Street Build Junkyard GST

[95FullSend99]

95FullSend99 submitted a new DSM Profile :

97 eclipse gst


Read more about this vehicle here...

 

[Ludachris]

More photos please!

 

[95FullSend99]

More photos please!

Several more have been uploaded. Finding old photos from over the course of the past few years. Build thread is being typed up. It is very very long and taking a bit of time but it will be uploaded soon. Thanks!

 

[95FullSend99]

I was introduced to this car in Chula Vista, CA in early 2016. I was looking for a door handle for my truck in a local junkyard and ended up striking a deal for this car for 200 bucks. Towed it home and had the intention of getting it running and selling. Obviously that didnt happen.

When I started I had zero automotive experience. I knew how to change my oil or a tire but I didnt know how to bleed brakes or really anything more complex than that.

The car was in rough shape. It was at a pick a part yard and had very little left to it. Zero interior besides a dash and front seats, half an engine, and rat droppings EVERYWHERE.

 

[95FullSend99]

Everyday after work I would head over the the Auto Hobby Shop on the naval base and work on it. Little things there, little things there. I honestly didnt know what I was doing but it was therapeutic.

At one point in time I decided that I should probably figure out what engine was in the car and found the little stamp on the block.

4G63. I didnt know what the hell that was but it got me part numbers on google and that's all I needed at the time. Right around that time I got introduced to this site and I was absolutly blown away. Years and years of information and I spent probably the next 3 months reading as much as I could at every opportunity possible.

 

[95FullSend99]

Fast forward a bit and right around this time I remember reading random post about everything from spark plugs to how to rebuild a motor. I watched endless hours of jaffro on youtube and a few names from this forum like snowboarder (?) And donniecac (?). I learned about the facebook pages around this time and posted endless stupid questions where I got lit up and made fun of for hours to get an answer for a question I could have googled. But I digress. I was enjoying myself and that's what matter right?

 

[95FullSend99]

At this point in time I was well aware of what I had. I still really didnt car about power or anything like that. I just wanted it to move unter it's own power. But I have an addictive personality and I obsess. I wanted to know now everything I could about anything cars. Notable at this point would be John, Mike, and Cruz.

John is a corvette guy but he is one of those people that know a little about everything. He made it a point to teach me how engines worked. Down to the basics. Everytime I went to smoke a cigarette I would grab him and he would teach me about anything he could. A different subject every smoke.

Cruz was into a scion tc. He taught me just about everything he could about turbos and forced induction. How a naturally aspirated motor is different then a forced induction motor. So on and so forth.

Mike was rebuilding a 30s ford in the car port next to mine. He is the biggest notable mention. He taught me about the details on involved in rebuilding a motor and walked me step by step as he did it to a gen 1 sbc. He now drag races that same ford in San Diego at Barona.

 

[95FullSend99]

This is the point in which I started looking into pulling the motor. Some part if me thought it was smart to yank the motor from the top and leave the transmission in. This ended up breaking alot of stuff but that was mostly because I didnt really know what I was doing. I borrowed John's engine stand and I remember struggling to get it on the stand and I remember putting a tire and stacking foam under it just in case the bolts gave way and the motor fell. Realistly this wouldnt happen but I didnt know any better.

 

[95FullSend99]

John came to help right around this time and we disassembled the motor. This ended up being a big mistake as I had to figure out on my own later where everything went. It was a breeze and there was nothing crazy that I could see but I remember john telling me that he thought that it was a blown headgasket that sent the car to the junk yard.

 

[95FullSend99]

So the motor was now disassembled I was left with a plastidiped car with no interior, the transmission still in the car and zero maintenance parts replaced.

Keep in mind, I was hemridging money due to this car. Paycheck to paycheck for parts.

At this point I had read a million posts about maintenance parts and I started to replace most of the suspension components. I also started working on the exterior. This is where I made the biggest mistake that I could have made at this point.

I started to sand all the platidip off the car. But I didnt hand sand. It was too slow and I was an idiot. I broke out a palm sander and to this day the paint is still wavy due to this. Not only that but I was using rustoleum to paint it and I was outside. Quality paint is on the current to do list.

Paint happened over the course of months. It took alot if time but it still was done prior to rebuilding the motor. Alot was going on at work at this time so I would just sand down the car and paint over and over a section at a time over the course of a few months.

 

[95FullSend99]

More mistakes happened around this time. Got to love ebay. That's about all I have to say about that.

One thing I didnt go cheap was though was engine parts. I was convinced, and am still convinced, that crank walk was BS so I chose to keep the 7 bolt.

I chose a local machine shop and took the factory crank in to get magnifuxed and it failed so I bought a manley 7 bolt crank, manley hbeam rods, and Manley forged 9:1 pistons. With the help of endless hours of jaffro youtube videos and a factory service manual, I rebuilt the bottom end. It took and entire day. My perfectionist came out and for good reason. The rotation assembly and all the machine work was the most expensive thing I had ever bought in my life.

After the bottom end was done I wrapped everything up in plastic wrap and set the short block aside. I was out of money. A few weeks passed and I started on machine work for the head and assorted parts that I had acquired over the past year or so were installed. Cams were on order. BC276. I didnt like those cams at all and I later ordered a different set that would provide more streetable power.

 

[Ludachris]

Thanks for sharing Will. It's gotta be tough doing a build outdoors. Hell, it's hard enough doing one indoors.

 

[95FullSend99]

Thanks for sharing Will. It's gotta be tough doing a build outdoors. Hell, it's hard enough doing one indoors.

Thank you. One day I will have a garage. I will be posting quite a bit more of the story tonight to get up to date on where it is.

 

[95FullSend99]

Fast forward a bit:
Paint got wrapped up. Looked bad up close but I was satisfied for now. I call it my 20 foot paintjob. Looks darn good from 20 foot away.
Short block was dont.
Interior I got from a pick a part.
Head was back from the machine shop and went on with no problem.

Now at this point I purchased an hx35 and decided I was going to used the twin scroll housing. Good ol ebay bad decisions got me a manifold for it. All got fitted and went well.

Pulled the transmission and quickly inspected it based on what I had learned from this forum and install and dropped in the motor.

I learned that having the intake manifold and exhaust manifold on when you drop the motor in makes it a much bigger pain than it needs to be.

End of the day the motor was finally in and I could marvel at what I had done. Intercooler and piping was the next step. Dont and one step closer to starting.

At this point I got deployed. The car sat for 10 months.

 

[95FullSend99]

I got back from deployment and got a new apartment and it had an extra parking spot. At this point I was convinced the car would be running soon so I threw it on a trailer and parked it at my apartment complex. Much easier to work since it was right in front of my house.

FIC 1220CC injectors were installed, a fuel pump, and a few other assorted goodies.

Right around this time I switched everything over to speed density and got rid of alot of the wires that I had in the engine bay that I didnt need.

 

[Ludachris]

One request - when you upload all your photos, click the Full Image button to make your images full size at the end of your posts, instead of them displaying as thumbnails. I went back and did this for your past posts.

 

[95FullSend99]

Believe it or not, at this point in time I was thousands of dollar in and I hadn't even connected the car to a battery yet. Relocated the battery to the back around this time and connected it to power.

Honestly this was the most exciting part of the entire build. This point to me was more exciting that first start. I hadn't touched most of the electronics and I didnt know what would happen since the csr had sat for so long. I had several friends with garden hoses and a fire extinguisher there just in case.

Everything worked. Even the sunroof. Radio. All of it. Only thing that was wrong was the window. Felt like it was off the track and even to this day I haven't fixed it. Priorities right?

I was very emotional that day. Several beers with friends followed. It was a good day.

 

[95FullSend99]

One request - when you upload all your photos, click the Full Image button to make your images full size at the end of your posts, instead of them displaying as thumbnails. I went back and did this for your past posts.

Will do! Thank you!

 

[95FullSend99]

He are a few photos from that day.

 

[95FullSend99]

A few days after this was first start. Kenny Kline helped quite a bit with this. He helped me understand everything I needed to do in Link to get this think to crank over. After playing around with deadtime a bit, it cranked over and started for the first time. It was very very lean and I didnt know what I was doing at all in Link but it was running and that is what mattered to me at the time.

 

[95FullSend99]

The next few weeks went by very quickly. I had been doing alot of research in tuning and I decided that I was going to try and do it myself. In reality that wasnt a good idea but in my eyes I had done all of it to this day myself, why have someone else finish it up for me?

I thought it was going well at first. Reality it could have been better. I was more or less winging it off of a few theads I was reading and I didnt 100 percent comprehend what I was doing.

Several people helped me through this process as numerous logs we uploaded onto facebook and I was taking in copious amounts of information from the community.

This car was on the road. Accually driving. It couldnt feel any better. There is a lack of photos right around this point as I had lost my phone around this time.

 

[95FullSend99]

With every high comes a low.

I was on my way home from work and of course I was driving the car. I was very proud and drove it everyday. I was on the 5 and quickly moved pass someone and noticed in my rearview a bit of smoke. Figured it was someone else.

It was me.

I had removed the balance shafts during the build and my oil pressure was very high. I didnt really do anything about it. I had done the head port mod and kinda just let it be. But I didn't restrict my oil feed and I blew the seals out on the hx35. Turbo went out for a rebuild and I did research and restricted it as I saw fit. Problem solved. But that wasnt just it.

I kept burning oil. I didn't know why. And fast too but only during pulls. I couldnt figure it out. In reality i knew what had happened but i didnt want to accept it. Also around this time i had smoked out a used southbend clutch i had picked up last minute and upgraded to a competition clutch 6 puck sprung. Keep in mind, the clutch had always felt weird but I thought it was normal. I had never driven one of these that were in perfect condition so I had nothing to compare it to. But we will get to that later.

Cutch got replaced and I was convinced the head gasket had blown. It was MLS but anything can happen. The self tuning.i had done probably caused it from predetonation or something. I dont know.

I pulled off the head. The first thing I noticed is I could physically see a gap between every piston and the wall when it was at the bottom of the cylinder. This is when the rookie mistakes from literally years before came up to haunt me. I hadn't bored out the cylinders like I should have and they were egg shaped at the bottom. I hadn't measured piston to wall clearance ether. This was a very bad day. Money wasted on stupid mistakes that shouldn't have happened.

Frustration got the best of me. I closed the hood and didnt open it for a few weeks. It went up for sale several times during this time.

 

[95FullSend99]

The car sat on the trailer for several weeks with a cover in it and I didnt really touch it. I had gotten word that I was being sent out to some little town called Groton in Connecticut and I was going to have to move everything up there. At this point I decided that I was going to tow the car and figure out what I wanted to do with it when I got up there. The way I looked at it was I was bringing a rust free frame up to the rust belt and I could probably get more for it up there than in California.

Trip went off without a hitch. Hit a deer in Kansas and blew out a tire in ohio but for a single cab ram 1500, it didnt do all that bad for towing my life 3600 miles.

Parked the car and trailer and a few weeks later I had the motor yanked and started once again on another rebuild.

This time I told myself that I was committed to keeping the car. No shortcuts. No cheap parts. Everything ebay went away. I'm still working on that as I put alot of cheap support mods on like BOV, wastegate, Intercooler and piping. The last cheap part still on is the catback and intercooler. Due time though.

 

[95FullSend99]

December 2018 and january of 2019 I spent rebuilding the motor for a second time. All my machine work was done at a local place called Larry's Auto Machine in Groton, CT. Unlike the place in San Diego that I went for the first build, these guys knew exactly what I was doing and exactly what motor this was.
This place opened my eyes to automotive machining. The San Diego place was oldschool. Very large machines and in comparison, not very precise. I didn't know any better than to question their ways and if I did, I wouldnt have gone there.

But Larry's was something else. They blew me away. I didn't have to explain anything at all. They were asking me questions that I didnt know. Things i didnt expect to be asked. Everythong they had was CNC. I was so ecstatic by this place that I went back multiple times just to watch everything be done. I infact, called off of work to watch my block and head get machined. They assembled the head for me and I choose to assemble the block and the rest of the motor.

I had the block decked, a line bore done on the main caps, and the cylinders bored .20 over.

I spent the next day gapping rings. Another thing that I didnt really pay attention to on the first build but at this point I fully understood the importance of it and spent an entire day making sure it was perfect.

The next few days after that was checking and double checking measurements. I did all over this at this point in 2nd floor apartment kitchen.

After I was confident with my measurements I took my block to a local storage unit and rented a unit to assemble to motor in. I was alot more clean this time around and even more meticulous than before. I also had been investing in several tools to help me that I didnt buy before hand. Example being a tapered ring compressor. I will never use the crank band one again. I brought the engine to short block on Christmas morning while I drank egg nog and there was 2 foot of snow on the ground.

I spent new years eve verifying valve clearance. I had finished assembly just in time to watch the fireworks at midnight.

The vast majority of the motor was the same parts I had from the first build. The only big thing that changed was the timing belt and components, and I used manley sport compact forged 8.5:1 .20 overbore pistons

 

[95FullSend99]

Around late February the temperature had climbed just above freezing so I decided that it was a good day to install the motor. Of course the moment the motor and transmission were in the air, it began to storm. Gotta love New England weather.

Other than that the engine went in without a hitch, everything got bolted in place, and within a few days I was driving it home again. Ended up parking it at a different storage lot closer to home. Threw a cover on it and started it once a every 2 weeks untill it warmed up a bit more come spring.