Hello everybody, this will be somewhat of a small update. I say small because nothing really “major” happened in the last few days, but we are nearing the end of the build as far as getting this thing up and running. I still have tons of stuff to do, enough to keep me occupied for months probably. But, a bunch of little things have been going on with the car.
I noticed every time I drove the car, I would arrive back at the house with less oil on the dipstick. When it comes to oil, I don’t mess around. I pegged the oil lossage due to a leaky oil return line. So I planned to take it off one day and inspect it. The return line that was on the car was a nice SS braided black line with -AN fittings that mated each end to a -AN 2 bolt flange. I found that one of the fittings were cross-threaded beyond repair.
So I dug through some boxes of other random return lines and ended up using a more of a simpler return line. It used two 2 bolt flanges with push lock hose fittings and a rubber hose. It still isn’t what I would prefer to run, but that’s all I had with mating ends even though I found 3 or 4 aftermarket return line in my stash of parts. I put it on and noticed one of my bolt holes on the oil pan for the return line was partially stripped, but still tightened down half decently.
I got everything finished up with new gaskets and started the car. I let it run for several minutes and then hit antilag using my hand on the throttle body. When I hit antilag, a geyser of oil erupted near the oil filter housing. Luckily, the engine stalled on it’s own as the RPM’s fell so the car shut off practically instantly. I immediately knew what the issue was.
My oil filter was loose. This has happened to me in the past on multiple cars and engines and is a pretty common thing. So, I removed the oil filter the rest of the way and found that the threaded stud that the oil filter threads onto came loose, as expected. I decided to completely remove the stud so I could take the oil cooler off and check the orange seal on the back. The seal looked in OK shape, but I had a few new ones in the house so I changed it anyway.
I put the oil cooler back on, tightened the threaded stud to 33ft/lbs and put a new oil filter on. Started the car and no more leaks. I presume that my oil loss before was due to my oil filter gradually backing off, although the return line was leaking pretty good as well. I still however, have a small drip from the return line at the pan since the one hole is slightly stripped, I will fix that soon.
Today, I spent the day merely just “tidying” things up. I cleaned the dirty engine bay, installed some header wrap on specific intercooler pipes that are extremely close to the manifold and wastegate dump tube, replaced a leaking inner brake hose on the left rear, bled the brakes, reblead the clutch, put some more of my interior together, just small stuff that, at the end of the day, made a big difference.
As you can see in the picture below, I carbonfiber wrapped my sheet metal passenger kick panel to match my push button start panel. I will be making one for the driver side as well. The interior of the car will look like a full race setup/theme. It’s not for everyone, but I love the look and it suits my goals and setup perfectly.
Tomorrow night, I will be making my first appearance with the car in town. So far, I have only driven the car up and down my road. I am confident in the car and engine now that the oil loss issue was taken care of, so tomorrow I am going to go cruise around town.
My aluminum half radiator setup has been sufficient so far. I drove the car around for about 20 minutes today. While driving, the water temps are well under 200 degrees. When I came back home and let the car idle, the temperature rose to about 210-212 degrees, which is about where my temps were on my 2G with the full aluminum radiator and 2 slim fans. I do, however, have to use my fans at all times. I would imagine it would be fine while driving without the fans on, but I have a toggle switch to activate my fans so, I just leave them on once my water temps are near normal operating temp.
I also did a log while I was driving. I did several WOT pulls and didn’t get any knock. Once, I got a random 1 count of knock between shifts when cruising, but that isn’t a concern. WOT showed zero knock. The engine is still running very very smooth. Again, I credit the smoothness to the Evo ECU. Anyway, here are some pics and stay tuned for more updates.
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