WRX Engine Installed

This is low time consuming business, finally got the WRX engine in, and decide to sacrifice the storage area being the rear seat and leave the original configuration as is with the intercooler, makes the job a lot simpler and everything just bolts right in.

Should be able to make some regular updates on the build now as its full steam ahead.
Regards Bill

PS my Thunderbird has arrived at its new home Down Under, every one loves it

Bill -

Thats a big step in forward progress for your project. Cool!

Hope the rest of your project goes as well. Maybe your license plate should read MDMXTUB (Mad Max Tub)! LOL

Peace - Out!

Hi All,
Another day and a bit more progress, bolted on some 18 x 8 wheels and lowered the weight down onto the floor so the tyres ( we spell it that way ) took the weight, I was worried it was going to be to low at the rear, but happy with the result, then I tried the 9 1/2" rims, not sure I can clear the gaurds...mmm have to think about what to do, may have to go back to 8". Tried to fit the gearbox brace , its a after market mount that helps with twist in the drive system , but as things are it wont fit without modifications.... will attempt that tomorrow

Off course all the time I have Help ..( pictured) . these guys are wandering about watching every move I make. ( or maybe they like the bread )

The sun has gone down on another day, as we move away from our hot summer and out of the heat ( into the football season ) its a nice time of our year

Regards Bill

I'm really sorry, I should have introduced the gang, from the left
1/ Baby
2/ Plonker
3/ Milton ( in Brown)(( he's the male))
4/ Google
5/ Mum
and some would say the ugly one, with the red cheeks Dolly

there consider your self introduced... you know they all now
Bill

I thought for sure you'd have sheep instead of birds. (everyone in Australia has or works on a sheep ranch)

Birds ??? there Duck, you've got us confuse with those Kiwis, we have cows and Kangaroos :+))

Bill:

What'cha gonna use for the ECU? My son's been toying with an after-market ECU that seems to be at least as programmable as the original WRX version, but doesn't have that nasty habit of looking for all of its brothers elsewhere in the car before it decides to work. I'll try to find out what it is and report back (he's on holiday this week...)

gn

Hi Gordon

I check on local possibilities and they are all a rip off, just today i contacted some one about doing the head gasget on my sons WRX, they said better to install a replacement engine at $2800... on our last trip to jhthe UIS it helped open our eyes, Australia is a great place but costs are way over the top, they were saying the other day that in Australia we have the most un affordablity of houses in the english speaking world ... and now interest rates have hit 10+%

I have been in contact for some time with Greg Britz out of South Africa, Greg has been kind enough to arrange for a wiring harness and engine computer to be put together there and he will send it to me...I'm confident that will work well for me.

I should warn you, were already orginising our next trip to the US arround Xmas and will be heading for the East Coast
Regards Bill

Hey Bill I spoke to Marius this morning and the harness and engine management system will be ready to ship by Friday.

Great news Greg, you need to get detials to me so I can send you some dollars, will it be tested your end before dispatch
Regards Bill

Greg
I need a wiring harness and an engine management system as well. One problem is that all we can get here is 95 Gasohol.

My tyres are 245/40 on Boxter 17 x 8.5's on the rear. Trailing arms are 85 944T and clear the wide body CMC fenders perfectly. Later 944T are 25 mm wider and will not fit

Please let me know about the harness
rgstraghan at yahoo.ca

nothing to report today... went to the pub Bill

Cheers!!

Bill,

Regards from Texas...A flock of ducks...a gang of thugs.
We have both, here. My cat assists me on my Speedie project and, like your helpers will probably reject the test ride.

Enjoyed the pics.

GG

Hi Robert.

No problem to supply you with a management system. With our crappy rand at the moment you are looking at about US$800. this includes the crankshaft cam belt pully with the 36-1 tooth to use the standard scooby pickup. I can even load my cars map as a good starting point. The 95 gashol should not be a problem. I would recomend that you have the car dyno'ed. The engine management system comes complete with the tuning software and the cable. Let me know if you want one.

Greg

Is there an engine wiring harness?

Robert Yes it includes everything except the coil packs.

Bill I will gladly connect it up to my car to do a test run before shipping, Sorry I had to go to Cape town unexpectidly this week but I should be at home on Friday and I will go through and pick it from Marius. I think I gave you my banking details in one of my previous emails

regards, Greg

Hi all, here's a Quick update:

Fitted Grearbox mid mount to held with engine torque.
Finally decied on fuel cam and where to position it.
As I have put the WRX motor in with the intercooler in std position, we have fabricated a ducting to direct air flow, it will have to butt mounts with a rubber seal so htat we can still open the engine hood without any problems.

Other stuff like gear lever installed, brake and clutch pedals... still workiong on the instument wiring harness

So the build ( fun ) goes on........

Regards Bill

If your thermostat housing is facing towards the pulley, you can purchase a Lexus housing and it will re-direct the opening towards the flywheel.

Hi Larry. Please explain your posting, does it pertain to Bill's Subaru installation?

The stock Subaru engine has its water pump mounted to the pulley side of the engine with the thermostat housing on the bottom of the engine. In a stock configuration (In a Subaru) the thermostat housing faces the radiator as does the pulley. In the case of a stock configuration, the pulley and thermostat housing face the front of the car.

When the engine is turned around and installed in a rear engine car such as my sandrail or a Speedster, the thermostat housing must be turned to face the direction of the flywheel and thus the radiator.

To accomplish this, you can use a Lexus thermostat housing.

Thanks Larry, I was scatching my head wondering what you meant, so greg thanks for asking that question, can you tell me what model Lexas the par is off.

I undersatnd what a thermostat does, however perhaps you may wish to comment on the removal of the thermostat altogeather ? I've cut the centre out and installed the outer ring and seal only.
As you'd know we dont have the airflow over the engine line in the Subaru

Keep in mind the temp where I live is generally hot so keeping it cool is generally the bigger issue.

Regards Bill

In general, removal of a thermostat will cause an engine to take longer to get to operating temperature.

Removal of a thermostat can also cause a running engine to run hotter. Sometimes the coolant actually travels through the engine TOO FAST to have time to absorb the heat from surrounding engine parts. You can end up recirculating lots of cool coolant and have a very hot engine! It takes a finite amount of time for water to absorb heat. Most modern engines are engineered very carefully to control heat and thereby control related exhaust emissions.

I would suggest you carefully monitor all your systems until you get a confidence factor built up (actually I'd leave the stock thermostat in place).

Hi David,
I appreciate your comments and agree completely with what you have said, in the past when engines were some what less sophisticated I pulled out the centre of the thermostat replacing the outer ring, there fore simulating an the unit in its open position retaining some minor flow restriction, I

In 1996 when I installed a Subaru in my old dunebuggy, I did the same thing. Removed the moving parts of the thermostat and re-installed the the thermostat outer plate.

Race cars that are driven at high speeds for great lengths of time and are water cooled will actually run a smaller hole in that plate than was originally configured via the thermostat. The reason, If you slow down the water movement, then it has a chance to cool for a long time while contained in the radiator.

Total removal of the thermostat allows too much water to travel too fast through the radiator and thus, the engine will either overheat or run very hot.

Some physics in this thread is not correct. I would like to set it straight.
First, the colder the water or cooling fluid in the part you want kept cool, the better for removing the heat. The mass flow cannot be too high (modulo cavitation) as the higher the mass flow, the more cool fluid is available to absorb heat.

Second, the more exchange surface, air flow and cooling fluid mass flow delivered by the radiator, the higher the temperature differential from the inlet to the outlet.

A thermostat is great for allowing an acceptably short time for the engine to come up to operating temperature when you have a cooling mass flow which is suitable for full operating temperatures of both the engine and the fluids, designed for the external ambient temp at its highest design extremes and a system which is at the end of its design life with blocked and clogged passages.

This leads to the conclusion that the role of the thermostat is ONLY to establish the proper operating temperature, NOT to increase the effectiveness of the cooling system. This makes sense if you consider that a thermostat can only impede or limit flow of cooling fluid which works best the more un-heated molecules per unit time pass over a hot region.

Tomm

Tomm -

You took the words right outta my mouth!!

Billemail - good luck with continued progress on your COOL WRX project!

Cheers!

When I was racing my sprite I (and everyone else) used a sleave in place of the thermostat. It sort of looked like to top part of an aluminum tumbler cut off about 2 inches down. If you didn't use something to slow the water down it would overheat. We're talking old radiators (old british radiators) and that probably had something to do with it. Can't argue the laws of physics but sometimes they work better on a blackboard.

I must go back to my blackboard to understand this phenomena. I do not dispute the overall effect, I just want to understand it. The sleeve you installed restricted the coolant flow, correct? By what approximate ratio of diameters?

The more restriction there is, the higher the back pressure will be and the less mass flow you will have. With less mass flow, the heat energy per volume of coolant passing through the engine will be larger and the temperature of the coolant reaching the radiator will be higher.

Now I must go and cogitate on convective heat exchange, etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps I will develop the 'wasser-speedy radiator' equation! BWA HA HA HA!

Tomm

Forget physics. If the water is allowed to rush through the radiator, it doesn't have time to be cooled by the air transfer. The longer the water stays in the radiator, the cooler it gets.

All water cooled race cars have a restrictor plate of sorts to slow the water from rushing through the radiator.

Does this now make sense?

Jerry,

Thanks for making me think harder about this. While I cannot forget Physics, I can swallow my pride and confess that you are correct regarding the time the coolant stays in the radiator. This is because, I suspect, there is a balance which must be met between radiator size, back pressure and heat transferred to the fluid in the engine. Without a radiator, I want to flow enough water through the engine to keep it cool (operating temp), the more I push through, the more heat I remove. However, since the radiator has a limited surface area and airflow there is a fixed amount of heat I can remove from the fluid (heat is energy, not temperature). If I move too much fluid through the radiator per unit time (what I have been calling mass flow)I will observe a higher exit temperature than I want because I removed a fixed amount of heat energy from a large amount of fluid. In this case, the engine might indeed overheat. If I move too little fluid through the radiator per unit time, the engine will overheat because I am not allowing enough fluid to collect the heat. If I move just the right amount of fluid to transfer the heat from the engine and achieve the proper exit temp from the radiator, I have reached balance. Because this is not a fixed point but instead depends on ambient temperature, humidity, condition of the plumbing and the stress on the engine, I need an active throttle on the fluid flow. A THERMOSTAT!

cheers,

Tomm

I have heard from the Suby forums that you should only use OE thermostats. Others have found out the hard way that aftermarket parts in this case are junk.

OOPS! I meant Larry!

Tomm

And you wouldn't use a thermostat in a racing engine because it has moving parts.

Anyone remember the flapper doors on bottom of the Corvair engines? They were a thermostat to help warm up the engine. They didn't work very good because I don't ever remember having enough heat to defrost the windshield in Michigan winters. The heat sensing device that opened and closed the doors usually died in about two years anyhow.

So did the orignal VW have a similar device? I don't even know.

I think they used to have something that looked kinda like a round bellows between the barrels with a rod attached to a flap that restricted airflow past the barrels. I could be wrong, but I vaguely remember...

Greg - sorry for the delay as I have been off on a bike trip to the south of Thailand

I also will need an exhaust header for the Suby. Did you fabricate one and can this be supplied as well?

Lets move this to email. I am rgstraghan@yahoo.ca

Robert

Hi Robert. You have mail!

This thread is awesome - I'm following pretty closely, as the WRX motor is a very stout platform. I've modified a handful of them to the point where they're very stout street platforms - can't imagine the same power in a car that weighs half as much. :)

The ECU Dad was referring to earlier is an AEM EMS. There are maps for pretty much every popular platform out there, and the WRX/STi certainly qualifies, given the tuner following for the car.

By the way, to further continue the radiator discussion, keep in mind that while the thermostat does impede flow at one point in the coolant system, it also establishes a pressure differential. I've done some testing to prove this, and the mass and heat transfer math backs it up, to say the following is true:

1. Time spent in the radiator doesn't matter (meaning, the t-stat is not there to slow the fluid down to give it more time to cool).

2. The purpose of the t-stat (or a restrictor plate in the cooling system with race cars) is to increase coolant pressure in the head, and thereby raising the boiling point of the coolant (remember pv=nrt?).

3. If you remove the t-stat, chances are you will overheat with a daily driver, unless you change the stock cooling system dramatically somehow.

4. If you decide to throw caution to the wind and run without one anyway, I've seen a bunch of cars getting local hot spots from coolant boiling within the head, which eventually kisses the head gasket good-bye. While this isn't so much an issue with a standard inline 4 cylinder motor, in a boxer motor, it's a bitch because you have to do everything twice.

Good work so far with the 'rex transplant. Looking forward to further progress updates. :)