Taking a journey through pain and a misfortune. A speed6 saga.

With cylinder head #2 off at the machine shop I figured I could use cylinder head #1 to still do some mock up/fabrication work..

The bottom end was fully assembled, transmission bolted up.. You can see oil filter sandwich plate below the oil cooler, and the -4 an line ready to us for the turbo oil feed..


Got my big boy front mount intercooler mounted.. This was one of the pieces I recovered from the theft.. This intercooler and the T3/T4 hybrid turbo were meant for the Mx3 as part of it's SMF build progression... but that dream died back in 2018 when my best friend and racing partner passed away.. I figured why not re-purpose both for this build?


The FSWork manifold got ported out.. It was setup for a T25 turbo.. but I wanted to run the T3/T4 turbo.. I got a T3 flange and welded it to the cast manifold.. I did that by heating the manifold up in a small BBQ.. Once welded I put it back in the BBQ and turned it down, and then off using the radiant heat to control how quickly everything cooled off.. This looked like it worked well..

The "new" used gen2 motor came with a stock manifold.. I used that, with my stock turbo and stock down pipe to create the "wire mesh" as a way of fabricating a down pipe with out having to install the motor in the car.. I wasn't happy with this setup and scrapped it... I was having major trust issues.. That T3/T4 turbo might be brand new, but it was bought 10 years ago when cheep ebay turbos started flooding the market.. They were hit or miss in terms of quality... I didn't like the wastegate pipe setup.. It had no flex coupler. It had warped a bit during welding.. I didn't have the materials I wanted.. The OBX wastegate...... yaah... This was all old shit I wasn't really trusting anymore..


Here's a random picture of the turbo drain with the PTO bolted up.. it's tight, but clears just fine.. just above the support brace on the passenger side of the PTO is a better area to run the turbo drain.


Ok ok.. the engine bay looked pretty empty... I did tuck the motor in once with the T3/T4 turbo setup on it... If you zoom in you'll see the nicely ported intake ports of that botched cylinder head...

 

Autotech fuel pump internals upgrade, with an E85 safe seal kit.. I was going to do a bit of a "make sure you check this stuff" kind of post with this. I am not sure what happened to all the pictures I had of my stock worn out HPFP... There are area's of the housing and such to keep an eye out.. they do wear out..

Something I haven't tried yet, but I have loosely been researching... The pressure relief valve.. I can't help but notice how similar these HPFP's are to VW/Audi's... There are upgraded relief valves to help prevent issues with it sticking open, and allow for higher pressures..

This one comes to mind.. You jump from 2200psi to 2500psi...
https://jdyperformance.com/products/fuel-rail-prv-pressure-relief-valve-ea113-tfsi

 

I know some folks have tried the higher pressure PRV and I recall it not always working don't remember the specifics but @Sho I believe can shed some light on that specifically

 

I wonder if its a case of early attempts to build a better valve weren't that great but it might need to be revisited... The Audi/VW world has blown up when it comes to tuning and upgrades.. I've had the pleasure of working on and driving the CTS Turbo Golf R development car..

 

Pictures of assembling the car jump quite a bit...

Since I didn't like the T3/T4 turbo combo, I wasn't confident with my stock turbo after what it had been through... I went with this turbo.. The one I picked up as part of the Escort/Fusion turbo kit package.. This runs a T25 flange.. If you are connecting the dots, you'll have the same thought as me... "Adam, you moron! why didn't you just used this turbo to start with.. That FSWorks manifold would have worked just fine with this turbo."... Late night, stress. making bad life choices... Either way, now I had to modify the stock exhaust manifold, or the FSWorks manifold... *Face Palm* stupid... I think it's becoming clear, where I came up with the name for my build thread... My own self inflicted stupidity with a sprinkle of bad luck... Or was it good luck finding and recovering most of my stolen parts on FB market place??


I spent a bunch of nights before this point with my hand hovering over one of the many bolt on options that would have worked with the stock manifold... But, I didn't want to "buy" my way out of all my problems and I wanted to build my fabrication/tig welding skills...I've also been consumed by project cars and parts collecting over the years.. Once I was done with this build, I was chucking out the "junk" to de-cluter. Sooooo I got a T25 flange, welded it to the stock manifold, made some modifications and it bolted right up..

Turbo drain.. I've been talking about a different location for putting this drain on the 2.5Ls... If you read this.. I suggest mocking up your turbo setup on the motor, before you modify your 2.5L block.. At this point my turbo was hanging a bit low, and I believe the down hill run to the other location, might not have been that great..


I built a new down pipe..


Built a new 3" exhaust system... Putting a large cell California spec cat in, where the secondary cat would be and relocating the rear O2 sensor behind that.. I kept the stock mufflers because I am getting "old"... I am tired of daily driving my autocross cars.. I wanted something relaxing and quiet to drive.. I am not proud of this at all.. At this point, my struggles with learning to tig weld.. Trying to dig through all of my random exhaust bits to find pieces I needed... The need to just get this done, had taken over.. It's ugly, but functional at this point..


I don't have good pictures of it, but I fabricated a new battery tray, so that I could fit a smaller battery I had laying around that was brand new from a Corvette project.. I also fabricated a new Turbo up pipe and part of a cold air box for the air filter.. The cold air box gave me a place to mount my dual catch can setup.. I've got the PCV valve side isolated to 1 catch can with a 40PSI check valve in case the stock valve leaks boost pressure.. The fresh air side from the valve cover is isolated to a second catch can, routed back into the intake like factory..


Built my own intercooler piping..

I didn't take any pictures of the car completed.. but she started up and ran with out issue first shot..

I'd say at this point.. this build thread isn't so much about hey here's how you build a car the "right way"... This more about, here you go.. learn from my mistakes..

On to the fun part.. self tuning the car right??

 

There are two reasons no one uses the higher pressure prv on these cars.

First there is an inconsistent cut from to high of fuel pressure in the ecu. I don't know that any tuning solution ever unlocked this table

Second and most importantly we run out of injector first and with no injector upgrade available there is no point

 

That inconsistent cut is interesting... Little things like this, I haven't found much talk about when I've been digging through old posts... thanks for the added info..

 

Stuff like that is really from the early days of the old forum and sadly has mostly been lost.

 

If you've gotten this far and you are thinking... "wtf, how the hell is this ever going to hold together?"... Well you're right.. mistakes were made in the name of science? Can I get away with that?

First issue... The turbo.. Although it was brand new, it didn't last... While it was working, it was ok... I am pretty sure the exhaust housing was to small.. I was cranking up the static waste gate pressure a fair bit, but it was acting like the wastegate was getting pushed open to early... hard to explain and I didn't get a lot of time to test things.. The journal bearings became really noisy with in a few thousand km's... It was hard to know what size oil restriction the turbo needed in the feed line.. I trusted the guy I bought the setup from and used what was supplied in every I got... I don't think this was the issue... I think the problem lies in the oil feed it's self... I haven't taken the time to identify which passage is filtered oil, VS non filtered oil.. I have a feeling the sandwich plate is feeding non filtered oil to the turbo... During the initial break in, there was probably junk floating around that quickly hurt the bearings...

So that meant an all night session at the shop switching out the setup to the stock turbo, because I trusted that more than the T3/T4 setup..

Like all typical stock turbo builds with all kinds of breathing mods, trying to get load/boost under control at lower rpm's was a challenge.. Lots of information on how to get a turbo to spool better out there.. Not soo much when it comes trying to stop it from spooling..

I was worried about this build, so I was cutting oil filters open each time I did an oil change... The first 2 were short intervals.. for the expected break in period.. After that I was starting to beat on the car more... I did another one at the 10,000kms mark and things still looked good.. I still didn't understand how to get the DBW system working, along with boost control to keep low speed cylinder pressure under control.. this took it's toll on the motor... getting close to the 20,000km mark I thought I heard something when I started the car one morning.. I took it straight to the shop, dropped the oil filter and cut it open... It looked shinny... not good... so I dropped the pan.. No damage to the crank.. minor hot spotting on the rod...



Something I don't recall talking about was some modifications I made to the crankshaft while I was building this motor... I attempted to mimic the stock 2.3L crank by chamfering the oil passages on the 2.5L crank.. During assembly I had a bit of an issue with this... It needed a fair bit of work to smooth down and polish.. I should have stopped at that point and sent the bottom end off to a machine shop and let them deal with making sure all my bearing clearances were correct.. But as we've been seeing, I was making bad life choices.. I measured with calipers and plastigauge thinking I got this resolved... But there was always something going on in the back of my head that figured I'd run into this issue...

So at this point... If you remember.. I had bought a gen2 motor, that was supposed to be a good runner.. We discovered valve issues were causing a cylinder leak down/compression issue.. That cylinder head was fixed and now sitting on top of this lovely paper weight of a 2.5L... Soooooo, that stock bottom end in theory should be good right??? I decided to finish tearing it apart to inspect it, before thinking I could swap parts around and put it in the car.. Not good... not good at all.. The cylinder bores on 2 of the cylinders were at the max factory limits and the rod bearings were worn out on 2 of the cylinders..

Ok at this point it was time to throw in the towel for a bit.. Re-group and start fresh.. My daughter was coming from Manitoba to visit for 2 weeks.. Remember that nasty split I mentioned? Having to put my house on the market? Well.. rising interest rates meant I no longer was able to qualify for a mortgage to buy my ex out.. so I had to let the house go and move.. again!...Jokes on my ex.. when the house did sell, she got $60,000 less than my original offer to buy her out... I was happy, her and I got lucky when we bought I was still a head in the end..

Do you remember that Mx3? The one burried in my friends field after being driven with no water pump for 20+ min... Well a I managed to find a replacement bearing for the tensioner pulley that blew up.. I put a new belt on the car and said fucked it... lets see... Turns out the KLG4 motor wasn't ready for the scrap bin yet... A hydrocarbon test performed on the cooling system showed no signed of head gasket issues... So back into service that car went for the rest of 2023... Since I can't kill this motor, lets pull out my big boy slicks (275/35/15 Hoosiers up front).. take it down to Packwood Washington for a full weekend of autocross racing... 2 weeks later, lets drive it from Langley BC, to Red Deer(ish) Alberta for Canadian nationals.. then drive it home...

We'll take a small break here.. this brings you up to the summer of 2023... We are getting close to present day.. All though at this point, I think I want to go back in time.. slap myself around a bit and tell me to smarten up... Start following the advice you give to clients..

 

Thats a bummer... I used to be apart of some Mazda 323 GTX forums.. Same thing happened when there were issues with that forum... Lost a lot of great information..

 

I found the way back machine on web archive has snapshots of the old forum. Lots of info both good and outdated and bad now.

 

I've been using that to try to find the diesel gear swap info, no luck so far.

 

I'll look for it.

 

interesting.. I've never heard of this..

 

You dont make enough power to make it worthwhile the gears are just too tall to be effective

 

so LS swap to make real power? /s

my 2nd MS6 transmission has a bad 2nd gear, won't engage at all. IF I'm going in to swap my front diff swapping a couple gears might as well go for broke.

Do you happen to know how much larger those gears are?

Thank you! i wish i would have saved this a while back.

 

If I recall correctly 600+ hp was going into third at the end of the quarter mile soo like 140 mph

Just get a gen 2 gearset it's a tiny bit taller

 

@Crazycanadian nice build so far. Lots of wild shit happened last few years. Glad to see that you are all well after the slide.

I love the "ima make this work no matter what" mentality you have dude. Especially the CBE!

As others have said about info, when the old forum died we thought we lost it all. But there is still good information out there, it is just extremely difficult to find anymore. Some of us are trying to find the good stuff and bring it over. Just tedious.

I am looking forward to seeing how this goes from here. Good work and a great read, I appreciate you going into detail and having as many pictures as you do. Something people tend to forget these days.

 

interesting information.. something I haven't looked into yet, but I've noticed people talk about Gen 2 gear set swaps..

Thank you for comment, I feel old and out of touch for asking... but whats CBE mean??

 

Cat Back Exhaust

all good, most of us on here are old.