Nocones $2020 challenge build thread

I think I'll offer the opposite opinion.  take your time rebuilding the car.  don't get burnt out.  find a way to make this sustainable, and then you'll get more enjoyment and success with it.

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

I really expect to let the bearings out while doing high g cornering..  not while making 60% of factory power stationary on a dyno..

In reply to nocones :

I guess that's the engine equivalent of smashing the hell outta your car on an autocross course, I can relate, I may even have a dead engine as well

https://www.facebook.com/share/3XJuwErfJRktTCiB/

Just figured I would share Nocones :) Maybe you need parts? Or the next challenge car?

Gridlife MW Festival complete.  Took the car up with the EJ253 in. 

The trip up was a freaking ADVENTURE with the RV just basically deciding that every appliance needed to have it's moment of attention on the way up.  What should of been a 4 hour drive turned into a 10 hour one with stops for parts and stuff.  

After getting settled in Robbie and Gumby joined me and we had a wonderful weekend of track action and fun festival stuff.  Literally thousands of people saw the car and stopped by to have a chat about it.  I should probably make a sign to try to stop all the people asking about my Beetle but at this point is it basically a living meme.  

Car ran flawlessly and got down to a 1:43.652.  Not bad for 115WHP.. hopefully for the last time.  I was able to do some "Gridlife Taxi" laps with Robbie and Gumby in the passenger seat as well as a few other Gridlife people and a couple randos.  Feedback was pretty much always, this is very raw, and I have never felt those kinds of G forces in corners.    Also as there are drift cars on course with you and there is something amazing about having a 800hp 240sx sideways in front of you.  

During Gumby's ride he identified that the rear looseness may be due to the fact that I have never rotated the tires and they probably heat cycle more then the lightly loaded fronts.  We swapped them front to rear and I immediatly droped 1.5 seconds..  That Gumby is smart.  

Overall again a great experience and a new one with all the festival schennanigans.  Next major event is Gridlife Summer Apex at Road America in July.

The Goal is to have the car with a EJ20 with Turbo by then.  It's really a simple matter of finding one and or repairing the one in my garage and getting it in the car.  Since the EJ257 was operational there isn't much unknown here.  

I failed to bring cameras this weekend.  Well specifically my cameras have been half in a bag and half in a Simpson Hans device box for the past 9 months.  I brough the bag.. Which contained my GoPro, Memory Cards, and the Batteries for my FauxPro.  the Simpson box got left at home, which had my GoPro Charger, the GoPro camera holder, and the FauxPro Camera.  So..  Sorry no video.  One of the ridealongs took handheld video and I will I am sure have it at some point soon, and will link to it if able.   I've seen some coverage of the car on Social media.  Gridlife official had a front shot of the car, and Rob Wilkinson posted another banger on FB.

Hi. I was the long haired fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt at bottom of grid. Seeing you on the grid sheet made me happy knowing you had engine drama not that long ago. 

Okay that's amazing.  Gonna need that as a poster in the garage.  

In reply to nocones :

That's pretty gnarly! The 360 looks like it was made for that poster.

Oh man .  It's been an adventure again.   

So a bit has happened.  First I spent like 4 weeks doing nothing and slowly putting heads on the high mileage EJ205 that I have in the garage.  No real surprises or noteworthy items there I just have a spare EJ205 WRX motor now.  

Then I decided to order a EJ20X JDM motor.  It took it about 3 weeks to get here.  Which was fine I wasn't really ready for it anyway.   It arrived and looked fine so I proceeded to swap a whole bunch of little crap off of the EJ257 onto it.   Stuff like coolant ports, the oil cooler, and many small things needed changed.   I put the IAG oil pan on and a gates racing timing set.  Then I installed the engine in the car.  The EJ20X has the advantage of using all the same sensors as the EJ257 including intake AVCS.  The disadvantage is it has exhaust AVCS as well.  I left it unplugged and retarded the exhaust cams 1 tooth.  

I put the engine in and filled everything with fluids, told the Haltech I had a 2.0l instead of 2.5l and pushed start.  And it rumbled to life. 

So it was time to Dyno.  Got the car strapped on the dyno and was fighting a high idle.  It seems that something is wrong with the way I wired up the IAC and it just doesn't work right.  We spent a while messing with it and got It to idle at 1500 on pulling timing.  It's not ideal but for now it idles and runs.  Time for some pulls to check things.   Did 2 good pulls, one in 2nd, 1 in 4th.  The first one the boost controller wasn't hooked up and the wastegate actuator opens a little on low boost so it took until like 5k rpm to make full boost.   The second we hooked up the controller and with 0psi to the wastegate until the Haltech saw 6psi.  This made 3psi by 3k rpm and 6psi at about 3600.  Made ~203 wheel.   All good.  

Prepped to run boost up to 8psi and went to do the pull. But at ~3000 rpm the transmission locked up the input shaft and killed the motor.  The trans made bad noises, popped into neutral and the Dyno rolled down.  Engine started and ran fine with the clutch in but the trans was locked solid.  Thankfully the car would roll in neutral so back on the trailer with another failed dyno session.   But the engine was tuned enough to use so I just needed a transmission.  

This was Tuesday..   GL summer Apex was 10 days away, and I had a shakedown Autox on Sunday..   ugh. Time to swap a transmission.   

Typically to swap a trans the car is split in half and the entire drivetrain comes out.   This sounded really annoying considering the engine was fine and I really didn't want to drain coolant and unhook everything.  So enter a crazy bracket!

This thing enables me to use 4 straps to hold the engine in position.  Then I just unbolt the subframe and the engine and trans stay hooked up. 

The transmission can then be removed and disassembled.

And I find this ..

That input shaft bearing isn't looking so good.. 

Enhance 

Enhance

That bearing is no longer bearinging.  It's fully seized and melted down.  It spun in the case destroying them and the race split.  My best guess is when I was dynoing the EJ257 when it locked up the inertia of the Dyno forced 4th gear appart so violently that it split the race.  Or it simply wasn't assembled correctly.

This Dyno run was the first use of the trans after the EJ257 run so it's probable that that is when the damage occured.  

So that brings me to a car in need of a transmission.   Thankfully I'm a hoarder and had a 2nd WRX transmission in the garage.  So in classic Haynes manual style assembly was the reverse of disassembly.  

The fixtures worked flawlessly and subframe assembly was only about an hour from trans out of car to running.  

The lesson here is "when you build something crazy, build it with service in mind. And that includes tools and fixtures." Nice work!

So with the car all assembled..  on Saturday at 8pm it was time to load up and head to the "Subaru Challenge" Autox.   This is an excellent all Subaru event that takes place at the Subaru of America factory in Lafayette Indiana.  44 Subarus showed up and I believe all of them including mine were still running after 9 runs.  

The event was shockingly uneventful for the 360.  All the tools stayed in the tool box and I just did 9 runs.  Car stayed cool, oil pressure was good and it ran pretty good.  It has some low throttle stumbles but overall runs fine for a race car on its initial tune.  I'll tweak on it at road America.  But there is no scramble for road America.  It just kinda works so it's ready to go.  I'm going to fab up a intercooler fan but that's about it.   

Here is some incar because everyone loves choo choo noises. 

The car is much faster now, so I am very interested to see what it's going to be like on track.   

Congrats on getting it together and (finally) running reliably!  FWIW, I was the one on Insta that laughed at your 'speedrunning  Subaru Ownership problems' comment, haha... It's still killing me days later!

Well..   it berkeleying blew up again.  

This time in likely a new and exciting way.  Ring/Ring land failure was still on my Bingo Punch card..  and I'm pretty sure that's what happened.  

When I initially got the car running it was idling high because I have an issue with the idle air control valve.  It's a race car so we just pulled fuel and timing at low load to get it to idle at about 1500.  It started, ran fine, ran good under load and everything, just had to idle fast.  One thing we noticed is it would pop every now and then at that idle.  We assumed it was something with the tune and just general lean and timing conditions.   

So with that and the logs reviewed from the Autox It seemed sending it at Road America would be "fine".  The tune was pretty rich, and timing was very conservative so it seemed like it should be safe.  

So I went out on the first session.   The first half lap was a little hesitant, but I was watching water temp, oil pressure, boost pressure and WB and everything looked fine so I pushed on.  I started to push a bit coming out of 6 through the carousel and thought..  woah this is pretty fast.  3rd gear was dispatched with a quickness and I was going through the carousel in 4th at something over 100mph.  The car was immediately comfortable and I went through the kink with a minor lift.  I then buried it until Canada corner and shifted to 5th..  which with my WRX trans and 7100rpm redline was north of 130mph..  a full 23 mph faster then the car ever went.  I proceeded to complete a lap giggling like a maniac as the boosty noises and speeds exceeded anything I've done in the car before.  I was behind traffic for another lap and a half but could tell the car was going to be fast.  I finally got a point by and coming out of the last turn onto the front straight... .   The cabin fills with oil smoke..   uh oh.  Check gages still have oil pressure but I pull off line and proceed to turn 5 where I exited.   I didn't think it was dropping oil because it would only smoke under load.  I got back grid and got out of the car, I checked around and saw that the left head catch can had ventilated all over the car.  I assumed it was just to much oil and the carousel being high G for so long pushed it out.   I drained and refilled the oil, and restarted the car and.  .  Heartbreak..  the crankcase was ventilating like a steam train.   Cover the vent and it just started spraying oil smoke and oil mist out the exhaust.   It still runs smoothly so it seems most likely that it is a cracked ring/ring land and not a massive hole in a piston but it could be that also.  

I checked the logs and nothing indicates that the car was unhealthy.  AFR/Timing, temps, oil pressure all good.  The only thing is there was a fair amount of knock events but all of them where well over 5500 rpm which apparently is a known issue with the stock Knock sensor location even when there isn't detonation.  

That said the engine wasn't "fully tuned" because like an idiot I am also rushing and trying to short cut everything.  

It's also entirely possible that the JDM engine had ring issues.  It had good compression however one cylinder was a little low so who knows.  

But that said..  its managed to defeat me.  It is currently sitting in time out in the garage.  I just can't pull the engine out again.  I need a little break.  I also have decided to withdraw from Laguna Seca this year.  Even if I get motivated to figure out what's next for the engine (more in a later post on the options there) I am not taking 9 days of vacation to drag it 5000miles round trip when statistics show it probably won't run the whole weekend.  

I'm pretty disappointed.  It isn't really about the money for the EJ20X or even the inability to finish the Gridlife event.  It's just that I'm back to square one of having a failed turbo engine and needing to figure out what to do next.  It's been so much scrambling to just swap engines back and forth this year.  

I'm going to take a few weeks and mess with some other projects in the garage and figure out what to do and how fast to do it.  With Laguna removed there isn't a big reason to be quick or hasty, but I'm mindful that letting it sit for too long could wind up with it becoming that racecar I talk about how I had working 5 years ago.   

It's just disappointing because it's fast .  Like..  really fast.   It's everything I wanted it to be and the chassis and aero handled the power so well.  The confidence going around RA was so different then in the MG which is not slow and very capable itself.  But this was on another level.   It's frustrating that it is so close to being a seriously quick time attack car, but yet still so far away.  

In reply to nocones :

Sorry to hear that it broke, but I'm glad it was nothing life-threatening.

And its cool that it's exceeding your expectations as far as speed goes.

Best of luck to you, and I can't wait to see what solution you come up with.

That's brutal! Very interested to see where you decide to go from here.

F

Burn out is normal after the streak of explody engines...

I know it is probably impossible to find the silver lining in it, but we are still talking about a build that is 99% hand crafted, and the only thing that is consistently bringing up issues is the stock motor... Take your time, clear your head and come back to it later.

In reply to Piguin :

The irony of the fact that all of the custom random stuff I built for $2000 is trucking along and the OEMish Subaru parts are what's failing is not lost on me.

nocones said:

In reply to Piguin :

The irony of the fact that all of the custom random stuff I built for $2000 is trucking along and the OEMish Subaru parts are what's failing is not lost on me.

Sums it up perfectly. 

Your engineering is not the problem, which means that you're dependent on whatever strengths and weaknesses exist in the Subaru flat four. 
 

Every engine layout has comprises, seems like Subaru has left a lot of the requirements for compensating for the fundamental issues to the end user. 

Does the flat 6 Subi engine fit in your space?  Seems like when it was NA Subi it worked great for you and fairly reliable.

Since you already have the standalone now, it could run the EG33 and maybe make the same power without possible turbo troubles?

In reply to SpeedAddict502 :

The EZ series 6 cylinders are more compact than the earlier EG33, and may fit the space better.  They do still seem to do typical Subaru oiling things if you don't take care of them properly, though.

I can't help but think of "So You've Drilled a Hole Through Your Own Hand"... But now it's "So you built your car around the wrong engine."

Sorry to make light of the situation. I know it has to be incredibly frustrating at this point. The upshot is that if anybody can overcome this, you can. No pressure.

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

Yah I knew the EZ's were more compact, but for some reason I thought the EG's were just considered a better design even if they were slightly larger.  But good to know!

The reality is there is an ea$y answer.  IAG and a few other companies have near bulletproofed the EJ20/25 for ~400-500 HP race applications. 

I have the oiling solution already (fully baffled pan with windage tray, special pickup and ported Oil pump).  

It's just not cheap.  It's about $6000 for a new shortblock and to rebuild and use the built EJ25 heads that came off the EJ257 that failed.     

It's just that is a lot for me to spend compared to my typical way I do projects.  It is likely I will do it though, as it is literally just a bolt in affair at this point.  

The other options are:

$0 - High mileage WRX motor in garage (sunk costs already own).  Advantage $Free at this point, disadvantage just another OEM engine with high miles so probably won't last long.  This likely will be put in for a few events to finish out the year because I have it already as a place holder.

$1500-2000 - EZ30D Flat 6.  Advantage, ~200whp still NA.  Not a high $ motor build.  Disadvantages: Oiling is a question mark with no off the shelf oil system enhancements though it is unclear if they are as critical as the EJ.  It's a full engine swap.  Yes the trans bolts to the engine but mounts, cooling, wiring are all new again.   It's also still a OEM used engine.  

$2000-3500- KSwap.  See EZ30 for basic summary.  Requires $1300 adapter kit.  It doesn't seem that the K engines are inherently more reliable (at least 1 lets go at every Gridlife event) but they are everywhere, easier to build then EJs, and inherently a more capable motor then the EJ.  230whp NA is apparently possible in a K24 with fairly limited changes to junkyard motors.  

Other engines/drivetrains have been considered.  But for the power goals of the project the Subaru Transmission seems capable when the input bearing isn't broken. 

I have done research to determine I could make a LS+C5 vette auto transaxle work.  But that's a half a year or more project involving basically redoing the back half of the car.  

I'm not sure.  This is what I'm thinking about during the "time out" the car is in.  

I'm planning to spend a few weeks getting the 360 van running and driving and then probably sell it to fund whatever engine or solution I want to do.  

Is 4-500 hp your goal here or is it just nice to have that headroom built into the block so at 300 hp you can just enjoy the car? Is there a reason the EZ30 is an option but not the newer EZ36?

It seems like taking your time here will be the best thing you can do, with how the last few dyno sessions etc. have gone it doesn't seem like you had a chance to work through the bugs before hitting the track. Even though you weren't pushing the power at all if there were underlying issues which it seemed there were (rod bearing and tune/idle/ringlands) the failures were going to happen. At the end of the day these are 15-20 year old powertrains at this point.