I still feel this way about my RX lol. Also keep finding myself checking the temp gauge. Stupid head gaskets...
I've had the same feeling on other cars. It mostly goes away. But I've kinda tried to keep the habit of regularly checking the temp gauge. I figure it's a habit that could save you a world of pain one day.
Update!
With the exhaust booked, I got to work with getting it drivable.
I’d previously picked up a pair of JDM HIDs from Ichiban so I had to wire them up.
I used this thread as a guide:
http://www.subyclub....libertyoutback/
But it involves cannibalising the AUDM lights. The lights from Ichiban came with the car-side plug included so I decided to snip the AUDM plugs off the car’s loom and wire in the Legacy connectors.
The main issue with the swap is that AUDM car come with a three wire connector and the JDM cars come with a four wire connector.
Here’s a diagram of the wiring changes I made if you want to go the same way (click for Hi Res):
The JDM headlights use a double filament parker/corner lamp where as the AUDM ones only have a parker. The socket is also different. With the exception of the third wire for the corner lamp, the connectors are quite similar so I thought I’d try to re-pin the JDM connector with the AUDM wires.
It was just a case of figuring out which wires did what and and plugging them in. The corner lamp is meant to light up with the blinker. I’ve kept the de-pinned wires to wire them up in the future.
JDM Connector:
AUDM Connector:
The retainer clip pops out with a screwdriver:
Done:
With the front end back on the car an the car it was time to drive it to the exhaust shop. I had originally planned make use of the 3 inch system I had on my WRX but it was a little loud for this car. It wasn’t until I removed the exhaust that the car came with that it was a half decent 2.5 inch Fujitsubo catback. The car already had my 3 inch dump and cat on but it came back quite a bit further than the standard NA headers. This meant the catback needed modding to fit and that meant driving the car for the first time to the exhaust shop with no exhaust!
I work in the city and get home late most nights so it meant that it was going to have to be at night as well :-/
Besides being down on power, the car made it to the exhaust shop in one piece; One very loud piece!
I felt like such a bogan driving something so obnoxiously loud LOL. It’s a good thing I only had to drive it about 10km.
I was a little concerned about the car being down on power as it felt like it wasn’t running on all cylinders. I was also a little worried to leave the car with an exposed cat that was red hot!
I made sure it was off the grass and went home.
The exhaust was modified bt TM Exhaust in Erina (Central Coast) and I’m really happy with the work.
Dave ended up replacing most of the mid section after the first muffler and extended the tip (lol) a little to sit flush with the bumper; I suspect the exhaust was actually for a sedan. He also bent the dump a little to get the exhaust nicely tucked up out of the way.
I think I’ll eventually replace the front muffler with something that flows a bit better (apparently has a noticeably smaller internal diameter than the rest of the exhaust), but I’m happy to get this thing working for now.
With the car nice and quiet and back at home I went about figuring out why it wasn’t running at 100%. My initial thoughts was a blocked injector or a bad coil pack. I thought I’d swap some coil packs around to rule that out as pulling injectors is a pain.
The coil packs were fine as the problem stayed in the same spot when I moved them so I replaced the plugs (they were old anyway and plugs are cheap). still no joy.
Before pulling the injector I thought I’d make sure I was getting an injector pulse. If anyone ever needs to test this it’s really cheap and easy to do.
You can buy 12V LED bulbs from Jaycar. They have a built in resistor so it’s plug and play. Just unplug the injector and push the LED wires into the connector pins. With the car started (or cranking), the LED will flash if there’s an injector pulse
I was getting a pulse so I proceeded to pull the injector to test. With the injector out, I rigged one end of a piece of rubber hose over the top of the injector and the other over a can of throttle body/carb cleaner. For power, I just pushed some de-pinned wires from the HID install onto the injector terminals. It was then a case of pressurising the hose with the cleaner and then tapping the wires on a battery to trigger the injector. It appeared the injector was working fine.
This method has worked for me but there may be a better way. I’m open to suggestions if there is one. Obviously a flow bench works better but who has one of those?
I was running out of ideas as to why this cylinder wasn’t firing – my mind was coming up with some pretty nasty worst case scenarios.
I started thinking about spark again and thought i should check the signal being sent to the coil pack. That’s when I found it:
Somewhere along the way, the ground had jumped out the back of the connector going to the coil pack of cylinder #2!
I re-seated the wire, plugged it back in and viola!
It’s frustrating that I wasted so much time on something so easily fixed but I’m happy that it wasn’t something more sinister.
I’ve ordered a replacement connector in case it’s damaged on the inside but so far so good :-)
Something else I noticed after getting back from the exhaust shop was that the throttle body coupling was barely hanging on. It may have just been a loose hose clamp but the rubber was looking a little tired so I bit the bullet and picked up a silicone hose set from PSR.
Much better:
