LTA 1998 GSX

[Boomdeeze]

Heck yea! Love the car and how you've been laying down the law with a 4 cylinder!

One thing I noticed that would be a nice upgrade for the drivetrain/rear end is the Boston performance four point mounting solution, it adds another mount on the front drivers side and helps it from twisting!

Other than that, your car is basically the same as mine and wouldn't change it. Keep on representing!

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[spoolinpos]

Heck yea! Love the car and how you've been laying down the law with a 4 cylinder!

One thing I noticed that would be a nice upgrade for the drivetrain/rear end is the Boston performance four point mounting solution, it adds another mount on the front drivers side and helps it from twisting!

Other than that, your car is basically the same as mine and wouldn't change it. Keep on representing!

Thanks man! I wish I knew Boostin sold those before doing everything back there, I've seen them in photos before, but never knew where people were getting them, damnit! I would have 100% picked that up, but something for me to keep in mind for the future, I appreciate it!

 

[Boomdeeze]

Thanks man! I wish I knew Boostin sold those before doing everything back there, I've seen them in photos before, but never knew where people were getting them, damnit! I would have 100% picked that up, but something for me to keep in mind for the future, I appreciate it!

Its @bostonhatcher who was making them, not Boostin! Could see if he still has one left, never know.

 

[spoolinpos]

We build it race it break it repeat! Head is off the car and to a friend for machine work. Here's the SCE Vulcan cut-ring head gasket I will be trying out this time around! Part number CR330058 if anyone is curious. This will be used with a fresh set of ARP's L19 head studs which was purchased from @extremepsi, truly grateful we still have such great vendors within this community.

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So after my first win, the payout was much more than I had expected, so I went ahead and treated myself to something I've been wanting for a long time now. I've been using a friend's work torque wrench all this time, and it was getting to a point where I felt bad always asking to use it . I blame this purchase on him though for spoiling me with a Snap-On axe, so here it is my new Snappy tq wrench. I love it, knew I would love it, it is by far the most expensive tool I own and everything gets torqed down to a spec now

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I've also been keeping a rather large change up on the hush hush so far this year. I've let the cat out of the bag though, so I'll just go ahead and post this up. Last black friday Forced Performance came out with their much annticipated DSM Zero, so I had to go ahead and try it out. I love the thing so far, but don't have too much data to compare vs my old Black. These races I go to also are not timed, so there's no comparing times between the two as of yet. Doesn't really matter though, as every outing so far I've had issues with the shift box so the times wouldn't have been any good. The turbo seems to spool very similar to the black though, and the billet Zona center section is very easy on the eyes. Car pulls hard and I can't wait to see the progress from here on out with it.

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Well that's all for now. Will try and get this car back together as soon as the head is finished up and I get some time. Thanks for lookin!

 

[spoolinpos]

Not too much of an update here, as the head is still at the machine shop. But ever since that cam angle sensor failure from the first event this year, I wanted to swap in a fresh sensor on the Kiggly crank trigger kit for a piece of mind, and this was my opportunity since it was all apart. I couldn't remember if I used an OEM unit or aftermarket, so I pulled the old sensor to find out it was OEM, but who knows how old this thing is. I found something pretty interesting though, the tip of the sensor looked to be damaged.



It looks to be damage from contact with the trigger plate, but I really don't think it is. The clearance fit Kiggly's recommended air gap spec of .025"-.035", and the plate doesn't seem to be bent or damaged at all. So I tossed in the sensor I'll be using, which was the new OEM sensor I bought for the cam sensor failure. I figure I know this unit works, and this will avoid any kind of chance of an out of the box failure for the new unit I ordered. Much easier to swap these things out of the 2gb cam sensor housing than this trigger location .

Anyway, The new sensor fit the spec, but was very tight using the .025" feeler gauge, so @kiggly Racing sent out some shims for me, which I GREATLY appreciate! Again, so thankful to have such great vendors on this platform.



That's all I got for now, hopefully next post will be the head on and successful tests of the shift box changes, I get so frustrated even thinking about the shift box at this point SMH .

Thanks for looking!

 

[spoolinpos]

Well, we're back up and running! Finished off a bunch of small stuff to get ready for this Saturday's race. I still need to take the car for a small test pull and make sure everything head gasket wise has sealed up, but I'm fairly confident it is. Anyway, here are some photos of the head and head gasket used. I'm hopeful this head gasket works out well, seems like the couple other guys that I know of running them are having success, time will tell.



Here are some close up photos of the rings used if anyone was curious as to how they look:

Here's the "top" of the ring, these 3 ridges will bite into the head ~0.003".

And here is the "bottom" of the ring, this will sit on the block's surface.

The composite section of the gasket seems of decent quality, fits very nicely. Once the felt section of the gasket is down, the rings almost had a feel like they snapped into place which I felt was reassuring, I was a little worried about the rings possibly moving around on me while dropping the head onto the block.

We'll see how this works out, hopefully this car is ready to go for this weekend and also for The Shootout next month!

Thanks for lookin!

 

[Vegas Smith]

Looks great. Were you the guy that got rid of the 10cm black? If so, what was the reason for that and overall what did you think of it vs the smaller black?

 

[spoolinpos]

Looks great. Were you the guy that got rid of the 10cm black? If so, what was the reason for that and overall what did you think of it vs the smaller black?

Thanks! Yup, because the buyer of my old fp black wanted the turbo with the 8cm to save a bit on cost of the turbo. Seemed a little more laggy with the 10cm, which was to be expected but was still able to get on converter with the 50 shot of nitrous. I trapped 5-6 mph more with the 10cm housing than I did with the 8cm, but also added about 2 psi and shaved some weight off the car at the same time. Never really had any back to back comparison between the two housings tbh, but the black worked well for me with both of them.

 

[spoolinpos]

Well, made it out to this month's PYOP event, and had success with the event itself, the new head gasket, and some of the changes to the shift box!

I'll start with the shift box first. I'm still not 100% sure if the RPM up-shifter feature is working properly, but there was some positive data showing we might be heading in the right direction. Round 1 1-2 shift was again very short, about a 7000 rpm 1-2 shift. I upped the rpm up shifter value by about 500 or 750 rpms and the next full round it shifted 1-2 at 8000rpm, so there's signs of improvement finally there. Hopefully add another 500rpm to the shift point in the box and we may be back to my target 1-2 shift point of 8500-8600 rpm.

2-3 shift was short, a little over 8000 rpm... I added about 200 rpm into the shift box for the 2-3 shift to see what it would do, and it shifted at like 7950 rpm, so I will try to just keep adding more rpm to the shift box I guess. This is a bit confusing to me as it shifted at 8500 on a test pull on the street prior to the event.

Got the shift box's stall up feature to work properly again though, which was nice being able to launch out in 1st gear again!

I only really had two full passes for the day, but threw a good amount of boost at it and there was not one drop of coolant pushed! So it seems as if this SCE headgasket is working out so far, which I am super happy about! I'll check and retq the head studs if needed in the coming days.

I took the win in the hard tire class with a total of 12 cars.

Round 1 VS a quick diesel truck. I don't know the full mods but he is a really cool guy! The truck has been into the 10s, and he's looking for a 9 second slip this year with it, super impressive! I believe he may have had some issues off the launch.

Round 2 VS a Tesla Model Y Performance. Very cool guy, unfortunately he jumped which I caught and got off the two step and just drove down the track, so no data there.

Round 3 (semifinals) I drew the bye.

Finals VS a really really awesome carbed 5.3 nitrous powered Isuzu truck. This thing was really cool and a great group of guys. He has done a ton of suspension work to the truck and this had only been their 8th pass in it. I think these guys are going to be really cool to watch get things dialed in with it.

Well that's going to do it for now, thanks for checking things out! Looking forward to seeing great friends at this year's Shootout! cheers!

 

[AWD-Tony]

Crushing souls off the line one car at a time!!

 

[spoolinpos]

Well, got bored the other day and figured it's time to toss on the Hoosiers and go for a ride to make sure everything fits fine before The Shootout next month. I didn't hear or feel any kind of rubbing so I'll chalk that up as good to go. I do have some 5mm spacers I will be bringing just incase I may run into something weird, but I don't think I will. These are the Hoosier QTP 26"x9.5" 15 on a 15x7 Rota slipstream with an offset of +40, OEM 2g brakes, no spacers used.

*Just to take note here, I have 2gb rear knuckles, I have heard these allow a bit more clearance when compared to the 2ga rear knuckles (I'm not able to confirm this).

Anyway, I'm a fan of how they look

Can't wait for this year's Shootout! Thanks!

 

[b00stedtalon2]

Looks tough, but just because you wear Jordan's doesn't mean you can ball. Jokes aside, can't wait for the Shootout

 

[mikEclipse99]

SUBBED! Looking forward to drinking some beers with you guys in a few weeks!

 

[spoolinpos]

I didn't do a very good job at keeping up the the last bit of the year. I went to two more of my local no prep events and the 2021 Shootout in between those events.

August no prep, I was eliminated in the second round. There's a pretty fast GTR that started to show up, and my shift box was again not working correctly. I knew the short shifting and pretty much throwing me into 2nd gear right off the brake just wasn't going to cut it if/when I would have to run him that day. So I did something I try not to EVER do, and that's it to try something different in the middle of competition.

I tried to switch my shifting strategy from RPM based shift points to speed and throttle based shift maps. My thinking here was, I can have pretty much 0 chance of beating the GTR with the faulty shifting, or maybe get lucky enough to get this different type of shifting dialed in enough to have a chance at beating him. That back fired on me pretty hard, and the car didn't even shift out of 1st gear , it was a mess to say the least. Anyway, here's a video of the runs from at event.

 

[spoolinpos]

2021 Shootout:

First of all I want to thank my friends for always helping out and being so supportive. I had a blast seeing lots of people I haven't been able to see in years, and also meeting a lot of awesome people!

It was a long, HOT and HUMID weekend, some small issues the were overcome, and some LARGE issues that were finally overcome. The highlights of this year's shootout for me were two things: a new PB in the car, and also FINALLY a correctly working shift box!!! Thank you goes out to Shawn at ForcedFour, he has been working with me on the shifting problems all year, I've bugged him probably about a million times haha, so thank you for the amazing product support! Tried a new shift box along with a different PTU and the RPM shift points were on the money! Also the new PB ET was 9.740 and new best mph was 143.

I had a total of 9 or 10 passes at this year, and the car was going consistent 9.7xs by the end of the weekend. I wanted a bit more, but I just didn't have much left to give. I entered the 9.5 index class, and got a bye round 1. Round 2 I had an amazing race with Bob Breach, but was eliminated. It was an awesome race! Congrats to Bob for taking the win in the 9.5 index class this year also! Car is a beaut and he's a super cool dude.

I believe I toasted the OD on Saturday, I had a nasty habit of pressing the up button on the hand held to shift into 4th at the END of the pass, so while I was off the throttle. I've done it for years, and I think it finally killed the OD clutches. They were also very old clutches. I ordered an OD rebuilt kit from IPT right before the shootout due to being a little suspicious that something may have happened to them at the last no prep event. Thankfully I brought the kit with me, and spent the rest of the day rebuilding OD and getting the car ready for eliminations the next day. Car ran 100% after rebuilding the drum.




Here's a video of a fun little grudge race that went down Sunday morning between Steve Roque and his BEAUTIFUL Eclipse GSX and I:



I FINALLY got to use my party lights too!!! It wasn't working correctly, but they were supposed to come on when the car reached the two step, and stay on all down the track . I have some party light tuning to do still! I'm using one of the shift box's digital outputs to control the activation of the lights , I got bored one day what can I say



Anyway, it was a fun shootout as always! The fact the I was able to pull off a PB in that kind of air (DA was like 3500 Sunday) and getting the shifting issues all figured out was a huge win for me. Here are some of my favorite photos from that weekend:

Thanks for lookin!

 

[spoolinpos]

September No prep:

Well I was super excited to finally attend one the these no prep events with a properly working shift box! Unfortunately though, other issues popped up as the day went on. The first run everything felt pretty good, car launched out nice and all the shifts were on the money. The dragy told me I was down a couple mph though from what I was expecting, so I chalked it up to a glitch with the data or something and just didnt even both using it the rest of the day.

Second run is where things got weird. The car seemed to have a hard time getting to the two step, and once it reached the two step RPM it didn't want to stay there. Super weird I thought. Car launched out pretty slow due to the car not being able to really hold my target launch RPM, but pulled clean through the gears.

In the pits, we tried and tried to figure out what was going on. At times the car wouldn''t even get to the two step RPM, I had thought maybe the nitrous solenoid was failing. Anyway, we tried a ton of things, couldn't really figure anything out, and were about to head into the finals against the GTR I mentioned above in the August no prep event.

I was pretty pissed, didn't even bother recording the run as I knew what the outcome would be. Car didn't really get on the two step, didn't build the boost I normally do to launch, and was a complete turd out of the hole. The GTR got me by a car and a half or two cars, I don't know, you can hear the guy on the radio say by a car but I'm pretty sure it was a bit more than that. I watched him walking away from me, and at that point I knew I will have to make some changes for next year if I want to keep up with him. Anyway, here'a a picture and a video with each run from this event.

This was the last event of the year for me, a lot of decisions to make over winter. I will dive into what issues I find in another post also.

Thanks for looking!

 

[Vegas Smith]

If you had a manual you wouldn’t need a shift box.

any plans to go to a FP Zero?

 

[AWD-Tony]

Congrats on your pb and getting everything worked out. Your exhaust hangs awfully low.

 

[spoolinpos]

If you had a manual you wouldn’t need a shift box.

any plans to go to a FP Zero?

haha as much as I miss the 5 speeds, the auto really does shine in the type of racing I've been doing, when shifting properly that is . I actually ran the zero this whole season, and will be moving into a larger frame turbo over the winter, at least that is the plan for now.

EDIT: well moving away from the Mitsu flange bolt on turbos***

Congrats on your pb and getting everything worked out. Your exhaust hangs awfully low.

Thank you! It's a bit worse looking in that photo than it really is, must be due to the car launching. Maybe at some point I will try and find a way to tuck it up more than it currently is.

 

[Vegas Smith]

haha as much as I miss the 5 speeds, the auto really does shine in the type of racing I've been doing, when shifting properly that is . I actually ran the zero this whole season, and will be moving into a larger frame turbo over the winter, at least that is the plan for now.


Thank you! It's a bit worse looking in that photo than it really is, must be due to the car launching. Maybe at some point I will try and find a way to tuck it up more than it currently is.

Whoops, for some reason I thought you were still running the black.

 

[spoolinpos]

So I mentioned in my post above that the car seemed to have developed some issues at the last no prep race I was at. I thought it may have been a failing nitrous solenoid, but so far those have tested out to be ok, and nothing showed this in the logs. The car would have a really hard time getting up to the two step RPM, and if/when it got there it really wouldn't hold there. It was really weird, almost felt like it didn't have enough power to stay at the two step RPM.

Well, this wasn't the only issue that the car had developed, and this next issue/sound I didn't hear till a day or two after the race when I was in the garage messing around a bit. The car seems to have developed a very weird and concerning sound at idle. It almost sounded like a rod knock, so immediately I thought I was in some trouble. Oil pressure looked normal though, and the sound would get less pronounced when I gave it a little gas, so very strange, and not what I would be encountering if it was truly rod knock. So I figured I'd toss in some new lifters as the car has always had kind of noisy (3g) lifters in it, I thought maybe one finally shit the bed on me. Well no change after the lifter swap. So I decided to pull the oil filter off and opened it up. I was fully expecting to see glitter from bearing material, but to my surprise it was SUPER clean, I couldn't find a speck of anything in the element.

I still need to pull the engine and trans out to do some digging into this sound and find out what's going on. At the moment I'm thinking maybe a piston might is hurt, maybe a wrist pin or possibly piston slap. At this point I'll be happy if the oil pump and crank are still usable (and I believe they are after seeing a clean oil filter element). Another thing that could be possibly causing the sound is maybe a crank bolt came loose. I hope to dig into it more in a couple weeks to figure it out and get a solution in the works.

Back to the car seeming to be down on power, I did a compression test and it showed fine results cold, nothing that would throw a red flag out to me at all. I started to take the turbo kit off to sell it, and while inspecting it I found the turbine wheel was chewed up at the tips, every single one! Maybe this is the reason the car wasn't able to stay on the two step and seemed to be down a bit on boost trying to launch? Anyway, that turbo is out to FP being repaired at the moment. Here's what I found:






I'm not 100% sure what caused this, I'm guessing EMAP and temps were too high? There's no evidence of the anything passing through the engine a this time. Oh well, it's being fixed up at the moment, thanks to FP for the great customer service, as always!

More to come once I find the time and motivation to pull the motor and dig into that noise. Nice thing about winter here is it gives me plenty of down time to do stuff like this ha.

Thanks for lookin!

 

[spoolinpos]

Hey everyone, well I'm about 95% sure I have found the weird noise I was hearing. Saw all flexplate to crank bolts rotated to some degree, so they all back out on me. I'm not sure if this happened just over this season, or if they have been doing this slowly over the 2-3 years of being installed. I really should have taken a look at them last winter when I had the trans off the car to refresh. Not my first lesson learned the hard way, and unfortunately I'm sure it won't be my last. I usually torque these to 120 ft/lbs and with a good amount of loctite red, along with loctite on the spacer plate. I guess next time around I will up that to 135-140 ft/lbs and use even more, fresh loctite 272.

Unfortunately the crank took a beating from everything coming loose, and will have to be replaced. Thankfully I have a spare crank that hopefully will be ready to go after a polish. I decided since I have to pull things apart, I'm going to take this opportunity to replace the Eagle rods and Mahle pistons with some stronger parts to accommodate the turbo upgrade I have planned. The plan is to bring the short block up to Tyler Hassing over at Force Engineering in Plainwell Michigan and have him perform the machine work and assembly of the new short block. More info on that as time goes on.



Also, since I took the time to overhaul the entire rear suspension last winter I plan to do the similar to the front. All lower control arms will be replaced with OEM, new front OEM knuckles, and new upper control arms will be installed this winter. The arms on the car now are old and worn, it's time to get them changed out!



And how we stand as of now. Got to get the head off and short block stripped down to take to Tyler in a couple weeks. Anyone interested in buying a 6 bolt Eagle rod/ Mahle 9.0:1 85.5 piston set up?



As always, thanks for looking! Hopefully next update will be better news.

 

[Ludachris]

Hey everyone, well I'm about 95% sure I have found the weird noise I was hearing. Saw all flexplate to crank bolts rotated to some degree, so they all back out on me. I'm not sure if this happened just over this season, or if they have been doing this slowly over the 2-3 years of being installed. I really should have taken a look at them last winter when I had the trans off the car to refresh. Not my first lesson learned the hard way, and unfortunately I'm sure it won't be my last. I usually torque these to 120 ft/lbs and with a good amount of loctite red, along with loctite on the spacer plate. I guess next time around I will up that to 135-140 ft/lbs and use even more, fresh loctite 272.

Unfortunately the crank took a beating from everything coming loose, and will have to be replaced. Thankfully I have a spare crank that hopefully will be ready to go after a polish. I decided since I have to pull things apart, I'm going to take this opportunity to replace the Eagle rods and Mahle pistons with some stronger parts to accommodate the turbo upgrade I have planned. The plan is to bring the short block up to Tyler Hassing over at Force Engineering in Plainwell Michigan and have him perform the machine work and assembly of the new short block. More info on that as time goes on.

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Also, since I took the time to overhaul the entire rear suspension last winter I plan to do the similar to the front. All lower control arms will be replaced with OEM, new front OEM knuckles, and new upper control arms will be installed this winter. The arms on the car now are old and worn, it's time to get them changed out!

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And how we stand as of now. Got to get the head off and short block stripped down to take to Tyler in a couple weeks. Anyone interested in buying a 6 bolt Eagle rod/ Mahle 9.0:1 85.5 piston set up?

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As always, thanks for looking! Hopefully next update will be better news.

Well that sucks. Though it sounds like it's opening the door to a rebuild that you're excited about, so maybe it's not the end of the world huh?

 

[spoolinpos]

Happy new year! Haven't updated in a little bit, and don't have too much to share. I did find more "garage wall art" aka broken shit while tearing the block down! Number 3 piston was deformed in the dish, things must have got HOT. It's kinda hard to see in the photo, but if you run your fingers across the inner dish, the top of the piston almost dips inwards , probably was on it's way to a melt down. Rods still look decent, so I packed them up and put them in storage, maybe I'll find a use for them some other time.

Anyway, I gave it some thought, and my current head has been decked a good amount of times in my hands, and the valve springs are 5-6 years old already! I decided to pick up a core 1g head to have done by Tyler over at Force Engineering while he's doing the short block also.

The short block will be a 2.0L long rod motor using 156mm R&R Aluminum rods and Wiseco HD pistons. Fresh ARP main studs and the addition of a Kiggly main girdle! I also picked up a 6 bolt crank shaft for the build since my old one was toast from the bolts backing out.

The head will have a fresh set of Kiggly HP valve springs with shims to target about 120ish lbs of seat pressure, new GSC intake and exhaust valves (STD sized), GSC valve seals, valve job, new valve guides, and will still be using the GSC s2 cams. I also took a little bit of time after I tore the head down to clean up some of the casting flash in the intake runners.

I also may have picked up a Magnus cast intake manifold with a Ross Machine Racing 82.5mm throttle body to go with the fresh head, why not right?

Oh, also I have been ordering parts like crazy from Josh over at JNZ Tuning ( @DSSA ), and I cannot express how badass he has been! All new OEM front lower control arms and knuckles and also as much hardware as I could get for the front suspension! I'm going to probably apply a coat or two of POR15 to the control arms before I go ahead and install them. I also have new aftermarket upper control arms and new front end links for the sway bar.

Well I think that's going to do it for this post, hopefully next post will be of some pretty turbo stuff!

Thanks for looking!

 

[Ludachris]

Did you get a used 6-bolt crank?

If I were to do it again I think I'd go with a cast intake manifold - the sheet metal manifolds are light and look cool but you don't really have to worry about cracked welds with the cast.

Josh is good people for sure. Wish we had him involved here years earlier.