Project RS

[ScottyB]

yeah, it doesn't hurt to get it done and its not that expensive, really. good way to also tell how long you can extend your oil change intervals so you aren't wasting oil that has alot of life still left in it.

you know, after looking it over again after doing some more research, i'm a little concerned with the chromium number, which is the ring/cylinder wall. that's a little high especially for a small engine (you don't see much over 2ppm in most engines) and my oil usage is up...i'm going to take a look over the intake and see if i have a leak. that would explain the high silicon number (ingested dirt) and higher wear. we'll see i guess.

[ScottyB]

luckily i had a couple recent updates copied over in another thread on a different site. sooooo, imma go get them and get this thing back to a roughly current place in the project.

[ScottyB]

[ScottyB]

so, in other news, i had to replace the driver's side steering rack boot. i went and bought a boot kit from EZSubaruParts.com, and a decent looking bag of parts showed up at my door with instructions in another language. no big deal, its just a rubber accordian right?

for us guys with UEL headers, the header merges about 3 inches underneath the driver's side boot and the heat just melts it. stupid design but the exhaust isn't OEM so nobody's to blame but me. anyway, the stock boot soldiered on half-ripped for about a year and i had previously made a little heat shield from aluminum flashing to try to deflect the worst which i think helped it last a little longer. so i decided to replace the boot before i put tires on, so that i could take the tie rod off and not have to give a shit about being careful since i was getting the car freshly aligned with the new tires anyway.

i did not take any pictures for reasons you will understand. i have taken minimal liberties in describing the actual event.

a $5.00 boot. "how hard can this be?" I said to my battle hardened, callous-handed self. Much like a star wars fan walking into the first ever showing of The Phantom Menace, so to was I calmly assured that this wouldn't turn into a laughable shit-heap of an effort because I can change the oil and stuff. Unbeknowest to me was the fact that non-subaru steering rack replacement boots fit like a speedo on Michael Moore (pause, absorb). like a good boy, i had "bought", i.e. Extendedly Rented a front-end service kit from Advanced Auto ahead of time to make popping the ball joint off the knuckle easy as pie. i had the car up, wheel off, brakes off, rotor off, header dropped and ball joint off in about an hour.

now i find that i don't have an open-end wrench to fit the tie rod. it would have been so easy to test this ahead of time. i am le dumb. 40 minutes later i have now acquired many wrenches. boom, tie rod end is off. a screwdriver-ectomy later the boot is off and i pay respect to its ravaged husk of a former self. new boot comes out of the plastic baggie all fresh and nice, ready to pop on and be out of my consciousness for as long as possible. small end goes over the inner tie rod with no drama. big end starts to go over steering rack body, then plants its ass and bottoms out. you ever see someone hauling back on a stubborn dog that decides it WILL NOT move another inch, and just drops its butt to the grass and doesn't give a damn if the collar squeezes over its head until its eyes pop out? that is this boot.

by now my fingertips are raw, it is high noon in NC and i can smell my flesh cooking, and people are literally gathering, most likely out of sincere concern, to watch as i am writhing on the ground trying to throw my weight into the tips of my fingers to pop this boot over the end of the rack. i am elated with a glimmer of hope as one side of the boot goes over the rack, only to cause the other side of the boot to pop completely off. i try this from alternating angles with similar results. children from the neighborhood stop with confused voices to ask my why my car is broken. their accompanying adults ask why i am not taking my car to the very highly rated garage down the street, and i attempt to explain that i'm "saving money" as i am surrounded by my collection of approximately $800 in tools and another $40 worth of wrenches i just bought an hour ago. i begin to sweat through the seat of my pants which makes me appear to have pissed myself.

over the next 2 hours i try almost everything i can think of. i am dehydrated and fairly sure i'm becoming delusional, as at one point i think i was actually trying to sneak up on the boot by looking away as if disinterested and then hurling myself at it and clamping down on it with all my might to try to force it onto the rack. i have but literally a millimeter more of movement before the boot will seat and i will be victorious. at this point i've put enough time into this that i'm very leary of using pliers lest they rip the rubber, since i have no idea if this thing will even actually fit the car anymore. but i cave, and go for my trusty vice grips and a screw driver - a deadly combo. i swiftly yank them from my now disheveled toolbox like the sword of Excelsior, shoulder-blade crawl back under the car like a retarded sea lion, and start giving this boot hell. the screwdriver pries the boot away enough to give the vice grips purchase. i am attacking this bastard from all sides. it cannot escape my rage. my wife comes out to check on me for fear that the grunting has meant the car has collapsed on top of me in an effort to release me from this suffering.

with a small, girlish war cry i pucker my buttocks and summon the ancient power of my inner spirit animal; the pygmy hippo. screwdriver on one side, vice grips on the other, i use all of my Beiber-esque frame to offer one final challenge to the Boot of Regret. and just like that...pop! it seats perfectly. it is done. i lay on the searing payment for a moment to regain consciousness and take note of my massively sunburned thighs. no! be strong...i must finish this. back under the car i slide the clamp over the large end of the boot to finally ensure it shall never again move from this place of resting. the clamp does not fit. it is approximately 1 mm too short.

40 minutes later i return with $2.50 worth of hose clamps.

the remaining hour is spent piecing the car back together in a swirling haze of dehydration and rank BO stench. i am thankful the shop where the car will be aligned tomorrow is only 3/4 mile up the street, because i'm only partially sure the car will be roadworthy once i get it back together. tools go back in all the wrong places in the toolbox. i forget to put the brake rotor on before the wheel. the powdered nitrile gloves i've just taken off leave white powder marks all over the inside of my car as if a crackhead has had a seizure in it. 4 shirts and 6 hours later i retire to my abode mostly in shame. that night i have nightmares that the first time I turn the wheel tomorrow the boot will pop back off the steering rack.

epilogue: that boot's goin nowhere. works like a champ. alignment was perfect. tie rod ends are still totally solid with no slop. if any of you subaru owners use a non-OEM steering rack boot i will come to your place of residence and elbow drop you in your sleep.

Cliff Notes: cheap parts can get right the fuck out.

[ScottyB]

cheap mods are the best mods. this will probably interest the 05-06 (maybe 07?) guys who want to Romraider-tune their cars.

the cable for 02-05 cars (aka me) is about $140 and if you're lucky and quick on the draw you can get a used one for about $100. its a cable with a usb connection on one end an an OBDII connector on the other.....as a warm-blooded, opposable-thumbed, soldering-iron equipped simian who is only semi-retarded in nature, i was sure i could do better than drop 100 bones on a stupid cable.

what brought this all on was that i was going to be making a pretty serious roadtrip to Columbus OH in the worst heat wave in recent memory, and the RS still pings like crazy when its really hot out during extended cruises. i'm really not OK with the idea of climbing 5% interstate grades for miles through blacked-out WV (they're still recovering from the huge Derecho storm that hit 2 weeks ago), in 105 degree heat with my wife and some nice luggage, in a car whose engine is detonating the hell out of itself. i need the thing to be rock solid especially at its age. after finding a really helpful thread on NASIOC, i realized i could plug in a much safer engine tune for about $20 through the use of an alternate cable source. turns out this should work for any non-CANBUS (i.e pre-06) subaru, although it looks like 02-03's are still having issues with this.

what we're going to do is use a VW VAG-COM cable and solder some wires to provide the adequete 12v power to the cable so it can do its job. then, we're going to install the right drivers to our laptop so it can see the cable and send it our nice shiny new data. finally, we'll be using an old version of flashing software on the laptop so that the software can't tell that the cable isn't Tactrix brand. sneaky!

first, buy your cable. i used ebay seller Alpha-Bid and got the cable in 3 days from WA. $22 shipped. not bad.
more info obd2


then, find your soldering iron that can barely melt cheese and some wire than has metal on the inside and plastic on the outside. proceed to molest the nice factory solder joints with your junky radioshack iron. you're doing this to connect pins 11 and 16 to jump them and provide 12v power. ace!


finally, download and apply your drivers from FTDI (the producer of the chip in your cable), find an old copy of EcuFlash 1.29a, and go to town. I had to bump my COM port's baud rate down to 4800 so the cable could speak all proper-like with the RS's ECU.

so what was i up to in the first place with all this? i applied a new tune that cut a big chunk of ignition advance off of the low-load section of the ignition advance table so the engine would run smoothly and safely at highway engine speeds and loads. pulling timing is especially important in hot weather when the intake charge is already starting out at like 180 degrees by the time it gets into the combustion chamber. subaru, in its baffling wisdom, decided to just fuck all that nonsense and jack the timing to the stratosphere to probably eek 1 more mpg out of the car on the highway, presumably so they could compete better with their 2WD competition that was getting 30+ mpg. at cruising load the car was sitting at nearly 45 degrees advance. some cars can get away with that, but the EJ25 is an old engine and the head design just can't make use of that kind of timing. the constant pinging pounds the pistons and rod bearings and just isn't very friendly to the engine....at 100k miles i want it to last for another 100k at least, and cutting that abuse out is key.

the result was excellent. no audible knock at any engine speed or load, and power was barely affected on the low end. the ECU now has tons of headroom to pull timing as it pleases whenever it senses knock instead of in the past where it would pull timing all it could but would hit a wall at the factory base timing numbers which were still too high. the car never missed a beat through intense heat (to the point the A/C could barely keep up on high recirc to cool the car) and actually returned my all-time best mpg ever in Ohio at 35.7 mpg over a half tank.

i'll be tweaking the timing further after logging knock feedback over the next few weeks, but this has been a great success so far. Romraider (program to edit tunes) and EcuFlash (program to flash and log tunes) are both free, so i can truthfully say that you can tune your subaru now for less than $25 and an investment of your time in learning the tuning language.

[ScottyB]

rear struts are clunking like a mother. common problem with STi struts, the grease in the inner bodies turns solid and the strut body ends up no longer moving smoothly but kind of sticking as it goes along (stiction).

i'm gonna ride these out until later this year and have them rebuilt by FEAL and also revalved to match the stock springs better (they are overdamped). plan is to replace the tophats as well - Whiteline Com-C in front, Group N in the back. i'll toss in the RTAB's as well and get it aligned, and then be done with the suspension for a long time.

registered for my first RallyX in November. getting less excited about autocrosses these days but still want to go out and race. i'm looking forward to this.

[WRXtranceformed]

Dude that is awesome. RallyX is going to be a blast. You better have tons of pics!!

[D_Eclipse9916]

registered for my first RallyX in November. getting less excited about autocrosses these days but still want to go out and race. i'm looking forward to this.

Badass!

[premiershine9]

Excite!

[Ken]

Always wanted to do one of those, although i here they make it mandatory to have a skid plate? any truth to that?

[Goodspeed]

Still going to be your DD? I only ask b/c I've seen a few rallycross cars and they were....ah...."rustic"

[ScottyB]

so, yeah normally i'd want to armor up. however, of the 3 venues that the local club runs, this event is at the smoothest. its essentially a fairground with a smooth dirt (think infield baseball diamond) oval around it which they build the course out of. there are no jumps and not many ruts. my ride height is also basically stock despite the STi springs, so i have lots of clearance (can change the oil without putting the car on ramps), probably 5 inches at least.

here is a video of the course from last year:
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i'll take video and let you guys know how the experience goes.

Still going to be your DD? I only ask b/c I've seen a few rallycross cars and they were....ah...."rustic"

oh yeah! its at the point now where the car is old and as much as i try to keep it clean, i don't feel bad about scratches. the stock paint sucks. mechanically its fine though.

[Steve85]

Glad we didn't lose the boot story!

Very cool to to hear you're doing the rallyx. Looking forward to your recap!

[SlimKlim]

Glad we didn't lose the boot story!

Very cool to to hear you're doing the rallyx. Looking forward to your recap!

I just re-read the entire thing. We need to compile all of the good MM stories and publish a book or something. :lol:

[xvxax]

Pretty cool that you did your own tuning. Does your ECU log? If so, can you access it with your VAGCom thing? What does the tuning software look like?

[ScottyB]

Pretty cool that you did your own tuning. Does your ECU log? If so, can you access it with your VAGCom thing? What does the tuning software look like?

Thanks! although i'm far from a "tuner", more of a hack who makes a few tweaks. if i were to look at the overall scope and copmleteness of the tune i'd say i've only scratched the surface. its fun to do though and a great education on how the car runs and why it does what it does.

yes and yes. there are 2 programs. ECUFlash is the software that interfaces with the car itself to log, flash, and pull data. Romraider is the software in which you can access the car's tune and make adjustments.

as far as looks, here is an example of 2 fuel map tables, the first stock and the second with changes i made:



its pretty intuitive and the resolution on how minute the changes in values can be is very good. there are plenty of screencaps you can check out with a little google image search if you want.

both subaru and mitsubishi cars can work with this software and both programs are free and opensource.

the only real trick with this particular homemade VAG cable project (besides the little jumper cable i soldered) was that it requires certain versions of both programs to work, which was just a trial and error situation.

[Mike]

i really liked it when you said vag.

[ScottyB]

rear wheel bearing replacement coming up. expect a fun filled adventure with that hot mess. the costs of having a dealer or shop do it around here are full retard, so I've got the tools and will be doing it myself.

i'll give the rundown list on all the parts and tools you need, considering the price of having a place do it, your ROI is fulfilled pretty quickly.

[ScottyB]

"But what I do have are a very particular set of tools; tools I have acquired through a very fast internet connection. Tools that make me a nightmare for bearings like you."

not many pictures here due to me concentrating on not f'ing the job up, but i'll probably be doing the other rear at some point soon, and will take more time to document it then and add the shots at that time.

the verdict is still out on whether my work causes this new bearing to explode or if my wheel falls off at 80mph, but so far its all holding together and quiet. prior to this, the most mechanically complex thing i've done is changed out the struts. so, the good news is its really not a difficult job. the bad news is you can't do it without getting a hold of some required tools, and the job itself takes some time. if you're lucky, you can find the tools at your nearest parts store and return them when you're done. if you aren't, you'll be buying them over the internet because nobody local carries what you need (in my case), but you can at least consider it sort of an investment...because once 1 goes, others are probably not too far behind unless its really low mileage.

I was able to take advantage of sales from nearly every vendor i bought tools from, but in the end it adds up to about $350, not including your car parts. and of course i had some necessary tools to start, like a torque wrench and sockets. it still beats paying $600+ at the shop.

i'm not going to reinvent the wheel too much since this NASIOC guide exists and it works great, but there are a few additional tools and notes I'd make to it that will probably help you out.
How to change your rear wheel bearing

notes along the way:
Parts/Vendors I chose (only applies to WRX/RS/early STi, 05+ STi's are too cool for school
- i used a new hub instead of re-using the old. i used a Dorman and thought it was worth the great price of 40 bucks. if you re-use the old, be sure not to scratch it when removing the old bearing race that stays attached when you yank the hub out.
- 42Autosports sells a bangin' bearing kit. You get all 3 OEM seals, a new OEM axle nut, an upgraded taper roller KOYO bearing (stock is a radial bearing design) and a tube of LiquiMoly Long-Life Grease to repack the bearing, for a great price. This particular shop does not like the stock grease at all and by their recommendation I cleaned and repacked the bearing with the LiquiMoly. Time will tell if i packed it properly, but its important to note that (as i understand it) you can overpack them. If you stuff the bearing to the tits with grease it can create a lot of drag which equals heat, and you could run the risk of blowing seals out from the grease expansion as it heats up. i put a fair amount in, but tried to visualize how much space it was taking up as i went and stopped at what i thought was pretty good coverage.

Prep
- drink water, a lot. and beer. in hindsight, do both equally but save the beer for after.
- don't forget to lube the bearing puller bolt threads or they could gall. whatever random motor oil you have lying around is probably fine.
- get some kind of penetrant to free up the lateral link bolt and spray it over and over a few days in advance. i used PB Blaster, its an old stand-by. my car has literally never seen salt and is only 7 years old, but the lateral link was still a bitch to free up. buy a new OEM nut and bolt and plan to cut or snap the old off if you know its corroded really bad.
- if you don't want to buy seal drivers, get a square block of wood and a mallet instead to drive the seals in evenly. you can't push them in by hand.

Tools
- leverage is king. get at least 2, 2 foot breaker bars, and then buy a 1" x 48" steel pipe from the plumbing section of Lowe's. You'll need the bars for the lateral link bolt, hub puller, and will need to combine with the pipe for the axle nut.
- get some nice mechanics gloves. nitriles will rip way too easy on this job. or just be a bear-fighting lumberjack stud and use your bare hands, like a real man.

Technique
- raise up the whole rear end with a jack via the rear diff and use a good jack stand on the chassis rails. you will need to free up the jack to use it on the suspension later.
- don't forget to chock the front wheels so you don't kill yourself when it rolls forward
- don't forget to release the e-brake, or have a fun time trying to get the rotor off. i had a fun time!
- you'll need to put the lateral link bolt back through the link-ends and knuckle to keep the suspension together when you use the slide hammer to remove the hub. you will hit a certain point where the link ends and knuckle match up perfectly and the bolt will go back through with little effort. it takes a bunch of tries to get it lined up, but it will work. As the strut compresses it will try to swing outward, stuff a rag under the jack wheel to keep it compressing straight upward and not rolling back.
- don't try to pull the seals out from the outside, push the seals out from the inside using pliers or something.
- be nice to the bearing housing in the knuckle. don't scratch it and clean it out nice.
- once the bearing is in the knuckle, you can pull the plastic insert out with the bolt head of the bearing puller.
- don't forget to stake the new axle nut once its on and torqued properly.

that's about it. the rest is all mentioned in the NASIOC thread.

here's a shot of the old bearing. at 105k miles, the grease was the consistency of candle wax. my bearing did not exhibit some of the hallmark sound signatures of a bearing going out - like a rhythmic humming or increasing in volume under side load. it was just a constant rumbling that got louder with speed. i was afraid it could be something in the transmission or diff but the way to 100% confirm was to jack the car up, grab opposite sides of the tire at the same time and try to wiggle it as much as possible. it had play which was the nail in the coffin that the bearing was toast.



again, i'll update better with pics next time i get the chance.

[ScottyB]

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i'll take as many shots as possible tomorrow but video is what i'm really after. we'll see what i can get with a ghetto-rigged in-car setup.

SO4 (street tire 4WD) class is going to be fun... at least 10 scoobs in my class already. will try not to come in last and/or flip the car.

:thumbup: