Complete Build Thread, Daewoo Nubira

Tempting, but I'm thinking that the next stage of this project is combining a spare Daewoo 1.5L, a turbo off of one of these and the intercooler off of one of these .

Well alrighty then! You're well and truly confirmed as 'crazy'!

It'll be awesome right up until the point I put a rod through the block or burn out the diesel turbo.

Finally got the parts for my cold air kit. It was a 50 dollar kit, including the filter, so you can guess at the levels of fit and finish. After cutting down the pipe so it will fit (it was originally 6 inches too long) I then had to shave the original rubber intake so that the MAF could be adapted to the new, completely grommet free pipe. PITA.

I have it pretty nearly center under the hood scoop and directly over the original intake duct. Driving the piss out of it produced no dent in the pipe's chilly temperatures. That and it's loud now. I can completely understand the elaborate measures Daewoo took in their ducting. Up around redline the intake noise almost hurts my ears, and this is with a stock exhaust. The butt dyno doesn't detect any extra power (or at least not new power you wouldn't attribute to the cooling weather), but the new setup is definitely lighter and less prone to heating up, so I think I'll keep it.

Now, if I can get a replacement driver's license in time, this Saturday will be the first race. My extensive middle of the night with "borrowed" road cone testing has led me to this baseline:

No swaybars, 40 PSI front, 35 PSI back, max camber front, minimum camber in the back.

Check this space for videos.

http://jaycut.com/content/5-october-2010-1755 Okay, this is 500lb/inch springs with bilstein shock cores and no sway bars front or rear. I'm running max height at all for corners with no preload.

The front brakes are slotted stock rotors and Hardrun sport compound pads, the rear is a stock pad and rotor. I did this because, for some reason my car had too much rear bias. With the sportier pads up front that problem is solved. The sporty-ish all season Kuhmos were at 45psi front and 40 psi rear.

As it ran, our car was around 2500 lbs and was making about 110 hp. We had no problems with water temperatures, brake fade or cooking the tires. I did notice something strange with the oil though. When I checked the oil level after the first session it seemed about a quart low (yes I topped off before racing). This kind of freaked me out, but when I checked it again later it was back up to normal. Combine this with some oil spilling out of the filler cap and I'm worried this engine is pushing all its oil to the top end under sustained thrashing.

Pleasant surprises: It didn't roll over the front tires. In fact, considering how much I was sliding it, the tire wear was minimal, and almost evenly spread between front and rear. The fronts took a little more beating, but not much. I have never tracked a FWD car before, but the balance was what I imagine for ideal in a front driver. Easily manageable oversteer on trail throttle or braking, mild understeer coming out of tight corners four wheel drifts on everything else. Realizing that I could not spin the inside front wheel coming out of the slow 2nd gear hairpin that is turn 1. Water temps were steady, brakes were Hand of God strong.

Unpleasant surprises: Oil weirdness. That rust hole in the strut tower I discovered while digging around in the trunk. Much, much less power than the chassis deserves. Realizing how much better the car would be on some max performance summer tires. The dumbass neighbor who doesn't know how to park and put a dent in my quarterpanel.

Okay, after a long break I'm finally getting things back in order for Munchkin Racing's Daewoo of Death.

I'm probably going to swap in a 1.8L or 2.0L engine for the 1.5. Found some swap information and supposedly this is a simple proposition. We'll be going without AC or power steering on iteration number two, so in addition to another 40 hp, I'm hoping we'll also get rid of another 150 lbs.

There will be three "teams" for the next phase.

Team one will rebuild a junkyard 1.8 or 2.0. We're going to do some cool stuff like getting rid of all the stress risers, balancing the rods and porting both the intake and exhaust manifolds, baffling the oil pan to prevent oil starvation. Possibly going to throw in some mild cams too.

Team two will fix rust on the door pans and in the trunk. This sounds boring, but they will learn how to weld and the rust "fixes" will in several cases involve building structural subframes and braces. Let's put it this way, my big practical trunk's days may be limited.

Team three is going to design stencils for the exterior so we can make an awesome custom paintjob. After that, they will re-upolster seats of some kind (don't know if I'll keep the stock ones or find some replacement secondhand) and modify them for better support.

As a baseline, we did some performance tests yesterday.

0-45 mph was 7.6 seconds 55-0 was 2.9 seconds.

We'll see how it works out after the motor swap.

I have to say, I'm amped up over this project. Keep those updates coming!

I REALLY wish I'd had a teacher like you when I was in High School...but at least I get to know how performance she is spoken in Korea. This a neat thread!

Here's the test video with a gratuitous peg leg burnout for kicks.

http://jaycut.com/content/21-november-2010-1814

Mikey52_1 wrote: I REALLY wish I'd had a teacher like you when I was in High School...but at least I get to know how performance she is spoken in Korea. This a neat thread!

Thanks!

I'm gonna try to get my extra engine soon. Pictures coming.

Well! It look like there MIGHT be some construction happening in your neck of the woods! NOW I'm impressed!

A hotrod Daewoo, where there's not much race support for the marque, and doing it with kids who don't know from nothin', but willing to jump in! Yessir, I like this thread!

Update. The long, cold winter is finally starting to lift and I'm going to try a few more things in the near future. The first priority, sadly, is fixing the rust damage I discovered under the driver's side door pan. That and the paint is pretty rough so I'm probably going to get a re-spray as well. I'm thinking matte white or grey so that the car is distinctive but hopefully not too ostentatious.

Korean laws I didn't know about before and what they're doing to my plans:

1. It's illegal to have a hole in the hood. I'm solving this by taking a plastic hood scoop off of a Kia van, turning it backwards and covering the reverse scoops on my car now.

2. Motorswaps are forbidden. I guess I'm sticking with the 1.5L DOHC. I'm thinking either of using a turbo off a sportbike kit or the roots type blower off a first gen mini-cooper and mounting it where the air-con used to be.

Update.

Finally got some real tires. Hankook Ventus Evo 2s in 205/50/15 size all around. The grip is way better than before, but it's actually a little less responsive. Faster, but less fun. I'm going to experiment with some higher pressures I think. They ride better too. Like, a lot better.

Before I would just barely lift the inside rear tire if I was at trail throttle on a grippy surface going 100%. Now I definitely pick up the tire on any surface when cornering hard and don't put it back down until I get on the power. Combine this with the better ride and I'm considering bumping the car up to some 12kg/mm springs from my current 9s.

Found a poly bushing kit that's going on next week. Also found Daewoo specific crash bolts for the camber adjustment. Gonna run about 2 degrees negative in the front and 1 degree in the back with zero toe in the front and 1/8th toe in out back.

Considering how well this thing cornered last time on the crap tires with no camber, I've got a feeling there won't be too many people catching me in the corners this summer. ;)

When you say motorswaps are illegal is that like "you'll be busting up rocks in The North Korean Cool Bar Hotel for mentioning the word LSx" or "small fine & show us burnouts"?

I mean they won't let me register it next time around. That said, if I swap the valve cover and intake manifold, the 2.0 and the 1.5 look exactly the same and I didn't notice the inspection guy inspecting that much.

BTW, deporting you to the North is the best "substitute for capital punishment" idea ever.

Koreans don't like used things. When demand is low, so is the pricing.

Got to inspecting the "used" Hankook tires and it turns out they still have those little casting nipples on them. I asked the owner of the store just how much use they were, and he said the previous owners bought a car new, wanted huge wheels, drove to a wheel shop from the new car lot, and got rid of my tires.

How much of a discount did those 8 kilometers get me? My tire retails new for about 180 bucks a pop. I got all four mounted and balanced for 240.

Update:

I went through and measured everything in the suspension. Trying to build a model. From what I measured, it looks like my car does indeed have unusually high roll centers and a pretty decent roll axis inclination. The front suspension should have better than typical camber gain for a strut, the rear should have less.

Other than that, it appears that I have minimal geometric toe out under compression in the back. (edit) Lots of bushing squish toe out. (edit)

Did some testing and photographing and, combined with the measurements, I think I discovered the source of my car's slightly strange behavior.

I've posted before that my car understeers in slow corners and oversteers in fast corners. I was worried this was simply a huge polar moment of inertia (expensive to fix) or aero lift. Turns out that my rear suspension toes out quite a lot under max G. Considering my stock squishy bushings and the fact the rear suspension uses 6 of them to locate the axle, and combined with my butt dyno detecting a squirmy feeling until the car settled, I think it's safe to say this is more a function of bushings than geometry. As such, just put in some poly bushings today and got an alignment.

I figured that since the car is nicely balanced once it settles, I might as well shoot for static toe out and try to get that balance on corner entry as well. I'll let you know how it goes.

Alignment specs:

Front toe is 0. Rear toe is -2mm

Front camber is -2 Rear camber is -1

I could have gone further with the front camber, but I don't see much outside tread block wear and photographs don't show that much rolling the tire over on its side so I'm going to be conservative with this baseline setting.

Testing results:

Turn in has improved massively. I don't know what the stock alignment specs were, or how bad the stock busing were, but after the changes the car's responsiveness got way, way better. The first time I drove it I almost ran over a curb because it responded so much faster than I expected.

My low speed understeer remains, although it's not as bad. If anything, the car likes trail braking less now. In transition it is still tail happy, but much more predictably so. In high speed corners it seems to take a slightly tail out posture and stick. If I trail throttle it will oversteer slightly. If I get on the throttle it will understeer a little. Overall the car is tighter than it was on the all seasons and looser than it was before the alignment with the Hankooks.

It feels a ton better and the grip has improved. Not sure if the camber helped a lot, but I can definitely feel the wheel pickup. It lifts under full cornering a little on trail throttle only.

This is good, right?

TrackDay Action:

Watch this space for videos in the near future.

So I had good news and bad news from this track day. Good news:

1. I have higher cornering speeds than a Honda S2000 with Pilot Sports!

2. Brakes stayed strong.

3. Didn't roll over the tires much. In fact, tire wear was pretty even front to rear and inside of the tire to the outside of the tire.

Bad News:

1. Oil. At the end of the track day I had oil splatter above the dip stick hole and near the cap. Never had the dummy light go off during the racing, but sitting in the pits with the engine idling afterwards, the dummy light went off. This was a good 2 minutes after the end of the session and the oil level was fine. It solved itself after about 3 seconds and I didn't have any problems on the drive home.

Still, it's scary and I don't understand what's going on.

1. My camber bolts slipped badly. Started the day with 2 degrees negative camber in the front and zero toe. Ended the day with .5 degrees negative camber and 1.3 inches of toe out. Going back to stock bolts and whatever I can get by pushing the strut mounts inward.

2. Stupid ABS. Without the ABS I lock up the rear wheels well before the fronts. With the ABS I get four wheel brake force free glide mode if one of the rear wheels lifts.

Videos:

You can watch parts 1 and 2 if you are into watching idiots (me and my friends) hike in a typhoon, but 3 and 4 are of the same idiots racing and testing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLzX7_ntl-4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKIP-YnC6Yw

Just before Daewoo launched here in the States in '97 I got to drive their line-up at the Daewoo factory test track south of Seoul. The Lanos and Leganza both had moderate understeer when cornering, but the Nubira spooked me with its abrupt transition from push at turn-in to loose as soon as the throttle was applied. Looks like that never got sorted out.

Is there a fuse you can pull to defeat the ABS? Weird about the alignment - did you go off track at all?

I think it's the roll center axis inclination. When the Woo was stock it was pretty awful. Violent understeer-oversteer transitions.

Right now the balance is pretty good. It has a little more push than I like, but getting rid of the bars and going with some pretty high rate springs, combined with mellowing the roll axis a little, seems to have cured the bad handling problems. The shenanigans you see on the rainy road are pre-alignment, pre-decent tires and pre-poly bushings.

I actually did some tests and the rear suspension on a Nubira toes out a LOT when you throw some stickier tires at it and don't change the bushings.

I actually ran the first session without ABS, but I kept getting rear wheel lock. I think the long term solution is to kill the ABS and get a balance bar.

I didn't go off track, but Taebaek is bumpy. I think it was just crappy camber bolts if I'm honest.

That's badass that you have your students involved. I've been thingking about getting a car and do some track days out in Taebek and Yongin too.

I'm limited in car ownership because the SOFA agreement between the US and Korea (I work for the US Government) limit us in how many vehicles I can own so I think my Korean buddy might have to register it.

In reply to Beaner:

Let me know if you get something going. All my friends here are depressingly car illiterate and I'd love somebody to run with.

If I were starting again, I would probably go with a late 90s Accent or "Avante," btw. They have a good aftermarket in Korea and they make decent track cars with very little effort.

Good luck!

Consider this a teaser:

1.5L evil, nasty engine coming out.

Farewell you nasty, inefficient, weaksauce, heavy, fragile piece of E36 M3.

2.0L good, happy engine .

It's rated at 135hp and is supposed to get better mileage. One of the key upgrades is a better oiling system!

Measured the stock 2.0L intake and discovered the stock intake runners are 790 mm. I think I figured out why peak power is only 5400 rpm.