A Guide To Modifying Turbo Subarus- The Aftermarket Ep. 1

[Music] the WRX early on had lots of lots of transmission problems once he started to put the power down and and so I just rebuilt an alarming amount of gearboxes everyone knows that it's a potential failure point in this vehicle and the more you have knock events that's more likely that you'll see a ring way and failure happened the factory downpipe is very very restrictive once you do in the exhaust system I mean the car really comes alive I'm Andrew I'm a subaru expert and you were watching the aftermarket hi I'm Jermaine and I'm a super expert and you're watching the aftermarket hi everyone my name is Sam I'm a subaru enthusiast and like to believe I'm an expert and you are watching the aftermarket [Music] so today the platform that we're talking about is the turbo models of the Subaru turbo ej200 5 turbo ej2 5 7 and also the fa turbo engines so today we're here at Andrews Tech Automotive we specialize in Subarus here whether it's your cross track that needs spark plugs done or your turbo STI that wants to go nine seconds down the straight we can handle all of that here so the turbo Subarus are very popular in today's car culture there's a lot of enthusiasts a lot of followers they have the boxer engine the horizontally-opposed engine with all-wheel drive system so you can have a lot of fun with them so if you're buying a new car and after the initial break-in period you want to start making more power it's a little bit easier because all the fluids are fresh the spark plugs are new you know all the bolts are gonna be easy to come off and a clean car to work on so it'll be very nice but if you're buying a used car and majority of the customers and majority of the cars here are used they've their had two three owners now in those situations it costs a little bit morning much more money it takes a little bit more time to you know make sure that the car is healthy before you start modifying because you've got a cylinder that's low on compression you don't want to slap on a bigger turbo and a full exhaust and the injectors fuel pump and stuff like that and put it on the dyno and come to realize you know it's not making the power that it should because it's got a bad cylinder or your spark plugs are too old and it's not performing when we need it to so when you buy a used car it may take a little bit more time and effort and money to get it up to par before you can start modifying it one of the companies we work with is Advance Auto Parts there are two miles down the road delivery to us they always have the spark plugs we need one-step holders oil filters rotala t6 which everyone loves nowadays is very good to have advanced auto parts right down the road [Music] so with our experience to ejf a platforms they have their issues just like any other platforms the piston ring land failure pretty common on our cars head gasket failing those are pretty common the valve cover gaskets are fairly common too especially the passenger side because the exhaust manifold and the up pipe runs up right under it and on the five pwx transmission the gears are referred to as glass they will fail even at stock power levels so we offer PBG gears here that handle more power so there's so many factors that can go into a piston ring than failing in a Subaru we've seen it happen on stock cars with 1500 miles we've never seen it happen on some cars so that's a that's the million dollar question but I think what's more important is if you're tuning it have someone with a good reputation tuning the car and just know anytime you mod any car your reliability will go down there's just no way about it but there's a lot of aftermarket options now to try to battle some of those issues so if you pass the health check the very first modification that that you want to do as best bang for your buck is you really want to open up the exhaust system the factory downpipe is very very restrictive once you do in the exhaust system I mean the car really comes alive so for example today in the shop we had a customer come in with their 20 20 STI he wanted to make more power have more fun on the street thankfully Cobb came to the rescue their new titanium catback their Bell mouth down pipe we also instead of installed a top intake and we were able to dyno tune the car afterwards the car ended up making 372 foot-pounds of torque and 315 wheel horsepower so when we go past stage to the factory location of the turbo is on the back side of the engine on the passenger side so it's actually very limited to say the least as far as putting on a turbo that is way bigger in size then you would move on to a setup called a rotated turbo setup you actually rotate the turbo to the right and further back to get the clearance that you need to put a giant turbo on there you can also put them in the front you can also put them on the front to the side there's a lot of different options so it can get very very crazy and very interesting so when the customer comes in and they want to make more than 360 370 wheel horsepower at that point in time we may have to consider talking about a built bottom and so we're talking forged pistons Forge rods once you built it so that you can actually enjoy it without the rings failing or spun rod bearing or something like that the the EJ and the FA platforms they come with an intercooler but they sit in the engine bay to the top so we refer to them as a top mount intercooler you've probably seen the hood scoops that's kind of where the intercooler is but again it's very limited with size there's companies that make larger ones but the most efficiency is to have a front mount intercooler where you relocate the intercooler core to the front of the car behind the front bumper so that that will have to happen normally we recommend that after again 360 370 wheel horsepower just to get maximum efficiency so after after modification you really you need to make sure that the car is dialed in correctly and we do that on a dyno people refer to it as a pro tune just making sure that every modification is calibrated correctly and that the brains of the car knows what is working with tuners typically know exactly how much power a car is going to make based on what modifications are on it so that person should be accessible to you at all times at turbo access we mostly work on Subarus but we also tune other platforms which is nice because you can see what's what works across the board so we've been tuning for over sixty years started in 2004 with our original Utecht engine management system and now since time has gone on we've basically leaned more into the cobb tuning software which is really good a lot of cars that we tune are ve j series now based in 2015 on we've started in two more to the fa series which is it's a new thing but still a very Subaru definitely more modern car it's good on gas mileage you get a nice power band for the the turbocharger that's on it I mean 3,000 to 6,000 rpm that's a pretty good power band for a street car ej series is just as good but you're you're topping goal can be much higher I mean now you're starting to see thousand horsepower ejs engines and you're not quite seeing that with that face but over time you'll start seeing that so you can start with the reflash which most people are going to do it's going to get you up at about 600 to 700 dollar price range just by reflashing your ECU and then you have the upper end of that which could be your stand alone which would be like a a.m. or a motek or something like that which puts it on an outlier most people don't go that far but for most of what you will want to do with a street car the cobb tuning software it seems to be the best choice and gives you the most Headroom say ej engine what your characteristic that you'll have is that it's not going to want to run very lean so you have to keep the combustion chamber cool by writing out of rich or AFR and not running a lot of timing once you start doing that you start running into nock and if you continue to do that over a long period of time that's when you start having issues with the the and so the FA is a little bit different since it's a high compression direct injection engine they also like to run rich because I mean we're still talking about a Subaru engine so you still have to run them up much Richard then you got the run with most vehicles you also find that they are very knocked prone because of the higher compression ratio in an EJ engine do you have a little more Headroom when you would have a knock event the fa engine it is definitely not something you want to have happen you want to try and mitigate it as much as possible by having a good intercooler which on the fa engines the factory top mount intercooler it's not the best you want to keep those intake charged temperatures down that helps keep your knock events very low also makes the car much more consistent when you're out on the street typically what we have a customer come in for a dyno appointment I usually basically talk to them and try and get an idea what their goals are for the vehicle and most of the time they they give you a high horsepower number that is that is crazy it's like I have a stage two car and I wanted to make 400 horsepower and you really have to give them a reality check of well I can't get you 400 horsepower out of these particular mods and even if I could it's not gonna be very reliable if we did it that way on ej engine typically about 350 360 horsepower is where you want to go without having to happen to have a built motor on the fa engines as soon as we just get around 330 the 350 foot-pounds that's when I'm starting to worry about basically bending a rod or or or something happening on these cars I know that there's numbers out there are people making way more horsepower and doing it for longer but if you just look at just the data of people who have light modifications and what type of failures they have on the new FA engines you're you see that the rods are bending at less than 333 or 50 foot-pounds and that's probably where you should say yeah if you're gonna go above this you probably should have a built motor it's not afford rod and I think it just comes out to the cylinder pressure I mean you got a I think at 11 and the one roughly compression ratio and then you're adding twenty to twenty-five pounds of boost pressure on top of that hey something's got to give in on a J engine yeah usually it's the ring land on FA engine it's the rod so the pearls of the ej engine is that we've got years of development and so that means that a lot of the parts to make the horsepower is very inexpensive so you can go from we're from a 300 horsepower to let's say a reasonable 600 horsepower and you can you can basically go to a store or any online shop and just say all right I want 600 horsepower and they can tell you here's what it takes to do so Pro for the FA engine would be that it really has great Headroom on the factory turbocharger you can make pretty much STI horsepower with the factory turbocharger on it which is roughly around 300 the 320 horsepower which is pretty impressive I mean it also has really good fuel economy that's kind of a nice thing to have when you're basically modifying your car that you're not just basically throwing the money out the window just paying for gas Yates auto we focused mainly on Subarus we're really passionate about these cars I've worked on Subarus my whole life and I can't get away from them early to mid-90s I went to the factory training with Subaru for manual transmission and did get a certification from them to rebuild manual transmissions did little jobs here and there but didn't really start putting that to use until the WRX and then really put it to use then I kept track for a little bit and then I lost track you know focusing on trying to run a business and things like that but I'd be surprised if the number were less than a thousand and I'd also be surprised if there's is there anybody that's really rebuilt this many as I have because if that's the case then there's a much larger problem for the WRX we had this the five-speed narrow gears didn't didn't take a lot of power to to plow through that gear so we had that and then I know for when we got the STI that was the US market dipping their toe into the factory 6-speed SDI you only get a manual transmission and you only get the six-speed much much longer gearbox it will take a lot more abuse before the catastrophic failure you can still wear out synchros you can still burn up Forks you can still destroy your transmission just like any other transmission but the the power capacity was much better much improved with the six-speed so the CVT s we can get the CV T's I know that it's in the outback sits in the Impreza you can get a CVT in a WRX I believe it's a different model my understanding is they have a high torque capacity CVT that they use in the turbo model I think it was model year 15 that they went to the split case six feet in the WRX it's still similar to the 5-speed and by the fact that it is a split case unit it does still have the biskits center differential it does still have transfer gears output to the rear dual output to the front so it's it's a similar looking to the 5-speed but then when you get into the guts of it it looks much like a six-speed inside smaller the split case six-speed that comes in the in the WRX is while it is a one through six and that's great it is not an STI 6-speed they're very different gearboxes cable shifter versus link it shipped the actual width of the gears the gears are huge and a six-speed compared to the split case six speed and the 5-speed there's no comparison that's what everybody wants everybody wants the the factory STI six-speed it's a it's a pretty stout unit I like them got a bit of a comparison the 5-speed to 6-speed I'm talking about gear with gear size and why these six speeds are able to handle a bit more power than the 5-speed so this is second gear on it on a six-speed and this is second gear factory on a 5-speed and you can see that we have several millimeters more of gear width so that all translates to load capacity that's the reason that the six people take quite a bit more of the use than the 5-speed does in regards to 5-speed anywhere around 300 wheel horsepower or above you really should start setting some money aside to hold that kind of power we have top-grade clutch so we're going to be transmitting that shock load directly to the gearbox and that's when things could really fail and really start to come apart I've never been told a rating on the six-speed because manufacturers actual vehicle manufacturers they don't say that stuff but I've seen them hold I think the highest horsepower factory gearbox was around 900 horsepower yeah if you're picking your poison do I want a WRX do I want an STI the five-speed versus just sick speed is a relevant question what will hold the power what are your goals with the car these are all all things that you need to forward think about if the 5-speed with the way it works is all you'll need power wise fine you can save a bunch of money by just going with the WRX if you want the the capabilities of the six-speed then you're gonna need to get the STI but it'll also come with some additional things that you'll appreciate also better brakes and nicer suspension the difference isn't just the gearbox but it is very relevant lots of folks are talking about I'm on a six beat swap my car went to six beats walk my car but I think I've only done like 1002 swap out all the components to actually properly put an STI six six feet in the car it's gonna be it's gonna be pricey by the time you get the axles the driveshaft the shifter linkage to clutch and the transmission itself and can get it all fitted in there could you have put an aftermarket gear set in your five so we can actually save money there's several manufacturers of aftermarket gears for the Subaru gearboxes in Australia and they offer sync run gage meant straight cut gears helical cut gears and the dog engagement also in straight cutter helical cut set your goal to know what you're going to need and go from there there's a tremendous amount of information available and if you search and use the right resources basically anything and everything you want to do has been researched already and tried these cars can run the full spectrum from daily driver to weekend track car only and all the options are available [Music]

Channel: Gears and Gasoline

Views: 864,641

Rating: 4.9544988 out of 5

Keywords: subaru, wrx, turbo, sti, ej, ej257, fa20, the aftermarket, gears and gasoline

Id: FLDHUa-4-Ms

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/king21midas]

Love Gears and Gasoline especially the detailing video of the subie. Its a masterpiece.

[u/Generic_Name_Here]

Awesome, good find. Wish we had more stuff like this in this sub.

[u/[deleted]]

Great video. Just not sure why, when they talked about mods, they went from exhaust straight to a rotated turbo setup. That seems more than a little aggressive to me. So many more things need to be done before a rotated setup. At least in my unprofessional opinion.

[u/ImNotEvenJewish]

Donut Media also has a couple good subi videos

[u/Hazgebu]

I thought about posting it here but you were faster ^{^}