A couple weeks back, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, my friend Ron and I rolled the beast out into the elements (with the windows rolled down and the moonroof missing) for a trip across town to All Motor Mike Frye’s place for some FINAL welding to the front end. Previously, Mike had tacked things in place for me, but this time, I left him with [195] so he could make things good and permanent.
Here’s some pictures of the final repairs. I didn’t cut the replacement core support off as accurately as I would have liked, and some of these areas are pretty thin (with that gooey adhesive between stamped layers), but all in all, I’m really happy with how these repairs turned out. As I was telling my friend Kris the other day, Hooray! I’m back to Square One of my rally car build!
The outer sides of the “rails” are fairly thin, and the adhesive between the stamped layers can make for some really frustrating welding. Despite grinding things down thoroughly before the work, the welds still got contaminated, or the torch wanted to burn right through. This was pretty tricky stuff. Even so, I don’t care what it looks like so long as the front end wont be ripped off by heavy sweep one day.
Perhaps you noticed my new crossmember location bits. Since this core support is from a FWD Galant LS, it doesn’t have the provisions to locate the AWD VR4 front crossmember. Mike trimmed up some CrMo tubing he had lying around and set it in place for a perfect solution. These are merely tacked into place for now, as the clearances are too tight for him to get the torch in there to finish them up with the Tig. He’s going to get a Mig from a friend and lay down the last four beads in the near future.
What else is new? Well, I went to move a blanket in my trunk the other day and found a JDM Cylcone intake manifold back there! I totally forgot that was even there! These things are pretty slick. They have a slightly smaller plenum than the USDM 4G63T and 8 runners. At low engine speeds, prior to and shortly after the turbo begins to build boost, only one runner is feeding each cylinder. This results in greater intake charge velocity, meaning a noticeable improvement in low end torque. Once the engine is really cooking, the ECU opens the butterflies, effectively doubling the volume of the runners, for full power. I’m told there is a little loss of top end with these, but I’ll have a restrictor on the turbo eventually and torque down low trumps HP up top in my book.
Now I’ve got to decide – do I want to bolt up the Cyclone, convert to DSMap, and drive the car a bit or do I want to pull the roof skin and front glass so I can get the cage started. Hmmm…
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