Met Matt Farah from thesmokingtire. We'll see when the video drops, but he seems to approve of the H6 Impreza here. A skilled gentleman had his Turbo Scion racecar reviewed, pretty sure he is one hell of a driver. (look for TST review and you'll know what I mean) Andy brought his LS swapped Rambler. This thing was also sick. (again check TST for the review) View from the shoot parking lot. Can't get much better than this. Matt was also reviewing a Jag, pretty sweet ride. After the shoot we drove up the historic Pacific Coast Highway. Really awesome trip, highly recommend. Looking at the ocean in Santa Barbara. Only one self inflicted wound for the car the entire trip. The old 2.5 wiring harness (not connected or in use at all) got wrapped around the axle while doing 2nd gear pulls through the hills of Malibu. It was pretty worrying because all the gauges stopped working. Figured out that was just a ground wire. In the next corner we also found out it yanked on the coolant hose and broke the Coolant Tee for the expansion tank (H6 impreza specific part found at NAPA). After we diagnosed that we decided to have it towed and head to the bar. The next morning we met the car at Performance Auto Care in Thousand Oaks California. These guys are top notch. Most shops in MN won't touch my car since it's custom. These guys were really interested in the car and even found me a brass coolant Tee to replace my broken one. Can't say enough good about their shop. http://www.performancenapaautocare.com/ After that we stopped in Phoenix to meet up with some family. Swapped on the winter tires then hit the road again. Parked next to another OBS at the Grand Canyon. After 60+ hours of driving, 5000 miles, and crossing several mountain passes we finally wrapped the trip up on Sunday. I am very impressed that the car made the trip without major incident and it was even comfortable throughout. STI seats were much better than expected. I would suggest driving the US at least once just to see all the sights. I'll post the video of the TST review once I see it online. -Eazy
Looks like it was an awesome trip! And sweet write up/pictures of the journey Evan, thanks for sharing!
Awesome work! Any suggestions on where to pick up a used EG33 for a reasonable price locally? Would be curious to pick your brain on the megasquirt functionality too sometime. Congrats! Ben
Looks like you can get a whole SVX on CL right now for $800: https://rmn.craigslist.org/cto/5515902360.html After searching car-part.com it looks like the closest EG33 is in Ames Iowa for $250.
Really cool. He had some great stories, I'll have to share some if I make it out to the LAX cruise. I think the fact that he is willing to review a rusty Subaru shows that pretty much anyone with a semi unique build should not hesitate to contact him if they want him to review their car. I listen to thesmokingtire podcast which I enjoy, seems like his personality comes out more on that.
Glad to hear. He seems like a cool guy, nice to hear it's confirmed. I'd like to have him review the old derpwagon someday.
Cool thanks, yea I saw that on Car-part, I spoke with them and they weren't too excited to ship an engine for like 250, when it cost 250 haha. It does seem like they are harder to come by now than even a year ago. Thanks for the help! Ben
Whew~! Been a long summer. Moved to a new house which has taken up most of my time but I have managed to get a few things done on my H6 Impreza. I set up a new soldering station to build my Megasquirt 3 and MS3X. This allowed me to build the JimStim and JimStimX for simulating the car side once I finish the ECU (also did these because I didn't want my first soldering project to be my ECU ) Next I wanted to simplify my coolant expansion tank setup so I found one from a Ford Edge that would make things a lot easier with coolant hose routing. This meant that I would be doing a battery relocation. So I got a battery box and some welding grade wire and got started on that. Ground Side wires. Venting tube. New +/- block under the hood. You can see the bottom RHS of the block has the 2x 4ga welding grade wire that goes all the way back to the hatch for 12v. In hatch ground. Look at the open box in the trunk. Look at the finished box. Future aspirations. A few friends and I are heading to BIR next week for there Performance Driving School. Hopefully learn some things and see how the car handles on the track. -Eazy
I also found out that 90's 300ZX along with JDM skyline injectors are a drop in replacement for the SVX rails. So once I get the Eaton M90 intake fabricated and the Megasquirt ECU running I plan to pick some up.
To get my car ready for BIR Performance Driving School I thought I should go with some front negative camber to save my brand new Pilot Super Sports. managed to get about -2 degrees with a friends driveway alignment tools. It does not show much in the pictures but it seemed to help a lot. Not having been on a track in my life I was not sure how it would go, would my car hold up, is it setup right for such an event, would it be too slow? The environment that the team at BIR create for you takes all of the concerns away. They gave clear instruction and helped in any way they could. I will be returning to this event for sure. My friend brought his C5 Corvette. On the track he was able to diagnose that his power steering fluid was overheating and even was able to add a transmission cooler to the system to completely fix the issue. His guess is this is why the Z06 came with a factory Power steering cooler. Some really cool cars showed up. Even got to run with a brand new Focus RS. The car ran great all day. After lunch they opened up the long course and I decided to top off my oil. Problem was that I didn't put the cap back on and wound up in a cloud of smoke. A Fleet farm filler cap and a car wash later and I was back on the track. Shot of the car just after my last session. Here's my final outing. Did money shift from 3->2nd at around 9:20 but glorious sounds was the only result. Here's my friend's C5 running next to a C7, pure 'merica. Basically if you've not been to a track and you want to go, start looking into BIR PDS. -Eazy
So I'm still building a GG Chassis, just not the same one. This winter I sent the rusty chassis of black knight to the scrap yard, minus all of the parts that were useful. What put me over the edge was changing the fuel tank resulted in several bolts getting snapped off inside the rear subframe that would have only been rectified by some super sketchy welding. It was pretty sad to see a car that I've been through soo much with siting in the scrap pile... But this did open up the opportunity to welcome the next iteration of the same project. Welcome the Silver Fox. It's not perfect and for pretty much all the opposite reasons the previous chassis. Either way this thing should be tearing up the streets in the near future. I've been documenting the build process on the youtubes. Here's the latest installment: I'll try to post any updates to this thread. -Eazy
Nice! Watching that reminded my why I just did the 4 pot caliper swap. I should mention that the brakes held up with no changes after that shoot. Even did a BIR track day on the same rotors and pads
Custom built setup using the orginal manifolds from the SVX. Basically the cheapest setup possible. I'm in the works building headers though so my 2002-2007 specific EG33 Impreza exhaust may come up for sale in the near future. It's been rock solid and it bolts to any WRX cat-back.
Watching your dash cam videos of BIR makes me really wanna sign up for that PDS now. Pretty sweet to get a perfect sample of what it's actually like and hear them coaching you in the video.
I'm doing it again this year for sure. It's so much track time for the money. Also I got one of the better instructors, but if the one your assigned is not as great, feel free to ask to switch.
Thanks for the tips. I was hoping to do it last fall but didn't get to make it happen. Hopefully this summer. Did you book through BIR directly or a 3rd party? I remember finding a 3rd party either linked on here or via Facebook one time last summer that had a better rate than through BIR directly. Of course I can't remember or find it now... Edit - by 3rd party I mean like a separate group of people (I think) that just make use of the facility. Might be some of the same instructors, tho. I suck at this memory stuff... Haha.
Track time motorsports used to offer discounted track days, and it was literally the same bir school. I'd guess they are still doing the discount... Check out their website.
The Videos Krazylegs was referring to are on my other channel Black Knight EG33 Impreza (eventually going to edit / migrate them to my new channel)
You wearing flip flops? Lmao That is one sexy motor that you're assembling there my friend! Let me know when you want the title changed to "Boosted EG in a GD by EZ"!
