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Month: June 2018

Cars

Cars

A few pictures from the awesome Taste of Motorsports event yesterday. Fantastic food, friends, and car! Can’t wait until next year.

dEQ

dEQ

I took my Suzuki Carry to DEQ, and it didn’t pass. Looks a tad rich. It is carbureted, so I know pretty much next to nothing about calibrating it. Time to learn somthun’.

Headers

Headers

A bit of sand blasting and those cleaned up nice! Now all I need is the 5/8 steel tube and I can get this car back together.

GTR MS

GTR MS

My GTR is all cleaned up and ready for the Taste of Motorsports event this weekend at PIR. It is going to be a fantastic event, and tickets are still available. Lots of incredible food, awesome cars, and cool people.

If you are in Portland this weekend, you should come… and stop by and say hi to me while you are there. I’ll have graphs too. lots of graphs.

https://www.facebook.com/events/623147598027322/

Integra

Integra

I picked up a new project. (because we all know I need more projects). Some people know I really started getting into automotive stuff when I purchased my first car out of college, which was a brand new 1996 Acura Integra GSR. It was a great platform to learn on, and a great car to drive. I did autocross, track days, drag racing, and everything in-between. After a few years I added a Jacking Racing supercharger (one of the very first kits offered for the Integra by Jackson Racing). It is one of the cars I regret selling.

Myles Kerr, who as most of you know has the fastest Integra GSR on the planet (208mph), noticed a GSR that might fit the bill for what I was looking for. Anyone ever looking for a GSR knows how hard it is to find a clean example that hasn’t been either crashed, stolen, stripped, and most of all modified.

This particular example was exactly what I was looking for. All original, single owner, no accidents, and completely unmodified. Even the oil changes were done at the dealer. It is a 1995 with 187,000 miles, and has almost no body rust. Engine still sounds perfect and pulls to redline with smooth acceleration. In driving the car it is hard to believe the milage. These cars have amazing build quality.

I’m not sure what I am going to do with it, although I don’t think I’ll make it a Myles Kerr or Tony Palo level car. 😉 I might just restore as a complete original car and drive it some. It is a good addition to my 90s Japanese car collection.

First two pictures below are of my old Integra, last two of the new one.

GTO

GTO

While doing some calibration on my twin-turbo GTO, I noticed one bank had some odd narrow-band sensor behavior. After a bit of looking and listening I figured out there was an exhaust leak between the header and the uppipe to the right side turbo.

I removed said turbo, plus the manifold and pipes, and sure enough it was loose in the connection point. While doing that I also inspected the lines I had running from the engine to the heater box. These lines have been problematic because they run directly underneath the turbo uppipe. In the past I replaced the lines with high temp Aeroquip lines and used a fiberglass high heat insulation, but when I inspected the lines they were both directly damaged and discolored because of heat.

The root cause is the contact with the header. Insulation works great if there is some gap between the two objects, but when the lines directly rest against the red hot exhaust pipe the insulation is not sufficient.

It is such a tight space that I think the best answer to us use some stainless steel tubes in place of the lines. The stainless will not be damaged by the heat, and is more compact in terms of space usage. I should be able to run the lines down close to the frame rail so as to not be in direct contact with the header.

I ordered some stainless 5/8s hard line and fittings from McMasterCarr, so in a few days I’ll give it a shot.

EJ

EJ

With the release of the 2018 STI RA, I was curious what changes were made to the internals of the engine. Subaru had indicated that new pistons were installed, but didn’t specific much else in terms of internals.

I ordered a 2018 RA engine block about 2 months ago, and at that time there were no spare engine blocks in the US. It was eventually ordered from Japan and arrived at the end of last week.

On first glance, the block looks almost identical to the existing EJ257 motor. The cases is the newest 705 case, the crankshaft has the nitride black finish, and the piston tops look very familiar.

I disassembled the engine and first took a look at the pistons, since that is something documented as being ‘improved’. The pistons are very similar, and both appear to be machined cast parts.

The most obvious difference is the construction of the bottom of the piston. The older EJ257 piston does not fully enclose the pin boss, while the new construction has significantly more material around both of the pin sides of the piston.

From the side, you can see the difference in material around the pin area. Construction and dimensions of the ring and ring area looks the same, with the exception that the upper ring area is fully coated on some of the older ones.

While not easy to see in these pictures, on the bottom side the depression right at the center of the piston is less, and the material is thicker. I would estimate the piston is between 1 and 2mm thicker going from the top to the bottom surface.

Other dimensions appear to be the same. Compression height, ring position, etc are all the same.

I did a quick CC measurement and they appear to be pretty close. I’ll do a more complete measurement in the next few days.

The crankshaft appears identical to the 2016/2017 crankshaft, with no special oil modifications.

The rod also looks to be the standard previous year EJ257 rod. You can see the slight difference in design between the original EJ207 rod, the early EJ257 (2004), later EJ257 (2008), and the 2018 STI/RA rod.

One interesting difference in the piston is the presence of a ‘Hitachi’ logo in the casting. This did not appear in previous pistons (which has a small Subaru mark in that location).

I will measure all of the factory bearing clearances to see if there is any difference there.

Thanks to Clark Turner for nudging me to look into this!

ADC

ADC

It seems like any project that involves CAN, SPI, ADC, and DMA at the same time will eventually lead to the discovery of something that was noted, but not by you, in the errata for whatever processor you are using.

Of course this discovery will only happen after you have spent at least an hour configuring and capturing edge cases that seem to work and lots of cases that don’t work.

Expert

Expert

“A bullish call from a Wall Street analyst capped off a rough week for Tesla short sellers, with Nomura Instinet advising clients that the electric car maker’s shares could rally 42 percent over the next year. The stock rose 1.7 percent Friday and is now up 10 percent on the week. One of the most shorted stocks in the United States, **Tesla shares cost investors betting against the company more than $1 billion in losses on Wednesday alone after the stock rallied 9.7 percent.** Adding to the short woes, the stock is up 13.5 percent in June and up 21 percent since April. More than 30 percent of Tesla’s floating stock is currently sold short, according to FactSet.”

Further proof of the inability of expert financial advisors to actual be experts. If your expert financial advisor is so good and ‘consistently significantly beating the market’ , why is he an advisor, and not sitting on his private island. 🙂