Skeeter update thread #5!!

[skeeters_keeper]

Skeeter update thread #5!! My last update thread is HERE. It ended with my B6 install... that thread was in Dec of 07, so my next update thread is more than over due!

I. Coilovers
II. Aspire Swaybar
III. Custom header-back exhaust
IV. Misc
V. Non-festiva work
VI. Future plans!

I. Coilovers

I’ve a few ppl ask about my coilover setup, I may take this little bit of info here and try to do a more informative write-up if folks are interested. I used KYB GR2’s on all four corners, I got cheap coilover body setups from e-bay ($25, they came with springs, I didn’t care about the springs), and then 10” 150/125lb springs from South West Speed (also e-bay). This gives a 25% increase in spring rate and a 15% increase in strut dampening... a little stiffer strut would be nice but it worked out pretty well and doesn’t feel under damped. When looking for coilover bodies on e-bay I was mostly looking from something that had aluminum top hats, because a lot of the cheap e-bay kits have rubber/plastic top hats that I can’t imagine ever using!

Some of the goods (Note: these are the springs I didn’t use that came with the bodies):


Coilover bodies and adjustors installed on rear strut.


Old vs new:


The way the top of the coilover will mount to the rear strut mount. No modifications required for the rear.


Rear installed:


In the front I had to grind the top hat out a bit so that it would fit over the top of the strut. In this pic the top one has been adjusted, the bottom one hasn’t been ground out yet.


Front assembled:


Front installed:


Finished:


The above pic is with both the front and the back lowered all the way. It dropped it almost 1.5” in the front, and actually raised the back about 1”. But as you probably noticed, I didn’t remove the spring perches! When I remove the spring perches I should be able to go about 2” lower (maybe a little more), on both ends, which is way more than enough for me, I don’t want it to be real low because I live out in the sticks and bottom out even with it like that sometimes. Also, depending on what you want, you may want to go with a different length or different rate of spring. That’s the beauty of coilvoers, at $30 a piece playing with spring rates/lengths isn’t real expensive!
I can say that for my somewhat aggressive style of daily driving this combo has been amazing! It is comfortable enough for long hwy rides and bumpy roads, and yet makes the car handle so much better. Seems like a good compromise to me, but it may not be exactly what your looking for, so do some research first!

II. Aspire Swaybar

A while ago I did some measurements showing that contrary to what a lot of people said, the aspire front swaybar should fit (thread here). A few people then actually did it, and I also finally got around to doing it! One of the main reasons I didn’t do it before is b/c I had just gotten polly bushings for my stock swaybar, but I decided it was time to switch them out, and man, what a difference!! The swap process is straight forward, the only problem I really ran into was trying to get it to fit past the front trany mount. It took some work to get everything lined up, and the swaybar does contact the front trany mount, but my car has been in a few front end accidents so that may have caused some of the problems. I’m working on making a front trany mount with more clearance for the bar and also filled with urethane.

You can see where it runs over the top of the xmember, that’s right where it contacts the front trany mount. Also... the coolant is because I had just pulled my radiator out at that point, lol.



{{apparently I'm extremely long winded, my post was too long, contunued in the next post}}

[skeeters_keeper]

III. Custom header-back exhaust

As usual, I took a bunch of pics during this project... but when I came in to put them on my PC, there were none! Apparently my camera is having some issues and wasn’t saving any of my pics to the memory card... it saves them to internal memory, but not to the card, so I don’t have as many pics as I’d like.
For the exhaust I used 2” conduit (equivalent to 2 1/8” pipe) that you can pick up at lowes or home depot. A 10’ section is a little over $20, and you can get 90* mandrel bends for around $10 a piece (I used two). I also got a 2.25” stainless steel high flow muffler on ebay for around $30. I cut the flange off of the stock DP, cut one of the 90 bends so that it just cleared the oil pan and came out about where the stock DP did (it sits a little lower than stock), then welded the flange to it. From there I used a piece of cheap autozone flex-pipe that just fit on the outside of the conduit to run to the new cat. I clamped the flex pipe to the DP and to the cat so that my exhaust is somewhat modular, and easier to modify/repair. I then cut the stock exhaust hanger off of the stock cat, and welded it to the bottom of my new cat. After that I took a straight piece (around 40” long) of pipe and welded it to the output of the cat, and ran it back to the next 90* bend which bends right under the gas tank just like the stock exhaust did. I added a little more straight pipe after this 90* bend so that the end of the exhaust exits from under the cab (around here you need a cat, and the exhaust must exit from under the cab to pass inspection), and hung it up from the stock hanger locations. I also put a piece of high-temp silicone from a cookie sheet on the bottom of the frame rail where the pipe might rattle against the frame a bit.
Its loud. Very loud. But it was cheap, easy, and light. I’m going to try a few things to make it a little quieter (the noise doesn’t bother me so much, I’m just worried about the negative attn from the police). I think its perhaps a little too large for my na B6, but it would be great for a turbo setup, and feels better than the stock exhaust on my B6 as well.
Now for some pics I took recently since my original assemble pics didn’t turn out, which is really too bad b/c I had pics of the stock vs new exhaust side by side and everything.

Fabbing the DP; I ended up cutting a little more than this off to get more ground clearance.


The stock flange, I left about ½” of the old pipe on b/c it fit very snugly inside of the new DP and I thought it would make it stronger... If I were to do it again perhaps I would cut more of it off so that there wouldn’t be this restriction there, but at that time I wasn’t very confident in my welding skills (I basically learned to weld while building this exhaust!)


You can see how tight the fit will be... worked great.


DP @ the manifold:


Ground clearance, I bottomed out once... I was going sidways through a parking lot and went over a sidewalk. No damage, its pretty strong pipe:


Dumps infront of the pass tire:


Just a straight piece of pipe... beautiful!


As I mentioned it pretty loud. There are inserts you can buy on e-bay that are supposed to help quite your exhaust down... some of them are sorta like mini glass packs, others act more like a resonator, but there’s one kind that is sorta like a mesh cone that is supposed to help diffuse the noise. I made one out of some wire mesh, and it took the edge off a tiny bit... I think. But not very much, and I didn’t put it in with a set screw (just jammed it real tight) and ended up blowing it out. I may try make a series of them and put them in with a set screw, but I’m thinking more likely I’ll build a small glasspack sorta thing and install it inside the pipe with a set screw so that I can remove it whenever I want. Another method for quieting up the exhaust I’m looking into is installing a rotating fan in the exhaust stream... this method of exhaust noise reduction is commonly referred to as a turbo. This is the original “cone” design I made that didn’t work very well:



............continued.........

[skeeters_keeper]

IV. Misc

I also did a few other smaller things during this time... I replace my radiator which had been leaking, installed a white tach cluster, gutted some of my interior, and did some other more or less normal maintenance items. After installing my tach, I wanted to be able to tell how fast I was going and how far off my spedo is. So I got the gear ratios for the trany and final drive (from here, of course!) and then took a little while and put together a simple calculator in C++ that accepts as input the tire size, gear you were in, and engine RPM and gives as output your speed... as expected with an NA B6, it seems the top speed on relatively flat ground is about 105-110. I had uploaded the calculator to an online hosting site so that other could download it but it seems to have gotten deleted, so I’ll try to upload it again sometime next week and I’ll update the thread w/ a link then.


V. Non-festiva work

Just before spring break one of my friends @ school came up, and said “I need your help...” her car had had minor overheating problems on and off before and I had done a little work on it (oil changes, plugs and wires, etc). Well it had completely overheated and blown the HG. Plenty of coolant in the oil and blowing white smoke everywhere. Since it was right b4 spring break I said I’d try to do it, she had it towed to my house and I started tearing it apart. I worked 40hrs that week at my normal job, and still managed to get it done in my spare time! It’s a ’93 toyota tercel, 1.5L sohc 12v... its name is Tucker. I pulled the head off, had it machined, cleaned up the block, pulled the valves and cleaned them all and replaced the valve stem seals, cleaned everything up and added a little paint and put it back together. I saw it again yesterday, its got somewhere in the 5-10k mi range on it since the job and still going good. That was the first of my on-the-side paid jobs.
Before:


After:



After I finished that I drove it to work one day and changed the oil there (free oil changes at work!) and then returned it to Joy (its owner), she was very happy! One of the guys at work had a 93 Dodge Dynasty, 3.3L OHV with blown head gasket that had been sitting for a few months, after I was talking about doing the head job on Tucker he asked if I would do a job on his car... that was #2, no pics of that one. It was fairly straight fwrd, I did it after I got out of school for the summer just in my extra time. It was more of a pain than the HG on tucker, and also the first V6 I ever did any major work on. That ones still running good too, I saw it earlier today!

The next one I actually ended up going up to PA to help a friend, he was putting a clutch and a HG in his escort. I stayed for a weekend and we worked on it a lot, we didn’t get it finished (got the clutch and everything out, and most of the top end of the motor disassembled) and he finished it then on his own, I know he was driving it for a little while... I didn’t charge him anything but he gave me some cash for my efforts.

The last one so far was another guy from work, he’s the store manager at another one of the shops in town. He has a 91 BMW 735i with the M30 (3.5L straight 6) engine. He wanted me to do a head job as well, he got the car for real cheap b/c of the bad HG. Apparently the geniuses who owned it before took it to a rather shady (but cheap!) mechanic who tried to fix a leaking head gasket with permatex. Yes, he reused the old HG and just put permatex on EVERYTHING. I wish I had a before shot, I don’t think he replaced any gaskets, but there was permatex everywhere... this was by far the hardest HG I did this summer, but it’s a BMW, what can you expect? I took quite a while on this one because when he brought it to me he wasn’t sure if it was only a HG, or if it also needed a water pump or anything else. I cleaned this one up a bit too, and gave the VC a shot of red then ground off the raised lettering and stuff... I drove this one on wed, still running good as well! Guess I’ve been lucky so far, seeing as I’m just a kid who’s been more or less teaching myself and asking my dad for help if I get stuck.



VI. Future plans!

Well, I’m hoping to get some new rear wheel bearings tomorrow (for my bday, how many kids ask for wheel bearings for their bday?) so I guess that’s the first thing to do. I’m also still planning on cutting my rear struts so that I can adjust my coilovers further. I’m also planning on starting to tear apart one of the aspire trany’s I have. The trany is basically the only part of my car that is still stock, so I’ve gotta do something about that!!! I would REALLY like to do a LSD install (and phantom grip seems to be the only option), but at $260 I think that’s probably not going to happen... we’ll see.
I’ve also been looking into a standalone engine management system. I have always treated my car as a “learning experience”, I mod it for 3 reasons: 1) I love to work on my car, 2) I want to learn as much as I can about it, 3) its fun to drive something you’ve “built” yourself. After I’ve got the trany re-built I’m going to have basically covered most all of the mechanical aspects of my car, so I’d like to learn about tuning. I’ve mainly been looking into megasquirt, I’d LOVE to get rid of the VAF and disty, and I should be able to do that with MSquirt. I’d also be able to try to tune for both fuel economy and performance... We’ll see how that turns out, but I hope to go standalone at some point mostly as a learning experience.
Finally, a guy at work with a mitsu eclipse gave me his old T25 turbo... but it has a cracked exhaust housing. If I get my hands on another exhaust housing, I’ll be trying to get a small turbo setup running as well... all the more fun!


That’s about it for now! I think that’s enough of an update thread... I need to start putting up slightly shorter threads just a little more often, its just hard for me to sit in front of a PC and type in what little spare time I have when I could be working on my car, flying, or reading something. Speaking of flying, I soloed over the summer too... should have my license soon I hope! Yea, it was a busy summer

That’s all for now, folks!
Skeeters_keeper out,

[m715]

Great job, Nate!

Michael

[neanderpaul]

Nate, you are my hero. I wish I was that talented at that age. shoot, I wish I was that talented now!

[skeeters_keeper]

Thanks guys!

Paul - you going to get that BPt rolling? If not i know someone who will

I pulled apart two aspire trany's today, both of them have shot diff gears (the spider gears that are mounted on the shaft)... gotta see if i can find them somewhere. One of them I was told wasn't going into reverse, and I was told the other one was whining... they are in a lil worse shape then I was hoping but hopefully I can get at least one good trany out of the deal.

[neanderpaul]

Nate, I have the GT at my dad's garage. I need to pull the engine. Maybe we can work out a trade? I have my dad's garage, an engine hoist, air tools, etc and 2 festivas. The thing I don't have now is time. If you came and wrenched with me I would be forced to throw time at it. My buddy who was supposed to do it with/for me moved. ARG! BTW I met a guy who just started at advance who went to liberty. He's 20. I'll get his name. I asked if he knew you, but I couldn't remember your last name.

[25Horseplay]

Great job Nate!! You want some work in Ohio???

[Safety Guy]

As always Nate, you're awesome!

If you don't launch a career as a travelling auto mechanic, perhaps you could do a custom "auto mechanic/modder" minor in college!

Karl

[skeeters_keeper]

Brian - maybe sometime! I'd love to, just would have to work out time.
Thanks Karl, I'm a Sr in college now (still got another year left though, trying to squeeze 4yrs into 5!) and the university i'm at doesn't have any kind of mech school. I'm doing my BS in math, hope to do my masters in aeronautical engineering, and then see where things go from there...

Paul - my next break from school is around thanksgiving. Don't think i have any major plans yet, maybe i'll swing out your way for a day or two if you've got off!

[CharlieZ]

Skeeper,
Nice work. You have a talent that won't be outsourced to a foreign country. Watch out for that aeronautical engineering tho. LOL.

You might check out the local Harley group or shop for some OEM exhaust pipe/muffler take-offs. I know my son's OEM exhaust system ended up in the trash after laying around for a couple years.

[batstiva]

Nate, you are like the energizer bunny with Skeeter. You just keep going and going. Nice work. Looking good. Do I even want to know why you were going sideways in a parking lot??? lol.

[wrestler3025]

Just an idea here Nate...maybe you could T the exhaust and have it exiting in front of both wheels.

[Ogrestiva]

Is that a radar dish sticking out of the back of the blue festy?...lol

[geezerstiva]

holy. crap. dude, youre awesome! great job on skeeter!