TRE. I don't know the service history of the driveline of the car other than the trans is original and the diff and tcase had been built by Shep many moons ago. I figured after me racing on it for a few years and not knowing how long it'd been since they were last gone through I should have them checked over as preventative maintenance.
The rear diff was already a 12 plate setup but figured I'd have TRE do their 12 plate race deal which adds a bunch of other upgrades other than the 12 plate clutch packs, namely a beefier diff carrier side cover which is stronger and acts as a scoop to improve oiling to the pinion bearing, a beefier pinion spacer which does a better job of keeping the ring and pinion meshed properly under high load, higher load rated bearings, the rear housing cover is machined to add a sight glass, the cross posts get machined to eliminate slop, and everything gets shot peened. Jon and Aaron tore them most of the way down for initial inspection when I dropped them off and they found the pinion bearing was basically dry and one of the side bearings was no longer an interference fit on the diff carrier; given enough time this would lead to extra play in the gear mesh and would wipe the ring and pinion out.
Stock on the left, TRE on the right. This is the pinion spacer that keeps the pinion running true. If it compresses at all the pinion can walk around. Where the OD gets larger on the stock piece the wall thickness gets a fair bit thinner, with the TRE unit it keeps the thicker wall thickness through the entire length of the piece.
This is their diff carrier side cover. The asymmetric cut outs on the periphery act as scoops while the carrier turns and slings oil up towards the pinion bearing. It is also made from a much stronger steel than the stock piece. We were able to remove the bearing on the stock side cover by hand, it should be an interference fit and require a bearing splitter to remove. Once that interference fit is gone the carrier no longer runs true. The 4 holes around the bearing post also help to increase lubrication to the clutch packs so they live a longer life.
Yay I can check my diff fluid level without removing the fill bolt. Looks exactly like the sight glass for the oil on my motorcycle lol
My transfer case already had larger bolts holding it together and a Wavetrac diff but I didn't know if maybe the viscous coupling may have been worn out at all. Things looked good on initial inspection when I dropped it off but after they magnafluxed everything they found cracks in the ring gear teeth. Ring and pinions for the tcase are no longer available from Mitsu but luckily TRE offers a heavier duty ring and pinion so that was my only choice, but I'm not upset, this is the entire reason I had everything gone through. Other than that there were no more surprises, the viscous coupling was good and nothing else was damaged so it got new bearings and seals and reassembled with their slick cooler/neodymium magnet plate. They also don't paint aluminum housings which I greatly appreciate, I hated looking at the chipped paint all over the tcase before.
How they left:
How they came back:
Shiny
Ended up being more than I originally planned but am happy to know that I won't have issues with either of these parts going forward. More exciting stuff to come. Still not sure when I'll have the car totally back together, I still have to move half my life 700 miles, do a bunch of home reno work, get the trans inspected and upgraded which my wallet isn't looking forward to, and build the new engine. In a perfect world I'll have it ready next summer but it'll likely be next fall unless I stumble upon a winning lottery ticket.
