First time posting here, and I feel it's my duty to first give thanks and praise to everyone that is part of this beautiful forum, because without you all I wouldn't have been able to do half the work I needed to do on this beauty.
In this thread I want to address all the work that I've done on the President, all the work that still needs to be done, and current issues I'm facing.
Bit of a background: I purchased it at 72k kilometres last June, now it's at 82k so I do quite a bit of driving in it. I've had it as a daily every time it hasn't been in my garage on axle stands. When that was the case, I would drive my trusty 2004 Mitsubishi Airtrek Turbo-R (4G63T engine and auto transmission off of a Lancer Evolution VII GT-A)!
I bought it as a birthday present for my 29th birthday, as I wanted to tick another item off my to-do list before I'm 30 - own a President
Initially when I purchased it, I knew I was buying a 32 year old vehicle (now 33) with a leaky active suspension in both rear shocks. Knowing there isn't anyone around me with expertise in rebuilding those, I unfortunately had to go the route of coilovers. Don't get me wrong, I have the coilovers dialled in perfectly now and it's such a smooth, cosy ride, but when I first bought the car the suspension worked on and off (it would drive fine until the rear end would drop to the ground out of nowhere, until it regained height again.... and then repeat.) and I got to get a glimpse of a working active suspension back then. It was tremendous!
I knew I could get the job done with the conversion, only issue was the power steering pump and how to correctly loop it back without starving it for hydraulic fluid.
So here goes a quick write-up for anyone who in this day and age drives an active Q45 or an active President:
I figured you can just loop the output of the active side of the pump directly to the bottom of the active radiator, I had a spare banjo fitting that had a hose end, similar to the below image:
The way I figured that out was with the pump running and making that awful noise, I would undo the banjo fitting at the output and start draining fluid, until frothy fluid started coming out and eventually it would run out of fluid (empty pump) and no noise AT ALL. Then I'd start filling up the reservoir, with pump still running empty, with fresh fluid and it would remain silent while spinning nicely. The problem would come back soon after, a day or maximum 2 after the remedy.
That got me thinking, maybe the pump needs a tiny bit of pressure on the output so that it has fluid to compress instead of cavitating/frothing it. I went ahead and built a diy pressure builder (for lack of a better description), and depending on the opening of it I could increase or decrease pressure at the output of the pump. Once I mistakenly increased pressure enough that the pump cracked open the thick-walled brass fitting that I was using to create pressure! What a hell of a pump
so I went through a few of those fittings, had about 5 of them and each one would be permanently set up for a bit more or a bit less pressure. I stopped at one of them that seemed to build just enough pressure that after 2 months of driving, revving high etc, it would not cavitate no matter what.Then one day, same exact issue. Cavitation, awful noise at the pump, dropping the fluid and refilling it again would stop the noise, etc. etc.
That was when I had enough of it and finally got enough courage to take the pump off the engine and start familiarising myself with dual-chamber pumps like the active ones in our vehicles.
Back side of the pump (the one with the lid that has 4 screws on it) is the simple vein design, unfortunately for me that chamber deals with the power steering, so cannot be disabling that...
Then I went to the front side of the pump, took the pulley off, took off the 7 torx bolts holding that hold the 2 chambers mated to one another and I cracked open the front side of the pump. YAY! Or.... nay.... turns out it's an entirely different design, one I had never seen before in any power steering pump videos I watched. No veins, a completely enclosed design that seemed impossible to work with. Until I figured out that taking off all 7 side (side meaning around the outside perimeter of the pump) 24mm caps (caps is what I call them..), they each contain a piston, spring to press that piston down, and a tiny rod inside piston to keep it all centre I suppose...
Turns out this type of pump is called radial piston pump, but I'm yet to see images on google of one that works EXACTLY the same way as mine. Regardless, the solution is still the same:
Take out all 7 pistons, springs, and rods, and screw on the 7x 24mm caps back on. Now the axle of the pump spins freely, no compression created, no rubbing of concentric shaft against 7 pistons to make them rise and fall, so as long as there is some fluid in there to keep it lubricated it should be fine.
I've had slight inspiration from the Skyline R32 GTR guys with their hicas steering systems, as they also have dual-chamber pumps, but theirs are a bit simpler where both chambers simply have the vein design pumps, removing the veins disabling it. No pistons
But mainly I feel safe knowing that when they disabled their pumps all they do is remove the veins and leave some fluid inside.What I've done as well is once the power steering pump is mounted back onto the engine, the very bottom of the pump has another one of those 24mm "caps" visible when you look at it from below, the one with a small 10mm bolt screwed into it to hold the bracked for the input line of the active side. I wanted to have the reservoir full of fluid, and let gravity feed it into the pump, so that there's always some kind of fluid in there, but unfortunately the pump is now airlocked, and I figured that once the bracket flap is cut off and away from the bottom 24mm cap, the cap can be removed, and that allowed fresh fluid from the reservoir to be gravity fed into the pump and as soon as fluid started spilling everywhere from that bottom cap, I screwed it back in. So now I think of it as an oil sump plug. I'll be making sure to drain a bit of fluid from there every time I do an oil change on the engine, just for peace of mind in order to keep fresh fluid in the pump.
I forgot to mention the output of the active side is now blocked off. Just a reservoir full of fluid, gravity fed into a pump with no output, free-spinning and just getting lubricated.
All 3 serpentine belts were changed to Gates ones, simple enough job...
Fan was changed out for a brand new one from Amayama, weirdly enough the one from Amayama is a smaller diameter, the blades are wider but closer to the engine, and they rub against one of the plastic covers in front of leftside cylinder bank. Had to very carefully dremel off an edge profile into each blade to make not hit that plastic cover, so now it's all good, but extremely annoying knowing I bought the exact oem number from Japan for it to turn out slightly wrong.
Fuel filter changed out, the usual things like stabiliser bar links, new air filter (old one looked like it hadn't been changed since 1991, it crumbled once I started pressing on it with my fingers... and was BLACK!)
Obviously did an oil change as well, and the oil looked terrible so safe to say if the air filter hadn't been changed in that long, the oil could easily not have been touched in years, potentially decades.
All very satisfying work, until I started getting a misfire, quite a terrible one at that. At idle it would bounce a bit, and some days when I tried driving it would bounce QUITE a bit upon acceleration, scary stuff! At the exhaust you can hear a sputter as well...
It had gotten fairly bad, and I decided to change out spark plugs for NGK PFR6B-11. The previous plugs that were in there were the hotter ones, PFR5B-11, and on some of them the electrodes were close to completely gone! Absolutely devoured! So I was glad to do that change, the car felt better for sure... but then after a while the misfire was back, so I started thinking injectors or bad fuel.
Little info on Ireland: we only have 95 octane, and anywhere you ask on any forums everyone would tell you there are no higher options anymore, it's all E10 95 octane (95 octane in EU is equivalent to 91 in the US from what I read), but alas I found one petrol station close to my house that has the option of 97... so I ran until my 95 octane tank was empty and filled it up to the very top with 97 octane, and dropped 2x 120ml bottles of Liqui Moly DFI cleaner (as it has polyetheramine in it)
Honestly, the problem went completely away after a couple of days of driving like that. I would do another tank after that with another dose of injector cleaner for good measure, and everything was perfect. That was probably a month ago, and I've done about 1000 kilometres since, and now when I park up somewhere I'm starting to feel the slight bounce at idle inside the car, I go to the back of the car and the exhaust is sputtering occasionally again, misfiring.
So this is where I'm at right now, it runs and I daily it, but occasionally it misfires again. One thing I've always noticed was an intense enough smell of petrol inside the cabin when I start it in the morning, cold.
When it's been ran already for the day and I start it I don't smell that anymore. I saw a thread here explaining that leaks are common somewhere in the back of the plenum, out of a hose that when hot it expands and the leak could potentially stop.
So one morning before I started the car stuck my phone centre of plenum at the very back of it between plenum and firewall, and got a video. I can clearly see a leak around a small rubber hose, I have not tightened the clamp there so that's definitely my next move. Once I drove the car for more than an hour, I parked it, took a video of the exact same place and everything was bone dry! So more and more I'm certain it's a leak there.
Now my mind is wondering could this be in any way related to my misfire...
I also haven't done ohm reading on the injectors yet, that's something I'll try get done soon. Plenum job has never been done either, and that's one I'm dreading as well but I'll get to it soon I promise!
And most importantly, I have not yet done the chain guides replacement! I know I know, I will gather up courage to get that done as well soon!
I'll keep this updated as I work through future issues, or remember some of the work I've done to it.
Thanks everyone for providing such a fantastic place to share ideas! Keep those beauties running!
to NICO! 