Turk’s Buildup, One Dream & Endless Nightmares by Turk82

7 minute(s) of a 102 minute read

With the motor rebuilt and all set with supporting parts for the single turbo you would think I would bolt the fenders up and drive this thing to get some miles on it but that wasn't the case. It had starting issues, which turned out to be a bad battery cable. Once I got it to start regularly it had an uncontrollable idle surge. It would rev up to 1100 and then drop until it nearly died. I fiddled with this for a while and got it to idle well enough to drive. At this point I took it for an "inspection" to get it on the road a bit. On the way to the inspection station, this happened

3 hours of work later and the diff was out of the car and on its way to IRP for a rebuild with an s4 T2 LSD. I decides to keep the stock 4.10 Ring and pinion because I thought Rx8 4.33 gears would be excessive.

11-3-2013

So it had been a while since my last update but I will continue documenting the build until I get to the current time.

So I left off with the Diff being built by IRP. While the diff was out and the car still ran like garbage I decided I would remove some weak links and narrow down the number of variables on the engine. I took the LIM and UIM off and removed the block off plates and welded everything shut to remove any possibility of vacuum leaks.

While welding the manifold I also upgraded from the low impedance injectors to an ID 725/2200cc. I don't have any pictures of this but I had to machine some spacers for the rails because these new injectors were longer. The secondary rail spacers were easy but the one for the primary rail was more complicated. This one needed to be machined to size and then I had to mill a pocket in it so the injectors could clear the spacer. Ill try to get picture of this later.

With the diff out I also took the time the time to relocate the fuel filter. For me with my long arms and little hands its stock location wasn't terrible and I would be able to change it but it was easy to move so why not. I reused the stock bracket and just drilled and tapped the subframe. If I pull the subframe out at a later date I will rework this a little because tapping the subframe wasn't ideal.

Here is the relocated fuel filter with a rag tag shield that is nothing to look at but serves its purpose well.

From the front

11-6-2013

The 35r is what I figured would be a good choice. I was going to talk to Turblown to see what he thinks as I will be buying some other things from him.

Back to the build. I got the car all set with the new diff and injectors installed along with a base tune that IRP was kind enough to do for free when I went to pick up my diff. Primed the fuel and oil and the car started right up. All was not well though. It idled much better (probably due to faster reacting injectors) but there was still a surge in idle and it would stumble when revved. This led me to my next adventure in this car. WIRING

I decided to go through the main harness because this was the one thing I hadn't touched yet in the car and with Speed 1 doing some wiring other places I thought there might be some sub par work done in the past. The initial goal was to return it all back to factory spec.

Found this little beauty hiding in the driver footwell, tapped into the hazard module plug. Two wires wound together and then twist and taped into the harness for no reason. the two didn't even connect to eachother.

My roommate pulling this monster of a harness out of the wheel well.

Dash out

I stripped the tape and protection from the harness in the garage since this was dirty and just a terrible job. I then took the harness to my apartment to fix the problems with the harness (don't worry this is a college apartment so it wasn't that nice). I found an area with some melted wires, some proken wires (fuel pump related), and some other odds & ends that needed to be fixed.

Just pulled it out of the box

Laid out and ready for work, drop light included for that garage feel.

Roommate doing some soldering

We got sick of working on the floor so we moved it to the coffee table

^ The turbo oil drain looks odd in that picture because its from the side. If you look at it from the front it is a downward slope until it hits the 90 degree AN fitting where it enters the block. Ill try to get some better pictures of it when I'm in the garage this weekend.

As for the engine harness, I have converted it to a single turbo harness and it all looks good. You were talking about converting to Haltech and lets just leave it at that for now because I am still getting this build to current times.