My poor S14 sat outside for the second winter in a row due to the setback to the shop renovations - there just wasn't room with the ladders and scaffold and materials. My wife's convertible and her dad's convertible were both in there taking up space while my car got snowed on.
Anyway, enough of the unimportant stuff. The winter plans seemed simple enough: get Nistune and add fuel. So I started accumulating parts. Once the dust had settled my stockpile for this round encompassed a lot more than just a daugter board and fuel injectors.
Finally out of the elements:
I never did take a good engine bay picture from the last round, so here's a picture before I got started this spring:
I had managed to acquire both an old Forced Performance (at least that's what I've been told it is) equal length manifold as well as a new Tomei manifold. After spending some time thinking about it, I decided to go with the Tomei for a few reasons. I test fitted both and the FP manifold was too close to the master cylinder, was more difficult to bolt up, and was going to be more useful in the upper RPM. Ultimately, I think it'd be better after a turbo and cam upgrade. The Tomei was better in every way except I suspect it would lose in a side-by-side max power dyno shootout. The S14 is mostly a cruising car with occasional romps when time and money allows.
Of course, unbolting the stock manifold was a bit of an adventure. When I loosened the rear-most nut I said, "Wow, I can't believe this wasn't leaking because this nut is really loose.... Never mind. It just broke..."
Great... At least the rest of them came off without much trouble.
So right off the bat I started wondering how I was going to remedy this situation. I certainly did not want to have to remove the head and take it in, but I also couldn't really take the car somewhere either. I still don't have a welder, but my old buddy Bill had recently purchased one. He let me borrow it and I hooked it up to my portable generator and fired it up. It took me several tries, but I was eventually able to make it work and get it extracted. Turns out, there was something wrong with the gas and I was basically operating a gas shielded mig like a flux core. Nevertheless, I was victorious:
The intake side mostly gave up without a fight. At first, I left the coolant lines hooked up because I didn't want to have to mess with them later, but I eventually decided it would be easier to just get it all right out of the way.
Before continuing, I need to back track a bit. I purchased a used set of Subaru STi side feed fuel injectors towards the end of last year because I knew I needed more fuel. They're supposed to more or less be a drop-in replacement and should flow something around 500cc depending on where you do your research. With bigger injectors, I would need something to control them with. It was finally time to step up to a Nistune ECU. In December I sent my ECU off to Andy at Auto Vaughn Performance and he installed the daughter board and flashed it for feature pack 1. Boy, was I excited to receive that package:
About the time it was returned to me, I sent the Subaru injectors off to Which Hunter Performance to get them cleaned and tested. I'm a big proponent of this procedure when you've got injectors that have been sitting around before tossing them into your engine. It's worth the few extra bucks for the peace of mind. I also sent two sets of S13 SR20 injectors at the same time. I wanted a matched set for my other project and sold the remaining injectors. It turns out, the Subaru injectors flow about 530cc which is a substantial upgrade.
On that, I'm going to take a break. There's a lot more to this series of installments, but the Subaru injectors weren't as easy as I expected. So I'm going to put together a bit of a how-to if one doesn't all ready exist. Expect more frequent updates in the near future as I bring this thread back up to speed again.
As always, thanks for following along.
