Why do I even own this thing? 2ga to 2gb talon build

[Tyeler18]

Thought I started a build thread on this thing but apparently not. A good buddy of mine used to own this car and I tried to buy it off him when he was selling it. Long story short it changed hands quite a few times in typical fashion and ended up with another guy I know. He drove it for a bit before parking it for various issues and decided to buy another one. This car ended up as a parts car in a field for 4+ years where pretty much everything on it was either stripped off or degraded from the AZ sun. I had mentioned to him a few times that I wanted the car to fix if he was going to scrap it, over the course of probably 3 years he finally decided to let it go in trade for getting his second DSM fixed back up and running. He told me the car was likely better off as a parts car, but I wasn't super concerned. I hadn't seen the car in probably 8+ years at this point and after he sent me a rather pointed video of it in the store field I decided to make the trade with him. His list of work started off pretty small and seemed like a fair enough trade, boy was I wrong. I ended up with the equivalent of roughly $4500 in labor along with a handful of parts I had on hand that he needed. Had I seen the car in person prior to agreeing I likely wouldn't have traded, but here we are and I'm fixing it.

The car wasn't supposed to be dropped off at my house until I was done with the work on his, but we needed parts off it so he dropped it off and this is how it showed up...



I live in an HOA, I about had a heart attack when he started unloading this. He took the headlights off, the bumpers, side skirts, the hood was rattle canned, the interior was full of junk, rat piss and just misc garbage. This was nothing like the video I had seen of it. The quarter had very obvious body work done on it, I almost told him to just pick both cars up and take them it was so bad.







Luckily I had a handful of parts to put on it while I waited for him to bring the rest of the body panels for the car since it ended up taking a bit to get everything here.



The hood needed immediate attention so we ran down to Lowes and grabbed some turbo cans to try and just quickly paint it black. I had never used these before and didn't realize I would end up doing an entire paint job out of this.

 

[Tyeler18]

I was so happy with how the turbo can worked out and the fact that paint on the car was completely destroyed that I decided to completely paint the car with turbo cans. I was going to leave the car black but I really wanted a white 2gb talon and they have gloss white in the turbo can so I decided to strip the entire car and turbo can it white. The guy I traded actually offered to trade me cars since his was white and mine was black, but I would've had to swap all the parts between them and I honestly didn't want to hold onto his car for any longer at that point, so I started sanding and prepping panels one by one.







Bought a 2gb high rise talon wing, I actually love this wing and the 2ga thumbnail wing had been removed long before me so gloss black turbo can to restore it and it looked great again.



I've had a set of 2g talon blacked housing headlights in storage for years. I haven't had a 2g to put them on since probably 2012 but I knew I'd use them at some point. The housings were rough so they were sanded and ceramic coated.



Next on the list was the quarters and doors, I was dreading the driver quarter covered in bondo because I had no idea what I was going to find there. My buddy that initially owned the car sent me a picture of what happened which honestly made it worse. Apparently the guy I got the car from had it backed into by a trailer right behind the driver door. It put a huge dent in it and he decided to fill the dent with bondo. To be honest it looked pretty decent and the body line wasn't bad, I actually contemplated just prepping it and painting it until I saw the picture of how deep the dent was. I apprehensively started grinding out the filler and I'm glad I did because it was huge. That chunk of filler would've absolutely broke free and fallen off the car down the road.. This is after grinding it out. The picture doesn't show the depth very well but there was easily 1"+ of filler depth there.



Im no body guy but I've watched enough youtube dent repair videos to give it a shot at popping this out. While I was staring at it I happened to have a 2x4 chunk in the back of the car and a 3lb sledge laying on the ground by the car. I have body hammers but I just wanted to see what would happen so I used the 2x4 as a dolly and smacked the quarter lightly with the sledge just above the dent and I couldn't believe the entire dent popped about 95% of the way out with a very light smack Took all of 3 seconds to fix it good enough that most people wouldn't have noticed. I ended up smoothing it out with a body hammer almost 100%, sanded the rest of the side of the car down to metal.



Now I've been painting this car outside in my driveway which under good circumstances is the worst idea. I had to be somewhat quick about it since I live in an HOA and while they're pretty lenient I didn't want this thing sitting outside with flash rust all over the body so it was kind of just strip to metal, prime and paint all in the fewest days possible. Lots of this was done panel by panel in a few hour span from black to base white but I wanted to paint the quarters and doors together at the same time to make prep time quicker. Unfortunately for me I decided to do this during monsoon season in AZ where we get a ton of dust storms completely out of the blue and every time I went to paint the doors/quarters I was greeted with a dust storm in the middle of laying down a coat of either primer or base. I think I painted both sides of the car 3x before I managed to get it all done and cured without being hammered by sand. I've had legit paint jobs by shops that didn't turn out as nice as this with more nibs and debris in the paint than I got.





Did the white part of the hatch while redoing the driver side quarter.





Lots of flash rust on the hatch/roof from the previous owner starting to sand this for paint and letting it sit in the elements unprotected for years. Luckily this was all surface and didn't take a horrible amount of work to remove. The top was gloss blacked along with the back of the hatch to complete the 2 tone 2gb talon look.





Bolted all the body panels back on, 2ga turbo twisty skirts, mirrors etc. It was nice to finally see this as a complete car and for a rattle can paint job this turned out way better than I would've imagined it would.





Now that it could actually sit outside without too much worry it was time to start on the drivetrain. The car did come with a "refreshed" shortblock in the bay but it had been sitting with no head and no oil filter on it so naturally the cylinders were rusted, the deck was rusted and the OFH was filled with dirt. My initial plan was to just ball hone the cylinders with the pistons in it and scuff the deck and just slap a cheap head on it to get it running for now. I put a ratchet on the crank pulley to spin it over and go figure, its seized solid. It did have an ACT2100 on it which I was at least happy to not need to buy a clutch right off the rip, but it was rusted together also so that was junk



I yanked the engine out and man am I glad I didn't even try to put this thing together. The #3 wrist pin was seized, rod caps were installed backwards on a few cylinders, none of the main bolts were torqued, the oil pickup had no gasket and only had one bolt holding it on, lots of misc bolts missing, the pan was full of dirt. The whole engine was a giant mess, theres no way this would've even ran for 30 seconds if the wrist pin hadnt been seized so I stripped it all done and ran a hone through the cylinders just to see if they'd clean up enough for some stock pistons. I wasn't super happy with the finish so I started looking for some .020 pistons and ended up grabbing a set of 2.3L stroker wisecos and eagle h-beams. I traded my stock 2.0 crank for a 2.4L crank and I guess this shit box is getting a stroker. The fun didn't end there though, i dropped the block off at the machine shop to be cleaned and bored. I end up getting a phone call from the machine shop a week later saying I need a new block, apparently when it was "refreshed" someone decked the block and decked it at an angle. My machinist didn't square the block in the boring machine, he just assumed since the deck was flat it was square so he sent the bore down the cylinder and ended up with over .015 out of round since it was boring the block at an angle. We could've gone .040 and cleaned it up then decked the block back flat but i already had .020 pistons and a $200 block is cheaper than $800 pistons. I think he should've been covering the cost of a new block for me here but I didn't push him on it and just ate the cost and bought a new block. I ended up getting a split thrust 7 bolt now with a spun rod bearing so while it was annoying I did end up upgrading to a "nicer" block to build. Back to the machine shop it went to be cleaned and bored.

Fresh stroker install in a crusty but clean block.





The head was crusty too so some easy off oven cleaner to strip it (dont let this stuff sit on aluminum for long) worked really well.







I changed the valve seals and lapped the the valves in but the valves are a little more pitted than I was hoping and none of them are sealing properly so this is going to the machine shop to get a valve job still. Put the head on the block to cover it while I cleaned the crust off to paint it.





Some fresh freeze plugs and paint, this looks too nice to go in this turd of a car.



This is where I'm at currently with the car. I'm going to try and stab the engine and trans this weekend and i'll just button up the head install when it comes back from the machine shop. I'd like to get it out of my garage and honestly off my property so I can get a couple of my other projects in and my black evo back in the garage where it should be. I haven't decided on a turbo setup yet but I do have a 16g off my mighty max that will likely go on for now at least. Still no clue what purpose I have for this car, I have a few buddies that want to use it so as soon as it's running I'm dropping it off at one of their houses so someone will at least keep fresh fluids in it while I work on other stuff. The cars put a bad taste in my mouth but I expected nothing less after seeing it so it'll be relieving to be able to drive it soon.

 

[Tyeler18]

Spent a little bit in the garage today just to get this thing out of my way. I've got piles of parts for the car along the sides and all over every work bench in the garage so having this in was a nice weight off my shoulders. Don't mind the absolutely wrecked engine bay. I planned to pressure wash all of this before installing the engine but I completely immobilized it when I yanked the engine not expecting it to sit as long as it did so it'll get cleaned once it can roll again. The head is just sitting on the block right now so it'll be easy to deep clean everything with the head off.



Found more of the just goofy assembly done on this while I was putting the engine in. The strut mount was bolted in with the rubber cover under the strut tower so it's currently sandwiched. This entire car has just been a bunch of dumb stuff like this.

 

[Jalapeño1G]

The turbo can paint job came out amazing!!! Might have to do this to my 1GB. Also just picked it up from East AZ and hauled it to Buckeye

 

[Tyeler18]

The turbo can paint job came out amazing!!! Might have to do this to my 1GB. Also just picked it up from East AZ and hauled it to Buckeye

Prep is everything here, the cans spray out like a cheap HVLP so it's pretty easy to get a good coat down and it lays down flatter than out of a normal spray can. If they had more color options I'd definitely be doing more color changes with this stuff. I plan to clear over this at some point just to see how it works out

 

[Tyeler18]

Back on the ground for the first time in probably a year! I wanted to roll it out so I can wash all the dust and dirt off but I decided to tear apart the van for it's turbo swap in the driveway right behind the car so I can't move this out until it's put back together. I still need to pull the turbo setup off the mighty max to put on this and a couple of small bits and pieces bolted on and it'll be ready to fire

 

[Tyeler18]

I was just getting ready to order a handful of misc engine parts to finish this thing up. I need a thermostat housing, cam sensor/housing and just a handful of misc bolts, fuel rail spacers etc. Saturday night a pair of 7 bolt 4g63's were posted on marketplace for $200 as parts engines and they happened to have everything I needed and then some. When I got there the guy told me one of the engines had "stage 2 cams" so I was mildly hoping there'd be something worth while in at least one of the heads since the engines had clearly been sitting outside for a while, go figure after pulling the head off it was a completely stock head on both engines. I didn't expect much less considering the guy I got it from. I was quite surprised to see flat top pistons in one of the engines, I started looking closer and realized it wasn't a 4g63 but a 4g64 someone DOHC swapped. The cylinders were full of rust from water sitting in them but the bottom end does rotate over. The other engine was just a stock 4g63 but its a split thrust 7 bolt. Again one of the crank journals had water on it so it's rusted but the plan is to take the 4g64 crank out and build the 63 into yet another 2.3L. Both heads have bent valves so they both need work but they came with good useable parts on them at least.

The only picture of the rat pee coated engines prior to pressure washing everything off of them. At least I got the parts I needed.

 

[Tyeler18]

I've been crazy busy on other projects and this is getting so close to being ready to fire, but I haven't gotten there yet. I did finally pull the turbo setup off my mighty max and swap it onto this. This is just a b16g which will likely not be the end turbo for this project but it's the only good turbo I had and the mighty max got a top mount upgrade, plus this is all nice and ceramic coated. Engine bay is still filthy since I haven't been able to roll it out to clean it. I need an oil feed line, the top half of the thermostat housing, plug in the harness, and stick a computer in it and it'll be ready to fire. I ended up just buying everything to put a haltech in this so I may wire it for the haltech and just rob one from one of the 40 other cars when I want to drive it until I can get a handful more S2's since I've used up all of mine now. It's starting to get hot out and I need to have this driveable before the AZ heat when I wont want to spend any time in the garage.

 

[Tyeler18]

2gb talon + factory fogs + fmic have always been a bit of a disaster. Short of an ETS 2gb talon FMIC there's not much out there that fits an adequately sized core but keeps the fogs. This treadstone has been hanging around at my house for a few years so I decided to test fit it and was pleasantly surprised how well the core fits. It's a little on the narrow side, but its a 3" core with 2.5" outlets and should be a good compromise for airflow and space. This car had a VRSF on it at some point in its life so the core support was already trimmed for an intercooler pipe. A 90 fits right into the notch where the VRSF used to go. I will be making a somewhat intricate LICP to clear over the fogs and around but it won't be that bad to do.

The core is 2" lower here since it's resting on the fog lights.



zip tied it up just to make sure the bumper would clear. I used this front bumper because I planned on cutting it up for a front mount but this fits pretty tight behind the bumper. I may have to actually paint one of my good bumpers to use now.



The previous owner really did a number on anything and everything on this car, the amount of labor and diag that went in to getting all the lights to function for this picture was ridiculous for how simple the circuitry is on these. Nearly everything in the systems that could be wrong or missing was, but I'm happy to see everything on and functioning.





I was basically at the point of getting this ready to fire up and as I figured the fuel pump was dead. The cars been sitting in a field for years before I got it, what I didn't know was that the tank was full of fuel. It wouldn't have mattered, the damage was done long before I got it but this was pretty annoying to find.



I knew the feed fitting was botched from a really poor repair job by the previous owner but I was hoping the sender was at least salvageable. I repair fuel tanks at work with acid etching all the time but this thing is rotted beyond repair. Every line broke off just from touching it, the fuel sender bracket broke off the hat, and it has small rot holes through the hat. I've got my eye out for an OE replacement with a working sending unit but I'm on hold until then for now. I imagine the driver side sender is just as bad, but at least that ones not required to get this fired up. I was able to shoot a little carb clean down the intake and fire the engine just to hear it so that was a nice win at least.

 

[chrisman287]

Making me want fogs!!

 

[Tyeler18]

Finally got a new fuel sending unit, tossed it in on black box 2g ecu out of my spyder and to my surprise the car fired in half a crank. I was expecting some level of cranking being a fresh engine with an older set of evo injectors and the maf crudely fixed to the throttle body since the intercooler wasn't finished yet. That was some much needed motivation to get going on this further.

Started with fully mounting the intercooler core. This is an 18x11x3 if anyone wants something similar. There's 24" between the fogs so a 20-21" core would fit perfectly with the endtanks. I may swap this out down the road for one but this works and puts the passenger outlet at the perfect spot to back door exit like a VRSF. I'm going to be cutting the straight outlet off and welding a vibrant close ratio 90 on to aim it out the back. The goal is to use straight couplers everywhere rather than any 45's or 90s. Lowes has aluminum bar stock for $20 that was long enough to replicate the $90 punishment intercooler bracket so I just built one myself.



I put some 1/2" spacers under the bar to bring the core up. The bumper hits the LICP as it starts to round. I could lift the core or shorten the outlet pipe closer to the core support and not have to trim anything to clear. I'll likely shorten the pipe and drop the core back down to keep as much of the wide portion of the intercooler in the mouth of the bumper for airflow, but a combination of both may be what I need to do. I'll find out once I'm finished building these fully. The start of the LICP here



Fully tacked up, this was super simple. A basic 2.5" u-pipe cut down the center of the U, a 3" extension between the 2 halves, and a 13" extension to the one leg of the U going to the turbo. Lands the pipe perfectly to a downfiring/j-pipe setup. It's also low enough and far enough from the radiator a stock A/C fan still fits





Upper pipe was even easier. 2 45's cut down and angled to clear a stock battery. I plan to put a 90 on the end but this may be one spot ill run a 90 coupler just to keep it simple. I'd like to do a big sweeping 90 off the throttle body so this may get changed down the road. I'll drop the battery down on the subframe if I go that route and this pipe will probably end up on my spyder since I like how this routed better than VRSF's pipe does.



Bumper just barely hits the core so it's not fully mounted here. The core could be a little lower which is why I want to pull those spacers out, it's just barely below the lip of the bumper but I don't hate this if I have to leave it.

 

[Tyeler18]

Spent the weekend off and on working on this thing. Finished up all the intercooler piping and just buttoned up the little things on it I needed to fire it up and actually run it. I've got a nasty gear oil leak from what I'm hoping is the driver side axle seal but I haven't gotten under it yet to see if that's for sure where it's coming from. I honestly didn't care, I just wanted to get this thing fired up and idling. A buddy dropped off an o2 housing and an internal gate hotside for the 16g, the one I have is nicely ceramic coated but it's external gate and I didn't feel like building an external gate o2 housing right now so it's back on an internal gate for now. I got it together enough to roll out of the garage and start cleaning this bay. It's not great but it's way better





I had to electrical tape the maf to my intake pipe to get it working since I didn't have the right size coupler and my stock intake tube is MIA, bunch of random vacuum caps on ports and I'm pretty sure the tune in the ecu is still a SD/ FIC1000 tune and I'm on a MAF with evo 560's but it fired up and ran surprisingly well. The odyssey battery in there was the only battery I had that would take some what of a charge and I didn't want it to leave me stranded but I was able to take it around the neighborhood which was awesome.







The exhaust is currently just a cut up 3" downpipe turned into a turn down basically right at the oil pan so it sounds like a tractor, the suspension is absolutely atrocious for ride quality, partially because they're some cheap shit amazon coilover sleeves on stock struts and partially because I decided to slam them as low as I possibly could because I have no idea what I want to do with this car but outside of that it was a good test drive. I need to get a battery and finish up the battery terminals, put a plate and insurance on it and see if it makes it out of the neighborhood

 

[Tyeler18]

I probably should've bolt checked the car better before driving around the neighborhood in this considering how everything on this has been. I don't normally take the driver side suspension apart when I pull a trans/engine so I never really bothered to make sure anything on that side was tight. I did notice a clunk while backing out any time I stepped on the brakes. Glad I didn't go very far/fast



I also had the deep horizon gear oil spill going on in the garage the minute I started putting fluid in this trans. I shouldn't be surprised but apparently this trans was full of water at some point. The brand new gear oil i was pumping in was leaking out looking like straight rust water. I'm surprised this trans even works, but the driver axle seal was destroyed.



New seal in, it looks like the output shaft seal for the tcase may also be seeping. I'm not planning to split this case anytime soon so I'm hoping as it gets some fresh fluid through it it'll seal it up some. I have a couple of spare 2g trans but I don't want to waste one on this until it's in a nicer state.



With that all fixed I decided to take it out for a cruise to the gas station, I needed some better tires so I robbed the RPF1's off my grey 1g for the time being and went out for a little cruise. There's no reason this car should be on the road right now, I have no cooling fans, the suspension is some of the worst suspension I've ever ridden on, the fuel pump assembly is just sitting in the tank because I'm waiting on a new gasket to come in so the cab is just full of raw gas fumes, but I was able to get it out and roll around. I even managed to roll it to work today. I did swap the black box ecu I had in it out for an evo ecu, my tactrix 2.0 cable wasn't happy with the car for some reason but my 1.3U cable works fine with the evo ecu. This 2.3L feels just like the 2.3 in my black evo, so much torque and so nice for a street car to just roll out without needing to build boost. Snapped a handful of pictures while I was out and about









I played a sketchy game today with opening the sunroof. Like every other switch on this car the years of sitting in a field took a toll on all the contacts. I was able to work the switch and free it up so I didn't have to take it apart. Surprisingly the tracks were pretty clean but I regreased everything and it seems to be working good. This would've been nice to have to help air out the gas fumes that were filling the cab from the fuel tank being open.



The radiator thats in the car is out of my van that was having overheating issues. I wasn't sure if it was the radiator or the headgasket but I swapped a new radiator in the van when I did the headgasket and it was fixed. I put the old radiator in this just to have a radiator and sure enough this thing doesn't want to cool well going down the road so I'm pretty confident this radiator is messed up internally. I've got a 1g 3 core I'll throw in this weekend and see if I can get some fans on it so I don't have to eyeball the temp gauge every where I go. Considering it was 95 today I'm not too upset with how it does but the temp does start to creep after some drive time. My other cars will hold 190 pretty much all year round.