$12,000 vs $4,000 Transmission Upgrade

I spent $4,000 on parts to upgrade the transmission with my superx and I spent $112,000 on parts to upgrade the transmission in my Subaru WRX does more expensive mean more better uh let's find out in case you don't remember we bought two nearly identical Subaru rx's and upgraded them to be fun daily drivers as well as cars you can take to the track until we couldn't look man all right come on it it wasn't my fault it it wasn't my fault guess what just [Music] happened if you watch that episode you would know that Subaru made really weak Transmissions mainly because they have to package an all-wheel drive system in such a small economy car that creates weak gears so when you add more power they tend to blow up yeah and we've blown three of them up yeah at least they're consistent right yeah pretty consistent so consistent that we decided we needed to do something about it so that brings us to today so in true low car fashion and we're actually looking to save as much money as possible so we're actually going to fix the old five-speed but we did upgrade we got helical cut dog gears they're way stronger with no synchros I see that we're only replacing third and fourth gear in the components that interact with it everything else is bone stock so here's the stock third gear was thir gear was third gear that doesn't have nothing left what's left of third gear uh and then here's the new one oh yeah big difference it's hard to tell since none of the gears are left on this that's true but here's fourth gear so here's one that didn't break as much that we're upgrading as well and you can just tell the difference this is made out of a tougher material and it should be able to handle more power more consistently unlike this yeah those tiny little teeth I hate tiny teeth yeah but it's going to make it way more harsh on the street that's okay it's a race car right well it's supposed to be whatever you'll get it you'll figure it out all right now let's go look at my part if I break this immediately okay Justin you might have gotten some nice new parts for once and I got some nice used parts yeah this isn't clean enough for high bar right well but it's nice enough we've spent as much money as possible and we have gotten an entire STI six-speed swap for high WRX and not only does it have one more speed it's going to make me way faster than you guys but it's a lot stronger but you don't just need to buy the transmission you got to buy all the kind of peripherals the drive shaft the diff we've also got a clutch and flywheel axles our shifter and linkage and a button so we can modulate the amount of power going to the rear or to the front which is all one of those fun these are really nice parts we spent $122,000 on all this which is pretty crazy but the big thing about this is that install should be painless all I got to do is take out all the old stuff and just throw in the new stuff how hard could it be it should be pretty simple I've done something like this before in my personal car yeah I don't have to touch any gears man that is very true I'm going to take my time it's not as hard as to take my sweet sweet time the first thing I'm going to work on is getting the rest of the stock stuff out of High car so that pretty much means the rear diff and the axles and then from there we'll pretty much be ready to start putting stuff back in two nuts I could have landed on my [Music] toe with our axle popped I'm going to use my approved official uh workst here which is clearly a trash can with plywood on it and uh lower the car basically until the diff just rests on this then I'll pop out the last bolt then we should be able to pick the car up and leave the diff behind now the full weight of the car is supported by the trash can it's very safe trust me um just kidding I'm just [Music] kidding voila the old diff and it's okay I mean it hasn't blown up yet but uh it certainly you know not meant to hold as much power as we're putting down and it's an open diff which isn't great for handling and it's definitely not great for fun before we put our new transmission in we've got to install a new clutch and flywheel that match up with the STI transmission so it's very similar to what we had in the car we had an act and we are reinstalling an act but you got to change them because of the different transmission uh and in doing so we're actually going to get some increased holding capacity almost 600 foot PBS of torque on the new clutch and flywheel setup which is pretty good these are very sturdy they've got great holding capacity and they feel really good on the pedal so that's all exciting and we're almost ready for the transmission moving right along my name is Jimmy spun and I'm the WD40 brand specialist at donut now to make quality content everything's got to be smooth so it's my job to prep the set gets it all nice and loose those puppies be looking smooth what are my go-to products I love the no drip No Mess formula of the specialist gel lube for the boy power tools of the specialist dry lube then there's a silicone spray that works on rubber plastic metal and more I especially love the white lithium grease for Gears and easy pods for greasy Messes in the shop the whole WD40 special design in general allows me to quickly and easily grab the right product for the right job hey can I get some thank you my name is Jimmy spun I'm Donut's WD40 brand specialist if you want to become a specialist like me visit WD40 docomo to learn more about amazing specialist line are we done here we're done okay does anyone need WD40 anyone while high team and Zach job just plug and play OEM parts I have this 10,000 piece puzzle of engineering mess to put back together so instead of me trying to figure it out on my own we hired a professional this is Ron professional transmission Builder he knows what he's doing I do not I don't even know where to start start assembling I'll walk you through it okay we're going to assemble some shafts all right cool so this is the shaft the input shaft that's the input shaft that's going to hold third and fourth and then the upgraded gears are going to go on top of this correct all right cool well seems simple I doubt it is is this even the right way uh the other way there you go I'm learning I'm learning this assembly will only go on one way see it's really hard to mess that up it's really hard huh yeah like that your spins clean and then this one or drop got to get it real straight sometimes you have to press them all right that's Lube that's a lot maybe more should I do some more on this side no you're fine that's good all right cool I'm so unsure a little bit of a technique with this one oh that's an aggressive technique all right fifth gear is sliding on how does it lock in other one oh oh oh oops oops right there should explod oops so in theory all of our woses of a weak third gear and fourth gear are now behind us I say in theory because we're now running a hybrid dog SL Synchro setup and I don't think anyone's done this before also these parts are no longer available these were made like 20 years ago these are the last ones on the Shelf so let's see what happens stop this man stop this man the this my reminds me of home sleep like a baby on an exhaust that's our transmission jack don't make fun of [Music] me so obviously we're changing this transmission to the STI 6-speed mostly for the strength of it so that we don't blow up any more gears but we are getting an added benefit that I wanted to take a second to talk about and that is that the STI transmission is a six-speed the top speed on the STI 6 and the original 5-speed is very similar but the big difference is that each gear gets to be a little bit shorter so first gear is shorter second gear is shorter third gear is shorter than the five-speed components which is really nice for a turbo car especially on track because it means you get to stay up in the Power Band you know say you're going around a corner and you have to downshift uh one gear now in the 5-speed that might drop you enough RPMs to get you out of boost but in the six-speed it won't drop you quite as many RPMs so you might stay in boost or at least closer to it so you can power out a little bit quicker it'll make you quicker around the track so that is another way that High car is going to be faster than low car six is better than five okay you get anything in there are too many dudes down here too many cooks yeah many hands make light work but it's tough to get them all in the same kitchen oh there you go there the transmission is officially in bolted in place so now it's time for things like the dip the rear axles and the drive shaft SLA it right in took like maybe 10 minutes pushing on it which is not bad I'm at cruising altitude right now you guys got so much stuff to do you have a billion Parts on the table over there and I just got to like install a dip so that's what happens I love it I can get used to this just a little bit of grease on the splines to help the medicine go down and then [Music] you I'm going to hang them in the hubs dangle them get my trash can back get the diff on there pop these into the diff and then put it all up together together W now where's my trash can the tool befitting the project oh god there you go there we go yeah that's it got our rear diff and our axles installed so now it's time to connect the two with this drive shaft God this is uncomfortable time to put the down pipe in like and glove now I'm going to start installing the front axles let's Chuck this thing in there some clever editing and you set that so they can't spread apart hang on to that yeah I did ex H that interace exactly what you said not to do after we pressed on the 34 counter gear you want to check all your tolerances with transmission you kind of want a little bit of backlash or play uh because if everything's contacting each other it's not going to work properly it's just going to bind up so while we were checking that we found out that second gear is touching our counter gear and uh that's not good we keep running into these problems because we're mixing aftermarket parts with OEM parts so now we have to undo all of this to make sure we can get the correct tolerances we might have to maybe shave some tolerance into it I would known any of this stuff if I didn't have an expert here all of these gears would have been shredded immediately as soon as we tried to drive the car it it really takes a lot of knowhow to get this stuff to work properly especially when you're trying to save a book in hybrid system aftermarket parts with in Parts here we go again there's nothing I can take off on here I mean we could technically trim off the back side of the teeth mhm a little bit and it wouldn't interfere mhm oh God please no you know it's at this point when you're grinding away at your $2500 gears to fit inside of your stock transmission you might have messed up somewhere this is when you know that at least there's a pro doing it I [Music] don't the next bit of Kit we're going to install in High car is this this is from eyewire and it's called their DCC D controller dccd stands for driver controlled Center diff and that's a pretty cool benefit of doing the six-speed STI swap is that it's got a center diff that you can control and it's super easy this is going to be a plug-and-play kit and basically how it works in auto mode it sends roughly 65% of the power to the rear and 35 to the front and it has this it's an accelerometer that mounts in the car that's kind of monitoring what you're doing and how the car is moving and it'll automatically send power front or rear based on what it sees but you can also click a button and then turn a knob and lock up that Center diff so normally it's sending 65% to the rear 35 to the front and that's not always what you want sometimes you're going to want closer to a 50/50 split so as you crank this knob you get closer until you actually hit that 50/50 split so you can lock up the center diff send equal power front and rear and really rip so it should make this thing super fun on track I'm going to install the button and knob right here in these two blanks and I think it should be pretty easy we got to throw some wires around the car we got to mount a few things let's do it getting rid of the poverty cubes no I'm using them oh I'm putting buttons in them oh you're going to drill them open oh that's even cool yeah I'm going to have to chop a bunch of this off though yeah you hear that let's start with these you hear that noise cutting a new gear or yeah what do you mean he's grinding them down there wasn't enough tolerance is that normal yeah well he knows what he's doing yeah clearly uh well best of luck a fun little task what's the best [Music] tool we're just going to eyeball it I guess yeah that's pretty centered right ooh yeah baby no drama whatsoever we've got a onoff button and a knob for cranking up the front-wheel drive hour let's pop these [Music] in sounds way better it's not touching all right this is the sound you want to hear you want to hear a little bit of Wiggle if it's not making any noise that means everything's touching each other and that's just going to generate heat and create a lot of bad problems so we're good we're good we're good good to move on that is completed beautiful nice job time for step two now we're going to assemble then we close it up yes we're all lubed up coach all lubed [Music] up you hear all that it's not it's not supposed to bind up like that it's just not it's just not supposed to do that what we need to do is get rid of that interference that we're currently getting so that all this works together well it's not hyped about it I'm not hyped about any of that it's not really a uh thing I like to do but it it is what it is we have to have to make it run this is something I would never do on my own and seemingly the low car away uh [Music] sketchy our man Ron here chiseled away at a bit of the teeth on these new gears and now we have no interference just a little clearance a little a little bit of clearance in it'll work good enough it'll work for a little while all right the moment is here we're finally going to put the two case halves together all the intricate important really specific stuff is with inside these two housings so we're kind of going at an angle and then come straight down how do we know if I did that [Music] right all right the last thing we need to do is add our transmission case bracings what these do is they stiffen up the transmission case so that it doesn't Flex which would cause our gears to interact with each other the way we don't want them to some people say that's a myth we're going to take what we can get here 250 bucks low car why not let's do it time to put the intermediate housing on holy smokes awful lot like a transmission right W this baby is the center diff and all we have to do is feed it back in its [Music] mommy reverse reverse bird here we go this is it the last piece to this freaking transmission that has caused me two days of heartache and headache it even stressed out the [Applause] professional too much stress don't ever buy aftermarket gears don't do it don't do it they finally got the transmission together which is a huge step and all it took was grinding down a bunch of of the gears hope everything works out grinding gears and shedding tears we're getting pretty close all the parts are in High car I'm just tightening up the exhaust and then it's time to put fluid in the diff and the transmission meanwhile uh Justin over there hasn't left the table he hasn't even started working on the car yeah you're going to have that thing in the car today or yeah actually really actually yeah it'll be in the car today and we'll probably be running right right behind you right behind you way behind me really I'm going to leave you in the dust dude this thing's going to be so fast do a donut around you yeah you can do that now uh sorry you know I just don't normally get time to talk so I just wanted to try it out it's okay buddy it's about time you [Music] knowby yeah I'm trying out for NASCAR oh that' be fun for fastest wheel install wait bad start bad start no I I was just figured wanted to see if you were ready you [Music] know shut [Music] up okay the moment is upon us I think everything's done so it's time to try to start it hasn't been started in a while so there's plenty reasons that it could not start but cross the fingers hope to [Music] die [Music] hey baby for the first time ever sixth gear break sound terrible thank you so's my [Music] engine it moves thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you [Music] everyone oo Bab will be Subaru it up no time I felt it slip right in job car [Music] L time to fill her up woo Final Touch is done let's see if all this work in time has been worth it see if the Caron starts on again woo boy all right first gear good good this a second gear all right moment of truth third gear woo good good hey all right one more one more we did replace [Music] fourth there we go and that is the dog Gear with no Synchro it's going to make that loud clicking noise every time but everything seems to be working so let's go catch up with job on the mountain yo what took you so long I've been up here for 2 days two days days yeah I had to eat grass and weed no no dog how are your dog gears I don't know listen to this okay yeah it's kind of a race car sound a little bit race car it doesn't feel race car does it feel bad like does it feel weird it's a big thunk and I was just like yeah it's like am I shifting this right so what do you think so far dude well it's driving you know there was a there was a moment a couple days ago I wasn't sure if this was going to happen when we had to disassemble everything again yeah and start grinding gears literally well luckily our professional yeah out of the park yeah yes I'm just not happy about how much money we spent $4,000 on just two gears and that's insane right we didn't get a new clutch we didn't get new axles we didn't get limited slips it's a strange feeling feeling like I made the the smart play yeah right okay yeah I feel it you know a little Notch going into gear right the down is tricky yeah so I suppose you got to be rep matching well hey overall I got to say you did a good job uh car drives well it feels like it should it does you did save money I did you did hopefully make it so that this transmission isn't going to let any gears loose in the future and you know while this does feel good I got to tell you I think High car feels even better yeah it feels great um it stays in the Power Band yeah exactly the gearing is so much better it's perfect for the Canyons so I expect it'll be great on track as well you're always in boost yeah cuz that was the problem with this car it fall out Bo out and then it's just like yeah but now you're always in the Ah that's the mode you want to be in in the best part is is it's all OEM exactly I don't have any concern oh this is just in here and I like trust that it's going to work I'm not worried where like I bet you're paying a little bit more attention to every sound every feeling quite literally yes so while it is kind of crazy that this cost $122,000 basically three times what you guys spent right but it seems like it's sort of the price you got to pay if you want to make a bunch of power on this platform without exploding gears Dude that feels so much better I know and it's so smooth and apart from the shifting and the gear ratios and everything the limited slip diffs it's awesome this car used to under steer a lot worse and a lot easier and now it feels super gripped up it feels like you want it to feel right and we've got control of the center dip yeah so I got this knob over here once we take it to the track getting to dial that in will surely save seconds yeah it will if not minutes off my lapt it's really the transmission it seems like this thing was meant to have it it really does but that's why you buy the STI that's true but we didn't so now we had to do this dude what a good transmission yeah oh my [Music] god well we did it both cars are back on the road and they've got stronger Transmissions that will hopefully not explode hopefully yeah and for once in the history of high low there is a clear winner and I think it's High car it is it really is while we did have to spend more money to do it I think it's the better upgrade and low car is pretty much back in the same spot yeah just a little stronger it's like it worked out but this got a bunch of plastic surgery this is all different yeah this iser way better I hope you guys enjoyed watching us do it leave a comment below to let us know what you want to see us do next and like the video subscribe to the channel and we'll see you next time check out our merch check out Zoomies y'all have a good one bye [Music]

Channel: Donut

Views: 2,096,857

Keywords: donut, donut media, cars, james pumphrey, up to speed, moneypit

Id: yIzfZ2-tnM0

Length: 26min 1sec (1561 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 19 2024