PorSTi Project Thread…, Well that was fun, time to make some upgrades! Options

[Amenson]

In case anyone is interested, here are the parts that I used in the engine. Pistons are higher compression...hopefully it gets me to 400whp with the current turbo and to above 500whp with a sensibly sized upgrade in the future.

Oil pump: 11mm Subaru 15010AA360
Pistons: Manley Performance Platinum Series Piston Set 99.5mm 9.8:1 (Part Number: 612100C-4)
Rods: Brian Crower bROD Connecting Rods Model #: BRIBC6609
Bearings: King Engine Bearings Standard Crank Main Bearing Set Model #: KGNMB5382XPG
King Engine Bearings Standard Connecting Rod Bearing Set Model #: KGNCR4125XPG
Valve Springs/Retainers: Brian Crower Single Spring/Titanium Retainer Kit Model #: BRIBC0600
Crank: Subaru OEM Forged Salt Bath Nitrated Crankshaft Model #: SUB12200AA430
Subaru OEM Complete Gasket Kit (Including Head Gaskets) Model #: SUB10105AA590
Head studs: existing ARP
IAG Stainless Steel AN Breather Fitting Set Model #: IAGIAG-ENG-7301

[mepstein]

I saw the engine when I was as Scott's house. It was sort of stunning for a water cooled engine. Smaller than I expected and though I imagine it wasn't cheap, just think about what it would cost to put a 400hp Porsche engine into our cars.

[Aerostatwv]

I saw the engine when I was as Scott's house. It was sort of stunning for a water cooled engine. Smaller than I expected and though I imagine it wasn't cheap, just think about what it would cost to put a 400hp Porsche engine into our cars.

Agreed. Can't wait to see the completed project. Is that yours in his garage?

[mepstein]

I saw the engine when I was as Scott's house. It was sort of stunning for a water cooled engine. Smaller than I expected and though I imagine it wasn't cheap, just think about what it would cost to put a 400hp Porsche engine into our cars.

Agreed. Can't wait to see the completed project. Is that yours in his garage?

Yes. I'm lucky that Scott was willing to take on my project and turn my pile of crap parts into a driver.

[Aerostatwv]

I saw the engine when I was as Scott's house. It was sort of stunning for a water cooled engine. Smaller than I expected and though I imagine it wasn't cheap, just think about what it would cost to put a 400hp Porsche engine into our cars.

Agreed. Can't wait to see the completed project. Is that yours in his garage?

Yes. I'm lucky that Scott was willing to take on my project and turn my pile of crap parts into a driver.

Can’t wait to see it when done. It will be perfection. It looked fairly solid from what I remember.

[Shivers]

Some fine work dude

[Amenson]

Agreed. Can't wait to see the completed project. Is that yours in his garage?

Completed! This car will likely never be finished. I do hope that once it is back on the road from this round of work that I can manage to keep it that way at least until the winter of 2022.

Yes. I'm lucky that Scott was willing to take on my project and turn my pile of crap parts into a driver.

It is a good base for a conversion. Not too nice but pretty decent.

Some fine work dude

Thanks....go back to the start of the project and you will see what it took me to get to a point where I can make somewhat respectable parts. I started not even being able to weld my own parts. Luckily I have some very tallented friends that got me going in the right direction.

[Mueller]

Impressive shop, love that C10.

The new motor looks great and should be a blast.

This thread reminded me I still need to make something for you...

[Amenson]

Impressive shop, love that C10.

The new motor looks great and should be a blast.

This thread reminded me I still need to make something for you...

The C10 is great. Can hardly drive the thing without someone wanting to talk to me about it. If things go well with Mark's car and the Porsti, next winter it is getting swapped with a drive-train that has never been installed in one of these.

As for the other thing, I have a spot still reserved for it and would be honored if you would take the job of making it for me. Haven't followed up on it because you have been making such great progress on your project and didn't want to distract you from it.

[Amenson]

Some of you may have seen the reference to some issues with this project in my post on Marks thread. Well, let's kill the suspense, it runs and is stupid fast but is far from where I planned on it being this summer. On to the details.

As is customary, my annual trip with my buddies to participate in Hot Rod Power Tour pushes progress. In order to force myself to be ready for Power Tour I signed up for Airstrip Attack Indy for the weekend before. That will really push the issue and give me an opportunity to find issues on a closed course and could trailer it home in case of breakage.

With the car mostly apart and a completely fresh engine to install I decided that I needed to get everything in the engine compartment "done" so that the drivetrain could stay in the car, hopefully for quite some time.

Big thing was the cage from the main hoop to the rear shock towers and then down to the transmission mounting points. (The front part of the cage can be installed later.)

Before that can go in…
-Fill in any unused holes
-Remove any unused brackets
-Install the new trunk hinges
-Seam weld and pretty much shave the horizontal seam in the firewall
-Clean up some of the seams from the previous rust repairs.

Also In the spirit of having the engine compartment "done":
-Remove the intake on the engine and unwrap the engine harness (yes, again) so that I could remove all unused plugs/wires and run the new sensors through the subaru engine connectors.
-Unwrap the harnesses in the engine compartment and run the new wires to the ecu/dash
-Also decided to put a new center section with billet compressor wheel in the turbo

Not to mention tidying up all of the new stuff that had been installed since the last time it was running like a basically entirely new cooling and fuel systems, updates to the pedal box plumbing and the new shifter setup.

Oh yeah, and after it is driving again, finish the rust repair around the a pillar area and fit the fiberglass front fenders.

You kind of get the point, a shit ton of really fussy work to be done.

Also part of getting it ready was putting the car on the dyno to get it to run with the new flexfuel system, external BOV and turning it up to make proper power. I made an appointment 5 weeks from Airstrip Attack with a very reputable tuner, the same one that tuned it last time but at a different shop. He said that we would make a startup and break in file for me.

As was somewhat predictable I wasn’t ready for the first appointment on the DYNO and had to cancel the night before the appointment. When I canceled I fully expected to pay a cancelation change but the tuner said that it was fine and he had plenty of other cars to work on (this is foreshadowing). The next appointment I could get was only 16 days before Power Tour. Not great and will make it impossible to attend Airstrip Attack but better than nothing.

So I plugged away and got pretty much everything done but found while I was doing the final welds on the cage that I didn't leave enough slop to move the cage enoug to fully weld all of the tubes. I didn’t have enough time to wait for the micro tig torch to arrive so I left the cage unwelded and pushed on getting the drivetrain installed and running. I got it running 5 days before the appointment to give me enough evenings to get one trip around Columbus and an oil change each night so that the engine would be somewhat broken in for the Dyno.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tktUowQCInM


The first trip out really highlighted how sensitive the engine is to not having the recirculating BOV. The startup MAP wasn’t converted to speed density so it would not idle. I had to keep the rev's up to keep it running or let it stall and restart it at every stop. It is really loud and I have to go through an area with a bunch of nice restaurants with patios so I went with the stalling/restart. The restarts were still pretty rowdy because of the higher RPM's to keep it running and a completely fresh twin disk clutch. Finally get it onto the highway, enjoying the sound of the turbo and general satisfaction when the hood comes unlatched. Window is cracked, hood is mangled and the hinges both tore through the cowl. Whatever, smash it back down and get my miles in for the evening. The rest of the break in drives were uneventful.

The appointment at the dyno was planned to be a full day plus a bit of the next. I took the first day off from work so that I could stay at the dyno and support any issues that came up because there was no time for delays. I arrive at the shop, drive around back and there is another car there. The tuner went to the office and came back after a while and the dyno was double booked for the morning. He said that he could get other car finished pretty quickly and then get mine on directly after lunch. He would call when he was strapping Porsti down. I took an uber home and stared at my phone for the next few hours waiting for it to ring. Around 2pm with no call I decided to drive back only to find my car still in the parking lot. The other car was gone but he had not started mine. I stayed around until 6 and he managed to strap my car to the dyno and spent some time working on updating my map to SD plus the other changes. Car was started once before I left. He said that he would get it finished tomorrow.

This started 3 weeks of little to no communication about the status of my car. I popped in a few times only to find other cars on the dyno and left with no commitment on when my car would be finished. Best way I could find to describe the experience was being stuck in an airport in another country because your flight was cancelled so you are super angry but the gate attendant is holding all of the power so you had to be nice in order to have any chance of getting home.

This killed any hope of having it ready for Power Tour so I transitioned over to getting the C10 road trip appropriate. Before leaving for Power Tour I had to grab my road trip gear from the Porsti and while picking up the gear I had a very frank conversation with the shop and they committed to getting my car finished before I returned from the trip.

Power tour with the C10 was great except it needs 500whp more to hang with my buddies. I'll fix that during 2022 winter. Does great burnouts as is though.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNoQbCEqp5k


To give you a halftime reward during this way too long post, here is a video of my buddies LSA powered extended cab, long bed dually doing doughnuts in a drift competition at one of the events that I took with my 360 gopro. You should be able to rotate the view during the video.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jsh94iOcMI



When I returned from Power Tour Porsti was ready for pickup. Dyno chart is much better than the last but a bit disappointing.



With the higher compression and billet compressor wheel, closer to 400whp on E85 should have been possible. He didn't think that the billet compressor did anything and thought that my header was also hurting output. He also pointed out that the intercooler is heat soaking terribly so it was hard to get runs without having timing pulled.


Drove it home during rush hour so I couldn't really push it but it felt quite nice. There was an annoying rattle in the cabin and when I arrived home I found this in the passenger side.



I couldn’t figure out what it was…until I was returning from Cars and Coffee and was able to give it a proper rip onto the interstate. Whole bunch of wheel spin with every shift and beautiful noises until a huge woosh and loss of power. I blew the BOV off.



The fastener that I found on the way home was part of the t-bolt for the v-band. This had apparently come loose while on the dyno and somehow made its way into the cabin. My theory is that the shop found it on the floor and tossed it in there because even without the rear window, it is highly unlikely to have flown in. The tuner was not sure how it got there and dismissed my concern that it was tuned with a boost leak but assured me that even if it had, the tune was robust and that it would be safe.

I did some testing and confirmed that it was safe. After studying the boost/wastegate targets in the tables and the data in several logs, I convinced myself that the gains that should have been coming from the billet compressor where still there to be had. So I cranked up the boost and wastegate targets in all areas except peak boost and went out for some more testing. I definitely found some more midrange power and the limits of my resplined axles!



This happened ~ 40mph in third coming out of a roundabout…wasn't even launching it!

This already turned into much more text that I could have ever imagined and there is a ton of cool details to share so I'll just skip to the current state of the new axles installed and a video of axle testing.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42TIK2RV8vU


This wasn't in Mexico so I won't disclose the speeds. But to give you an idea, the first shift was at redline into third and the second at redline into 4th. Yes I bounced off the rev limiter both times…it gets there a bit quicker than I am used to.



I've only driven it a dozen times or so but have already decided that it needs wider/stickier tires. Last drive I got a bit confident with the loud pedal on an uphill swooping onramp and exceeded traction at about 60mph in third and had a fair amount of tire spinning drifting to deal with unexpectedly.

I'll make posts of detail stuff in case anyone wants to borrow, refine or criticize.


Cheers,
Scott

[jeepguy06]

wanted to see what rear springs are you running?

[123quattro]

Just wanted to give a small update if anyone on here still follows the car. Scott passed away unexpectedly earlier this summer. I bought the car and spares from his wife last week. He and I were coworkers at Bosch over the years. Another work friend of his and I will keep PorSti in the PowerTour group of friends.

It's still a bit of a mystery as to what state it's in. I do know last summer the plastic cam timing pulley came apart in Tennessee and wiped out the heads. It appears to be fixed, but we haven't pulled the belt covers to confirm yet. Also, it doesn't start so could be that, or something else. It will be an adventure.

John
84 928S

[mepstein]

Just wanted to give a small update if anyone on here still follows the car. Scott passed away unexpectedly earlier this summer. I bought the car and spares from his wife last week. He and I were coworkers at Bosch over the years. Another work friend of his and I will keep PorSti in the PowerTour group of friends.

It's still a bit of a mystery as to what state it's in. I do know last summer the plastic cam timing pulley came apart in Tennessee and wiped out the heads. It appears to be fixed, but we haven't pulled the belt covers to confirm yet. Also, it doesn't start so could be that, or something else. It will be an adventure.

John
84 928S

John - (IMG:style_emoticons/default/welcome.png)

I recently was at Scott's house and met his family. I told Tara it was a really cool car and would hopefully be picked up by someone who knew him. I'm glad it's in good hands. Please reach out if there's any Porsche parts needed. I'll help out with whatever I can. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/beerchug.gif) mark