3 door sleeper

[Tyeler18]

Someone please shut down my bank account, I need to stop buying things.

I tried to get a couple buddies to buy this car when it popped up on Facebook marketplace about 2 months ago. I started talking to the guy and decided maybe I need this. I've had 3 colts but not a van and i've always wanted one. The guy said the engine had a spun bearing and the trans was missing 5th but it was complete/stock. 2 hours before we were loading up to go look at it he told me he was pulling the ad and didn't want to sell anymore, but would add me on facebook incase he changed his mind. I had pretty well forgot about it up until Wednesday of last week when he messaged me saying he needed to sell it now. We loaded up friday and ended up negotiating him down to $600 for it. In comes a 1992 eagle summit AWD to the collection.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

We stuck a battery in it and confirmed the noise, then promptly took it out in the desert and tried to blow it up but it's a fighter and just won't die. Had it singing at 5K+ in some deep soft sand through 1st and 2nd and it just keep plowing along so we decided just to yank the engine out this week and drop the 4g in it. The plan is just to get it running with one of my spare 16gs and then mod as we need to. We have an HPDE event next month and the goal is to have it ready for that. I'll continue updating as I can!

 

[fwdmaster]

Congrats on the pickup,these are so cool and $600 is a killer deal.

 

[Vegas Smith]

Such cool cars.

 

[CrackedDSM]

Love these things. I want a 4 door version. I love me some sleepers!

I had an 80’s model montero 2 door when I was 17, and man do I kick myself when I remember how I traded it off. I’d love to have one of those and build a nasty 4G64 for it. No one would expect it to be fast.

 

[vanilla gorilla]

I love it. I still have a 92 Colt Vista fwd. My grandma bought it brand new. I used to drive it some when I was younger. Tne auto trans went out, and i pulled the engine at the same time to rebuild it because it becsuse it was smoking. 15 years later its still sitting there

 

[CrackedDSM]

I love it. I still have a 92 Colt Vista fwd. My grandma bought it brand new. I used to drive it some when I was younger. Tne auto trans went out, and i pulled the engine at the same time to rebuild it because it becsuse it was smoking. 15 years later its still sitting there

Mitsubishi can build a hell of a reliable engine when they want to. I remember my first ever car and DSM was a 4G37 1GB talon. It had like 0 compression on two cylinders and half compression on one…still ran until the day we ripped it out to 4G63 swap it. Freakin hilarious the smoke show that would happen when going WOT with all of 45 horsepower.

 

[Tyeler18]

Love these things. I want a 4 door version. I love me some sleepers!

I had an 80’s model montero 2 door when I was 17, and man do I kick myself when I remember how I traded it off. I’d love to have one of those and build a nasty 4G64 for it. No one would expect it to be fast.

You'll like the 4 door gen 1 in my profile too then . 600+hp turbo V8 makes for one hell of a sleeper. A buddy has a 2 door raider we're LS swapping too but plan to do an LSA instead of a turbo. The montero has no business with this kind of power

 

[Tyeler18]

Spent some time friday after work pulling this thing apart. I don't have enough room at my house so my buddy was kind enough to keep the car there. He lives about 30 minutes away so it prevents me from spending time wrenching on this like I can with my other cars, but luckily he has no fear of ripping into projects like this and is motivated to work on it. I showed up and he had half the hard parts off and nearly ready to pull the drivetrain. We spent maybe an hour and had the 4g93 out! These use a small crossmember compared to a dsm so it was easier to just drop the whole drivetrain out the bottom. Quick work on this thing.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

This trans was missing 5th and reverse was hard to get into and when my buddy drained it it was basically out of fluid completely. I'm actually amazed how nicely it shifted and how quiet it was considering there was no fluid in it and we beat it quite a bit. I'm going to tear into it and see if I can throw some bearings and fix 5th and we plan to run it. If not I have a few spare trans we can either pillage for parts or build another.

There is good news though. We picked up a 2ga eclipse a few months ago to AWD swap his spyder with. What we didn't know was how many quality mods/extras the car had (neither did the PO). The guy had done a headgasket and couldn't get it to run afterwards, we didn't really care about the engine we just wanted the trans back. The car ended up having a 6 bolt swap, a bunch of greddy parts, fidanza flywheel and ACT clutch and a handful of other parts. We decided the 6 bolt would be perfect to drop in this car after noticing the intake cam was timed 180 out. I stuck a light down a spark plug hole to take a peek in it and noticed some shiny looking pistons, so we decided to pull the head off and inspect it.

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Turns out it has ross pistons, h-beams, ARP studs everywhere, BSE, and a built head with 1mm over valves! He definitely got his money worth and then some on this car as we picked it up very cheap. The plan was to throw one of my spare 16g's on the car and just crank it up and have a responsive street setup, but now we may have to throw something a little bigger on. The plan is to throw the head back on with a new headgasket and get it in the car so I can start wiring it up. I have a couple spare 3g/evo ecu's and since all of my other cars run on evo ecus it'll be easy to throw those in and go.

 

[Tyeler18]

Officially 4g63T swapped! We started off the day resealing the shortblock. There was one broken off oil pan bolt that needed fixed and I was 30 minutes from my tools so we improvised with a torx bit socket. Worked perfect!

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Next we needed to make it pretty so a few coats of engine enamel had the block looking fresh again.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

We went to the yard saturday to pull a spare trans from a 95 only to find out that they had recently crushed it. This is an oddball 92 that uses 3 trans mounts like a 2g dsm so a standard 1g trans (which I have a few of) doesn't just bolt in. I decided to open this one up and see what happened with 5th. I was kind of surprised to see a broken shift fork in this thing. It wrecked the hub too.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Grabbed a spare out of a parts trans and tossed it in. There is quite a bit of metal in this trans but it shifted nice aside from 5th/reverse so were going to run it until it blows. I'll flush the case a few times and get as much out as possible, but it shifts on the bench great into 5/R now so I'm satisfied for the time being. Glued the end case back on and brought the pressure washer out as this thing was filthy.

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Tossed on the well used fidanza flywheel and a used OE replacement clutch and mated the now clean-er trans to block. We had some issues figuring out what starter plate to use. Ultimately I think a 1g AWD plate is the go to here, but I had already drove home 2x and wasn't wasting another hour trip to get a 1g plate so we threw on the 2g starter plate after testing the stock summit plate and realizing it wouldn't work. The 2g plate fits everywhere except 1 starter bolt hole needing drilled out which is no big deal.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

The next obstacle was the timing belt mount/bracket. This being a 92 would normally use a 1g style mount, but being an oddball with 2g style trans mounts I wasn't sure. One of the van guys said use a 1g mount so we swapped the 6 bolt swap 2g bracket out only to find out we needed to swap back to a 2g mount and bracket. Not a big deal but for anyone doing this swap, if you have 2g style trans mounts use 2g style engine mount too. All said and done we got it all dropped in and bolted up. Stuck a 20g on it which is probably what will be on here for now. Not bad for a days work!

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Planning to mesh the harness this week and get some hoses/intercooler setup done, but there's not a whole lot left to get it going. We pulled an evaporator case from a 92 while at the yard since this was a non-a/c car so I need to swap all the A/C parts in but thats all minor details for now. We just want to get it running so we can use it.

 

[Tyeler18]

Had some free time at work today so I stripped down a stock harness and made it standalone. I planned to reuse the stock summit harness and just repin it to a 1g pinout and add whatever wiring needed added in. Studying some of the pinouts and it looked like it would turn into a pain quickly. I also would have to run one of my patch harnesses to go to the evo ecu. I took a 2g harness instead, pinned it to evo pinout and stripped it down. No patch harness needed and this should work out better in the long run anyways. Just need to loom it in some mil spec loom and wire in a few pigtails that I cut off in the past. Kind of mad that I've been using this as a parts harness as this ended up being a really nice harness when I stripped it down. Nothing major at least and it should be in the car tomorrow.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

 

[Tyeler18]

A junk head turned this project into a back burner build the last few months. I'm sitting in the hospital right now with my new first born and decided it was time to update this thread. What a time to finish the minivan just 2 days before my first kid was born! So last I had updated I had bought what was supposed to be a good, stock 6 bolt head from a local. It was relatively bare and I just cleaned it up, threw it on the engine to bolt things on and planned to go about my way finishing everything else up. It was time to put a belt on and time the engine and that's when things started to go sideways. I pulled the cam caps and there were a couple with some metal smear marks that were a bit beyond what I was comfortable with cleaning up, but I figured in the name of a cheap swap I was going to just run it anyways. I stuck a set of stock cams from my racecar in and started torquing caps down only to find that the cams would bind hard as I started torquing things down. The guy I bought the head from had a couple and I can only assume that cam caps must've been swapped around at some point as there were multiple caps that would lock the cams down when tight. I got irritated and pushed it to the back burner. I've always had multiple spares on deck but with the amount of cars I have now I was completely out of anything usable. I actually looked at a few local heads and couldn't find anything worth while, even looked at another buddies that had a locked up exhaust cam and some of the weirdest line bored cam caps I've ever seen in 15 years of 4g building.

Fast forward to last month I got the itch to get this running again during thanksgiving. Another local had a built 6 bolt head that smoked real bad and recommended a rebuild on. I really wanted a stock unmolested head but decided to take a chance on this one after having issues finding anything worthwhile. It was one of the grimiest heads i've ever seen, valve cover had been clearly leaking for a while, the valves were coked in carbon and it was just all around gross inside BUT after cleaning the surface up enough to do some testing it held an alcohol test so I felt confident just slapping some valve seals in it and running it.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

In the middle of this I had changed jobs from the shop I've worked at the last 11 years, to a buddies off road/motorcycle shop. I had access to most of a fab shop at the old shop but the new shop while having a pretty good selection of fab tools was missing one key piece- the tig welder was broken. I needed one at home for another project anyways so I grabbed a primeweld 225x.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

I had planned to just run a dsm side mount for the time being to make things simple but having a tig on hand the wheels started turning and decided the evo 8 intercooler I had on the shelf would make a good addition. It bolted right up to the stock hood latch mount and just needed some lower tabs made to make it actually sit level. I did end up cutting the driver side inlet off and welded a 90 that fires next to the radiator similar to a 1g VRSF or ETS kit does. The UICP had to wrap around the core support like a GVR4 ETS kit does but it still worked out great there. I'm using a VRSF throttle body elbow and 1g/2g j pipe to mate it all up, really simple 4 coupler setup.

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We tried to start it after getting it all put together and it was running horribly. I could unplug any assortment of 2 injectors and the engine would never change how it was running. I couldn't see anything wrong with evoscan data, tried swapping another maf and cam sensor thinking we were getting erradic signals and just couldn't get the damn thing to run properly. Rather than chasing my tail any further I decided to go back to the basics that I had neglected to do prior to our excited test fire- boost leak test wouldn't even move he needle on my tester gauge and air was blowing out from behind the intake. I thought the intake mightve been cracked but pulled it off to find I was an idiot while assembling and stuck a 7 bolt intake gasket in it and 1/4 of all 4 cylinders were leaking heavily to atmosphere So fresh 6 bolt gasket and a quick boost leak test later and it fired right up and idled like it was supposed to. Like a couple of cavemen we decided the best thing we could do was jump in it and go straight to WOT pulls down the street. Mind you I have no boost gauge in the car, no wideband, not sure if anything on the car is bolted down properly or even working, but it held together and pulled cleanly through the whole rpm range. We brought it back to my buddies house to make sure it wasn't puking it's guts anywhere and decided I'd drive it the 30 miles home so I can button up all the little projects left on it. I need to thoroughly clean the inside and outside as well as the engine bay on this before I can get any good pictures. The inside has soda stains all over and just smells like what a typical used high mileage car that hasn't been cleaned smells like. I think I can get the interior back to 95% with the steam cleaner and some cleaning products. The outside just needs a good thorough wash, blow out all the crevices and a clay bar to get it back to nice. Final shot at my friends house with my evo 9 and his awd swapped spyder.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

We have an HPDE day towards the end of the month that I'm going to try and have the car ready to race at. We're all looking forward to slinging a little mini van around our track

 

[Tyeler18]

I really need to get better about updating these things more frequently. I've basically just been daily driving this thing since my last update. I drive it pretty regularly just because its fun to rip around in. It still needs window tint and A/C installed and it'll be an awesome daily. Since the last update I added a set of JIC magic evo 8 front coilovers to lower the car, the stock suspension was pretty wore out and this really improved the front end. Unfortunately on the rear being a divorced spring its not as easy to lower. Just to get the ride height somewhat level I cut a coil off the rear spring to drop it down, I do plan on putting in adjustable coilover sleeves shortly to be able to adjust height and give it a much needed increase in spring rate. For now this worked to somewhat level the car, it could use another coil cut to actually level it out but I didn't want to sacrifice anymore suspension travel with such a soft spring.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

I wanted to update the wheels and tires on this thing from the get go, the motegi's aren't bad but I'm not a fan of black wheels and these are only 7.5" wide so the plan was to 5 lug swap it at some point. There was talk on the wagon group that 03-06 outlander rear hubs were a direct swap to 5 lug the rear of the van and 1g hubs up front were a direct swap as well. Luckily for me there happened to be a couple AWD outlanders at the yard, unfortunately the disc brake outlander which is really hard to find apparently was from the midwest and I gave up trying to pull the hubs after almost an hour of slide hammering with zero progress. We went back the next weekend and pulled the hubs off a drum brake car and grabbed a set of outlander front dual piston brakes.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

With the 5 lug swap I needed some new wheels, the plan was to take the FN01RC's off my galant and put them on the van so I could change wheels on the galant to evo X GSR's or something like an advan RG4. I have this set of rota grids in a 17x9 +25 sitting in the garage from my black evo. We swapped to a legit set of TE37's last year as the grids were missing a giant chunk of the lip on one wheel from a fight with a concrete guard rail in the rain. I had wrote off the grids as being junk after that, but couldn't bring myself to toss out 3 good wheels. I test fit them on the van and to my surprise they fit really well with the 255/40 NT555's that were on them. I even test fit the 18x10 +30 TE's and was really surprised how well they fit and thats with a 275 tire! The turning radius is next to nothing with the TE's as they'll contact the frame rail long before full lock but the grids fit perfectly with zero rubbing at full lock. TE's up front and grids in the back

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

While I was at the 5 lug swap I wanted to swap out the trans and tcase for a 2g AWD setup I have. The stock van trans has held up to way more abuse that I would've imagined and more launches than I think I've done on my other cars combined.. but 5th gear has been a problem since before the swap. I previously swapped the hub, slider and shift fork for 5/R after realizing the shift fork was broken, however, I still had issues with it kicking out of 5th randomly with varying throttle changes. I had a supposedly good 2ga AWD trans so I was planning to swap that in while doing the 5 lug swap. The trans swap turned into a much bigger ordeal than I anticipated. I knew from research that the van rear diff ratio was probably going to be different than the DSM which would warrant a rear diff change. It should've been a 3.909 vs the 2g awd 3.545 and I had a dsm ring/pinion to swap in if that were the case. When it came time to swap it I found more bastard child stock parts on this thing in that it had a 2.8 rear gear which I couldn't find any information about other than they came in some galant GSX's. I didn't think this was going to be too big of an issue until I actually pulled the carrier out and realized its drastically smaller than a dsm carrier and I wasn't going to be able to just swap ring gears. On top of that the axle stubs for the vans are smaller than a dsm so swapping a dsm carrier in won't work either. I had almost given up on the trans swap at this point but luckily a local van owner had a 3.303 van diff which happens to use the same size carrier as a dsm but with van axles stubs. We picked that up, swapped everything over and got it back in the van. The rest of the trans swap went smoothly, all the stock van mounts bolt right on to the 2g trans and I used the van shift bracket and shift cables. I ended up tig welding the grids up and grinding them back into shape and was able to fix the wheels to an 8/10 condition. I was super happy that I was able to fix them!

We're now 5 lug, full 6 bolt/2g drivetrain with outlander big brakes.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

I thought everything was going to be all good from here until I went on the first test drive and realized I still have no 5th gear. It would just try and grind going into 5th, but every other gear worked flawlessly. I was hoping the hub was just dry from sitting and a long test drive might be it freed up, but no dice. I started to wonder if I had a stretched shift cable or a bent shift bracket which led to the last trans having issues and just decided to deal with it down the road, well we had a track day coming up and with an 80 mile drive down the interstate I really wanted 5th. I also needed new tires as the 2012 NT555's weren't going to cut it. What I didn't know was that the new wheels were going to present a new problem with the van. I dropped it off on a tuesday at discount tire for some fresh 245/40 advan apex's. I run these tires on my track evo 9 and my galant and have been really happy with their overall performance for both track days and daily driving. Unfortunately when the guy who was swapping tires went to back the van out he managed to jam up the 5th/R slider and now I had no 5th or reverse. We had to push it out of the stall and I drove it home. I think he tried to get it into reverse and it didn't go the 1st try and ended up mashing it back jamming the slider up. What also sucked was that the track day was that saturday. Wednesday night I decided to pull the end case off and make sure the 36mm nuts hadn't come loose on the trans since that is a common failure point to lose 5th and reverse. I got the case apart and found much worse. It's hard to see in this photo but the roll pin for the 5th shift fork had worked its way out and was contacting the gear and hub.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

It had marred the teeth on the hub and I was doing everything possible to pull it apart and nothing short of pry bars and hammers freed it up. In the process of hammering it off I broke the silicone seal on the midcase so here I am at 6:30 at night in the driveway with the midcase and half the trans ripped apart in the car.

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That turned into a fiasco after the shift rail popped off the shift selector and it seemed like everything that could go wrong went wrong, but by 9pm I had the case glued back on and was all put back together. I ended up robbing a hub and slider from a built jacks trans I had but I now have a smooth 5th and reverse!

With the trans fixed I spent the next night getting rid of the school bus steering wheel these come with stock and put an evo 8 wheel in. I have these in 8 of my mitsubishis so this was a no brainer for this thing too.

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Friday night before the event I spent some time changing fluids, routing lines, installing a catch can I had on the shelf, and finally putting to use a stainless heat shield I built 6+ years ago for my galant that didn't end up fitting over my FP manifold and blanket. I also ditched the crappy 10" cheap slim fans that came on this free 2g aluminum radiator and put a 13" spal on.

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RACE DAY! I was a little nervous for the drive as this was the longest trip I have taken in the van so far and we had changed so many things in the last 2 weeks I wasn't sure how it was going to go. A buddy with an AWD swapped spyder I helped him build as well as another buddy with an absolute shit box of a 420a GS were both coming along to race, neither of which car were in anywhere near the mechanical shape as the van, so I was a little less concerned. I honestly can't believe how well this thing cruises. I led our group down and had to pull my GPS out to make sure the speedo was accurate when I realized I was cooking along at 95mph and it was just purring away. Easily one of the best, if not the best highway cruiser out of my entire fleet.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Setting up to get ready for tech. Unfortunately the GS quit charging on the way to the track and somehow still made it there on the battery alone, and the spyder puked all the power steering fluid and started getting warm (I think it lifted the head the last event) in 3 laps so both cars were done for the day before the event even really started.

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My first session out was my fastest session, despite hitting traffic the entire night. My fastest flyer lap was interrupted at the start and the finish by traffic which slowed 1.5-2 seconds on my lap time and the rest of the night I couldn't put a clean lap together without traffic at some point. It felt wrong beating up on miatas on a track they normally destroy the lower power cars on, but it seemed every lap I had a miata holding me up.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

All in though it was as flawless night, I finished with a measly 67.8 lap time (my prepped evo 9 does low 61's easily here) which was a solid 4 seconds slower than I was hoping for. The stock seat is absolutely atrocious to race in, a real seat alone is an easy second or more of lap time. I was constantly swung from one end of the seat to the other and wrapping the seat belt up to make it tighter did very little. The rear shocks are the original shocks as well and theyre well past their expiration date. When i could actually carry speed through the corners the rear would lift and bounce like a basketball making it hard to rotate the car. I've also been spoiled by the mechanical front and rear LSD's in the evo. I was so used to being power down at the apex and steering the car with throttle that I was pushing through corner exits with a tire lifted and free wheeling. A mechanical LSD is high on the list of priorities along with a bracket for my corbeau fixed back and some rear shocks. Even with no boost controller on this internally gated 20g I never felt I needed more power or more response. It lights off like a rocket ship which didn't help with my heavy right foot driving style. The outlander brakes were insanely impressive as well. I reused the junkyard pads that came with the calipers and the rusty rotors, with fresh fluid I never managed to fade them and everyone who rode with my was really surprised how hard they would bite. I don't think i ever used over 1/2 pedal travel and i was constantly into the seat belt lock at the end of every straight away. I'm super excited to push this thing. The reactions to it were the best part of the whole night, everyone thought it was hilarious other than one old man in a ZL1 camaro that was talking shit in the tech lane, but I never did see him on track.

I have go pro and drone footage I need to compile into a youtube video and I'll post it here. Until the next event!

 

[mitsubishikid]

I love it. I still have a 92 Colt Vista fwd. My grandma bought it brand new. I used to drive it some when I was younger. Tne auto trans went out, and i pulled the engine at the same time to rebuild it because it becsuse it was smoking. 15 years later its still sitting there

Is it a 4g64 sohc or the 4g93?
The 4g64 sohc 8 valves are actually not that hard to work on and i loved the non interfearence design that they have, the Transmission computer aka TCU is a common failure point the capacitors often leak out much like on the ecu Engine computers, so it might be worth revisiting.

 

[Tyeler18]

More upgrades! It's getting hot in AZ finally and that means its time to make this AZ heat ready. This car was a base model when I started so manual windows, locks, and no A/C factory. Its also a fishbowl so you bake in the sun driving around. luckily for me a local knew about a van in the yard an hour away so i sent a buddy to check it out and to my surprise it was still nearly 100% untouched after sitting in the yard for almost 6 months.

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Better yet it was a loaded model with power windows, locks, and an entire A/C system that much to our surprise still had a full charge... A buddy and I cleared mostly everything out of it and set about installing everything into mine. I now have power locks, windows, and an Ice cold A/C system! I also tinted all the windows so it's bearable to drive in the sun

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Spal 12" 1800CFM fan and a cheap 12" china A/C fan on a 2g dual core radiator seem to be working great. This was my 10-15 minute drive home and then idling in front of the house with the A/C cranked on a 100F day!

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[Tyeler18]

Been a while for an update. I actually drive this car more than most of what I own at this point. Everyone that sees it loves this thing, even the people who questioned my sanity when I purchased it have grown to love this thing. My boss has refused to drive it and we think it's because he knew he'd fall in love and sure enough one day he needed to use it at work and came back trying to offer me money to buy it. It's really turned into such an awesome car.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a whole bunch of stuff between the last update and now, but I had started tidying up the engine bay a while back. The valve cover I was running had been painted 3x in different colors with really poor quality spray paint. It took a while to decide on a color but I finally picked a blue I liked that didnt clash with the body color. This picture is actually far more recent but just the color change drastically improved the overall cleanliness of the bay. I also ditched the stock battery tray to move my group 51 battery allowing the use of a dsm intake routing which worked out a lot better than the hot air intake I used to get the car running. I had to redo the entire upper intercooler pipe and I also v-mounted my intercooler to fit under the stock front bumper now that the A/C condenser was installed and I knew how much room I had to fit it.

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The outlander brakes I put up front have been fantastic but I really wanted discs all around. The end goal is probably a set of evo brembos all around, although performance wise I have zero reason to upgrade from how it was. That being said a set of very hard to find factory rear disc brakes with backing plates came up on the facebook group so I grabbed quickly grabbed them. These cost half of what the entire car cost me but at this point it didn't really matter as I'm not budgeting anything anyways. I shot the fronts and rears in a matching blue to the valve cover, grabbed a set of 2g awd rear rotors, and swapped the stock drums out for some "nice" looking disc brakes. I have yet to track this with the new brakes but I don't expect any drastic improvement over what it was, these are just lower maintenance and look was better.

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The last track day I didn't have near as much front end grip as I was hoping. It's easy to compare this car with my evo since they run "similar" setups and the front definitely felt off. I hadn't actually checked alignment short of matching my camber plates and a tape measure toe adjustment, so I figured I'd check it out since the camber seemed pretty poor. Sure enough the front with the plates maxed out barely got me -.8 degrees of camber. I run -3.2 in the evo and most of my other track cars are in that ball park. I have evo 8/9 coilovers and camber plates up front, however, the plates get spun 180 to fit the van chassis. This gives you a whole lot less negative camber adjustment since the evo plates are meant to adjust the opposite direction. I snagged a set of fortune 510's for my evo on black friday which meant the tanabe sustec pros that were on the car were gifted down to the van. While it was apart I machined the camber plates to give me as much negative camber as possible. These are also kicked slightly back so camber changes also add caster which is a win-win. I was able to pull them out to -2.7 with plenty of room to go more if I ever needed to. I also modded the rear shocks to fit as I was running stock blown van shocks previously since it's a divorced spring. I still need to swap to a heavier rear spring but the newish shocks with stiffer valving are a minor improvement on their own.

This is how much adjustment I had before, you can see in my first picture that they're not machined all the way out to the strut tower lip now. Easily -4+ degrees capable on their own now.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Here's the new ride height with the new coilovers. Plenty of ground clearance still and it handles nicely, we'll have to see how well it does on track. I had some issues with the MVD here messing up my registration so I got my 3DR EVO license plate I was planning to get

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Another black friday purchase- I had my truck out at a buddies house 30 minutes away so I figured id try and load my new garage tool box in the van. I found you can fit a husky 52" box in the van if you take one set of wheels off it.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

We had a local car meet and my 1 year old has an electric mini f1 car he likes driving around, so we put the god awful roof rack I refuse to remove to work. Everyone loved the car mounted on the roof and it was nice to let the kid cruise around in his own car at the meet. Brought my evo 8 out for the first time in a while here too.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

That leads me to my latest update which is arguably the best mod I've done so far. For anyone who hasn't driven one of these the seat position is the same as my 4wd gen 1 montero- forward and high up. You might as well be driving a cab over, the seat position sits so high in the chassis and forward you're basically on top of the dash. The visual is great as you can basically see the front bumper, but as someone who always struggles looking forward on track it becomes quite an issue as well as any tall person has to recline the seat way back to fit a helmet. The stock seats are also the worst seats I've ever raced in and honestly not all that comfortable if you ask me. I'm not a huge fan of the blue interior of this car but I also didn't want to source everything to swap it to grey. I figured the best compromise would be to add some nice blue interior pieces and hope I would like it better, so evo 8 blue recaros have been on my radar since the last track day. I finally found a set semi local for a reasonable price and I wasted no time putting them in. These sit 3" lower than the stock seats, the way I have the brackets set up they have a little more lower seat recline than how they come in an evo which is drastically more than the stock van seats. Super comfortable seat position now with the pedals nearly parallel with your legs rather than under you. The shifter is in a better reach and the whole car just feels more comfortable.

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

Untitled by Tyeler Andersen, on Flickr

The plan is to recover the rear seats and door panel inserts in a matching material to tie it all together. Outside of that I'll probably dye the carpet black, black suede the headliner like my white 1g and a nice double din radio to finish off the interior to where I'm satisfied. I turned the boost up a while back to 22lbs on pump 91 and I'm just waiting to grab a bigger set of injectors so I can put my SD setup in and do a flex tune. This china 20g probably won't survive long so a turbo update will be in order sooner than later. That's it for updates for now though

 

[ErikTande]

Awesome work, keep it up!

 

[Tyeler18]

Exciting (to me at least) update on the not so sleeper van! I guess this isn't really a cheap build anymore and I've gotta actually make some things nice now. I had a huge package delivered last week that i've been waiting on customs to clear from australia.



For those that aren't familiar with these or RVR's in general, the high package of an RVR was the Hypersports gear R. Basically an RVR with an awd 4g63t, fishnet recaro interior, and an awesome factory body kit way more aggressive than anything that came on any of the other packages. These weren't very common and they obviously never made it to the states. I've been trying to purchase a kit for over a year but between shipping costs quoted in the $10,000 USD range and people just flat out (rightfully so) not wanting to ship it, i figured it was as pipe dream purchase, until now!



My full hypersport gear R kit minus the factory fender flares which are much easier to get although I'm on the fence if I want them or not anyways and the rear bumper which just has a huge jeep style spare tire swing out that I definitely didn't want. The kit consists of a front bumper, side skirts, and a giant rear wing, I also have to swap out headlights, corner lights, and the hood. I'm using HSG lights, but a late model USDM hood is the same as a hyper hood. The front bumper needs a fair amount of body work but I'll gladly get that fixed to have this kit.

Started mocking up everything just to get holes drilled for clips and mounting screws before it goes off to paint. Spoiler and side skirts on, the skirts make a huge difference in the overall profile of the car. I dont know why US models didn't get some form of side skirt but this looks so much cooler with the side skirts on. The wing gives it a nice japanese styling, it's massive but it doesn't look out of place with the rest of the car.







And the crown jewel of the whole kit, the front bumper. Easily the most desirable piece and the biggest pain to source. This is a goofy looking bumper but it makes this go from a plain jane van to a cool tuner hot hatch.I was going to order the HSG mitsu front grill emblem but stole the eagle emblem off my stock grille and think it looks cooler with the factory eagle emblem in there.









Now it's off to paint and I guess it's time to upgrade from the evo 8 intercooler to a nice shiny aluminum core that fills the bumper front up better. The rear bumper is a little lack luster now too so I'll be making a few modifications to that to help the front flow into the rear

 

[Tyeler18]

New front end meant it was time for a light upgrade, the factory lights were like candles and the housing kind of sucked. A bulb upgrade from whatever probably 20 year old bulbs would've helped but they still weren't impressive. The HSG lights have a much better design for light output and a good cutoff so I threw in a set of H4 LED's along with converting the side markers from just white LED markers to a switch back turn signal. The corner lights are almost as bright as the headlights themselves. I do have a set of USDM expo headlights in this same design since the HSG are for a RHD the cutoffs are opposite. I like the silver housings on the HSG vs the black housing the USDM expos have so I may swap lens over to have a proper LHD reflector, but this is significantly better. I have 35% tint across the entire windshield and can actually see well at night now.



Aside from repairing/painting the kit I had to ditch the giant black hole in the front end the stock evo 9 intercooler left. The USDM bumper barely cleared this and I had to v mount the intercooler just to tuck it under the cover with the crash bar completely cut out the center. The HSG bumper has an insane amount of room, arguably more than my evo 8 and 9 bumpers do. There's 7" of front end clearance to the inside lip of the bumper to my A/C condenser and plenty of width/height. I had a 2g punishment core laying around so I installed that hoping it would fill the front end, which it does, but the sheepy 4" core I run on my evo 9 would fit better and have nicer outlet angles for the intercooler piping. For now this will work, but I'm probably going to order an evo core and install that instead. Regardless it looks way nicer with the silver intercooler taking up the whole front end. I'll be ducting whatever permanent core i install to keep it cool on track and the AC working properly.

 

[Tyeler18]

Decent amount of changes to the car since the last update. My coworker loved my van so much he bought an identical (same year, color, and everything) van. I bullied him into ordering the same hyper sport body as what I have on mine. I don't know how this guy gets these giant body panels from australia to the USA faster than summit gets me parts from reno to phoenix but I'm not complaining. Ironically he ended up with the front bumper from the car I got my sideskirts and wing from and his side skirts and wing were from the car my front bumper came from. We ended up swapping front bumpers so he has a full white kit and I had a full black kit. The black front bumper took some tweaking to get on the car which is likely why I was sold the white bumper but we got it on and it looks way sleeker with the all black. It'll get painted eventually but it's been low priority.



Like all my other cars I decided to ditch the evo ecu for a haltech S2. I really hated how the 2g harness ended up in the car and I've been building standalone harnesses from scratch so I decided to add one to the van. This was DBW converted with an endeavor throttle body and lancer pedal, same as all my other cars. The wiring is all TXL, brand new connectors, lots of stuff logged to the ecu, I still have A/C, cruise control etc. This turned out really nice vs making a stock 2g harness standalone.





I actually tried to buff the car for the first time just to see if I could get it to shine a bit better. It shines a lot better but it honestly just brought out the imperfections more. I really want to paint this in the nearer future so a full repaint will likely be next. My ebay 20g is on it's last leg at this point and I have an FP green that needs to go in for a rebuild and I'll actually crank this thing up. The 20g has been making 22-24lbs for a few years but I don't trust that it wouldn't disintegrate if I turned it up more.





While checking tire pressure the other day I realized I have not 1 but 2 spokes on this rota grids that have cracked all the way through. I took these off my black evo for a set of real TE37s and planned to trash the wheels as they were cracked from a curb prior. I had already welded these up once but don't trust welding the spokes of the wheel to last so I'm on the hunt for a nice set of real wheels for this. I have a few wheels I really want but they are getting hard to get in the specs I need so for now I'll continue hunting.

 

[Tyeler18]

I was really looking for a set of 17x9 SA3R's for this but they're not a very common size and getting a good spec (+22) for this car makes them really expensive. My buddy posted his OG TE37's in factory white and I couldn't say no. I've got SL's on my black evo and really want white SL's for the white evo, I didn't think the van would get TE's before my IX but I'm not complaining, they look great on there and they're way lighter than the rotas which was a very noticeable difference on the test drive.

 

[MitsuTimes]

I was really looking for a set of 17x9 SA3R's for this but they're not a very common size and getting a good spec (+22) for this car makes them really expensive. My buddy posted his OG TE37's in factory white and I couldn't say no. I've got SL's on my black evo and really want white SL's for the white evo, I didn't think the van would get TE's before my IX but I'm not complaining, they look great on there and they're way lighter than the rotas which was a very noticeable difference on the test drive.

that looks amazing! Keep up the great work!

 

[Tyeler18]

that looks amazing! Keep up the great work!

Thanks!

Well you buy nice parts for your shitty van and it repays you by shelling out the turbo. I knew the 20g was on it's way out but it decided to clear all the mosquitos in town today. Lots of axial play and it's smoking like crazy. FP green is boxed up getting sent out for a rebuild so once it shows up itll be back and better!

 

[CrackedDSM]

Sorry for the turbo woes, but I'm stoked for the FP Green and to see what an OG can actually do with it!

 

[1fastcolt]

sucks about the turbo, hope you get it back up and running fast... and we really need to meet up sometime when you are down here..

 

[Tyeler18]

sucks about the turbo, hope you get it back up and running fast... and we really need to meet up sometime when you are down here..

It should be to justin on tuesday so hoping to have it back quickly as long as my housings are back from coating before he gets it back to me. I plan to do a couple of mussleman track days now that its cooling off and I have way more beneficial mods than the last time I was out. I'll let you know the next time I'm down there for a track day in it