How We Built Our Project Subaru So it Won't Blow Up! (AND Drive Great)

so you've seen our videos about Subaru engines blowing up and why they blow up um how to build engines that don't blow up how not to blow up your car uh when you see all these you might have the impression that surus are pieces of crap and they blow up when you just look at them sideways but that's not necessarily true you might be wondering about how we personally build uh Subarus and uh what kind of reliab AB ility can you expect out of them well behind me is our shop car uh this is a um 2005 STI that uh We've totally built here it's my daughter's daily driver but we have it at the shop here it uh acts like a demo car for people that are curious and stuff like that and it's kind of what we feel is the ideal way to build a Subaru that could be an allpurpose car uh you can daily Al it uh you could run it hard at the track uh you could do actual track days um you know run both days uh every session not not worry about blow up and have a drive home um so you know there's been a lot of talk about all this but Subaru aren't like just total uh grenade cars and this is an example and this is kind of what we did so you might be a little curious about uh the engine for instance because that has perhaps the worst reputation of uh Subaru things well uh in our other videos we talked about uh reasonable expectations and to us that's keeping your engine at about 550 horsepower or slightly below uh we feel that this is kind of the happy place for a reasonably modded uh reasonably not super exotic belt EJ um sure I we can build you an 800 horsepower engine or a th000 horsepower engines but there's always going to be uh caveats at that like maybe you can drive engines like that on the street uh maybe you can do uh some quarter mile blasting but um unless you want to spend a lot of money and worry about replacing engines now and then I probably wouldn't recommend you taking them on the track to do track days or time attack or road racing you know those engines can hold but um you know it's outside the happy zone of the AJ unless you start getting into really exotic stuff so you know keep it at the happy spot uh 550 and below the the other thing about those big horsepower cars is that um you know more power more heat and it starts to get really difficult to manage the Heat and keep any semblance of a street car car I mean you have to get a really huge custom radiator huge oil coolers maybe a dry sump and it's hard to get that all the fit and keep your air conditioning and all your daily driver niceties the other thing is when you're at 550 um your your drivetrain is all good I mean you get a good solid twin disc clutch and um you know the stock transmission the six-speed anyway not the five-speed you know holds up fine and your uh axles generally don't give trouble and your um diffs and all that don't give give trouble when you start getting to the big horsepower guys you start breaking axles uh maybe you break the transmission it starts to spiral and get more and more expensive um you know sure you can get a race style dog box and and all that but on the street those are high maintenance items I mean they won't break but you have to take them a apart and dress the dogs and all that or you know they won't shift and the dogs and and things wear so although you can drive one on the street they're not necessarily the uh most low maintenance thing on the street the other thing to considered too is when you get really big Power you need a big turbos and big turbos mean more turbo lag um you also have to run a lot of boost to get up there so you know like fueling is a problem you know with E85 it's not as much of a problem but you know you're if you're running like um on a pump gas tune it's going to be a dog until you put E85 there um even with E85 uh you're going to have turbo leg and um you know it's not going to be the most Pleasant responsive thing on the street um sure it's doable but um you know like a a car that has no power below 4500 um you know kind of sucks as a daily so our car here was kind of built to not give up anything over stock so it has stock-like drivability stock likee levels of Turbo leg but um you know just way more power almost twice as much power as stock so basically the engine is a collaboration between us and ieg um we're using as a foundation um I iig cases um we think they do a great job of uh building their cases everything is precision CNC machined on um fixtures especially to accommodate uh Subaru's notorious um Distortion when you torque them up with studs and things like that um the case is converted to Clos deck using uh iag's cast um inserts the cast inserts are cool because their expansion characteristics match match out of the cast case so you're not going to get any uh weird Distortion due to the inserts under Heating and things um the uh case is Bored for big studs you know we're using a big 12 mm ARP um you know it's all machined with studs to uh you know avoid any of the Distortion um The Block is also o-ringed and uh we're running O-rings with the stock gaskets so we're not likely to have um any kind of uh head gasket issue um the the the bottom end we're running a stock 06 and later crank now these cranks are our favorite to run also like they're um nitrided and that gives a hard finish on the journals that um it's not likely to wear so easily uh the stock crank's not that bad it can hold up to 800 00 horsepower um so you know we're not going to have any problems uh the connecting rods are C's connecting rods they're uh longer than stock and they're running the ARP 625 custom age bolts that are quite a bit stronger than your standard arp2000 we're running the ieg J Pistons so what's different about these over your uh regular Jes is that um the pin is moved to accommodate the longer Rod um the uh quench area of the Piston matches the quinch area of the head better um you know we talked about that in our last video so you get more combustion turbulence and less likelihood of detonation uh the alloy is 20 2618 so it's a low silicon alloy um so that's nice and tough uh the best thing for uh turos um IG uses a nickel plating on the skirt instead of like Coatings and things like that the nickel plating is hard and slippery so less friction longer life uh the Dome is also nickel plated so um uh that also gives some protection against heat and detonation and the nickel plating is in the ring Groves which also helps the ring Groves have a longer life so EG with the longer Rod um we talk about stroke to Rod length ratio a lot in their videos uh the longer Rod gives uh more time to fill the cylinders uh because you have more dwell time at top dead center uh you have better angularity so you have less dig of the Piston into the cylinder wall um so you have uh less wear and more um uh better mechanical efficiency uh less mechanical losses um you know it might give you a little bit less bottom end but um that's not really too much of an issue uh overall it's a good deal and you know we're able to get the slightly longer rod and keep reasonable ring uh package spacing uh we're running uh King bearings in the bottom end the X xpc coated bearings uh we've had great luck with those um so overall uh the bottom end is pretty stout but it's nothing fancy like a Billet case or anything and so it's kind of reasonable um you know you're you're um it's solid but not super Hightech uh we're also running the uh ieg oil pump uh this oil pump flows about 15% more than stock and has about uh 7even or eight pounds more pressure uh with subus you know they have like their oiling issues so that um is never a bad thing the only issues are not usually due to the pump they're usually due to uh uh running low on oil um getting puked out and uh stuff like that but uh you know having more pump never hurts in the performance motor uh the oiling system uh we're running an ieg Pan um we really like their pan it has all these one-way trap doors so the oil can go toward the pickup but not away we're also running a i windage tray we really like this too because it also has one-way trap doors so the oil can't Splash up and get into the crank and cause a lot of windage to get puked out the Breeders like which is typical on these boxer engines um you know so like our oil is going to tend to stay in the pan and not fly around so much uh we're also running night Motorsports um Billet valve covers that have uh built-in air oil separators that are a lot more elaborate than trap more than the uh the factory air oil separator that's kind of rudimentary that um is is in these motors um so we're trying to do everything we can to keep the oil in the pan um so good solid bottom end good oiling control nothing exotic um also running the uh ieg pickup too so we don't have to worry about that fracturing or breaking and causing the bad day um our cylinder heads are the uh iag CNC parted heads um they work to try to get the uh flow even between the front and the rear cylinders uh we talked about that Infamous dog leg uh robbing the front cylinders of exhaust flow um CNC por is good cuz it has really good consistency uh we're running super tech valves uh stainless on the intake in canel on the exhaust um it Canal is good cuz it's really heat resistant um we're running 1 mm oversiz um we just did that because this is a fairly hot engine um um we're running um GSC valve springs and titanium retainers and GSC um their number two cam this is like a medium cam you know it's a fairly aggressive but um you know still streetable uh we have a slight L low idle due to that but um you know it's not too bad and uh with some tuning of the variable cam timing system we didn't really lose that much lowend power uh to clear the cam lobes um iig notched the heads where the cam followers go for more lobe clearance um that's about what we did with the cylinder heads um you know overall the lawn block is not exotic but you know it's a pretty solid deal um it has the potential to hold up to 800 horsepower um although you know it's kind of our opinion that it's happy place it's 550 and you can pound on it at that point and uh you know it's still going to last you a long time on the street um so you know that's our advice um we did some things on the engine like we're running a mxp equal length header uh we really believe in running equal length headers on these motors like they don't have that cool um subu sound that almost sounds like a normal car but um the equal links uh do make more power and they do have a broader Power Band so um you know when it comes to function you know we prefer that or over having the Subaru sound I know a lot of you guys love the subu sound but we're more interested in efficiency um now we're running a stock position turbo U that's because it just fits in the engine bay better um it has better thermal management and it kind of um you know looks a little bit more stop which is kind of important in California um we're running um a Precision drop in ball bearing turbo they have um two um with different size wheels we're running the bigger one uh We've run both turbos the the smaller wheel and the bigger wheel bigger wheel makes a little bit more power uh causes a lot less charge air heating and uh we couldn't even tell any difference in lag really so on a build engine you always want to go with the bigger one we're also running a uh cob 3-in downpipe and a gry tyy exhaust the uh cob downpipe has a cat so we're running a cat another thing uh we're running a process West intake manifold you know we kind of feel that that's free horsepower um it's one of the reasons why we make pretty good power on really low boost uh I'll get into that a little bit more uh we're running injector Dynamics uh 1700cc injectors and we have a flex fuel system over running the the Cobb system which is currently not being sold but um cob will bring it back on the market pretty soon I think they have a 49 State version on the market already and uh the 50 state version is pending it'll probably be out real soon if you don't want to run cob there's a lot of other companies that make Flex Fuel systems um to to handle like some of the potential Blow by and oil spinning on top of all the other precautions we've done we're running a ieg air oil separator uh for daily driven street cars we really like the uh iig unit because you run coolant through it so it helps uh get rid of all that milkshake and the oil so it'll help uh vaporize the water and uh send clean oil back to your pan it also has a centrifugal separator so when the blowby goes in there um it it it gets shot onto the wall at an angle so um all the vapor will go out and the oil will stick to the wall and drip back to the bottom and go back into the Pan um it's also a really big capacity I think it's the uh biggest air oil separator I know of for these cars on on the market which really helps when you're on the track and putting a lot of blowby through there um for ignition we're running um ignition projects multi-park coils uh these coils have about twice as much spark energy as stock and they um do multiple Sparks so low RPMs they fire the coils about seven times so you have a lot of chances to ignite the uh mixture so this is really handy when you have big cams that are wanting to L and eight stroke and stuff um it's one of the reasons why this thing idle pretty smooth for how built the engine is um when we're going through the motor we replaced um every single bit of rubber and plastic that could possibly get brittle uh we also changed the power steering pump and alternator we went through the uh wiring harness and everything that even looked like it might be getting brittle uh we replaced um eyewire makes like a lot of um uh connectors and goodies and um you know it's a good source when you're repairing your wire harness the wire harness was in pretty good shape on this car but typically they're not uh we replaced a lot of connectors and things anyway um the ones that are known to fail and get brittle so um you know everything is totally nice under the hood and a lot of those things are stuff that fails on these Subarus that cause problems um for our fuel Plumbing uh we went to all Earls um braided stuff and aend fittings uh we're running uh iag's uh fuel pressure regulator kit um we're running a fuel Labs big pump in a radium fuel hanger and the gas tank uh the radium hanger has a little surge tank and it has a higher volume um siphon jet so it helps get the fuel out of the saddle tank really well um really recommend that we did a video on how that's all cool so you might want to look at that um we have a iwire wiring kit and a iwire controller the uh controllers and the wiring are kind of known to be flaky on these cars uh when you're going to Big fuel pumps iwire makes a really good uh kit to get rid of the uh skinny wires and all that and make sure your pump gets a solid 12 13 volts and puts out what it's supposed to um so that's all by eyewire uh we also have a iwire uh wideband kit so you know we have full-time uh wideband uh air fuel ratio monitoring on the car which really helps with tuning that's another neat thing that iwire has uh we also have the eyewire stuff to convert to speed density um so you know iwire is kind of your OneStop shop for any kind of wiring things in these cars everything's topnotch high quality um totally recommend that stuff so um for cooling we're running a CSF their big radiator um this thing probably has about twice the capacity of stock we're also running a gry oil cooler um we like that because it has a thermostatic control which you probably don't want an eras car but for a daily street car um that's good uh we had our friends at uh BD engineering design a uh scoop and some ducting for the oil cooler um so you get a nice straight supply of cool air feeding it uh it also uh looks really nice down there uh it looks just like an oem part so they scanned it and did a 3D printed part and it looks like some of the factory did for an air intake we're running um Cobb's air intake it's probably a little bit small for this motor but I don't know it integrates nicely into the engine compartment and we think it looks cool um we're also running a synapse uh compressor bypass valve and it's recirculated so uh you know you don't hear all this pishy ricey noise that some people like but uh we don't so for an intercooler uh we're running a grety front mount um this might not be the best cooling or the biggest intercooler it's kind of slightly small for the power output we're making but what I like about it is um it's a tub and fin now most intercoolers on the market are bar and plate and these probably actually cool better they're also actually good as heat sinks so um for uh certain types of driving where um you know like drag racing where you have to do a burnout and do stuff with low air flow um the thermal Mass actually helps you um but when you're like doing a track day what I like about the tube and fin is as long as it has a lot of air flow it it cools really well and it also lets a lot of air go through the core and um that's important because your radiator needs air also to keep things cool so the uh core is also like a lot lighter than a barn plate so it's lighter um as long as it has air motion it cools well and um it lets air get to your radiator um now if I wanted to make a little bit more power I probably would have gone to a bigger Barn plate but uh you know for our allaround use I kind of like this grety unit um if I wanted to make some more power um I I could probably uh make bigger uh charge piping on the hot side of the intercooler and make a uh bigger air intake but our engine makes uh 520 wheel horsepower and uh 5 57 foot- pounds of torque and to me that's pretty pretty um pretty good um to me you know it's right in the um sweet spot of the motor you know I think with some charge pipes and um and some like a bigger uh filter on the air intake we could probably get I don't know another 20 horsepower out of it maybe a little more but um I'm kind of lazy and who cares and um you know it's good enough with a little bit of uh bigger charge piping also kind of make the transient response a little bit less good so uh there's some tradeoff I think everything packages nicely how it is and I don't feel like fabricating a bigger airbox or doing anything more but if I wanted to be king of King of the street or if I was actually racing this thing competitively you maybe I would do it but to me 520 is good enough um which is another kind of cool thing um you know like this engine's very efficient so you know the way we have it tuned is that the Boost Peaks at 25 psi and then Falls to 18 um as it hits the very top um you know this is pretty low boost it's almost kind of like a stock fa engine um so we make all this power without much boost so that's less stress on the motor um you know sure I can get a rotated Mount turbo turn the boost up or even turn the boost up on this but you know like why stress the motor you know any more than you have to like to me 520 is pretty scary on the tracks so uh you know I'm not a Pro driver but that's all the power I can use um you know 520 is pretty damn fast on the street too so one of the things we did to ensure the durability and strength of this engine is we made extensive use of cryogenic treatment uh we use CTP cryogen and we just about cryogenically treated the entire motor so we did the block heads crank rods and pistons even the bearings and the valve springs and things we uh cryogenically treated we also use WPC treatment on the engine cases the crank the rods um the cam followers the cams the springs then the retainers and Keepers uh anything that uh rotated or rubbed uh we also WPC treated it um we've talked about WPC and Crow treating a lot we have videos that go into what they are in detail so you can do a search on our YouTube channel or go to moto iq.com and do a search and there's a lot of material uh quickly cryogenic treatment acts like stress relief and it also does some uh conversion of the metal like if it's a ferris metal like it'll go from like an a tinis structure to Maric so you're going from a uh face centered cubic crystallin structur to body centered cubic uh this gives better wear characteristics and better strength um you know this is no BS and it's a real metallurgical stuff that happens with cryogenic treating uh WPC is a micro finishing process uh the surface is bombarded with uh uh really small ceramic me uh balls that are perfectly round U they're mixed with a Dry Film Lubricant and it that kind of acts like uh shot peening so it forms a really thin really hard compressed layer over all the uh surfaces that's slightly dimpled um this dimpling helps retain oil and the hard skin uh really improves fatigue strength and also reduces friction quite a bit uh so the wear and durability are improved a lot so we also have a lot of info about WPC treatment um it probably doubles the wear of things like your piston rings and your uh pistons and your cylinders and your cam shaft yeah I would say it easily doubles the wear um you know if you're running a low silicone 268 piston like we are for uh holding up to turbo boost uh 2618 is a lot stronger and tougher than your hyper detected cast piston but it um wears quicker because it's softer and more malleable so strong isn't the same as durable in the case of Pistons so these Pistons might only last 100,000 instead of 200,000 like your stock Pistons will but with WPC treatment uh they can last a lot longer so uh you know it's a little bit of a extra cost thing that we do on our Motors but it's an option and I highly recommend especially for a track driven daily driver kind of car so there you go so for the tuning on this engine uh Church Automotive testing did all our tuning uh they did a really good job when we did the uh Power tuning it was actually like an a record hot day for our area and it was 105 Dees in the dino room so so probably our 520 horsepower is like really conservative if we had even a halfway normal day it would have made a lot more power but um you know we wanted to be worst case like a our tracks in southern California they're all at Willow Springs and the middle of the desert and butn Willow and it it gets hotter than hell out there I mean uh you could easily be at a track day where it's 100 100 plus degrees out in our local so you know what the heck we didn't try to get hero numbers or anything but we tried to be very conservative like I said we're not running as much boost as we could be uh we're not running as much timing uh we did multiple multiple polls back to back to back and we had zero knock count um so pretty confident our tune's going to be really good um Sean at church uh he did a spent a lot of time and uh he worked the drivability and uh cold start and all that a lot of you guys that have Flex Fuel cars especially with big injectors and all that uh you know they can be kind of a when they're cold uh but this thing has a pretty Flawless cold start and cold drivability on ethanol um it also even though it has fairly healthy cams like very little lope it has a little bit of a rumbly idle due to the cams but uh you know no lope and no jerkiness and anything like that I mean it kind of drives like a stock car um stock amount of Turbo leg uh no Herky jerky and low RPMs stock like thaer response it's all pretty good um Sean also programmed in um a little bit of mild antile and uh no lift to shift and uh launch control with u a little bit of mild build boost on the line so uh you know we didn't want to fry the cad and uh we didn't want to have like kind of like annoying crackle tune kind of sounds coming out of the car so um you know we have a little bit of that it's all functional and it's not obnoxious so um you know a lot of I guess the big fad now is crackle tunes and pops and bangs but you know we think that's lame you know it's better to have a actual fast car than make all that noise unless you're on the track but uh so this thing has um you know like the bells and whistles of flat shift and launch control but with without any of that stuff um we also have like three levels of maps um so we have our normal 520 horsepower map um if it's a really hot day at the track we have kind of a thermal management map that limits the Boost by about 4 lbs uh we're still at about 450 horow on this map so it's still plenty fast but um you know it's like like if you're having problems keeping the motor cool uh this will this will do it uh and we have one even lower level of map which is about 400 430 wheel horsepower with even lower boost so if you're at the track and it's exceptionally hot day um and your uh temperatures are starting to creep which which can happen even with all this good stuff uh you can always go to uh lower map levels and uh keep driving so you know even at 420 horsepower this thing's pretty damn fast on street tires and no Arrow or anything so uh it's it's all good some of our video might jump around and I'm wearing different clothes and stuff and it's kind of because we shoted over maybe six months and stuff as we were finishing and refining the car uh but the car is pretty much where where we wanted and we're not probably going to change anything more with it um you know like if I get motivated I might uh change uh the hot side charge pipe to a bigger one I might reab fabricate the cob uh intake box uh I might make the Box bigger higher volume move it this way and run a bigger cone filter uh maybe get some cold air make a similar scoop for the oil cooler on that side and direct the cold air uh straight into the box um I don't know the car is pretty good right now so I'm not exactly motivated to to do that but um those are refinements that can get a little bit more power uh we spent a lot of time getting the details uh like the uh top mount water sprayers uh we uh reconfigured them and hooked them up so uh the front mount gets water spray uh controlled by the uh Factory controller we're running a anti-gravity lithium battery in a melee uh battery box um this batter is Prett pretty amazing I mean it has more power than the stock Le acid battery and it I think it weighs 3 and2 lounds or something I mean you pick it up you can pick it up with one hand and it weighs nothing so it takes about 40 lbs off the front end of the car and that's a feelable difference in handling um you know it's probably better to do this and have short wire runs than to mount a battery in the trunk um we think it's a pretty cool thing uh the melee battery box protects the battery in a crash and holds it securely and has quick release pins so you can take the battery out real quick since we're running um the process West intake manifold there's no provision to put the factory surge tank in there and uh I kind of think a surge tank is really important to get rid of the bubbles and things out of your cooling system uh you know the stock Subaru Factory one's really good but uh what we did is we got the iig surge tank that uh bolts to the shock Towers it's mount a little bit higher to help get the bubbles out a little better and it's a little bit higher volume so we're running the ieg motor mounts and the ieg torque arm uh these have hard urethane bushings and they really prevent the motor from moving around very much when you have a four-wheel drive and you're launching you put a lot of stress on the motor and you don't want the motor to twist around um you know this could contribute to wheelhop and you know just generally breaking things we were worried that the ieg mounts were going to be like vibration and noise monsters um in our experience with some Nissan and Hondas they're pretty sensitive to how hard of a motor mount you have but surprisingly you can barely tell um with the uh these things I don't know is it if it's a characteristic of how the motor shakes or if IE has some Secret Sauce in their motor mount formulation but um these tiny bushings that are made out of hard plastic really don't transmit that much uh noise and vibration to the inside of the car um sure you could tell a little bit it's not perfect but uh it's actually pretty darn streetable um I think we talked about it in other parts of the video uh we have white line transmission mounts and wh line diff mounts so everything's held in pretty solidly and to reduce wheelhop and stressing all the parts uh for a clutch I really really like the clutch we're running we're running a xclutch twin disc it has twin organic discs and um this clutch is designed to hold like um you know up to probably 650 horsepower but literally it drives like a stock Club like the pill effort is only a little bit more than stock the engagement is smooth and maybe even smoother than stock and it doesn't jutter or anything the only indication that you have some kind of serious clutch in there is when you push the clutch in you get the typical twin dis uh ringing of the center floater so you hear that ringing a little bit but that's the only indication that something that's not stock is in there so if you have a hot Subaru I really recommend this clutch um you know like having the organic discs and all that and the softer engagement is easier on your uh your transmission than the rest of your drivetrain so um I really recommend this on the street driven car over the uh supert trick uh Puck type clutches um another thing about the clutch is um Subarus are really sensitive to throwing multi-cylinder misfire codes and if you get a light flywheel um like a really light flywheel it'll pop that code all the time like a lot of you guys have race cars you probably don't care but um it's really important that if you want a light flywheel that it's not too light and the um xclutch is just the right amount like the flywheel is uh lighter than stock but it's not so light that you're going to be um popping those multi-cylinder mire check engine lights uh it's really important when you have cams like this car has which idle a little bit on the Rough Side to begin with so um this is one of the best clutches that's going to be the least amount of problems especially if you're on the a stock ECU I guess for our tuning side we talked about church automo testing doing the tuning uh he tuned an eutech we use a access port to uh monitor the engine conditions cais Port um so yeah um that's it on the engine side like I said um you know we're not trying to be the fastest in the world but we want to have the fastest most reliable uh daily driven reliability you can pound it on the track you can actually do a track day um you know conservatively tuned uh really friendly Subaru and I mean if you guys haven't driven a 500 plus horsepower um Subaru you know once you try it uh you'll have a lot of fun I mean sure it's not 800 horsepower and you're not going to be the absolute King of the street but you tell you what there's not too many cars that can run away from a STI with with um with a 520 horsepower a lot of you might wonder why we picked the 05 GD to build um I kind of feel like it's the best of the um GD type bodies so when they launched the car in 2004 uh the pattern so it really opens up your choice of Wheels um the other thing is the 2004's with the tighter bolt pattern hubs um their hubs were weaker and with a smaller smaller bearing system so that means like on the track with a little bit of wear everything would start to flex and you start getting knockback um in your brakes what this means is um when the hubs start flexing and develop play the rotor kind of wobbles around and it pushes the Pistons back into the caliper so you're at the track you're driving around you you come into the turn you hit the brakes and the pedal goes to the floor and you have to pump it to get it get it back up now you know I don't know about you but to me that's pretty scary so subu uh in the 205s went to a bigger stronger Hub to reduce that problem the other thing about the 2004's is the um steering rack is kind of like secured with clamp-on bushings so what happens is when you put big sticky tires uh the steering rack starts moving back and forth in the bushings um when this happens your steering centering changes um from turn to turn and um your steering Field's not as good in 2005 they mount the rack so it has small bushings folding straight to the crossmember not uh bushings going around the rack clamping to the crossmember so the 200s and later have a lot more positive steering steering rack mounting um the other thing in 2006 the car went through a lot of cost down things so um the overall the car is cheaper they did things like instead of Forge suspension links they went to stamp Steel from the WRX and overall generally the car wherever they could take money out they did so we kind of feel that the 2005 is the best starting point to build one of these things another thing we spent a lot of time on considering that this is an older car is improving the chassis stiffness so uh you know we have undercar bracing subframe connectors made by uh Cusco uh we also have a Cusco strut Tower brace and we have a bunch of bracing in the trunk um all Cusco stuff uh we have Ultra Fender braces which actually made the biggest difference of all the braces uh these things bolt to the uh door hinge bolts and U extended the shock towers and reinforce that part of the car and actually the ultra braces is probably made the biggest difference in them all but uh the braces really improved the ride comfort the mvh and overall the uh response of the car um you know newer cars they have much uh more stringent crash standards like the narrow offset barrier and all that and near cars are a lot stiffer than these old ones so you know the braces aren't as big of a thing but uh you know they're a N9 and day difference on these old cars so doubling the power means that you better be increasing your braking power quite a bit the stock Subaru brakes are Brembo and they're pretty darn good but when you're cramming double the amount of horsepower and a sort of a heavy car uh more brakes is always better uh so what we did is we used stop teex trophy kit uh this is a really outstanding brake system it uses a uh 355 mm rotor with a big uh six piston caliper um unlike a stop Tech regular system uh the trophy kits all the excess material is cnced away and uh everything is hard anodized instead of just regular anodized and powder coat uh so they're not going to burn off or change colors uh with all the CNC pairing down the whole system weighs about a pound less than the regular stop techs uh why we like stoptech is um because uh they have like I think 30 something different piston sizes that they can use in the caliper uh they can exactly match the hydraulic proportioning that you had in your stock brakes so what this means is uh things like your abs is going to work correctly now generally aftermarket brake systems they only have like maybe three different size combinations of pistons for your caler so sometimes um you have a long squishy pedal or uh the ABS is overb biased so the ABS is going to come on too early um that stuff's really irritating and often with some kits your brakes work less well than stock but when you're running the stock Hydraulics the stock Electronics uh stop Tech matches everything perfectly uh if you have a newer car that has abs and electronic Force distribution and uh stability control things like that they'll still work perfectly with stoptech because uh as far as the car sees it it's the stock brakes uh stock proportioning so that's why we love uh stoptech so much for OEM applications stock Hydraulics stock Electronics the stoptech rotor is full floating so that means it can uh move around with about um maybe 18,000 of play what this does is it prevents cone type Distortion uh like a regular rotor um because of the thermal mass of the uh Hub part um the the rotor kind of distorts like a like a cone as it gets hot and that causes a mushy uh pedal and unequal uh pad Force distribution generally you only see this kind of thing and track use but it's definitely something you can feel the floating rotor eliminates that uh the floating rotor is also a little bit more forgiving to a a piston knockback if the bearings start getting loose that's another good thing the disadvantage to floating rotors is when you're driving around on the street they make like a like a ringing noise that can be kind of annoying but uh stoptech has addressed this they have like some incent washers that you can't see on the backside that put some preload on the floating rotor so it's not uh free to Clank around so much but it could still react to the heat Distortion and still moves around freely enough um so that's another cool feature you get the the positives of a floating rotor with not the irritating noise finally the stoptech uh caliper has a bridge in it um this big bridge uh prevents spreading U with the hydraulic Force when it's applied and that assures that you have a really firm pedal and I think in benchmarking uh stoptech had one of the stiffest calipers on the market so you get a very good pedal feel very direct a stoptech kit comes with braided steel lines and we're running their 304 uh com compound in there for the brake pads 304 is kind of like high performance street now what's good about uh having big brakes is you could uh run a streetable pad on the track now you could probably run the stock brakes on the track but You' have to get a very aggressive pad and uh that kind of pad would wear out the rotor really fast on the street where it's not coming up to temperature so um you have to change the pads when you get to the track and then when you leave and that kind of sucks bigger brakes you can run the street of a pad like uh run on the street run on the track the 304 is pretty good it doesn't make too much dust and it doesn't make uh like squealing noise or anything so it's kind of a good overall pad and you can get away with it due to the bigger thermal mass of the uh bigger break for a suspension uh we use KW Club sport three-way shocks now what's cool about the three-way club sports is the damping is adjustable three-way uh you have your low speed and high-speed compression uh independent of each other and also you have your rebound adjustment at the top all independent um high-speed controls like how the car hits bumps and responds to a big hits low speed controls like uh body motion like dive Squat and Sway and rebound uh controls like rebound like how uh the the suspension unloads from bumps and things like that the ability to adjust these independently uh gives you quite a bit of flexibility now in this car we did it um for kind of like cosmetic reasons cuz we run the car pretty low that's purely for looks like if you're into the total performance we don't recommend you running the car as low as what we did but we think it looks cool um so when you run the car low you don't have that much uh bump travel so we up the high speeed to keep the car from bottoming out it's uh pretty cool enables us to get get away with that car is a little bit more nibbly over the bumps so if we're actually going to be racing this thing uh for competition or want a little bit bit smoother ride we probably would set the ride height about half an inch higher and kind of back off on the highspeed adjustment but we want to look cool that's really important you know um some of the other things is the uh Club sport has a stainless steel body so it's a kind of all weather all climate kind of thing it's not going to corrode and it has a stainless steel plastic covered uh spring seat now this thing is not going to corrode uh you can drive it in a salty winter and your uh spring seats not going to seize onto the uh the shock body so it'll be easy to adjust no matter what I think that's a really good feature I mean if you mess with coilovers you drive them in the rain uh drive them over the winter and man these things can get stuck but uh not a KW uh they also have a limited lifetime warranty so if um they ever go bad you can send them back and KW will fix them uh some of the things we did that's a little different is instead of the KW camber plate we're running a vlag uh camber plate uh we like the vlag unit because it has a half a degree of Caster offset built into the plate uh we wanted to run more Caster the Subarus don't have very much Caster stock I wanted to get about 6° so um this thing brought it up to about about five and then we used some white line bushings to get it up to almost six so more Caster more straight line stability um kind of more initial turning bite uh cuz the uh as you turn in the outside wheel goes to negative camber so the tire digs in a little bit better and uh overall a good thing you don't want to overdue Caster but uh for this width of tire 245 6° is about right uh so for some of the undercar suspension stuff uh we did kind of a lot of things uh first off we replaced all the bushings with uh White Lines polyurethane we used the black ones which are stiffer than the yellow ones um in hindsight maybe uh we might have used the yellow ones but uh the ride's still not that bad um we have white lines Roll center correction kit what this does is it moves the control arm pivot down um so the Roll center is restored on the lower car to a pretty close to stock location um when your roll center gets too low your roll moment gets bigger and so the car actually has a higher propensity to roll in Corners even though it's lowered uh so this corrects that um when you lower this pivot you also have to lower the tiod pivot or you get too much bump steer so this actually has white lines bump steer correction kit um we'll probably do other videos and get more into geometry correction and suspension geometry and what makes it good but I'm not going to dwell on it too long here because this is just a car overview and some of the things we did um we also have white lines um anti lift kit now they call it an anti lift kit I I I call it um anti dive reducing kit um the stock suru has like a lot of anti-dive geometry in it so what this means is when you hit on the brakes and the front of the car wants to dive under braking uh the suspension actually uses that braking torque to create an upward reaction force to resist uh dive this way they can control nose dive under braking without having to resort to really heavy Springs and stiff shock valving but uh guess what we got coilovers now so we have stiffer Springs and more shock valving what happens is that when you have a lot of anti-dive it it gives some unpredictability in the car's handling like it makes it like less linear so when you're breaking um you're actually adding kinematic bind into the front suspension so the bind is actually making it resist uh movement so it actually makes it stiffer so as you make the front stiffer uh you tend to get under steer and uh even wheel hop under acceleration cuz this is a four-wheel drive car um so when you're Trail breaking to try to transfer weight forward to reduce under steer you're actually increasing your front wheel rate and you're increasing your propensity propensity to under steer while your weight transfer trick is trying to reduce the under steer uh that makes for nonlinear handling and makes the car kind of harder to drive quick quickly but um what we're doing is we're uh actually making the lower control arm more parallel to the ground and when you draw all the force vectoring you're getting rid of a lot of that anti-dive so now the car will respond to Trail breaking in a much more predictive Manner and it reduces its tendency to wheel hop under acceleration another thing that the anti lift kit does is it um moves the suspension pickup point in the back outward so that kind of kick the wheels forward and that gives you more positive Caster so between this kit and the uh forlag camera plate we now have almost 6° that's up from the stock four so the car turns in nicer and it also has better straight line stability going down the freeway kind of The Best of Both Worlds with no negative tradeoffs we changed the anti sway bar in the front to uh White Lin's big anti sway bar so this is uh 25.4 millimeters it's um about 4 millimeters bigger than stock I think I can't exactly remember off the top of my head but it's something like that so it's quite a bit stiffer than stock it's also two-way adjustable and it has adjustable end links uh this way when you're Corner weting the car you can disconnect the end link do your corner weting and then reconnect it but dialing out all the uh preload that the bar might have that that would mess up your corner waiting job so that's a a pretty cool thing now if you notice we also have like a lot of Cusco under chassis braces uh this being an older car um the chassis flexes a lot more than like the late model so our steering rack uses uh wh line bushings the wh line bushings are stiffer and totally prevent the steering rack from moving so you get a lot better steering feel a lot more direct and gets rid of all the mushiness in the steering so while we're underneath the car we can talk a little bit more about our engine stuff I mean Super obviously you can see our front mount gry intercooler our CSF radiator you can see our equal length mxp header right here and mxp up pipe uh you can see our gry u oil cooler with the thermostatic uh housing oil cooler actually is over here you can kind of see it and you can kind of see the ducting if you look in there um you can see the uh the uh valve covers we're talking about and if you look really closely uh we have ignition projects multi-park coils the coils are pretty cool they have about 50% more ignition power than stock they also sparked the spark plug multiple times per uh firing cycle so you have a lot of opportunities to light off the mixture and these really make a big difference difference I mean we use it on our drift cars time attack cars Pike Speed cars and it really helps improve ignition reliability gets rid of the misfire we can run a bigger plug gap um they're a really good deal and uh you get all this ignition performance increase by just changing the coils so it's easy too uh Nob brainer uh you can see the ieg big sump oil pan what's cool about it is it doesn't have H below the crossmember so even though it's high capacity um man if you smash this sucker you've probably done worse things to the bottom of your car so looking at the exhaust we're running a cob 3-in downpipe it's a beautiful single piece manual vent piece with like seamless it's really cool uh the part where it bolts on the turbo is like investment cast stainless so you're not going to have any warping and there's plenty of area for the wastegate discharge to float with minimal of impingement on the turban flow so it's a super nice piece we have a cob adjustable short shifter uh really positive feeling it could be shorter throws right now we have it so it throws the same as stock so we don't put any more stress on the synchros we're just enjoying the better shift feel uh you can see some of the Cusco uh under chassis bracing here uh the exha is a gry Tai SE uh it's a 80 mm tube and it's really free FL it has straight through absorption type mufflers and surprisingly it's not that loud I mean this car is a little louder than stock but it's not ridiculously loud so going to the rear our rear suspension we're running the KW 3-way club sports just like the front our um shocks have a race comp engineering camera plate uh that's because you don't have a lot of camber adjustment in the rear without it um the back we're running White Lines adjustable links uh these have stiff bushings and you can adjust the uh track which is somewhat your camber but uh mostly uh you can adjust tracks you can get your tire fitment really good um especially if you're one of those hella flush guys which we're not but uh um we have full camera control um we have white line bushings in the uh trailing arm uh so all our bushings are stiff for one thing about these subu rear ends is that um they tend to bind if you go too crazy with your bushing stiffness so kind of recommend that you stick with the white line yellow bushings in the back maybe you could put a black one in the front but I would run yellow here here here here and here to reduce that bind um I guess if you wanted to spend a lot of money and you didn't mind uh some additional harshness if you go all spherical bearings that's another way to get rid of the bind and um you'll actually find like an improvement in ride but more vibration will be transferred to the cabin so it's kind of a tradeoff um we're running uh the white line uh bigger uh 24 mm rear sway bar um it's three-way adjustable and most importantly it has these heavyduty mounts um now the stock sub mounts are really weak and when you put a big bar like this they tear right out of the chassis um white line replaces this with a really strong aluminum Extrusion that's not going to distort or tear so we shot some of the last video we didn't have our rear brakes yet but we're doing some uh track testing and stuff and we felt that maybe the car would do better with more rear brake trouble is not too many people make a rear brake kit for these gdsd eyes and we wanted to stick with stoptech because of the proper piston size so what we did is we got a uh brake kit from a uh VA STI uh the one generation newer and uh we had our friends at uh BD engineering design us a uh bracket to adapt the caliper um the uh rear brakes are mounted really strange on these GDs uh they're mounted really close to the uh center of the parking brake disc and they're mounted on the uh backing plate for the uh dust cover of the rear brakes so because of this not too many companies make a rear brake upgrade um sex makes a AP rear brake upgrade and I think some Chinese company makes uh one too and you know I don't want to put any uh Chinese rear brakes on this car and uh the sx1 is nice but we like uh stop teex piston size so we came up with our own um Moto IQ rear brake upgrade for this so basically this kit uses a sd22 two piston rear caliper and a 135 mm rear rotor uh like the front it's a floating rotor uh has clips and what's really cool is the hat is designed so we can retain the stock parking brake so the parking brake is fully functional um it drops about five or six pounds of unsprung weight on either side of the car and gives considerably more stopping power so when combined with our front brakes uh We've noticed a pretty big difference uh the big brakes uh help us run a non-aggressive uh streetable brake pad uh at the track uh the stock brakes on these cars aren't too bad but for track use they're going to come up a bit short unless you change to a more aggressive uh track type compound which really sucks on the street like a like a track type brake pad will uh dust like crazy and chew up your rotors really quick in normal street driving uh so with our big brake system we can have a a pad that'll work good for Street and the brakes are big enough to have that kind of pad on the tracks so uh you know win-win situation here plus it looks cool as hell I mean you know I guess that's an important thing too so for wheels and tires we're using Advan TC3 uh this is a pretty good wheel for the price um you know it's one of those semi forged wheels so it's a highpressure die casting that has the wheel uh rolled out um on a roller and cold work for the uh Barrel section so the uh rolling actually produces uh a nice grain structure almost like forging in the part that's really stressed for a much cheaper price so it's not as trick as a fully forged wheel but it's kind of like uh a little bit more expensive than cast and has much of the benefits of forging being strong and light um the wheel is a u 18 by 92 with a 35 millimeter offset and we're running a 245 3518 uh Falcon uh right now they're 615s um you know as soon as these wear out we're probably going to put some 660s on here really good longwearing all-around Tire um you know with this wheel uh we get a really tight fitment um if if you don't do anything to your Fender lips you're going to rub if you're running a similar offset but uh we're able to get rid of the rubbing with just a light trim of the uh inner Fender lip we didn't even roll it we just uh trimmed it a little bit with a little U um standing wheel and uh I mean shoot we have a pretty tight Gap here no rubbing looks really cool so if you wanted to duplicate that that's the size wheel and tear we used so the subu um powertrain moves around quite a bit um stock the bushings are like made out the really gushy rubber so the diff moves around the moves around the motor moves around this contributes to wheelhop and jutting sometimes the wheel hop can get really bad um this this breaks components and stuff and uh it messes up your traction so what we did is we used white line bushings um they're solid hydrometer I think like 90 durometer polyurethane bushings to uh Mount the diff uh mount the crossmember and we're using ieg um heavy duty motor mounts for the and the engine now normally this stuff causes all kinds of extra vibration and noise uh we didn't notice any increase in nvh at all with the differential and subframe bushings uh the IG motor mount and transmission bushings maybe make a slight amount of more noise and vibration but it's really hard to tell I mean we've had project Hondas and Nissan where doing a stiffer motor mount really makes things vibrating and noisy but the IG mounts even though they had tiny small bushings we thought for sure they're going to be really rough I mean you can hardly tell over stock um maybe you almost can't tell but you know being really picky it's a slight amount of vibration and noise more but uh best of all it gets rid of all the wheelhop a really important thing we did is we use white line subframe locks now the stock Subaru subframe under cornering load and even launching at the drag strip can move around like an inch in all directions believe it or not but uh White Lines actually measured this with dial indicators and stuff and man that's a crazy a lot of uh movement it makes the handling Twitchy so um what we've done is installed white line subframe locks so they go right here and right here and what this is is a shoulder bolt that uh threads into like a stock unused Hole uh in the chassis through the subframe and what the shoulder does is it completely locks the subframe and keeps it from moving around at all um it's a really cheap part really simple but it really cleans up the handling and not too many Subaru people talk about it and I suspect not too many Subaru people know about it but it's a Qui quick cheap fix really effective and doesn't break the pocketbook it's one of the cheaper things you can do so before we close let's take this on a quick test drive okay so let's go on the test drive um the car has been cold soaking for a while so let's see how it starts and runs on uh ethanol from a cold start little bit longer crank than gasoline but not bad um R's nice and stable um you know not too bad at all uh let's roll out and see how she does so that X clutch is really smooth you might be able to hear the ringing of the floater plate a little bit but it's really not that much that's the only hint that this isn't the stop clutch now driving around uh the pavement here is terrible I mean this is LA and they they never fix anything and it's almost like a dirt road and when they do fix it it's not that [Music] great now the ride's definitely firm you know uh but it's really not that much worse than a stock STI or or an EVO or something or any any sports car I mean one of the great things is the handling on this car now this is like an industrial area Pavements really bad but the ride is actually pretty Pleasant uh this car is probably lower than optimal and to keep the car off the bump stops you know we're running a little bit more um high-speed compression than is probably optimal but uh it's still not that bad you know if I wasn't into having this thing look all low and cool I'd probably raise it up a half inch and back off the high speeds and you'd probably have some ride pretty close to stock but the handling is really really something now it's hard to get on this thing with all the uh traffic around here but let's try to a little bit so here we go man this thing is fast you get into a lot of trouble like a lot of people might want to run higher power but uh really 520 is more than enough I mean there's not too probably many cars of the factory that could keep up with this thing you know it's kind of scary on the street around here with all this industrial traffic and people going in and out you know being where we are the skill level of other drivers and the predictability of them isn't that great so I'm trying to be careful and still show you guys yeah it's really hard to get on it very much can only do Full Throttle for a few seconds yeah at this hour the traffic on the freeway is bumper to bumper not exactly safe to do too much [Music] here wow here's a guy about to pull out right in front of us had to hit the brakes oh well maybe that gives you a little preview about how good this thing runs but uh yeah sorry can't do a better uh better thing for you guys with all our traffic so that wraps up our take on how to build a Subaru um you know built correctly they're not bombs uh they can be really fast and really reliable um our Subaru here I kind of like to think of it as if the Subaru Factory wanted to build a super model um this is this would be it um you know basically we tried to even make it look relatively stock uh we tried to pay attention to the ride Comfort uh the engine drivability characteristics not make the most power in the world but uh have the best drivability uh durability good solid brakes uh try to avoid squeaks and rattles and things like that and uh overall I mean this is like a really Pleasant car to drive uh I I kind of call this OEM plus tuning I guess so you get all the attributes of a uh more expensive uh kind of a superar but without any of the negatives associated with it so you know if you like what we did want us to mess with your Subaru uh you can go to moto iq.com our website uh you can check on the garage services and we we can get back to you um there's tons of Subaru Tech content on Moto iq.com if if you're so inclined to read I know reading is a big stretch to ask from people nowadays but um yeah you can read all about it uh we also have a um um we're going to put all our Subaru content into the one place on our YouTube channel so you can look at all the Subaru stuff we have there all our videos uh so just you know look at our um our uh YouTube channel uh it'll be easy to find we'll organize it like that um if you want to get our merch um you like my cool Moto IQ hoodie and shirt uh we have that and a few other ones that don't say Moto IQ all over them um for sale in our web store and we also have a lot of the parts that we talk about here uh for sale in our web store too so if you buy our stuff it helps support us and helps us roll out more and more content so I hope you enjoyed this video I hope um I explained that uh you know C aren't total piece of the junk and you can build a pretty nice one um so until next time I guess we'll be talking to uh

Channel: MotoIQ

Views: 94,749

Keywords: motoiq

Id: cRr2pc9ctgE

Length: 77min 32sec (4652 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024