I'll start off by saying when i was introduce to DSM's i was a Nissan guy, never drove or ever owned a turbo charged car, and the first time i was given a ride in one i fell in love, in a 90 eclipse GST (FWD).. but at the time i was a strictly 4dr kinda guy. i never liked 2drs as much even tho i owned 2 of them, but found myself in a dilemma. a couple of friends owned Mitsubishi Evo's and i was crazy about them. 4 doors turbo charged power and AWD.. but thought long and hard about how much i hated OBD2 for the strict regulation and how fragile newer cars are now a days.. and i wanted something AWD, so it was either sell my soul for an Evo or try to find a AWD DSM and get over the whole 2dr issue.. until 1 day a friend of mine called me the same day i sold my last Nissan and showed me this..
i couldnt believe what i was looking at
, something that fell into every category of interest i was looking for.
4 doors, Turbo Charged, AWD, and OBD1. i was in love all over again.
So im sure you know what i did next right?..
"COME TO PAPA!!!"
sooo.. like every used older car you know what to expect and you know its flaws and what needs to improve or upgrade or even repair, and when i say that, i mean.. THIS CAR WAS A MESS!
i didnt expect myself to have to go threw so much, but with the right help from good friends that were knowledged in the field of DSM's i was in luck..
when i bought the car i knew i was walking into something with a blown turbo and something needing an alternator, no big deal.. (or so i thought)
sure enough, we came to realize that when the turbo blew alot of the aluminum housing of the turbo was blown into the charging system (intercooler and piping).. so i was in for some more trouble..
we did a compression test on the car and things werent to spec but good enough, my biggest concern was the motor being blown entirely but i was very luck it wasnt the case..
so we were forced to remove all the IC piping and FMIC to clean out all the aluminum shards that were blown into the sytem..
during the cleaning process of the ICP and the FMIC my buddy Jeff ^(holding the FMIC) mentioned he had extra powder and his powder coating gun at his dad's garage, so we too a ride.. on the way we stopped by the local Napa and got some of the tough semi truck radiator hose, (awesome for hi pressure couplers) we cleaned up the piping nicely and re-powder coated all the piping in a nice gloss black finish..
things were looking good at this point, got a replacement turbo (tdo5h 14b "stock turbo") and alternator, cleaned the piping and intercooler out, and even got a nice fresh paint job for the piping. i was just getting more anxious every day to just drive the car and feel what she had in-store for me
then......
WTF???
over the course of time of use leaning on the car, and brushing against it in my narrow driveway, we notice that the flat army colored paint was literally dusting off... some parts were really painted with multiple coats, and some parts had a very light coat, light enough to scratch it off with your fingernail. so my curiosity got control of me once again. we starting to chip off parts of the paint that was already coming off easily and noticed the car's original Belize Green paint was still in very good shape, so we removed all the army paint with Acetone..
MORE ACETONE!!!
ALL DONE!!
so now that the factory paint is back the car is making me fall in love more and more, im getting so excited at this point im even workin in the rain like it aint nothing, got sick as hell the day i put the FMIC and ICP back on the car..
time for the headlights and grille..
TIME FOR THE START UP!!!!!!
(sorry i don't have a video)
but unfortunately there was an issue with the harness that the previous owner did notice nor did he realize was the main issue why the car wasn't charging the battery. one of the wires in the harness were rubbing the back of the intake manifold so much it rubbed threw til the point it was grounding itself out and blowing the ignition fuse, so he said before "i was having problems with the fuse blowing so i hard wired it" and that blew the alternator..
when i went threw the harness i came across a lot of hacked crap with the wires for the gauges and the main harness.
finally the car started!!, but once again i noticed something was wrong...
none of the gauges except the boost gauge was working.. so i had to rip apart the interior and redo all the wires and run new gauges..
at this point the car was almost done, just had a bunch of little things left to do to have it ready for the street, but i enjoyed my time playing around trying out future looks and ideas.. i had 2 wheels my brother in law gave me back in the day, there were 5 lug universal. they never fit any of my previous cars because all of my Nissans were all 4 lug. ehh WTH why not, let see how these look on the car, but not really on it.. lol
not bad huh?
well a week or so later, got plates, got insurance, got gas, started tuning....
the car ran on a little base tune on 93 octane for a while so that way it would be easy for me to get use-too it and wouldn't be too much for me. coming from a person who owned only N/A cars and never controlled something that would just GRIP, everybody and anybody can handle a car spinning tires weather it be a FWD car or a RWD car, its just spin .. so me thinking the car is going to just hug and be fine ohh was i wrong.. first couple times me really getting on the gas the car would spin, and im like WTF!! scared for my own life with the response of the car, i was so impressed with how it performed. before any of this i only rode in a FWD DSM and that was spin city till the end of 3rd but i was controllable. this damn thing took my so silly sideways from launching in a straight line i felt like i was drifting more than launching.. lol
worked out some more bugs and realized the car was out of alignment and it was causing the car to steer out when under a lot of torque (torque steer).. new tie rods, ball joints, and new adjustable rear upper control arms took care of that.. drove the car around for a whole week with no front bumper BREAKING NECKS!. by the time the weekend came we decided to tune the car some more on the raised boost..
THEN IT WAS TIME TO REVEAL HER..
(Brockton,Ma 09)
(Rt16 Wendys Everett,Ma 09)
2009 EVO/DSM Meet Dedham Mall
the car ran so good i drove it everywhere and raced anyone, it came to the point in the end of the 2009 season no that many fast cars were really out so much, so it came to going to Brockton only..
(i'll never forget this) i remember 1 night i was out with some friends and few of us went out to run ppl in Brockton, nobody wanted to race me anymore cause they saw how fast the car was, and the only car they had that was worth racing me blew his clutch the week before and wasn't trying to come back out with it.. major bummer
so i stopped racing the car and started using it as i would've any other car and daily drove it threw the winter and then ended up with one of the worst experiences that has happened me with any car..
on New Years Eve 2009-2010 i was called by my brother saying him and my step father broke down and that they needed my help, so me being the mechanic in the family who has fixed dumb stuff before on our van i go and check it out. mind you, this day it was a blizzard we had and the snow was so badd. my AWD was ripping threw the snow like nothing and i was loving it, too bad no-one else could get traction. saw 3 accidents on my way going to meet them.. so i get there finally and the car it beyond repair and we were forced to call a tow truck to tow it,. tow truck comes and doesn't have a GPS to take it to the dealership we need it to get serviced at, so he fallows me from Downtown Boston to Neponset/Quincy.. and keep in mind, there is traffic every where, a 15 min ride took well over an hour.. and this tow truck is a wrecker with a minivan on the back with no weight on its front.. take a guess what happened next..
"Tailgating doesn't get you threw traffic faster a$$hole!!!"
i was beyond furious, i was ready to kill the driver of the tow truck, legit jumped out and ran up to his truck saying he has no idea lucky he was for me not killing him right then and there.. like legit psycho mode
its whatever, i got over it, the car still drove fine no frame damage or anything beyond repair i just needed to hunt down one of the only 2000 of these car ever made!! SMH..
but i did indeed get lucky again 8 months later i saw a post on the Galant Forum that a GSR Galant was at the junkyard and that it was hardly touched. so i legit screwed over there to salvage what ever parts i could, and just to my luck it was the same color as my car.. SCORE!!!
i stripped that car clean of anything i could use, but that day i left with only the trunk and a tail light, seeing how its what i needed the most. i hid the rest of the parts and came back week after week for more and more..
TO BE CONTINUED....
i couldnt believe what i was looking at
, something that fell into every category of interest i was looking for.4 doors, Turbo Charged, AWD, and OBD1. i was in love all over again.
So im sure you know what i did next right?..
"COME TO PAPA!!!"
sooo.. like every used older car you know what to expect and you know its flaws and what needs to improve or upgrade or even repair, and when i say that, i mean.. THIS CAR WAS A MESS!
i didnt expect myself to have to go threw so much, but with the right help from good friends that were knowledged in the field of DSM's i was in luck..
when i bought the car i knew i was walking into something with a blown turbo and something needing an alternator, no big deal.. (or so i thought)
sure enough, we came to realize that when the turbo blew alot of the aluminum housing of the turbo was blown into the charging system (intercooler and piping).. so i was in for some more trouble..
we did a compression test on the car and things werent to spec but good enough, my biggest concern was the motor being blown entirely but i was very luck it wasnt the case..
so we were forced to remove all the IC piping and FMIC to clean out all the aluminum shards that were blown into the sytem..
during the cleaning process of the ICP and the FMIC my buddy Jeff ^(holding the FMIC) mentioned he had extra powder and his powder coating gun at his dad's garage, so we too a ride.. on the way we stopped by the local Napa and got some of the tough semi truck radiator hose, (awesome for hi pressure couplers) we cleaned up the piping nicely and re-powder coated all the piping in a nice gloss black finish..
things were looking good at this point, got a replacement turbo (tdo5h 14b "stock turbo") and alternator, cleaned the piping and intercooler out, and even got a nice fresh paint job for the piping. i was just getting more anxious every day to just drive the car and feel what she had in-store for me
then......
WTF???
over the course of time of use leaning on the car, and brushing against it in my narrow driveway, we notice that the flat army colored paint was literally dusting off... some parts were really painted with multiple coats, and some parts had a very light coat, light enough to scratch it off with your fingernail. so my curiosity got control of me once again. we starting to chip off parts of the paint that was already coming off easily and noticed the car's original Belize Green paint was still in very good shape, so we removed all the army paint with Acetone..
MORE ACETONE!!!
ALL DONE!!
so now that the factory paint is back the car is making me fall in love more and more, im getting so excited at this point im even workin in the rain like it aint nothing, got sick as hell the day i put the FMIC and ICP back on the car..
time for the headlights and grille..
TIME FOR THE START UP!!!!!!
(sorry i don't have a video)
but unfortunately there was an issue with the harness that the previous owner did notice nor did he realize was the main issue why the car wasn't charging the battery. one of the wires in the harness were rubbing the back of the intake manifold so much it rubbed threw til the point it was grounding itself out and blowing the ignition fuse, so he said before "i was having problems with the fuse blowing so i hard wired it" and that blew the alternator..
when i went threw the harness i came across a lot of hacked crap with the wires for the gauges and the main harness.
finally the car started!!, but once again i noticed something was wrong...
none of the gauges except the boost gauge was working.. so i had to rip apart the interior and redo all the wires and run new gauges.. at this point the car was almost done, just had a bunch of little things left to do to have it ready for the street, but i enjoyed my time playing around trying out future looks and ideas.. i had 2 wheels my brother in law gave me back in the day, there were 5 lug universal. they never fit any of my previous cars because all of my Nissans were all 4 lug. ehh WTH why not, let see how these look on the car, but not really on it.. lol
not bad huh?
well a week or so later, got plates, got insurance, got gas, started tuning....
the car ran on a little base tune on 93 octane for a while so that way it would be easy for me to get use-too it and wouldn't be too much for me. coming from a person who owned only N/A cars and never controlled something that would just GRIP, everybody and anybody can handle a car spinning tires weather it be a FWD car or a RWD car, its just spin .. so me thinking the car is going to just hug and be fine ohh was i wrong.. first couple times me really getting on the gas the car would spin, and im like WTF!!
scared for my own life with the response of the car, i was so impressed with how it performed. before any of this i only rode in a FWD DSM and that was spin city till the end of 3rd but i was controllable. this damn thing took my so silly sideways from launching in a straight line i felt like i was drifting more than launching.. lolworked out some more bugs and realized the car was out of alignment and it was causing the car to steer out when under a lot of torque (torque steer).. new tie rods, ball joints, and new adjustable rear upper control arms took care of that.. drove the car around for a whole week with no front bumper BREAKING NECKS!. by the time the weekend came we decided to tune the car some more on the raised boost..
THEN IT WAS TIME TO REVEAL HER..
(Brockton,Ma 09)
(Rt16 Wendys Everett,Ma 09)
2009 EVO/DSM Meet Dedham Mall
the car ran so good i drove it everywhere and raced anyone, it came to the point in the end of the 2009 season no that many fast cars were really out so much, so it came to going to Brockton only..
(i'll never forget this) i remember 1 night i was out with some friends and few of us went out to run ppl in Brockton, nobody wanted to race me anymore cause they saw how fast the car was, and the only car they had that was worth racing me blew his clutch the week before and wasn't trying to come back out with it.. major bummer
so i stopped racing the car and started using it as i would've any other car and daily drove it threw the winter and then ended up with one of the worst experiences that has happened me with any car..
on New Years Eve 2009-2010 i was called by my brother saying him and my step father broke down and that they needed my help, so me being the mechanic in the family who has fixed dumb stuff before on our van i go and check it out. mind you, this day it was a blizzard we had and the snow was so badd. my AWD was ripping threw the snow like nothing and i was loving it, too bad no-one else could get traction. saw 3 accidents on my way going to meet them.. so i get there finally and the car it beyond repair and we were forced to call a tow truck to tow it,. tow truck comes and doesn't have a GPS to take it to the dealership we need it to get serviced at, so he fallows me from Downtown Boston to Neponset/Quincy.. and keep in mind, there is traffic every where, a 15 min ride took well over an hour.. and this tow truck is a wrecker with a minivan on the back with no weight on its front.. take a guess what happened next..
"Tailgating doesn't get you threw traffic faster a$$hole!!!"
i was beyond furious, i was ready to kill the driver of the tow truck, legit jumped out and ran up to his truck saying he has no idea lucky he was for me not killing him right then and there.. like legit psycho mode
its whatever, i got over it, the car still drove fine no frame damage or anything beyond repair i just needed to hunt down one of the only 2000 of these car ever made!! SMH..
but i did indeed get lucky again 8 months later i saw a post on the Galant Forum that a GSR Galant was at the junkyard and that it was hardly touched. so i legit screwed over there to salvage what ever parts i could, and just to my luck it was the same color as my car.. SCORE!!!
i stripped that car clean of anything i could use, but that day i left with only the trunk and a tail light, seeing how its what i needed the most. i hid the rest of the parts and came back week after week for more and more..
TO BE CONTINUED....
