Derrick is a bery bery bad man for putting this thing on the market. I don't know what I'll do if and when this turbo lets go, but till then, it'll be fun. And heck the gearbox'll prolly go first anyhow so....
So I took the car up to my pals' shop cuz again, he has a lift and I don't and I'm too old and crotchety to work on my back under jackstands if I don't have to. The original downpipe came off nice and easy, no siezed fasteners, which was kinda amazing. There were no surprises putting the new one on. No, you saw corksports' ad, you know what you're installing. The surprise is what you're taking off. If you're me, and you've found a GTR swapped awd pro for like cheap, and you're just needing finishing touches to make it go, you laugh yourself silly and don't look a gift horse in the mouth and fix what ain't broken. Besides, you've seen the GTR manifolds, both pretty dern good items for factory parts, so whatever's hiding under the heatsheild can't be too bad, can it?
Well geeze wouldja lookit that horrble choking wheezing skiinny 90degree abortion of a downpipe. OK time to bolt the new one in. Remove lower IC hose plumbing. Unbolt stock DP, do the happydance that all fasteners come off without breaking studs or stripping threads. Install new DP. Hmmph. You can't get to the fastener at 11 o'clock without removing the hardline housing at the waterpump. You just can't. So drain coolant and remove housing and bolt up DP and off you go, right?
Wrong. What you do instead, if you're me, is run the first bolt through and spin it into the threads by hand, get the socket on it and watch it go *snap* before you tighten it down to the washer. This is a most excellent way to turn a 2 hour job into an 8 hour job. We looked at the other fastener, saw where it's visibly stretched, and threw it away. Now I know I gotta take the blame, but I've never removed those bolts before. I need to do a better job of inspecting all fasteners before reusing them. So after removing broken bolt and redrilling hiole and installing Time-sert threads and re-removing downpipe and pwrsteering pump and IC plumbing and everything else that had to get outta the way to fix this, we welded the flex up to the new DP, and made it talk to the rest of the exhaust. Then we put the undertray back on. Well, this GTR DP might fit on a GTR, but I tell you what, it doesn't quite clear the undertray tin on a Protege. We had to have a discussion with the tray to convince it to cooperate.
First thing we notice upon starting it up is, it doesn't wanna idle. It's running way lean. This makes no sense; if there was an exhaust leak before and there isn't now, the O2 sensor should be saying "hey there ain't hardly any O here, we're running way lean, add fuel" and if there wasn't a leak and we made one, it should be saying "hey we have too much O here, add fuel"... but we put it back on the lift and looked for leaks. Ain't none. I refuse to believe that a new DP can make so much more flow *at idle* to lean it out, so it's still a mystery. And of couse the wiring that lets the keypad talk to the ECU chose this as a fine time to act up, so I can't talk to the ECU till I go into the circuit board and re-re-re-re-solder the loose traces. Again. Sucks having a delaminating circuitboard in your ECU, but I ain't gonna replace it just yet. Too broke for that ****.
But after a while, it figured out how to idle on it's own, AFR's looked OK, EGT's looked normal, so go for a drive. Well. Hmmm.
Seems some Chinese guy did something to my car. Cuz I find I need to say the fellers' name every now and again. His name is Ho... Ho Li Fook.
Throttle response is, um, improved. It's using areas of the fuel/ignition map it's never used before, the big-boost-at-low-RPM areas. It's going right to the tippytop of the MAP sensor so fast it's just silly. It's showing significant vacuum on the guage going down the road at 90, it's never done that before, it's even climbing grades under vacuum that it's always had to go into positive pressure to climb. Kinda indicates air is moving through the system better, ya think? It's too early to tell what's happened to fuel economy, but there's 230 miles on the tripmeter and a third of a tank showing, so that's very encouraging. It was no slouch with that stock DP on there before but now it's just ridiculous. Lemme mention that I have yet to put my foot to the floor. Until I can do a datalog and make sure everything's happy, I won't. But so far, no knock, no detonation, and more power at half throttle than there was at full throttle before. I'll get after that keypad commms issue later today... cuz Mr. Ho Lee Fook says I better, or else...
So I took the car up to my pals' shop cuz again, he has a lift and I don't and I'm too old and crotchety to work on my back under jackstands if I don't have to. The original downpipe came off nice and easy, no siezed fasteners, which was kinda amazing. There were no surprises putting the new one on. No, you saw corksports' ad, you know what you're installing. The surprise is what you're taking off. If you're me, and you've found a GTR swapped awd pro for like cheap, and you're just needing finishing touches to make it go, you laugh yourself silly and don't look a gift horse in the mouth and fix what ain't broken. Besides, you've seen the GTR manifolds, both pretty dern good items for factory parts, so whatever's hiding under the heatsheild can't be too bad, can it?
Well geeze wouldja lookit that horrble choking wheezing skiinny 90degree abortion of a downpipe. OK time to bolt the new one in. Remove lower IC hose plumbing. Unbolt stock DP, do the happydance that all fasteners come off without breaking studs or stripping threads. Install new DP. Hmmph. You can't get to the fastener at 11 o'clock without removing the hardline housing at the waterpump. You just can't. So drain coolant and remove housing and bolt up DP and off you go, right?
Wrong. What you do instead, if you're me, is run the first bolt through and spin it into the threads by hand, get the socket on it and watch it go *snap* before you tighten it down to the washer. This is a most excellent way to turn a 2 hour job into an 8 hour job. We looked at the other fastener, saw where it's visibly stretched, and threw it away. Now I know I gotta take the blame, but I've never removed those bolts before. I need to do a better job of inspecting all fasteners before reusing them. So after removing broken bolt and redrilling hiole and installing Time-sert threads and re-removing downpipe and pwrsteering pump and IC plumbing and everything else that had to get outta the way to fix this, we welded the flex up to the new DP, and made it talk to the rest of the exhaust. Then we put the undertray back on. Well, this GTR DP might fit on a GTR, but I tell you what, it doesn't quite clear the undertray tin on a Protege. We had to have a discussion with the tray to convince it to cooperate.
First thing we notice upon starting it up is, it doesn't wanna idle. It's running way lean. This makes no sense; if there was an exhaust leak before and there isn't now, the O2 sensor should be saying "hey there ain't hardly any O here, we're running way lean, add fuel" and if there wasn't a leak and we made one, it should be saying "hey we have too much O here, add fuel"... but we put it back on the lift and looked for leaks. Ain't none. I refuse to believe that a new DP can make so much more flow *at idle* to lean it out, so it's still a mystery. And of couse the wiring that lets the keypad talk to the ECU chose this as a fine time to act up, so I can't talk to the ECU till I go into the circuit board and re-re-re-re-solder the loose traces. Again. Sucks having a delaminating circuitboard in your ECU, but I ain't gonna replace it just yet. Too broke for that ****.
But after a while, it figured out how to idle on it's own, AFR's looked OK, EGT's looked normal, so go for a drive. Well. Hmmm.
Seems some Chinese guy did something to my car. Cuz I find I need to say the fellers' name every now and again. His name is Ho... Ho Li Fook.
Throttle response is, um, improved. It's using areas of the fuel/ignition map it's never used before, the big-boost-at-low-RPM areas. It's going right to the tippytop of the MAP sensor so fast it's just silly. It's showing significant vacuum on the guage going down the road at 90, it's never done that before, it's even climbing grades under vacuum that it's always had to go into positive pressure to climb. Kinda indicates air is moving through the system better, ya think? It's too early to tell what's happened to fuel economy, but there's 230 miles on the tripmeter and a third of a tank showing, so that's very encouraging. It was no slouch with that stock DP on there before but now it's just ridiculous. Lemme mention that I have yet to put my foot to the floor. Until I can do a datalog and make sure everything's happy, I won't. But so far, no knock, no detonation, and more power at half throttle than there was at full throttle before. I'll get after that keypad commms issue later today... cuz Mr. Ho Lee Fook says I better, or else...
Nice info too.
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