Initially, I received the car off a flatbed, from a well know Canberra tune house who had destroyed 2 pistons on the dyno. The engine had been imported and modified with the 05 heads removed, and my98 heads fitted to suit the rs manifold etc.
The car had 2 different ecu’s, a possumlink, and the haltech, both of which had been badly tuned and the car ran like poo.
I did the basics and found the cam pulleys had an issue and the pickups for the cam andgle sensor were intermittent, so replaced the cam pulleys with early RS liberty metal items.
Still didn’t fix the problem, so did some more investigation. Further fault finding I discovered it had broken ring lands on two pistons. A compression check showed 35 psi on cyl 1, 50 psi on cyl 3, 150 on cyl 2 and 140 on cyl 4.
I started pulling things apart and also found this.. not a lot of flow going on
Pull don’t of the engine revealed this
Other things I discovered is that the heads had been ported, had a set of unknown spec cam regrinds, that I later found out were from the possum bourne parts bin. Ive measured them at 10 mm lift but don’t know the duration. Expect they are about 255 or so degrees, nothing huge. Look carefully, youll spot the reprofile where the new metal is added.
While id decided to rebuild the engine, I also decided the my05 push clutch gearbox had to go. I got a my02 wrx case, and reshelled the internals (Thanks Doug)
The push clutch is su weak that it was slipping badly, and was replaced with s std pull type friction with an exedy pressure plate.
Initially turbo was a vf34 with a p20 housing, but I decided it wouldn’t be enough for my plans. It was sold.
So I went out and bought the following for the build:
Mahle 2618 forged pistons
Manley H beam forged rods
ACL race series bearings
OEM gaskets – aa610 1.6mm thick
Gates racing timing belt kit
PE 780cc injectors
Tech edge wideband controller and meter
Kando TD06 sl2 20g 8cm
And carious other bits, then proceeded to start my build under my house. Had some assistance from a friend with machining and general guidance as id not done an engine before. Went very smoothly..
Process for the engine build was as follows:
• Strip the engine completely
• Send block for hone / size to new pistons
• Send crank to be linished / sized to rods and bearings
• Received bits back. Proceed to clean block in large tub with kerosene/degreaser and boiling water. Did a wash/rinse cycle 7 times until I could not get any metal particles from bores using high powered neodymium magnet wrapped in caltico cloth soacked in wd40
• Dummy assembled engine checking clearances
• Set piston ring gaps (chose initially .023/.019 thou)
• Assemble short engine to factory torque specs and rod cap bolts to arp recommended spec
• Clean heads up then refit to engine (heads had done less than 3000 klms since rebuild so did not pull down)
• Fit timing gear, belt and do initial checks
• Fit parallel fuel rail mod / carl davey injector kit
• Reassemble intake and all ancillieries
• Fit to car
• Set initial run in tune up
• Run in
From there, things went swimmingly for 20k klms with this engine, until a head stud fail meant a head lift/gasket fail and a few more decisions, but that’s later. I had tuned myself, and had some issues with a fuel pump fail and massive detonation, but the engine went well, eventually tuned by spiro at Auto tech Sydney. It had massive restrictions somewhere and was flat lining at 204kw from 4000 rpm, and wouldn’t make any more power. We discussed this and it was decided the std my05 headers were not helping, plus my coils were average (Bosch hec716 coils id fitted earlier) so I decided to do a late model coil conversion and fit headers.
Old coils
headers
New coisl
Ok. These coils (FK040) are from GDB era subes, and some H6 motors. Not sure exactly which car they come from, but they are a coil over plug coil with built in ignitors.
This means the oem ignitor must be bypassed. Here is some tech info for those who wish to do it
I cut the coil wiring off a set of RS 2 bolt coils and used that to solder to my new coils.
these coils have the following pinouts:
P3 > +12V . white with black stripe - common to all 4 coils - wire to the positive 12V of your factory coil wiring (Red for RS coils)
P2 > GND > Black with red stripe - common to all 4 coils - crimp a large ring terminal and connect to the coil bolt
P1 > SIG > Black (yellow on 2 coils) - differed on 2 of the 4 coils - wire to the signal wire of the factory coil wiring. (Yellow for RS coils)
P1 being the clip end of the connector.
heres an odd one..
Theres a thread on RSLC where travers put some info up re the factory wiring diagram being wrong, its mentioned that wires are crossed over marked as wrong in the factory manual. Now my car appears to be the same as that wrong info.
the ground is pin 5 on the 5 pin, and the cylinders are in order, looking at the 4 pin plug from where the wires feed into it >>>>> 4-2-3-1
Cant reinforceenough the benefit of good tools
Next thing this car had was a gearbox fail. Munched third gear one evening, so decided a six speed was the fix. Got a 6 speed from mick from his rally car and threw it together in a day. Love the box, hate the open front diff. will rectify that next year (2012) but the 6 speed is the best mod ever for a sube. Don’t bother with 5 speeds, get one of these, it transforms the car. Don’t have any pics of it to display here, they are on my home pc, will dig up later.
As mentioned before, the engine had a fail at approx. 20k klms. A head stud nut fatigued and let the head lift (I was running 25 psi) so I pulled the motor back out and found some odd things going on. It appeared that the block had warped. Measuring piston to deck height had the pistons out from front to rear. Every type of check was done and I was convinced it was the block. We got another block and were going to send it away for machining when I decided to check the rods.
Who would think that brand new rods would be faulty, but when checking them against manleys specs, they were found to be out. One was within tolerance, and two were longer than the allowable tolerance.
This was odd because im sure they were right the first tme I assembled this engine, but essentially, it meant id only checked one cylinder, and that I had made a rookie mistake. What this also meant was that my compression ratio was lower than it was meant to be, such that I had approx. 8.2:1 in the front cyls and 7.95:1 or so in the rear cyls. Amazing the motor ran as well as it did but explains why it was a bitch to tune clod start and economy.
So a decision was made to rebuild the engine but since the block needed decking, the heads shaving, I also decided to run the head gasket thickness that would get me closest to 9;1 CR. So I sourced a set of eagle rods second hand from mick, checked them for true and had them closed and honed.
Bought new bearings, cleaned the pistons up, bought new rings, and had the heads and block machined.
I also bought new stem seals, and stripped and cleaned the heads, installed new stem seals and gave the valves a lap.
I bought .042” Cometic MLS gaskets to give the very minimum piston to head clearance to achieve the quench I wanted, and piston to deck height came in at .03mm so total CR comes in at 8.97:1 which is spot on where I wanted it. Quench is approx. .9mm and there are no valve to piston clearance issues even with 10mm lift.
Chose to reduce ring gaps and ran .018” on the top and .016” on the second ring.
Reassembled again, with the usual cleaning and dummy assembly process, everything measured up perfect so I reassembled and then retuned . Amazingly, I achieved the best ever fuel economy figures I have gotted from this engine in the run in phase, and its been improving ever since. Currently have ~6k klms up but been off the road for last 2 months due to being silly and getting booked speeding in a 560000 klm Hyundai
Heads and gaskets showing failure
Deck measurements showing rod length issue
Other general rebuild pics
Other than that, ive done mods to suspension, sound system etc, but nothing really worth showing off. Ill be putting a new rear bar on during xmas, ill then details her and take some new pics to share.
Heres a couple of my timing map and general tune..
As I sort my shit out, ill endeavour to post useful mod tips and pics showing step by step. Should be fun
Oh, heres what I did to my last liberty
Heres my VW eos
