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1995 Eclipse GSX - 2.3 Stroker 400WHP

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Great job - looks bad ass. Love the headliner too. This is very much how I wanted to do the Talon. Nice to see someone follow through with what I was picturing.

Thanks Chris. Follow through is tough sometimes for sure. I actually finished everything up to this point in the thread back in 2018. Car sat for a few years while I did a few things in life. Bought a house and did some reno work on it while the car patiently waited.

Thankfully I am finally getting back on it. and have actually made quite a bit of progress in the last few months.

At this point I had a car with rebuilt rear AWD suspension and good interior but an engine bay that looked like this:
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So its been this many years no reason to cut corners now I decided to go ahead and clean up the bay and give it a respray. So after a whole lot of unbolting we ended up with this:

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Went down to the paint store and had them give me a pint of R87 red and some clear to go with it. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out there's not much dirt in it for spraying it on the lift in the middle of the garage. The front suspension is out right now everything. I guess that's obvious by the lack of front subframe.
 
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Unmasked it and started to put a few things back in. Picked up some fresh headlights from RockAuto for only $47 a piece. I was suprised they were still available actually seems they are starting to discontinue a lot of the aftermarket repair parts for our cars as well. Quality is not bad they fit anyway. The factory ones were pretty well yellowed but I kept them in case I have an issue with these china ones down the road.

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Cleaned up and rewrapped the factory fuse box harness. Powdercoated the brackets in black as well. Found a home for my battery relocation terminal block where the original plastic UICP would have run under the fuse box. Thought about doing a relocation on the fuse box but it really is a lot of work and the factory location doesn't bug me as much as it does some.

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Location on where my battery relocation cable comes through the firewall. I'm really happy with this spot. It's where the wiper washer tube comes through normally. Just moved it over and drilled a bigger hole for the cable in it's place.

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Sharp eyes will notice the factory alarm horn and that I said goodbye to the DSM chassis sticker. Still not sure exactly sure why I kept the useless component but ditched the chassis tag but there it is haha. I think someone was making rep chassis tags on here a while back if I remember right. Might have to pick one of those up.
 
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Over on the other side of the bay got the master cylinders back in. Found out here that the GST & GSX master cylinders are a different bore size. The GST one being 15/16" and the GSX being 1". So being that I will be using the GSX 2 piston front calipers I went with the larger bore master.

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I'm usually not to much for spending money on needless bling but the factory master cylinder reservoir brackets I had were so rusted that the bolts just twisted off in them when I went to take them apart for powder coating. So I bit the bullet and bough the billet brackets set from @Gsx-Dude here on DSMTuners. They really are quality pieces. So much so that I would have felt bad putting the yellowed original reservoirs into them. Went to STM & JNZ tuning for some new ones. These have to be dwindling in stock as well for NOS parts so I feel lucky to have gotten them.

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And finally how bad the original reservoir was vs. the new ones. What a difference.

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Thank you to all for the kind words.

Damn that looks beautiful! Can I use those pics on some posts for illustration purposes?:D
@Gsx-Dude absolutely use any pictures you want. Will be some better ones coming with the motor in here very soon.

On that note a little more progress. Powdercoated the bumper support and put a fresh coat of satin black paint on the A/C condenser. Yes that's right I'm actaully keeping the A/C. I know most builds I see tend to delete it for both weight savings and to free up space. So I'm taking a little bit of a diversion from standard DSM practices here. But it's always hot around here and I also think it will be kinda unique to have a DSM that hopefully runs in the 11's but still has the creature comforts.

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Put a fresh drier in while I was at it. Cheap insurance to get the A/C back going after you have the lines apart. You'll notice the retaining clips for the A/C hardline is different than the factory clip. Unfortuneately the factory clip is discontinued and no longer available. I couldn't find anyone that had any part number MU418044 which is even the same for Evo 8. Instead I went on Amazon and found some wire harness routing clips for the same 3/8" OD as the tube and used those. They are close enough. Not quite as firm as the factory clips but they do work.

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Also took a break from engine bay stuff to paint the wheel wells with some flat black undercoating. Couldn't resist installing the @ec17pse front arms that I had from the group buy a couple years ago. The level of adjustment is kind of intimidating on these but I'm looking forward to learning more about setting up the alignment with them when I get the car back on the road. They really are some cool pieces.

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On that note maybe Bobby or someone else could answer for me what the point of these removable spacers is in the design? If I was to remove them it would move the pivot point of the arm up which would change the roll center correct?

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Also took a break from engine bay stuff to paint the wheel wells with some flat black undercoating. Couldn't resist installing the @ec17pse front arms that I had from the group buy a couple years ago. The level of adjustment is kind of intimidating on these but I'm looking forward to learning more about setting up the alignment with them when I get the car back on the road. They really are some cool pieces.

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On that note maybe Bobby or someone else could answer for me what the point of these removable spacers is in the design? If I was to remove them it would move the pivot point of the arm up which would change the roll center correct?

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You are correct on the roll center, its just a fine tuning tool for these upper arms but as always i try to add some adjustment into everything because everyone has different needs and i never want to hold anyone back from getting the most out of their setup! No point in paying money if it limits you on adjustments right
 
And my gosh that foam color! That used to be white LOL really shows its been stored for a long time
 
Well as always I fell behind on the updates. But I did continue on through with getting everything installed in the engine bay. One of the problems with a fresh engine bay paint job is anything old you bolt up to it ends up looking ratty if you don't clean it up. Takes a tone of time in the end. Fog lights are a perfect example. Since my Punishment Racing intercooler would allow to me to run them I wanted to put them back on the car. But they looked like this:

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So of course I had to tear them down and redo them up to the standards of the rest of the bay. Turned out to be more of a project than it was worth but still. Luckily I have my own powder coating setup at home which really makes stuff like this turn out great:

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Fog Backing plates before and after:
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All the parts and pieces laid out trying to make one good set from 3 crappy ones:
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And finally the finished fully powdered product on the car. Like I said not worth it at all for the amount of work it took but they do look good.

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So with that out of the way I was finally ready to get the motor installed. I think where I had last left the motor in this thread I had just assembled the long block. Well last few years the motor has just been sitting on a stand in the garage. I had put on the timing components and Evo 3 intake but no accessories or valve cover as shown below:

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So I started attacking that now getting it ready to go in the car. First I wanted to get the VC on it but I had never powder coated it after I finished shaving it. Now we all know when you sand blast a valve cover you need to remove the baffles to be able to clean out all the grit. But being a street car I want to run PCV and so I would need the baffles to be in place. I saw some people had gotten new laser cut aluminum baffles and welded them in before getting the VC coated. This really wasnt an option for me as my TIG skills are sub par and I did not want to get baffles cut. So I ended up reinstalling the original baffle plate by drilling and tapping the VC for some tiny M4 screws. I used thread locker on them so hopefully they don't end up in the head and oil pan. I guess time will tell,

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I got the cover coated up only to find that it didn't match the block color at all. Matches the engine bay red just fine. The block paint has actually gotten way darker over years of sitting if you compare the first picture to this one:

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I had purchased a bored out 1G TB here on tuners a few years ago to go with my Evo 3 intake. Pretty crazy when you compare it to the stock 2G one.

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Had to open up the intake just slightly to get a good port match:

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All buttoned up with the elbow:

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Also a while back I had picked up a built Shep trans from @b00stedtalon2 and got it all cleaned up and ready to be mated up. I've never painted a trans before but it was already painted when I got it and I did a fair amount of prep work so I'm hoping that it holds up and doesn't flake off after 2 months.

Also because I'm powdercoat crazy I did all the engine mount brackets and clutch fork in gloss black.

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So with the engine and trans ready to go it was time to get it in the car. When I went to bolt them up I ran into a little bit of a snag. There was no dowel in the crank for the flywheel.

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Wanted to get the engine installed and not wait around for a dowel to show up. So of course DSMTuners to the rescue I found a thread where someone had made one out of a drill bit. So I did the same. Cut off the end of a 23/64" and then spun it in a drill against my belt sander. Seemed to work out fine and the flywheel fit perfect.

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Aluminum flywheel which I hope I am not cursing using later after reading some bad things about them. But it's what I got so I ran with it.

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And of course finally for clutch selection I went with a nice South bend clutch I had picked up a few years from @twicks69 I went with the lighter #2200 SS pressure plate because I'm not going to be making insane power and I want to keep the thrust alive since its a non split thrust 7 bolt. Also went with the TZ/B kevlar ceramic disc for easier break in and to work with the aluminum flywheel which I already had.

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And finally engine/trans assembly ready to go in:

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So here's where it gets easier for us guys with lifts. rather than drop this in from the top I set the assembly on the front and rear engine mounts on the subframe and crossmember.
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Then just wheeled it underneath the car and drop it on. All the bolts are pointed to make everything slide together easy this way just like they did on the assembly line.

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Finally got it sitting in the car. And doing it this way I didn't get one scratch on my nice new engine bay paintjob.

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Pictures broken?

Their working for me so I'm not sure? I use the site to host them so its not linked externally or anything. Which is one of the best things about this site so we don't lose our pictures in old threads like happened so many places after the Photobucket fiasco.
 
Man thats alot of details and amazing work dude! Very happy to see this progressing forward. Super impressed eith your build and details and the cars in the back ground are also some nice things
 
Thanks for all the updates and great photos. Love how you went the extra mile to restore so much under the hood. It's true - once you paint that engine bay, everything else looks TERRIBLE if you don't touch it up. I've seen others take the quick route and it just doesn't look right. Well done.
 
Thanks for the very good pic of the "one piece" thrust bearing that you found in your 98 GST engine (post #8).

I'm curious, when you rebuilt the engine from the "early 1995" GSX, what kind of thrust bearing did you put in there? You say in post #68 that you put in a "non split thrust". Is that actually the same design as the one you found in the '98 GST?
I'm trying to wrap my head around all the thrust bearing variations in the 2g DSMs and the early evos. Evo 4 for example, which seems to have the reputation of being one of the "worst" ones in this area.

Lots of interesting stuff with really good pics in your thread here. I'm probably going to cook up a Word document to index some of it so I can find it again later LOL.
 
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