Tyeler18
15+ Year Contributor
- 2,566
- 368
- Dec 16, 2008
-
Casa Grande,
Arizona
I've got a build thread on evom from a long time ago on this, but figured I'd post it here with the other cars too. I've had this thing since 2013 and it's been the biggest headache of a car for most of my ownership. I've had it long enough I don't have early pictures on my phone anymore of it 
We bought the car for $12,500 with a majority of the mods listed, the owner needed to pay for his grandfathers funeral and needed cash quick. When we went to look at it it was in good shape overall, but the trans was grinding going into 3rd, the exhaust would smack the driveshaft on acceleration, and the windshield was cracked. There was enough little stuff to negotiate down on the price a decent amount, ironically I got to watch the car make an 11.4@12X pass the week before purchasing it at an IFO event. About a month after purchase it ended up lifting the head, when I pulled the tune from the stock ecu it was crazy aggressive on timing so I'm not at all surprised. I swapped the headgasket, backed down the timing a bit and it was a nice daily driver that we took to MOD in LA a few years in a row. It wasn't as fast as before but it ran good, then one of my buddies was getting his 1g tuned and offered to pay for a tune on the evo for helping him build the car and then everything kind of went south from there. I had nothing but issues, cold starts, cruise, hard lean tip in that made me just hate driving the car. I pretty much parked it for a few years only occasionally driving it because I absolutely hated driving it after that.
Ended up buying some rota grids off a fellow evo guy to replace the evo X GSR wheels the car came on. I really liked the change, looking back now they look too small and definitely cheapen the look of the car but I was happy to get away from the GSR wheels at the time.
I finally got the car retuned in 2023 and everything seemed to be going super well. Midway through a 3rd gear log it felt/sounded like the engine had just chucked a rod. I towed the car back home, drained the oil and pulled the pan and couldn't find anything wrong. While laying in bed a few nights later I randomly had a thought about pulling the head to make sure it didn't swallow something which then led me to wonder about the throttle plate screws since that was the one throttle body I hadn't rebuilt out of our cars yet. I pulled the intercooler pipe off the next morning and sure enough one of the screws was MIA and I found it lodged into the head of cylinder 1. Somehow it didn't mess up any valves, left a few minor dings on the piston and the machine shop just massaged the marks it left on the head out and back on it went to turn it back up.
Now that the car was running better it was really due for some new wheels, the tires on the rotas were almost 10 years old at this point and had seen some better days. I actually ordered a set of advan RG4s but getting new wheels at the time was still a major pain and ended up canceling the order after waiting 4 months. I got super lucky when show stoppers out of LA posted their last set of 18x10 TE37SL's for sale for pretty cheap (for TE's) to move into the new Saga series wheels. Fresh set of 275's on the TE's and now it's starting to look like a typical evo
Couldn't stop there, a nice voltex replica kit was posted on marketplace so I grabbed that and had it paint matched. I'm still on the fence about his, and I dont know if I can bring myself to cut the quarters up to finish the kit properly so for now it's got the front kit with stock side skirts.
I started to spend some money to try and make the car nicer since I was actually driving it again. Powdercoated a bunch of engine bay parts to match the brakes, the purple hoses were a poor choice. I still need to swap those out with something else but they work for now.
Everything was going pretty good, it made 39lbs of boost, pulled really well and cruised really nice but I had one major issue that was driving me nuts and that was the cold start. It would fire right up and idle for a little bit and then it would just go into a random idle hunt where sometimes it'd be idling at 2500 for 10 seconds and then it would drop to 700 for a bit, sometimes it would stall, it was very sporadic but as soon as it hit 120* it would start to smooth out. It would be incredibly annoying to drive in the mornings because youd have to baby sit it for 10+ minutes until it was warm enough to idle on it's own and I had voiced my concerns about this when we initially started tuning the car. If the car stalled while in warmup it was an absolute nightmare to get to restart if it wasn't warmed up and my tuner insisted on not messing with the startup tables until the rest of the car was dialed in which I was perfectly fine with, until it was time to actually work on it and then he ghosted me. I got irritated enough after swapping a few parts out to make sure it wasn't a mechanical failure on my end that I yanked the stock ecu out and wired in a haltech S2, DBW throttle body and all the associated parts to go with it. The car has never driven better now. Cold starts are flawless, idle is rock solid, driveability is far superior to what it was even on the last tune. I'm in love with driving the car again, so now it's time to spend some more money and bring the poor old thing back to it's former glory.
We bought the car for $12,500 with a majority of the mods listed, the owner needed to pay for his grandfathers funeral and needed cash quick. When we went to look at it it was in good shape overall, but the trans was grinding going into 3rd, the exhaust would smack the driveshaft on acceleration, and the windshield was cracked. There was enough little stuff to negotiate down on the price a decent amount, ironically I got to watch the car make an 11.4@12X pass the week before purchasing it at an IFO event. About a month after purchase it ended up lifting the head, when I pulled the tune from the stock ecu it was crazy aggressive on timing so I'm not at all surprised. I swapped the headgasket, backed down the timing a bit and it was a nice daily driver that we took to MOD in LA a few years in a row. It wasn't as fast as before but it ran good, then one of my buddies was getting his 1g tuned and offered to pay for a tune on the evo for helping him build the car and then everything kind of went south from there. I had nothing but issues, cold starts, cruise, hard lean tip in that made me just hate driving the car. I pretty much parked it for a few years only occasionally driving it because I absolutely hated driving it after that.Ended up buying some rota grids off a fellow evo guy to replace the evo X GSR wheels the car came on. I really liked the change, looking back now they look too small and definitely cheapen the look of the car but I was happy to get away from the GSR wheels at the time.
I finally got the car retuned in 2023 and everything seemed to be going super well. Midway through a 3rd gear log it felt/sounded like the engine had just chucked a rod. I towed the car back home, drained the oil and pulled the pan and couldn't find anything wrong. While laying in bed a few nights later I randomly had a thought about pulling the head to make sure it didn't swallow something which then led me to wonder about the throttle plate screws since that was the one throttle body I hadn't rebuilt out of our cars yet. I pulled the intercooler pipe off the next morning and sure enough one of the screws was MIA and I found it lodged into the head of cylinder 1. Somehow it didn't mess up any valves, left a few minor dings on the piston and the machine shop just massaged the marks it left on the head out and back on it went to turn it back up.
Now that the car was running better it was really due for some new wheels, the tires on the rotas were almost 10 years old at this point and had seen some better days. I actually ordered a set of advan RG4s but getting new wheels at the time was still a major pain and ended up canceling the order after waiting 4 months. I got super lucky when show stoppers out of LA posted their last set of 18x10 TE37SL's for sale for pretty cheap (for TE's) to move into the new Saga series wheels. Fresh set of 275's on the TE's and now it's starting to look like a typical evo
Couldn't stop there, a nice voltex replica kit was posted on marketplace so I grabbed that and had it paint matched. I'm still on the fence about his, and I dont know if I can bring myself to cut the quarters up to finish the kit properly so for now it's got the front kit with stock side skirts.
I started to spend some money to try and make the car nicer since I was actually driving it again. Powdercoated a bunch of engine bay parts to match the brakes, the purple hoses were a poor choice. I still need to swap those out with something else but they work for now.
Everything was going pretty good, it made 39lbs of boost, pulled really well and cruised really nice but I had one major issue that was driving me nuts and that was the cold start. It would fire right up and idle for a little bit and then it would just go into a random idle hunt where sometimes it'd be idling at 2500 for 10 seconds and then it would drop to 700 for a bit, sometimes it would stall, it was very sporadic but as soon as it hit 120* it would start to smooth out. It would be incredibly annoying to drive in the mornings because youd have to baby sit it for 10+ minutes until it was warm enough to idle on it's own and I had voiced my concerns about this when we initially started tuning the car. If the car stalled while in warmup it was an absolute nightmare to get to restart if it wasn't warmed up and my tuner insisted on not messing with the startup tables until the rest of the car was dialed in which I was perfectly fine with, until it was time to actually work on it and then he ghosted me. I got irritated enough after swapping a few parts out to make sure it wasn't a mechanical failure on my end that I yanked the stock ecu out and wired in a haltech S2, DBW throttle body and all the associated parts to go with it. The car has never driven better now. Cold starts are flawless, idle is rock solid, driveability is far superior to what it was even on the last tune. I'm in love with driving the car again, so now it's time to spend some more money and bring the poor old thing back to it's former glory.
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