With all the thought and energy I’m putting into my car, writing about beer has taken a serious back seat. That isn’t changing really until the car is done, but I made an exception recently. I skipped the Super Bowl and went to Stone Winter Storm in San Marcos, CA this past Sunday. I detailed the afternoon in a guest post on my friends blog at IDrinkGoodBeer.Com.

My post is here: http://www.idrinkgoodbeer.com/events/stone-winter-storm/

Mounted up the exhaust last night, front to back.

Heat wrapped from the turbo elbow back to just before the muffler section.

This exhaust is just ridiculous.

And this is how it sits right now.

Still working on running hoses and gauge wiring on the car. Boring pics are boring, so this is all for now.

The bird is in the nest.

I’m not usually one to waste a bunch of bits and bytes textually fellating the products I use. Most of them are off the shelf stuff that you can see anywhere. If I was doing some fab work, that might be different.

In any case, I am breaking from that because I got my hands on something that hasn’t really reached general release yet; it’s a Circuit Sports high capacity oil pan for SR20DET. I’m certainly not the first to install it, but it hasn’t been around long and I expect to see it become popular quickly.

I was talking to Wayne @ Phase2 a couple months back about some parts and mentioned that I wanted to get a larger pan. He told me that Circuit Sports had a pan for the SR20 coming out soon and that if I could wait, he would make sure I got one. As always, Wayne came through, and the pan is super nice – definitely worth the wait.

Here are some pics;

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s a welded pan, as opposed to the cast pans like GReddy and it’s millions of clones. Some of the really shitty ones are made from a casting so porous they actually sweat oil. Screw that, I’m not going to have similar issues with this pan. The next thing you’ll notice is the huge baffles with trap doors – perfect for drifting. One of the other things that I noticed about this pan that I liked was the fact that the top of the exhaust side has a slope matching the angle of the windage tray. Makes getting a wrench in there easier than if it were flat.

Here it is installed on my motor, waiting to go into my car. I can see that it can’t wait to help lube up the pumping and thrusting my motor will be doing.

It’s a pretty nice looking part and it fits really well. It comes with all the hardware you’ll need, a plug for the oil temp sensor and a magnetic drain plug. In addition, I can confirm that it clears the S14 oil pickup I had installed previously.

Wayne should have it up on the site @ www.phase2motortrend.com soon enough, and I expect most shops carrying CS products will have it available for purchase shortly thereafter.

So another update today. At this point in the build, I have only a few major things left to do. I’m also kinda jumping from one area to another, and haven’t been documenting stuff as well as I should. These pictures are a few days old and already I’ve made more progress but I don’t have any newer pictures.

I don’t expect there to be anymore posts about the sub-projects, just progress on getting the whole stupid thing together. For all intents and purposes, the motor is done. Finished it last night. Picking up a clutch alignment tool tonight and hope to put it back together. I’ll get some more pics of the motor up later.

So, here’s the new stuff.

Mounted power steering cooler with junk parts removed from the car.

Haha, the lower mount is one of the old AC hard line mounts that was on the firewall. Then I took one of metal sleeves out of an old exhaust hanger, cut 5mm off the end and used it as a standoff. The top mount is the bendy-rubber bracket that holds the breather tube in place off my KA trans. Even without fancy fab work or brackets, it’s mounted pretty solidly and doesn’t move around.

Only had to drill one more big hole and a small hole for the mounting bolt. I’m going to buy some wire mesh from Home Depot and bend it into a sleeve to help protect some of those fins.

Here is the gauge cluster mock up from my point of view.

And here is the motor as of Monday evening. I still have a few super-minor things – a couple hoses, a couple clamps and I need a little more fire sleeving, but otherwise it’s all done.

Hoping to drop it in this weekend!

So it’s been over a week, bleh. Between working and working on the car, haven’t had a chance to update really. Worked on the car past midnight a couple times this week though, so progress is being made.

I got the last two parts I needed for the rear suspension and bolted it all up. Immediately after doing that, I stripped one of the OEM studs on my rear 5-lug. Only the last 5mm or so of thread was damaged, so I decided to try repairing it first. Of course, no one locally had a 12 x 1.25mm die, so I ended up ordering this guy: 12 x 1.25mm rethreading die. Worked perfectly. So now that the rear is done, I can finally lower it down.

Finally. Now on to the front!

Once I got everything off the front, I hammered out the top of the fender well for clearance. Then I wire brushed the fender wells and the bottom of the frame rails to get the rest of the dirt and grease off. That didn’t take long so I decided to start re-installing everything right away.

Re-installed the new cross member, LCA’s, knuckles, sway bar, steering rack and column with new rack bushings. Yes I installed my sway bar upside down. Didn’t notice it until after I took the pictures, oh well.

Got that far and couldn’t stop there.

And that’s about where it sits now. Still need to paint the tension rods, so those aren’t installed yet. Need to fix the sway bar and get some new stainless brake lines, then tighten everything down. Should all be done this weekend, then hopefully drop the motor in the next couple weeks.

God damn this video is rad.

Spent some time this weekend finishing up the rear. The subframe has been in for a couple weeks already, but I was waiting on rotors and brake lines. Also, the fire sleeving I had ordered was the wrong size for the fuel line, so I had to wait for the larger size sleeve to arrive.

It all got here Thursday and this is what I ended up with.

I would have lowered it down and taken pics, but one of the studs on my used 5-lug hubs is stripped and no one locally carries a 12×1.25mm die to fix it with. Ordered one today, hopefully by next weekend I can lower it.

Shot of the fitment; it’s not really accurate though because of the lack of load. It’s at around -7 camber right now too. Suspension tuning will fix that right up.

On to the fire sleeving. I bought this fuel line sleeving from Amazon with the intent to wrap any soft lines I could. This is what I ended up with.

I got this by first measuring how long I wanted my fuel line to be. Then I cut a piece of fire sleeving the same length with an extra inch on either end.  About an inch from both ends, I made a two inch long incision to slide the fuel line through. Run the fuel line out the incision, place your fuel line clamps, then wrap the closed end of the fuel line sleeve around the end. Slide the newly wrapped fuel line over  your hard line ends (making sure that the fuel line has enough room to clamp, not just the sleeve itself), tighten down your fuel line clamps, then use a third hose clamp to lightly tighten down the sleeve end .

This is how mine ended up.

I’m really happy with the result.

While I’m waiting on the tools to fix my wheel stud, I did some work on the motor. Just simple stuff really, no reason to get all detailed. More on the motor as I go along.

I was kind of bummed when I realized that the brake master cylinder stopper I had purchased wouldn’t fit with the heat shield unmodified. I at first considered not using it at all, but decided that I had the time, so I went for it.

So glad I did, the whole assembly doesn’t move at all. In hind sight, I would have used a hole saw to round out the area where the stopper meets the cylinder, and taped afterwards. This should still be fine though.

Current engine bay pic, with the flipped and tucked brake booster installed.

The new subframe is in as well, but no pics yet. Probably this weekend when the whole rear end should be done. Just waiting on 5 lug rear rotors and stainless lines.

So the holidays are over and it’s time to get back to work on the car. I am still missing a couple pieces that are holding up putting the motor back together, but I still have plenty of other stuff to do.

I finished the new subframe last night; I actually finished it in November, but had been super lazy on finishing paint. No more!

The knuckles are unpainted because they are only there temporarily. The PBM rear knuckles aren’t available until March, so these stockers will sit there until I can get my hands on the modified pieces.

Pulled out the old subframe and dumped it on the ground.  Planning to keep it as a spare – probably clean it up, then have it sent off to a welder for reinforcement and modification.

Couple other minor things; reinstalled the brake booster, clutch master cylinder and the Z32 brake master cylinder. I flipped the brake booster too to get the vacuum connection on the bottom and hidden, then installed the Circuit Sports brake master cylinder heat shield. I decided to pick up some heat reflective tape from Amazon to add some more heat protection to the heat shield. Heat reduction is a major goal on this build and I’m hopeful that this will help keep the temps in the master cylinder down.

I actually ordered the Circuit Sports brake master cylinder stopper as well, but it won’t work with the heat shield in it’s default form. It’s pretty low importance, but I’m going to pull the shield out and do some cutting to make the stopper fit correctly. Around the same time, I’ll probably be mounting the power steering reservoir in that empty corner up there. I’ll post pics once that’s all done.

Lastly, I mounted up all the new cooling stuff to the motor. It’s an S14 water neck, S14 water pump, new thermostat and water pump pulley. The S14 water neck has a coolant line outlet built in, which allows you to run the coolant line for the turbo from the neck, as opposed to running a coolant line all the way around the back of the cylinder head. All the bolts line up, making this an easy upgrade and there are a bunch of hoses you can lose under the intake manifold if you switch to the S14 water neck.

S13 water neck is the ugly dirty one up top, the S14 water neck is the shiny nice one on the bottom.

The S14 water pump is also considered an upgrade over the S13 water pump, because the S13 pump is known to have cavitation issues at high RPM. This isn’t something I’ve personally experienced, but I don’t want to either. So I went ahead and did the upgrade, and the pump body is clearly different on S14 compared to S13; it bulges out slightly but maintains the same dimensions as the S13 water pump would. There is one extra mounting hole on the S14 water pump, but it doesn’t get in the way; the 6 other mounting bolts all line up exactly.

The S13 water pump is on the left, S14 on the right. You can see near the mounting holes how the S14 bulges away from the flange, whereas the S13 is more flat.

More pics and updates on progress as it comes. Hoping to put in the new subframe this weekend, but I still need to pick up the stainless rear brake lines and 5-lug rear rotors.