Street Build 1g build - The Real Life Trials and Tribulations of building a DSM

*EDIT*
As I'm updating this build, it seems that this is turning more into a story than just a build. I've updated the title to reflect this, I suppose. This build is really going to showcase the real life issues behind building / working on a DSM and the problems, solutions that other might run into as well. Hopefully this will help people someday. Enjoy



Oh man where to start.

i Bought this car off a buddy of mine that had it for almost a decade. With 155k miles, He parked it due to it jumping timing and bending valves. It sat covered in a garage for the last 7 years or so, with the head off and tons of bolts and odds and ends missing.

i started off by rebuilding the head. I did some research and found a few things that were highly recommended. So i ended up with some Ferrea Oem size valves, Kiggly HLA, Stock cams and gears, GSC Zero tick lifters. I bought some evo 8 rockers from a facebook group but they were trashed when i got them, so i moved back to some dsm rockers. to summarize i got the car running but it the transfercase was bone dry due to some leaky transfer seals, so i parked it again and while i was doing that i decided to make the switch to Speed Denisity and a buddy hooked me up with an old school PTE 5031e turbo so im throwing that on.

i have a TON of pictures so ill be updating this post in the near future with the process of the rebuild and the current upgrades going on!
Here's a couple pictures of what the car used to look like and how it was when I received it

 

When I picked the car up the cylinder head was zipped up in an suitcase, fully assembled with the bent valves. It was in rough shape. The cams and bare head were pretty much the only things usable due to rust inside the rockers and lifters. I was able to clean the cam lobes up with a scotch brite pad. I took it to the shop to have the head decked (.002) and they told me that the valve seats needed recut and stem seals needed replaced.. so i had them do that. I brought them in my Ferrea Valves and had them cut them to those valves and install new seals as well. The also assembled the valves and springs in the head too.

 

After Finishing off the head it was time to turn to the engine bay/car. This is my First DSM ever, and my first exposure to them was THIS EXACT CAR, about a decade ago (almost 27 now) and so at the time my mechanical experience was pretty limited.
Over the years ive owned and worked on: 86 300zx n/a, 84 300zx turbo, 06 wrx, and built my 06 sti so that helped my experience since then.

So its safe to say i had pretty much no clue what anything inside the engine bay was. I bought the car with the head in a suit case, and a ton of misc parts just laying around the hatch area and back seats. (Cyclone intake mani, stock 6 bolt manifold, misc custom intercooler piping, and a tacklebox full of random bolts .

I Started with checking the ECU to see if it was a eprom ecu or not and lowe and behold it was! Great news for me. The PO had recently blew the trans up (im assuming from using this ebay short throw with no stopper, over extending the shift fork?) Anyhow it was replaced with a "new trans". So i picked up some new upgraded shifter bushings and a whole new shifter assembly and swapped it out and made sure that all the shafts and washers were greased up nice. I also found some solid trans side shifter bushings too and got those on. Shifts like butter!

Because i was basically starting from scratch, i followed the upgrade path listed here: https://www.dsmtuners.com/threads/1g-dsm-upgrade-paths.486218/ to figure out what i should do.
I started by deleting and cleaned up almost all of the unnecessary vacuum lines, and removed the Evap Canister, EGR, FPR Solenoid and whatever other solenoid was up there with it. (planned on running walbro 450 or higher later on, with AFPR)
After that was done I turned to some of the in car fuel system items. I ordered up the fuel lab fuel filter and conversion kit from the stock feed line, as well as their -6an feed line kit, and oem rail adapters, a Aeromotive a1000 FPR, as well as their -6an lines and adapters to work with the stock rail.

 

I know some people are going to disagree here but you're all entitled to your opinions.

Since the car had been sitting from a jumping timing belt, there were definitely some signs that the valves and pistons hit. Nothing catastrophic though. I was recommended to replace the pistons for good measure, but i didnt want to jump into pulling the motor quite yet, and if i did that i was just going to build the hell out of it with new internals anyways.
What i did was took some ATF and an emery cloth and sanded down the valve reliefs where the valves had collided. I made them smooth with no crazy transitions or rough edges. And that took care of that.

Next up, it was time to address the timing side of the motor. This is where i spent a good amount of time to try and make things right. I was greeted by my first surprise right when i took the wheel off. The inner rod arm had been buckled in pretty good. . My second surprise was when i took the motor mount out, it basically fell in two so i added those two to my list of things to order.
Worked the timing cover off the engine with it still in the car, everyone knows how fun that is and yet another surprise. Oil, oil everywhere. All over the front case, everything black, dirty and grimy. No wonder it jumped timing.

 

*** GRAPHIC WARNING ***
This post may contain some blood, just as a heads up. If it breaks rules, please delete or let me know and i will delete or edit it.

I proceeded to start pulling timing components. I chose to replace the timing belt with a Gates belt, pulley's, idlers, balance shaft belt, OEM Mitsubishi tensioner and gates water pump. I didnt plan on pulling the motor to do a balance shaft delete, so i kept the balance shaft. I might end up keeping it later on as well, im still undecided.
Taking off the pulleys i managed to slip the socket off the front balance shaft tensioner and right into the belt guide on the oil pump gear and cut my index finger pretty good. That pretty much halted any work on the car for a couple days due to it breaking open and bleeding profusely (i think i hit a small vein?)

A few days passed and i started on the car again. Finished CAREFULLY pulling the other pulley's/gears. Replaced the front crank seal, as well as both the oil pump and front balance shafts. Cleaned the front casing or oil pump housing or whatever the hell you wanna call it with about a gallon of brake cleaner. Looking gooooood. Threw all the pulley's/ gears back on and torqued them down to spec. Using the gravity trick for the oil pump, to make sure it was at TDC.
Cleaned off all the caked on old grease, dirt and mud off the subframe and called it a day.
In the downtime I picked up a brand new oem timing cover and a full timing cover bolt kit from STM Tuned, because when I pulled mine it only had 4 bolts holding it on.

 

Yeah it caught me a little off guard! It didn't hurt really at all I was more shocked than anything. And yessir! I'm really enjoy putting in the work and seeing it pay off. I'll admit I was skeptical but pretty much everything I read said to do what I did for those pistons so that's a good dealing. Good luck with yours!

 

With all the internal timing stuff taken care of I moved back up to the top of the engine bay and addressed all of my injector clips. They were all broken and all of the retaining clips were missing, time to replace them. I bought new ones and repinned the wires into the harness and partially reloomed them.
Picked up an EGR block off plate and got that installed on the stock 6 bolt intake manifold as i wasnt going to use the cyclone due to being to difficult to get working correctly (IMO)
I also picked up a Megan 3" downpipe and got that thrown on (what a giant PIA). With that downpipe, it interfered with my current "custom" FMIC kit with its awesome crush bent piping and no name ebay Core. I opted to go for a cheap alternative and picked up a cx racing/punsishment racing kit that was almost as equally bad. Neither cx racings site, or PR state anything about keeping a/c or having to remove the passenger side fan or run a smaller one. Theres just a ton wrong with this kit and wasnt happy. Ill go over how i made it work later on. I emailed the store i bought it from and punishment racing refunded my most of my money AND i got to keep it . Neat.

I picked up some ARP head studs during the beginning of the build because i had already decided that those are what i wanted to run for awhile. And, they're dirt cheap for these cars! I cleaned off the deck surface of the block and stuffed up all the oil and coolant ports and went to town with razer blade. Cleaned out the head bolt/stud ports by spraying some brake cleaner in there and then using a wire brush to break stuff loose, and then vacuum it out with a shop vac, and a straw ductaped to the end of it to reach in there. (its not stupid if it works, right?) Threaded in the head studs and snugged them down, hand tight of course. Im super stoked at this point, being able to see the turn around from fixing stuff that needed fixed to being able to actually start putting it together.

 

Alright its time to drop the head on!

I brought the cam gears inside to give them a nice bath with some warm water, dawn dish soap and an old tooth brush. They came out great, Dried them off and they were ready for the head.

I Set the cams in and snugged the cam caps down, to torque the cam gears. I lubed the journals to be on the safe side. Snagged and cam gear tool to hold the cams together as well. Now im ready to drop the head on. LIke i said previously, ive never worked on a DSM before so i had no clue about the issues i was about to run into while running arp studs.

The damn far side driver exhaust stud hits the power steering bracket. unbolted the bracket (minus the one behind the coolant pipe) and used a dead blow to smack the bracket out of the way. Slid the head on, Success!... or so I thought. I smacked the PS bracket back into place, bolted the bracket back to the head and started on the head.
Started the somewhat tedious process of lubing up the stud threads and both sides of the washers. I go to drop the washers in.. they dont fit between the springs and the studs. Sweet right? So, I unbolt the PS bracket, smack it back out of the way, pull the head off and drop the lubed washers down in the washer seats in the head for the studs, put the head back on and torque the bracket back down. What a relief. However this bracket is not done with me yet.

 

With the head on, I looked to the exhaust manifold. With have installed a new downpipe I wanted to make sure that the manifold was going to bolt to the head and the turbo just fine. Threw the stock manifold on, getting the manifold and turbo lined up was a pain but eventually i got it. I started snugging up the nuts on the studs and made it to the far right. TO MY SURPRISE *sarcasm*, you cant really get to the far right nut with anything.. I had a single wrench that BARELY fit on the nut.
So I'm going at it with the wrench, and all of a sudden, righty tighty becomes righty loosey.
Half the stud and nut falls off in my hand.
Ive never extracted a broken stud from anything, let alone a exhaust manifold stud on a cylinder head. I guess now is as good of a time as any to learn. It broke down inside the head, below the head, so i couldnt get it with plyers or anything like that. I turned to youtube (like anyone would) and found one that might work, which was drilling a little bit out of the stuf, and then hammering a torx bit or security bit in, and backing it out. Simple enough right? Nah, the damn power steering line was in the way AGAIN. Once again, i unbolted the PS bracked AND removed the coolant pipe this time and completely removed the bracket. I chopped the damn thing in half so that i would no longer have those issues again. Good Riddance! Painted it black with some low gloss black high temp paint to prevent rusting.

Went back to the stud. attempted to drill out the middle of the stud, hammered in the torx bit, and it ACTUALLY WORKED. the stud backed right out! Hopped on Extreme PSI and ordered an FP stud and bolt kit to replace all the studs with.

 

I got my story mixed up but really who cares. I did the timing belt before the last post (exhaust manifold) But I Digress ‍‍

So next was the timing belt. Like I said previously, I picked up a gates timing belt kit, with the balance shaft belt and water pump, but went with the oem mitsu tensioner instead. All new bearings/pulleys etc. This was pretty easy and straight forward. Started off by making sure the cam journals, lobes, lifters and rockers were all lubed up with assembly lube, torqued down the cam caps in order per the service manual and made absolutely sure that everything was at TDC. I made sure that the oil pump/rear balance shaft was at TDC by using the gravity trick.

If you're not familiar with this, this is basically how it goes: Flick the oil pump gear to the left or the right, and see where the timing mark settles. If the timing mark tries to settle TOWARDS the timing mark on engine/front case, you're good and you can put the belt on (make sure that the timing marks are lined up) If the timing mark on the oil pump gear wants to settle AWAY from the timing mark on the engine/front case, then spin the gear one full rotation and repeat until it settles towards the timing mark. There's a few YouTube videos out there on this, as well as setting the manual tension too.

The manual tensioner was actually a pain for me because the motor was in the in the car, and for anyone that's done this knows that there's not a whole lot of room between the front of the motor and the frame on the driver side. Let alone room for 2 arms and tools at the same time. It took me awhile to get this set because every time I would torque down the tensioner pulley, the grenade pin would be loose. and then i would turn the motor over a couple times (probably 6 times or so every time i did this) the grenade pin would be tight again. so, Rinse and repeat until the grenade pin is loose at all times.

Got my FP manifold stud and nut kit and got the manifold mounted back up and torqued down, and bolted back up to the turbo too.

 

So you guys remember how I mentioned earlier, that this cx racing/Punishment Racing FMIC fit like crap? Its time for that. This will double as a unboxing/first install review for those that are interested and are looking for one.

I order this kit on eBay for $247.99, with free shipping. Sick right?
I get this kit in the mail, its boxed nice, with plenty of packaging around the core and the piping. The core its self looks pretty decent, 3.5" thickness, no damage to it anywhere, the welds on the inside of the end tanks that connect to the inlet/outlet pipes are a bit sharp. Piping is nice 2.5" polished aluminum with blue couplers. I mean its really just a basic FMIC kit.

Started mockup of the piping and pretty much IMMEDIATLY saw my first of many, many problems with this kit. Some of which were already outlined on PR's website. Here's a list of all the issues I've run into with this kit:

1: The 2 bolt BOV Flange interferes with the stock turbo inlet/intake
2: The Compressor outlet "J Pipe" basically sits inside of the stock passenger side cooling fan.
3: The Bolts that bolt the J pipe onto the compressor outlet don't fit. The welds are too big hitting the head of the bolt. So i had to go buy new allen key bolts with lock washers, which still were pretty hard to get installed right.
4: The Coupler from the J pipe to the turbo inlet rides on the front motor mount
5: The intercooler inlet pipe, hits the Alternator. Not sure if this will cause an issue later on, you might also be able to get a smaller belt to pull the alternator towards the back of the car.
6: The intercooler inlet pipe hits the radiator. Its an extremely tight fit, even when you trim the holes on the outside of the radiator (THIS IS REQUIRED ANYWAYS)
7: The intercooler 100% will NOT using only the hardware and parts included with the kit. The coupler from the inlet of the core is at least a couple inches short due to a couple reasons.

A: The Power steering cooling line mounted to the front of the Hood latch support needs removed, and the lines need looped just under the power steering.
B: The A/C line coming off the condenser on the driver side interferes with the core. You either have to remove it completely, or have a custom line made that is a lower profile. I removed it for now, and will have a custom line made later on.
C: Even with that line removed, the core STILL doesn't fit using the couplers that come with the kit because the hood latch support right in the middle. You either have to trim it, or remove it. Being that it seems that this looks like a structural/supportive part, I didn't want to do that.
D: Even with that trimmed the PASSENGER side A/C line would hit the core.​

8: The mounting hardware that comes with the kit, absolutely doesn't fit at all. The "bolts" that come with the kit are too wide to fit through the mounting "tabs"?, and not only that. The tabs aren't even long enough to attach to anything on the car to actually secure the core to the car.
9: The front bumper support/crash beam needs to be removed, and left off.

Now you understand why this is so frustrating. I'm not the only one to complain about some of these either with this kit.

Here's what i did to make it fit.

For the BOV Flange i cut off the old flange, bought a Tial BOV, took the pipe to a buddy of mine who can weld (Thanks Jaren!) had him patch the old hole from the cut off flange and weld in the vband for the new Tial further up on the charge pipe.

The J pipe bolts, I bought allen keys with lock washers.

The J pipe coupler, I left as is

The intercooler inlet pipe I left as is

The intercooler core, I removed the power steering line in on the latch support and looped the lines. Removed the A/C line. Ordered up some 8" silicone couplers (cut to length) to space the core out from the Hood latch support. (which i left that as is), and the passenger side of the condenser

The mounting hardware, I used the "bolts" that came with the kit as well as the spacers, but went to Ace Hardware and picked up some 1" Aluminum Flat stock and made my own mounts, mounting to the frame under the Radiator, and to the bumper support/crash beam stud.

I emailed the vendor and told them that this kit doenst work without EXTENSIVE modifications and even then it would need custom work to get things to work. They refunded me $150

Oh I forgot to mention that you cant run the A/C fan with this kit either.

While my buddy had my pipes to weld them, I went ahead and took care of getting my throttle body cleaned and rebuilt with new HD Shaft seals and FIAV gasket too. Replaced the FIAV bolts with nice allen key bolts and some anti seize too. nice little upgrade.

 

Now that the Intercooler madness is out of the way time to check over some stuff before an attempted start!

Previous, previous owner installed an SAFC-2 for tuning. So i had to fix that. They used dolphin connectors and wiring down there was a mess. Thankfully i was able to get it sorted out and had no issues.

intercooler kit on, turbo inlet/ intake on, all accessory belts (minus a/c because the care came with the wrong compressor?), crank pulley on, radiator hoses on, thermostat installed, spark plug wires installed in the correct order, throttle body installed, intake and exhaust manifold installed, new spark plugs in, new battery, fuel pressure set etc, etc.

I think she's ready for a start Boys!
Filled it with coolant, and new oil. Unplugged the MPI relay and cranked the car until it built oil pressure pretty good. Time to start. I put the relay back in and go to start it. No CEL's so far. I crank a few times and it sputters. Crank it again and it fires right up! Noisy ass lifters, but I KNOW I made sure to bleed them down before installing them. Check for leaks, the outlet of the fuel filter is leaking. Easy fix, tighten the an fitting and boom good to go.

This is the first time this car has been started in almost a decade! I'm so pumped.
I let the car get up to operating temp, but notice that the temp gauge is climbing. I also notice that the Tach is not working. So I shut it down and try to bleed the system more but nothing that I do is working. The Radiator fan is not kicking on yet. Its the stock fan, with the stock harness. Nothing seems wrong with it. The radiator hoses seem warm but not hot. Same with the radiator. I pick up some new radiator temp and coolant temp sensor for the dash to make sure that its not just a bad sensor.

New sensors don't work. at this point I'm pretty stumped.. Not sure what it could be so i pull open the thermostat housing and make sure the thermostat is opening. Tested it in some boiling water and it opens all the way just fine. So I hit up my other DSM buddy who has a really badass fully built 91 Talon and he comes over with a new cluster to rule that out and that didn't work either. At this point I'm at a loss. I check out some Clusters on performancepartout and find a cluster that has almost identical miles as my own and picked it up. It arrived and I slapped it in there after a good cleaning and WALA! Everything works! I know the previous owner swapped out the backings on the gauge clusters so im assumign that the needles got messed up when re-installing them.

Time for a drive!

 

Oops, i apparently went for a drive before fixing the cluster

Time for a drive!
I'm absolutely blown away with how far this has come. What the engine bay looked like when I got the car, and what it looked like when I was done and the car running

Idling- https://photos.app.goo.gl/hKeDiyjLGVg3zZc99
https://photos.app.goo.gl/wHxD8aE1ML6Jr2oe6

Small pull, wastegate only - https://photos.app.goo.gl/GxFdBJKaMswX1HXg9

 

So at this point the car is running and driving. The garage cleaned up. I've driven it around the development a few times and all seems somewhat okay.

I was able to drive it to work twice and all seemed fine so far

I do notice a 1-2, and 2-3 gear clunks when shifting. Not really grinds, but they kind of clunk into gear. The other thing I notice is there's a pretty distinct whine coming from the under the car. Like a gear whine. Maybe the transfer case, carrier bearing or rear diff? The other thing I noticed is that there's some fresh oil on the cam gears inside the cam gear cover. I DID put some rtv on the sides of the front and rear cam caps so it wouldn't leak. I checked the valve cover bolts and they were kind of loose so I tightened those and cleaned the gears the best i could. There was never any oil on the outside of the cam gears, only on the inside. So as far as I could tell, there was not any oil in between the cam gear and the belt.

I parked the car for a few days, at the beginning of the week and then saw that there was a cruise that Saturday night and I wanted to showcase the car! Perfect! Couple other things I needed to do to bring this back up to par was the trans, T-Case and Rear diff fluids.

Picked up some redline heavyweight shockproof for the transfer and the rear diff, and went with some regular mobile 75-90 gear oil for the trans for now to see if that helped improve the shifting. Ill be switching to some mt90 later on.

I get everything out of the way (really just the intake) and started with the trans. Broke loose the fill plug first and then the drain. Everything drained out of that just fine. Honestly now that I think about it, I don't remember if there was any flakes or chunks in the fluid when I drained it. Lowered the the car down a bit so that it was even and used a fluid pump to move the gear oil from the bottle to the trans until it was coming out the fill hole.

Moved on to the transfer. I was pretty disappointed here. You guys remember from awhile back when I mentioned that there was oil everywhere on the engine and timing belt and stuff? The transfer was no different. There was no less than 1/4 inch of built up grease, oil and dirt everywhere around the whole driveshaft tunnel/transfer case. So much oil I'm surprised the U.S. didnt confiscate this car, stick a flag in it, and start mining it. (Pictures in a later post). So I jacked the car back up, slid under and unscrewed the fill plug, and then the drain plug. What came out of the drain was basically just sludge, and not much of it. Between that and the grease, I could tell that the output shaft seal was leaking on the t-case. I continued to drain it for awhile till there was absolutely nothing left in it and then cleaned off the drain plug (which was filled with lots of shavings) filled it with the Redline Heavy weight shockproof.

Moved to the rear diff. Lowered the front of the car and jacked up the back (this car has a hitch receiver of some sort?) Put a stand in front of the passenger side back tire. Once again, taking out the fill plug first and then draining the gear oil. This one was full this time, but there was quite a bit of shavings on this drain plug as well. I have no clue when/if the last time these fluids were changed. Maybe never? Cleaned off the drain plug, stuck it back in and filled the rear diff with some more Heavyweight. All done for the night, Cruise is tomorrow.

 

So Cruise night comes and I take the car out. Cruising up and down one of our Main streets downtown (like a downtown cruiser car show) and my Buddy with his Built 91 talon comes out, as does my brother. We're all cruising around, messing around and I do a short pull and all of a sudden smoke out the hood and from under the car. I pull over into a gas station and pop the hood. Blew the dipstick out of the tube.. I guess a catch can system will be in the works sometime.. I push it back in and take it easy for a little while, and then again smoke from under the car. All 3 of us pull into another gas station and we check under the car and sure enough more gear oil flung everywhere including my down pipe/exhaust, driveshaft and the underside of the car... I park the car for awhile and go ride in my buddies talon (somewhere in the 550-600whp ball park) come back and drive it home and decided to park it and order both the input and output shaft seals, drop the t-case and replace them. This is where things started to get spicy.

 

So im not 100% sure how this came to be but I have a hunch it was from riding in my buddies 91 ga. I got the HP bug (I already had it but, now i definitely wanted more) One of my other car buddies had recenly picked up another 91 ga but was unable to keep it but kept the good bits. One of which was an old School Precision/Garrett scm50 or 5031e. He hooked me up with this turbo for $100, which was too hard to pass up. Even with it being old. Information on this turbo is pretty extremely limited so it was hard to even find out and STILL is hard to find out what its even capable of making. From the info ive found, its listed as a 47-49lb/min turbo which is roughly like 400wheel/ ish. However, the compressor, and turbine wheel size suggest that its somewhere in between an FP Green and an FP red. Which should net me really close to 500whp. specs and sizes listed below. MY Measurements

PTE SCM50 specs
Compressor:
53.86 Inducer
76.33 Exducer
50 trim

Turbine:
64.9986 Inducer
56.6166 Exducer

I had a buddy of mine verify what turbine housing was on it (he runs a custom turbo mfg shop) and he found that its a .63a/r housing. So to me, the above statement makes sense.
Now I knew as soon as i picked this turbo up, that it was going to need a rebuild. Black pretty much everywhere on the turbine housing. You could just tell it was oil. (How precision like, right?)

So I thought to myself: "Well, now I'll need a way to tune this car with this bigger turbo right?" and then it just snowballed into, "Well, if im going to tune it, im gonna need a wideband, and i might as well run flex fuel, and a boost controller and an intake or turbo inlet that will fit, and a bigger fuel pump, and a rewire kit, and if i do that i might as well upgrade to a EWG, and to help it flow i might as well pick up an upgrated exhaust manifold" YYYEEEAAHHH... it went like that.

So now here's the car sitting in the garage just waiting for some seals to stop leaking t-case fluid.. The car was kind of running like shit because of some lean surge issues. Could have been the BISS or the FIAV. I did make sure to adjust the TPS before starting the car. I figured that ECM link would help me get this car running correctly, stock turbo or this 50-Trim.

So I order up the only rebuild kit i can find for this turbo, from Turbo Lab of America. While im waiting for that to come in I also order up ECM Link v3, flex fuel plug n play adapter harness with GM Flex fuel sensor, Speed density Plug n play harness, with GM IAT and MAP sensor, ingersoll 3 port bcs and oem adapter harness, a fuel pressure sensor so that I can log that through Link as well, a walbro 450 as well as a rewire kit from STM Tuned, an FP intake and K&N Filter from Extreme PSI, a purple Tial 38mm EWG from a buddy of mine, and a stainless Vent to atmosphere o2 housing that im going to have Jaren modify and weld on the tial vband clamp.
Things are getting serious!

 

Thanks! I appreciate it. That was my goal with this post. I thought at first I was just going to make just another build post but as I kept adding stuff I started to feel like people MIGHT be able to benefit from some of the stuff that im going through during their builds and their issues.

What you're doing is exactly what I started doing too when I started. I'm pretty sure I've read more on this site than i have any and every book ive ever read. haha

I hope this helps and good luck with your Build!

 

Thanks! like I said at the beginning of this thread this is one of my favorite cars ever and I'm super stoked to be able to build it. Trying to build it right, and I'm definitely learning a lot and doing new things as I go

 

Thanks I appreciate it! Head gasket is pretty easy, it just takes awhile to get there because everything that's connected to the head. But yeah, sounds like it could be IACV or the BISS maybe?