Before we get to this evening’s results, there are a couple other updates that I’ve been remiss in adding. First off, in addition to the suspension order, I’ve also placed my order to import some new dry weather tires. I have no idea how long that’s going to take, but I’ll keep an eye on that. I’ve also been shopping quick release steering wheel setups and new seats. I never plan to do anything that would require SFI or FIA certification/homologation with the car so I’m looking at some more budget one-piece options that would work for RallyCross and maybe an HPDE/PDX once in a while. I’ve found these seats on Amazon that ship as a pair with the appropriate bracketry for a Neon and then there are high-back seats from Jegs which I’d need to fabricate my own brackets for. I actually have no idea how easy or hard it would be to do that, so I need to dig in to that some more.
In an effort to tidy up the wiring, I picked up this self-fusing silicone tape and it’s just amazing stuff! There’s no adhesive on the tape, but once it touches itself it almost instantly fuses together. More on that in a bit.
This morning I got out the junkyard with eastsidemav and found a couple gems.
There’s a super long throttle cable from an 01 or 02 Stratus, an upper water neck from the same car, a lower water neck from an 01 or 02 PT Cruiser, and over there on the right, I got a new cover for the PDC since mine broke and fell off at some point. Trying to make it look a little nicer, remember?
Here’s the water neck bits all put together:
The PT upper is way too tall, the 2.0 upper doesn’t fit, so the one from a Stratus is perfect. I probably could have used the PT turbo lower and made it work, but for some reason Chrysler moved the various ports around over the years. Here’s the 05-06 lower that I already had next to the 01 lower that I got today:
You’re looking at them from the bottom up as they would be mounted. The one on the left is the newer style. You can see that all the bosses are there, but for different applications and different years, they’ve drilled them differently. On the newer style, the CLT sensor bung is drilled into the left side which on my car would be a difficult fit due to the low pressure power steering line. The 01 PT Cruiser lower on the right, however, has the heater core output in the right spot and has the CLT sensor bung pointed towards the front where the wiring won’t be rubbing against anything.
The CLT sensor itself was different since I believe the newer cars used a single sensor and then fed the gauge cluster as an output from the ECU while mine is set up to have two sensors in one so the ECU (now MegaSquirt) and the gauge can each get their own signal. I swapped out the sensors so everything should continue to work the way it did before.
Here it is, all bolted up:
With the water neck sorted, I went ahead and got the intake manifold bolted up. I’m loving the way it looks:
I trimmed down the radiator hose to prevent it from rubbing against the intake, and I went ahead and started wrapping the wires. I had to extend the CLT sensor wires since the sensor has moved a bit. I also pulled the little fuel line locking clip off of the old DOHC fuel rail and put it on the new chrome one. The silicone wrap for the wiring really comes out looking a lot nicer and cleaner than the old split loom that I was using before:
Compare that to how the old setup looked:
