IT RUNS!!! - My 500whp build - Element motor and Moore Performance Twin Scroll Kit! by dexterous

5 minute(s) of a 312 minute read

Going to the local dyno at 10AM today to see what happens and if all goes well I have an appointment with Phil on Tuesday.

We just pulled it off the dyno and...
















NO SMOKE!!!!!

All I can say is thank God! For the first time in six months I am happy about my car again. I go to Element on Tuesday and I really hope this is it.

8-8-2011

Well, I am pretty bummed out because I just got word that there's a schedule conflict with the dyno and I cant get the car tuned tomorrow. At this point there's no ETA but my best guess is not until September. Thats really depressing...

8-21-2011

Thanks! You guys have been very supportive and I really appreciate it. This has been the most challenging car project that I have ever worked on. Its coming up on a year and I am to the point where I almost don't care how much power the car makes, I just want it to be road worthy again. As I said in my very first post, this is the grand finale for my car modding years. I am pretty sure i wont ever do a project like this again (at least not with a subaru street car) because of how terrible of an experience this has been.

An awesome car that doesn't move under it's own power 85% of the time...

8-24-2011

So back on topic here. My STI should be on the dyno in about 29 hours with the first possibility of an update coming in around 3PM eastern tomorrow. Wish me luck guys!

8-25-2011

Everything was going well on the dyno today until the motor had a catastrophic failure. The motor is toast.

8-26-2011

So here's the story. Its 265 miles from my house to Element. When I was about 15 minutes from Element the check engine light came on. The Hydra only turns the CEL on when it detects knock making this very strange since the car was nearly coasting on the highway at around 3200RPM. I cycled the key which made the check engine light go out and continued to drive. The moment I got to Element I told Phil what happened and he concluded that it must be the tune and that it was nothing to worry about. We loaded the car on the dyno at about 2PM and started doing pulls at about 2:30PM. The car seemed really healthy on the first few pulls as all the issues I had in the past were totally gone. Phil wasn't really doing performance tuning at this point, he was more or less just getting the AFRs, timing, cams, etc all in the general range that they needed to be in. After pull 4 Phil gave me a thumbs up and said the car was working really well. A few minutes later Phil started pull five and at 7000 RPM the motor made a horrible noise, blasted tons of smoke out of the exhaust and shut down. The smell of coolant filled the air and everything got quiet. That pull read 404whp on the dyno (motor was built for 700whp) so we were not even into what I would consider the high power range yet.

Phil, the AMS guys and I all looked at each other with stunned looks saying "what the hell was that". We immediately started to look over the car and discovered that there was nearly zero coolant in the radiator. We then discovered that the oil pan was full of coolant and there was tons of coolant in the exhaust. We quickly concluded that since the coolant was drained that fast (in a single pull) that the motor must have ingested it which could only have caused massive damage. After we talked about it for a while Phil said that he has seen the false knock between 3000 and 3500 issue on his race car a few times just prior to the motor failing. That being said, we are reasonably confident that the motor was on the way out before it even arrived at Element yesterday.

Since the motor was obviously destroyed I made arrangements to rent a trunk (expen$ive) and towed the car home. At this point the plan is to unload the car on Saturday and pull the spark plugs. I wont have time to pull the motor for at least a week (going on a work trip) but I will do it as soon as I can. Once the motor is out I am going to take it down to Element to see what if anything can be salvaged. My best guess is that the only thing that will make it out alive is the set of cams.

Yeah, I think its a little beyond "working out" at this point. Its pretty much the definition of "not working out". I am pretty much at the point where I am going to start suggesting that people never do built motors.