Turdbo Neon

Mud.  There was so. Much. Mud.

PE4 was a success for the car.  I took home first in MF (out of 2) and 2nd overall (out of 13 or 14).  The car held together very well and is feeling much more solid.  I haven’t had a chance to try to perfect the alignment, though, because the entire car is just coated in clumps of dirt.

The biggest problem I had was with tires.  The old mud tires just don’t want to hold a bead, so I’m going to need to do something about that.  Otherwise, though, everything is running five-by-five!

The hubs came back from the shop and we got everything bolted back up.  The front of the car is nice and tight with no play anywhere and no rattles or funny noises.

The alignment was waaaaaaaay off and I was going to take it to Sears but I thought it was worth giving it a try myself to see if I could save about a hundred bucks.  Turns out that an alignment is pretty easy to do when the parts are all brand new!

Right now, the toe is still off,  but it’s close enough to race tomorrow.  I just need to spend a little more time with it to get it all finalized and perfect,  but I made it a ton better in about 45 minutes.

After the last event, I had a tremendous shimmy in the front-end during acceleration at pretty much any speed.  I noticed that the front motor mount and the transmission mount were both destroyed so I tried replacing those, but to no effect.  I’m guessing the problem is related to axles and CV joints, so I decided to replace those, but in order to do it right, I’d go ahead and put on all the new bits I had waiting in the wings.

So far, I have the control arms with the Prothane bushings installed in the car, the sway bar is hooked back up, and the new tie rod ends are on.  I picked up some new brake rotors and I have them sitting, ready to go on.  The right axle was weeping a bit of fluid from the seal and the left seal didn’t look so great either, so I replaced it.  When I pulled the left axle out, the joints were extremely notchy and felt like they had a lot of play, so I popped in a replacement that I had on the shelf.  I’m not 100% sure about the replacement, but we’re going to give it a try since just swapping an axle isn’t that big of a deal.

While we had everything apart, though, I found a ton of play in the wheel bearings, so the knuckles and new National bearings have been sent to a local shop for press work.  Once those come back, it should be a quick matter of popping them on, getting the new rotors on, putting in the new brake pads, and bolting the wheels back on.  At some point, I’m going to need to look at the alignment, but I want to see if I’ve fixed the problem first and, if so, I may source that work to a pro.

Right now, though, the car is sitting with the new axles seals in, the control arms and tie rods attached, and the axles securely in the OBX with the transmission filled with Synchromesh.

On the topic of the control arms, we had some slight troubles with the horizontal bolts in the front.  They got rusted together with the metal bushing and didn’t want to pop out.  We were able to remove them by heating and hammering, but in the process we destroyed the nut on the left side.  I didn’t notice that the nut was damaged so when I went to bolt it together, there was too much force on the tab that’s supposed to hold the bolt head still inside the K-member so it tore off.  In order to hold it in place (once I got a new nut, of course), I chopped about an inch off a 21mm deepwell socket and put it on a universal joint.  Worked perfectly.

I also have all new brake hardware (springs, pins, drums, shoes) and the rear bushing set, but I’m not going to do that just yet.  The brakes wouldn’t be a huge deal, but I can’t really replace the rear control arms until I cut and move the exhaust out of the way.  And I’m too lazy for that!  I may wait until I do the motor swap — I have the exhaust in so tight to prevent it from falling off that there’s no play in it for easy removal and installation.

Good news/bad news:  I’ve been doing more work on the car than I have been updating my build journal.

After the last axle replacement, the transmission was just hemorrhaging Synchromesh fluid.  I was hoping that the problem was just the seal, but in the process of trying to swap that out, I managed to pull the axle out of the trans without applying any real pressure at all.

Taking everything apart again, I found that the hole in the OBX LSD is just not bored out right.  I finally wound up grinding off about an eighth of an inch from the end of the axle and that seems to have gotten the job done — the axle is seated firmly and does not leak.

I also put on a 3″ stainless downpipe that was bought from eBay.  There’s still an exhaust leak somewhere that I can hear, but I haven’t had a chance to dig in and find out exactly where it’s coming from.

During the process of working on the axle/transmission, I discovered that my intake tract made of steel exhaust pipe has been rubbing against the brake lines by the master cylinder.  In order to hold that steady, I’ve made a bracket from some small angle iron and a little bit of sheet.  That will bolt to the valve cover and then I’ll rig up a way to connect the pipe to the bracket to hold it steady.  I’ve also put another bend in the intake to try to scavenge some colder air.  The bracket will also secure wiring and hold the catch can for the breather side of the PCV system.

In bigger news….  While I was at the junkyard on a separate mission, I stumbled across a PT Cruiser with the “turbo-light” 180hp 2.4L turbo.  For about $250, I was able to score the oil pan, block, head, intake manifold, exhaust manifold, throttle body, turbo, all the water and oil lines, accessory brackets, and the hot-side and cold-side charge piping.  I’m going to put it on a stand, rebuild it, and then drop it in.  No rush on that project right now, though.

It turns out that I had way more motivation than I thought the other night!  Not only did I get the pan drilled, but I swapped the pans, got the steel-braided hose cut and built, tightened everything up, and filled it with oil.  A quick test drive showed a small leak from the blank plug on the oil filter sandwich adapter, but after torquing that down real well, I don’t see any leaks.

I was getting a leak from the left side, coming off the bottom of the transaxle, but I couldn’t really tell what it was.  I didn’t do anything about it immediately because I knew that the axle was bad and needed to be replaced — during the trans swap, I tore the boot and despite sealing it up with some silicone, I think the 860 mile trip through the rain got plenty of junk in and all the grease out.  No big deal, though:  I went ahead and exchanged the busted axle at O’Reilly and swapped it out tonight.  Took me just under an hour, but that included trying to find my stupid tire iron (left it in the van) and boogering up an axle seal.  I think the original axle seal was damaged when I put it in after the OBX went in and the leak on the left side was Synchromesh.  Upon swapping out the seal, I managed to bend up the first one I put in, so I pulled it out and put my last spare in — I think this one went in okay.

I also found that I had to swap out the c-clip with the one that I had rounded off in order to get the axle to seat.  One of my big worries with doing that originally was that I wouldn’t be able to remove the axle at all, but I was fortunate in that it took some effort, but nothing extraordinary to remove the bad axle from the diff.

Next up, I need to get it out and give it some test driving, but I’d rather do that in daylight.  Should be good to go for the first RallyCross of the WOR season this coming weekend, though!

The astute observer will notice through this project that the car has always had an oil leak of some sort.  While it has been a little better recently, there’s still oil escaping the car.  There have been two main sources of the oil so far:  The turbo lines under high pressure and the valve cover vent tube under hard cornering.  The valve cover problem is not a real big deal to me and can be fixed with a second catch can and/or installing a baffle of some sort on the valve cover.  The turbo oil line problem, however, is a bit more concerning.  This has manifested itself in the past when the car is super cold — as in, below freezing — and the oil pressure is very high.  I actually filled the cabin with oil smoke once because the oil was spraying out of the oil line and onto the exhaust.

While at Nationals, the car started to hemorrhage oil at a much faster rate.  The drive back to Cleveland consumed about a gallon and a half of oil, all of it spraying out the bottom of the car.  The oil pressure sender also lost its little thumbscrew that held one of the wires on, so we couldn’t even really monitor the oil pressure.

Before I put the transmission in, I had bought the AN plumbing and braided hose to re-do the oil lines, but I didn’t have a chance to get that done before nationals.  So I went ahead and pulled the old lines off and got to work getting them replaced.  When I pulled the old feed line off, I put the slightest bit of pressure on it and it wound up snapping in half, so that was a ticking time bomb and the source of all that oil.  The new lines are coming together nicely:  The feed line is already installed with plain braided stainless line with angled AN fittings and an AN to NPT adapter at each end.  The drain line is in progress with the tube-to-AN adapter installed and the tube re-installed to the turbo.  Rather than use more copper RTV or the stock SRT-4 gasket, I got the gasket for an old Dodge Stealth from the Dodge dealer since it seems a little sturdier.  I also picked up an oil pan at the junk yard so that I can start over and put the return bung in without using any JB Weld.

I needed to run out and get the right sized hole saw, but I did mock up the return line last night.  The hose end is angled as is the bulkhead AN fitting, so it looks like once I get the right oil pan in there, the return hose will be a very short, very straight shot right into the oil pan with no chance of interference with the passenger-side axle.

Tonight, I hope to get the new oil pan drilled and install the AN fitting.  I hope to also be able to get that new oil pan installed at a minimum, but we’ll see how much motivation I wind up with.

Since my last update, I ran the car at the GLDIV National Challenge and the Rallycross Nationals in Nebraska and it has been something of a wild ride.

In reviewing my previous post, the keen observer will notice that I destroyed another transmission.  Basically, my assembly method of just torquing the case halves together was pretty much the dumbest thing I could do.  By the time the car came home from the divisional, the transmission was completely thrashed.  Teeth missing,bearing bits rolling around, the whole deal.  The divisional itself was a challenge:  I broke a CV in the morning of day 1 and then had a ground wire come loose in the afternoon which absolutely killed my times and put me in third place.  I was also doing a lot of one-wheel action and through the pictures that were taken realized that it was a lot worse than I thought.  Nationals were going to require a lot of work.

For the transmission, I found someone in Columbus who had a trans for $75 that was already removed from a car.  From Modern Performance, I got an Ed Peters modified OBX limited slip.  I also got a set of Koni STR.T struts for the rear.  Tim helped me get the transmission put together since he is much better at those fiddley things than I am.  The LSD came with new bearings and races, and I sourced new ring gear bolts from the Internet.  I found that the axle didn’t want to seat all the way on the driver side, so I ground down the retaining ring to put some curve on the edge and was able to get it to slam into place.  I also went ahead and put the power steering back on the car.

For the rear struts, I got some really big and stiff bump stops and put them in to try to prevent oscillation. 

The wiring was fixed and I added a ground strap to the engine.

The combination of power steering and the limited slip is amazing!  There is all sorts of additional grip and power that I didn’t have before.  And with the rear end being so much stiffer, the car is much more controlled.

In the end, I was 7 out of 14 in MF, so not a great result, but the car made it through the event and then made an 850+ mile journey to Cleveland because I was trailering Pete’s car since it wasn’t in any shape to be driven back.

During the National Challenge event I started noticing a whine in forward gears, almost the same as when the car is in reverse.  I drove an hour and  half to go get some synchromesh fluid thinking that the transmission was low, but that wasn’t the problem.  Driving around town, I’ve noticed that the car will sort of slip, especially during right hand turns.  The clutch would be the first culprit, but the re-engagement is very harsh and slipping clutches have always been a little more gradual in my experience.  The main suspects right now are the differential and the CV joints.

Two nights ago, I got the spare transmission and the diff with the Phantom Grip installed out of “storage” and started to get them ready for installation.  I was missing the snap rings for the diff pin, so I picked those up yesterday and spent last night getting the differential installed in the transmission and the transmission reassembled.  I poured syncromesh into every bearing I could see and used the Mopar gasket maker / anaerobic sealant to put a bead on the mating surface of the transmission.  Getting the two halves to rejoin each other was quite a challenge — I eventually put the bellhousing on the ground and lowered the transmission onto it.  Despite gentle massaging, I couldn’t get the transmission to rejoin itself, so I put the bolts in and slowly brought it together by tightening the bolts in something of a cross pattern.

Also, I picked up an oil pan from the junkyard yesterday.  Since I’m going to be in there anyway, I think it might be a good time to drain the oil and swap out the oil pan.  I have a bunch of fittings and hose from anplumbing.com so I can re-make the turbo oil plumbing to try to eliminate the oil leaks.  I also suspect that the turbo drain hose is something of a ticking time bomb since it starts spraying oil when the pressure gets too high.  This job may need to wait, depending on how easy/hard it is to get the transmission out.  I’m not going to be able to do anything with the car over this weekend and next weekend is a points event in OVR, so I need to be able to get some testing in with the new transmission before I head up there.  If the new oil plumbing has to wait, then so be it!

I’ve been running the car, but haven’t written much about it so far.  There have been two events in OVR (with another two rained out) and I also went to a National Challenge event in Alabama.  I’ve led my class and been placing high overall in the OVR events and in AL, I placed second in class and second overall.  So, things are looking pretty good, but I need to work a little bit on my dry(er) surface performance.

I still haven’t gotten the Phantom Grip installed yet, but I really need to have that done soon, so I might need to make that a priority.  I did put new exhaust on the car, which has worked out well.  When I was in AL, I managed to rip the exhaust completely off the car, so I needed to repair that.  I bought about $170 worth of 3″ pipe and a Magnaflow glasspack resonator from Jegs, borrowed a flux core welder and built up a new exhaust system:

It sounds great and flows much better — I actually had to enrich the fuel map a bit to compensate.  Amazingly, it’s making significantly more power, but it actually much quieter, so it’s a win all the way around.  My next step with the exhaust is to replace the O2 housing, since that’s still necked-down to 2.25″.  I’m thinking that I can do that with a flange, some 3″ pipe, and a weldable O2 bung.

In addition to the pipe, I welded up cross members that are bolted to the floorpan so that even if the exhaust comes loose again, it will not be able to drop to the ground.  That means I may need to re-weld it or re-attach it at some point, but I don’t have too much worry about destroying any of it.

After the event on 28JUN, however, I discovered that it doesn’t quite give enough clearance on the rear suspension:

I really thought that if anything bad would happen, it would be the exhaust pipe caving in, but apparently the pipe was stronger than the control arm.  I have some spares, so that’s not a problem, but I’m going to need to alter that back bit of the exhaust to compensate.  My thought is to first cut the straight section that runs right-to-left in front of the gas tank, rotate the aft section by a couple negative degrees, and then re-weld.  While that will clear the control arms, the rest of the exhaust will then angle upwards towards the bottom of the body.  To remedy that, I’ll need to cut the post-suspension part of the exhaust and weld in a slight downward angle to level it back out.