to4garret

Good question! Sold the Focus RS Drove the Borg daily Waaaay to smelly No A/C sucks in 35c+ Im too old (read:fat) for the seat. Bought a Tesla M3P -> cars are ruined forever now. I haven’t touched the Borg in 3 years. (fuck time flies when you are old!) ... It's still here -> but i NEED to write a proper update

These things rock, once you've been in a proper electric car like a M3 its hard to imagine going back to a combustion car other than for nostalgia. I've had my P3D+ since September and its been unreal. So super jealous you have one in NZ as the roads are so much better, but it will be interesting to see how your range changes during the winter Did you see the guy who figured out the how to disable the nanny controls and drift the RWD model?

Been in Perth for the last 14 years and had my Cyborg for about the same amount of time. There is quite a good little motorsports scene over here with lots of events at the local raceways, driver ed days, cars & coffees etc. Just sucks that almost every road is straight as an arrow and anything twisty is hours away from the city, ok if you kill deathy highway runs i guess.

1st is almost useless.

Stock take time! Over the years if i spied some parts for sale and it was something worthwhile i would just add it to the collection and i've amassed quite a collection of "shit". One of the collected items was a full driveline from a 1990 Series II Cyborg that came up for sale which had front & rear mechanical LSDs and was 3.545 ratio! this means I had an upgrade path through VR4, GSR & EVO 1-3 components, plus spare drive shafts and axles which just are not available in Australia. Anyway, i went part picking in the garage and the only time i've been known to use oven cleaner is to make it snow on driveline parts. hose it off with a pressure washer and it does a great job - If you dont get wet you arent washing properly. Found the rear diff, very small amounts of surface rust on some of the trailing edges of the crown - nothing that some wet & dry wont fix. Turns out i had two steel case transfer cases, one is a 22 spline input and the other 23 spline input. I checked the ratio and they seem the same but im not sure if there are other difference between them apart from the input shaft spline count - i'll plan to use the 23 spline one. Now the W5M33 box was really dirty inside, i stripped it down to get right into the guts for cleaning and one thing i noticed was how much black crud was over the inside. i havent seen anything like it on previous gearboxes that i've stripped but i think it could be due to the front LSD being a plate type and shedding more particulate into the oil. I am not totally sure what type of LSD the front one supposed to be, i cant visibly see the plates but can get a peep of quite a few spider gears (at-least 4) And there is no cross-bar in the middle. With the W5M33 dissembled for cleaning and inspection i decided to pull one of the KM221 down as well to do a comparison. I find it quite interesting the differences between the gearboxes as they really are (pun!) an evolution of the design. the cases are essentially the same with the main change being the center differential drive being centralised to spread the load across the bearings better, but this means that the main drive for the center diff changes to 3rd gear from 4th gear in the KM series. This is interesting as W5's have been known to be quite weak on 4th gear and comparing the gear size between the two generations shows the KM has quite a substantial 4th gear - probably meaning it could support more than the 600hp a W5 4th gear can. but i digress and now that i've pulled the W5 down i can see it doesnt have double synchros on 2nd & 3rd like i had hoped so I have a few options from here; Learn how to inspect synchros for wear and see if the W5 is going to be good enough to use. Search for a later model W5M33 with double synchros and built a frankenbox, seems a lot of the supply is drying up though. Order a staged upgrade kit from TMZ in the states and have it installed locally. i'll have a beer on it i think.

Well had a fun night racing, drove there and back which is a bonus. Took quite a bit to get used to driving with the NTLS & LC enabled - the gearbox really hates life now and really isnt cut out for fast shifting. Set a new PB of 12.700 @ 187kph, 60ft 2.007 but spent 1.886 seconds of that on the clutch trying to get it into gear (or grinding it in) clutch switch is the lower green line (DI 6 - GP Input), when high - clutch in, low - clutch out.

Took this out for a good strop today to make sure i could actually drive it after the tweaks to the tune. It kept hitting boost cut in 1st & 2nd once it was making 21psi even though the actual cut was set at 26psi. I hunted the ECU for any correction that could account for that (ECT/IAT etc) but everything was zero'd. Only thing i can think of thats causing the cut is the boost ramp rate and the ECU being a bit conservative with cutting the fun early thinking it will prevent an overshoot, but there is nothing i can see to change that behavior. I think i will just change the boost limit to a dual map with ECT & RPM and set a high limit between 4-5krpm, that might work. Another unanticipated behavior, is that the launch control is triggered from the clutch switch, which is just a modified brake switch. When sitting there bouncing off the limiter the clutch pedal bounces around as well - not so much of an issue until you are rolling and the RPM limit bounces around 6k & 8krpm. I will see if i can jimmy up a spring to hold the pedal back. Looking good for Wednesday though, here is hoping i can actually pedal it on the day!

I've been driving this occasionally and I am definitely starting to feel old. Its loud, stinky, hard to shift, hot, light switch power delivery and basically everything a modern car isnt. I still love it though and i do need to use it more. I have been a little busy with it, there is an up coming Mitsubishi vs Subaru drag day at the Motorplex on the 13th March so i thought i might as well see if I can make an appearance. I had a list of things to improve after my last visit to the 1/4m, like adding launch control, flat shifting and more boost. Finally spent a few hours in the dyno booth last Saturday while it was 39c outside, lovely. but it was very productive. The car left with an extra 50hp atw at around 23psi but also has launch control & flat foot shifting setup. The "No Lift to Shift" is really the winner here with boost between gears changing from 3s spool, to around 1.6s. This is a huuuuuge improvement between shifts as can be seen in the dyno timeline below. There were a few touch up's after that graph and the car feels pretty good. I am aiming to get some seat time this weekend before the event next Wednesday and I am feeling confident the previous PB of 12.9 @ 112mph will fall.

So, this thing is getting more play time recently than it's had in the last 10 years, and by that I mean it's been driven a few times each month A few minutes from home on one of the recent drives the check engine light flashed up, which surprised me as I forgot I actually wired it up when I swapped ECUs. The error reported by PCLink was AN Volt 5 Short to Ground and AN Volt 5 is the TPS channel. A little look later showed that the TPS mount on the TB has cracked and fallen off... too much thong! This ticked me off a little as I spent extra on a local Aussie product thinking the reliability would be better in the long run over an eBay jobby but in the end it was an easy fix, I just drilled and tapped the TPS mounting holes into the TB. The shitty old single synchro KM221 gearbox hates shifting above 6,500rpm in 1st & 2nd and I hoped by lowering the RPM limit in those gears it will add some consistency to the shifts under power. I followed the Link ECU instructions for enabling and testing Gear Detection in the ECU, which is just RPM vs VSS and it's is working well, good enough to use as the main input for a Gear Dependant RPM Limiter. Other minor changes, ECU now controls the thermo fans and that keeps the idle much more stable when the parasitic load comes on. I also have the ECU setup to run the W2A pump and Thermo's all the time when the Key is in RUN, ECT > 75c and the Engine Stopped, this seems to help the cool down and limit the heat soak on the barrel cooler. I also did a compression test just to check general engine health, which came out at; COLD 155, 157, 158, 153 HOT 163, 161, 160, 159 ...and that is darn good as they're 165psi new, happy days! With a recently return to reasonable reliability, I spent a day up in the hills following a bunch of other 80s/90s Mitsubishi's tragic's. The weather was an amazing 26deg, no wind - made the day really enjoyable considering there is no A/C in the car. :rotflol: There are a few more things on the list of ECU changes, but i'm not really game enough to enable Launch Control & No Lift to Shift my self as there seems to be so many options for me to fuck things up. I'm thinking I will just organise another dyno session over the winter and have a few more PSI added and smooth/lean out the AFR's a tad. Its Logging over 10.5:1 under boost which is a little rich and means I'm hitting 80% duty on the 800cc injectors. Speaking of boost... I do wonder what the HP limit of the stock short block is? the turbo is supposed to be good for 600HP at the crank at around 27psi and I’m making 300HP ATW on 18psi right now and the turbo is rumoured to really start ramping in efficiency after 22psi. This could be fun.

It's a good days racing when you can drive to the strip and back home again all in one piece! No major issues at the motorplex today, I only did two runs with the first being a 12.9 @ 112mph and the second was a 14.2 @ 101mph - due to 3 crunched gears in a row but both with 2.1s 60'. It was the first time i've taken this car to the strip so i did learn a lot, especially about how to better setup the car. Launch Control needs enabling, will make it a lot easier than bouncing the revs around. "No Lift to Shift" would help a lot with the turbo lagg between gear changes. Shift point should be just below 7krpm the gearbox doesn't like anything above that (single syncros) Rev limiter needs changing from "Soft" to "Hard", near the end of the run i'm tapping out 4th gear into the Soft limit Need something to keep the W2A water circulating with the fans going while the motors off, there was quite a bit of heat soak. Engine Coolant Sensor seems buggered, it bounces around all over the shop during the run. Boost was recorded at 18psi, so there is still 3 or 4psi more in this tune. I setup the ECU to log the run and have a bunch of data to review later, but I did notice the Wideband didnt log for some reason.

(going back in time a bit) 7 months since the last update and a few things have happened to this nugget. 1. the clutch was "dragging" - it would shift okay'ish below 3krpm but anything above and it was almost impossible to change gears. Give the throttle a blip to 5krpm when stationary with the clutch in and 1st gear selected and the car would lurch forward. I spent months changing the whole clutch hydraulic system, new master, slave, braided lines adjusted and bleed dozens of times. but it just wouldnt fully disengage. Ended up pulling the gearbox and found the brand new flywheel was 0.1mm out from the tight end of the specification, which is bloody stupid as i would have thought something new would have been correct out of the box. Had the flywheel machined down about 0.2mm, then reassembled and fuck me, perfect clutch feel and shifting! 2. that fucking sump and bloody oil leaks, made from the finest chinesium and unbeknown to me the reason the transfer case was hard to slide on was because it was self clearancing against the sump and making it look like swiss cheese. fuck sake. Put some chewing gum in the hole and finally, after how many years - the car is leak free! Its all been fixed for the last few weeks and i've been driving it around a lot, its bloody hot going without air con, but so much fun! I do love this picture, there hasnt been many days over the last 10 years where this car could be outside - but next to the RS it remind me of an older sibling showing the youngin how it should be. ...anyway seems tomorrow, 3rd of Jan is a Mitsubishi vs Subaru night at Kwinanna Motorplex and well, that seems a fitting debut for this thing. No idea what it will run down the quarter, but if it survives a pass without killing me i'll be happy!

A long wait for an answer mjrstar - sorry i missed the updates from this thread. I dont think its pad choice as i've been through 3x sets of calipers and its always been way to firm. The original singles, VR4 duals and now the Willwood Six pistons. All have a very, very firm pedal. The booster holds vacuum and seems to work, but its just not providing enough assistance over all.

Hahaha there is a bit of gingerbeering in that rig Shane! Good to see you working on another project back home, i miss how much better turbo cars go in the cooler climate.

Thanks guys, Its been a love/hate relationship that is for sure, but its good driving it again. Still some more todo though, that friggin sump is still leaking the old gearbox that is in there is really, really hard to shift I'm probably going to ignore the leaking sump and just try some different oil in the gearbox. then think hard about the next stage (if any). Shane, I had previously taken it on an Evo cruise, was many lols and a very fun night. I think i will attend the next powercruise/supercruise if i can keep it together long enough. Kws, there is even less of these in Australia, just about every one thinks its a Galant.

Since the car has been on the road again, I’ve put on a set of Bridgestone Potenza RE003’s and printed some custom hub-centric rings. For the hub-centric rings I used ABS plastic which should be okay, its transition temperature is around 105c and it would probably still be okay around 140c. Really its only used to locate the wheels while doing them up and don’t really serve a purposed after that. This is where I am today, almost the middle of 2017, 12 years after buying the car. Where to from here?

Up until this point, I hadnt had anyone else work on the car except myself, but I was just getting to busy with life to spend time working on the car, I also had a bit more cash flow to do things properly compared to 10 years earlier which lead me to take to the car to a fabricators to help get the car to the next iteration. We started by removing all the crap from the boot, the W2A resoviour, sub, surgetank and fuel pump and in the bin. What is left is just an nice, lite, empty boot space. The lunch box on above the battery is the fuse & relay box for he fuel pumps. Which has been moved under the rear passenger seat with a custom surgetank and new ½” lines to the front of the car. Future proofing if corn juice is to ever be needed, though I would probably need something a bit better than an 044. What happened to the W2A resoviour? It was moved into the engine bay. The fabricator made a new intake for the turbo and built two resoviours, one closest to the air box is for the barrel cooler, next one across is the overflow for the radiator. The W2A pump was moved to the front of the car which has helped significantly shorten the piping run lengths and helps reduce total water volume and weight. I pissed off the air horns and replaced with a set of dual tone Mitsubishi 380 ones. With the larger 6 piston Wilwood’s the 1” brake master was a bit small. I grabbed a 1” 1/16 brake master from an Evo 7 and a Legnum brake fluid reservoir and had some custom lines bent up to take a brake bias valve installed on the rear lines. The car does stop good, but as I mentioned before it still feels very under assisted, you need a pretty strong leg to get it to pull up. There must be something I can do about the booster, but I haven’t found any other options. Something unfortunate happen during this time, I seemed to have gotten fatter, much fatter and could no longer fit in those stupid Bride fixed back bucket seats. I put the stock passenger seat back in and found a genuine Bride recliner that is sooo much better, Worlds apart compared to the fixed backs and people of normal size can actually sit in the damn thing too! Here is the engine as it sits today, changed most things over to black silicone. And it was just recently tuned again… On a different dyno and a totally different tune, it made 300hp @ about 21psi, or 25 hp more than before – but it’s hardly an apples-to-apples comparison. This tune is much nicer, they spent far more time getting the idle and cruise conditions perfect which has made the car much nicer to drive. The tune is also running very rich at 11.5:1 and there is only a max of 17 degrees’ total advance compared with 20 degrees previously. So, over all its made slightly more power but with a much softer tune. High five! It has been nearly 9 years since I had the car in a drivable mode and I am amazed at how old I’ve gotten. The car is raw, grumpy and takes a lot of effort to drive – god it’s fun – but this isn’t something I would appreciate driving every day and I don’t think it’s something I could.

Over the new month I get the tune better & better but I started to notice that not all was good. All that extra weight in the boot had changed the car, the way it handled and they way it drove was very different and not for the better. I guess there would be about 40kg in the boot and it was all high above and behind the rear diff, this made car feel like it had a few bags of cement in the boot all the time, but worse, much worse. What was once a nible agile car had been ruined, what had I done! Early 2011 and now “life” really started to accelerate for me and over the next four years, I started my own business, began a family, purchased a house, family got bigger, I took a stable job at a large multi-national and my career sky rocketed. Through all of this I was battling health problems and progress on the car took a back seat. Truth be told, I was also pretty pissed at myself for the direction I had taken the car. If only I had found the cyclone issue with the intake manifold after it was first tuned, then I wouldn’t have the car in this state. I could have been driving the car for years without spending all the cash – yada / yada. Hindsight is 20/20 – I wasn’t going to sell it, so lets make it what I should be. Back to the overheating issue, I wasn’t convinced that I had solved the problem by adding the bonnet vents and wrapping the exhaust manifold. The car has airconditioning, but I had never been able to use it as when the car starts to overheat the A/C would cut out and I would actually have to turn the heater on to help bring the temp down. This was unbearable on a 38deg day sitting in the car with the windows, sunroof open and the heater blowing full tilt, picture a sauna, that’s what it was like – except not as pleasant. Well, the revaltion to me was that I should get rid of the A/C as without the condensor it would give me a better mounting position for some slimline fans and if that works in keeping the engine cooler, it would actually make it more pleasant to drive as I wouldn’t need to have the heater turned all the way up on a hot day. Thinking man. So out comes the air conditioning. And in the place of the A/C condensor goes two 12” SPAL slimlines. The little cooler you can see is for the powersteering. I took a good look at the stock radiator and decided it could use an upgrade at the same time , ADRAD in SA built a custom radiator that fits magnificantly, it seems to be based off an Evo 1-3 radiator but at slightly different dimensions. The heatwrap on the exhaust manifold got binned as well and I had the manifold, waste gate screamer pipe, turbo exhaust housing and the turbo dump pipe ceramic coated by a local coater. This should solve the overheating once and for all. The new slim line fans are now mounted in the best position, I plugged all the gaps around the radiator with foam, there was no more A/C condensor adding resistence to the fans while stationary. The ceramic coating would (hopefully) provide some radiant heat sheilding and the new radiator would add another level of confidence that the problem should be erradicated for good. 2012 rolled around and time for another brake upgrade. The VR4 Twin Pots were much better than stock, but still not what I would call great. I could have gone late model Bremboes, but that’s a common upgrade. I found Wilwood 6 piston kit ex US with 320mm two piece rotors for a very reasonable price. Shortley after installing the bigger brakes I took the car out for a glamour shoot.

This car had a few partial resprays in Japan, its definity good from afar but far from good. At some point the boot lid had been resprayed and the original decals where missing. I thought it would be quite hard to get a set but thankfully a knowledgeable person in a Mitsubishi dealership was able to track down both the Mickey Mouse Club and Cyborg decal ex Japan. Originally, there would have been MIRAGE in the centre of the tail garnesh, but there were none available when I enquired. I should look at getting a reproduction made as it would just be a normal vinyl sticker. I quite offten keep an eye on the forums for items of interest for sale when I spotted a full Cyborg driveline that was from a 1990+, this mean it was the newer style gearbox and 3.545 ratio, but even better front and rear LSDs! I jumped and had it sent from Sydney to Perth. Nice 3.545 rear mechanical LSD. Here is a look at the tiny 22 spline rear axles, this is now a spare set as the ones in the car have already started to twist the splines from all the launches. W5M33 with a front LSD. Delish! I’ve added these to the parts collection for when I break all the early model geaboxes and diffs I’ve amassed. It was late 2010 by the time I finished installing the barrel cooler setup and because the old tune was for a different intake and cooler setup, the car needed a re-tune. I started looking at closely at the ECU map and comparing against other tunes from across the web. I was quite taken back at the amount of the total ignition timing that it was running, 20 deg which seems right up at the peaky end of where you would like to be. The original tune was the based of the stock VR4 map that comes with the Link and when I compared with the the Evo 1-3 the VR4 map was missing a lot of resolution in the fuel and ignition tables. Ignoring the engine differences between the VR4 & Evo motors the Evo map did look like a better starting point. I loaded the Evo map, set the base configuration and roughed in an idle tune, had a mate drive the car around the streets while I sat on the laptop letting auto tune sort out the low to part throttle fuel table. We pulled into a small carpark when I heard a loud “thunk” at the back of the car, I get out and look at the back of the car where I heard the noise and there was a bloody dent/scratch behind the wheel arch. WTF. I looked across the road and there were two kids, probably 7 or 8 who had thrown a rock and when they saw that I had put 2 & 2 together they piss bolted for the nearest alleyway. I gave chase and the kids headed straight to their home where, after I caught my breath, I tried to have an adult conversation with their junkie mother that went something along the lines of “my little johnny is an angel, he wouldn’t do anything like that, you are making it all up, im not talking to you any more, come back with the police”. Nothing ever became of it and it wasnt worth pursuing, it does still piss me off that the first day on the road after nearly two years in the garage the car gets a dent from two stupid kids playing silly buggers.

Mounting the W2A radiator was easy, right where the old A2A unit was. Except there was quite a bit extra room now. The reservoir on the other hand was intended to go in the boot of the car which meant that lovely boot I had built would need to be hacked apart. It also means I needed a way to get the water from the boot to the engine bay and back again. I didn’t have access to a bender at the time and looking back I should’ve used some aluminin bundy, but instead I decided to use hosing to run from the rear to the front and this is probably a good example of the way it “should not be done” I also thought that the underside of the car gets pretty hot so to be sure, I wrapped it in foam insulation to try and give it a chance of staying cool. I mounted most of the W2A hardware into the spare wheel well and ran the hosing through large grommets. It’s a bosch water pump and it flows a silly amount of water, pefect for sending all of this water to the front and back again. The boot did look like it was a bit unbalanced with that reservoir sitting on the left side all by itself. I know, lets put a sub in the other side. …and while we are at it, I visited super cheap to purchase a new head unit and some speakers to redo the audio system. Im not fussy here as anything would be better than what was there so I just went with a full Sony setup. It works well enough for me. My car never had door speakers, just little 4” speakers in the side of the dash so I needed to make some small pods to fit the 6.5” splits. And similar with the rear where I needed to build up a rear parcel shelf. It was a bit of trial and error to get it to fit nicely as there isnt a lot of room to fit a set of 6x9’s with the steep rear window. With the boot all finished up it came out quite neat, you can see the handle on the floor section that lifts out to give access to the water pump and valving. I added a Alpine PDX.1000 as the AMP for the sub and the whole stereo made pretty good doof, doof noises. I’ve had some problems keeping all the oil in the sump with this car, probably not a good thing I know. But it would ocassionaly drop a few drips here and there and this was because I had taken the sump off a few times which had cause some stress fractures where the oil could seep through. I had also modified the stock two bolt turbo oil drain for something a bit larger with hose fittings, but the welding had also cracked in a few places that lead to more leaks. After pulling the modified stock oil pan a few times to re-weld and repair it because obvious that it was just getting worse each time. The leaks really annoyed me so I purhcased a Chinabay Moroso copy sump, which soon after it was installed leaked more that the old pan it replaced. FFS. The qaulity looked passable before it was installed and it generally held liquid well except oil has a tendency to calpilery out where the oil pan meets the flange (not flange -> engine). I couldnt be bothered removing the pan again to fix it so I just smeared a shit load of goop around until the leak stopped, but it seems leaks stopped in one spot and started in another. Its not leaking bad, a few drips every now and then, fucken over it though – try and fix something – make it worse. With the W2A system, I connected the water pump up to the ECU so I could control when it was turning on/off. I had some crazy thoughts about pulsing it with intake temperatures yada yada. But I atleast wanted some sort of indicator in the car to tell me when it was working. I added these two small led’s on the intrument cluster. Green for when the pump is running Orange for when the Intake Air Temp reaches a certain temperature, Its currently set to 65c. (with no prior experience) I’ve always wanted a car with bucket seats for as long as I can remember, so it seemed like an opportune time to add a set of fake Brides to the car. I mounted fire extingushers to both rails and spent a bit of time making sure they were centered properly as well as low as possible. Knowing what I know now I wouldn’t have done this, the seats are very tight and not very comfortable after a short time seated. Live and learn.

Following that line of thinking I spotted a second hand PWR barrel cooler setup for sale that was used on a very well sorted VR4, perfect! When it first arrived, I set it all up for a test run. The reservoir was built quite large and had a [dry] ice pocket inside for extra cools, but that also made it large and heavy. The reservoir was originally mounted in the boot of the VR4 it came from so that’s the route I intended to take. I added some ball valves so the system could be drained and to allow bypassing the radiator for pure Icey cooled water, most likely a bit overboard. Now, I was still using the Fidanza Aluminium flywheel, sintered puck friction plate and a something/something pressure plate that I mentioned earlier and I had come to the realisation that it too, much like the twin plate was probably a bit unsuitable for this cars driveline. Since I had the barrel cooler setup to install now would be a good time to drop the gearbox and install something a bit more practical. This time around I went for a Fidanza chromoly flywheel, ClutchNet Kevlar puck friction plate and Fidanza 1500kg pressure plate. The idea here is that the Kevlar friction plate provides enough slip to give a good increase in driveability, while also being resistant to overheating and the heavy pressure plate helps with the overall power handling capacity. Clutch setup No#3 While the box was out again I installed some Nolothane engine mount inserts in the north – south, gearbox and cam mounts. This was not an easy task as the new mount inserts eliminates all the minor free play needed to bolt the engine in easily. I needed to get quite creative with the order in which the mounts were installed, jacks and pry bars to get it all lined up and installed. Before reinstalling the gearbox, I gave it a quick lick of paint to help hide it in the engine bay. Gearbox Nolothane mount installed as well, engines rock solid now. Tick. How the heck was I going to fit that barrel cooler? The outlet of the barrel was 3” and the throttle body was 2.5”. It also needed to reduce through a nearly 90 degree bend and had to be a little flexible. Easiest way I could see the cooler fitting is like the below dummy setup, but if the throttle body was 3” it would work well for the top bend. Taking a closer look at the intake manifold. It’s the original Cyclone intake from the VR4 the engine came from. It’s a rather complicated intake manifold compared to others in this generation as it has two runners per cylinder of differing lengths. In the picture below the blue line is the short runner and the green the long runner. The short runner has a set of butterflies that close at low rpm to help promote velocity through the longer runner and then the short runners open at about 4000rpm or 6 psi of boost. Interestingly if the butterflies were closed at high rpm it would be a significant restriction as it would act like a choke… hang on… let me re-check the wiring to the Link G3 – Fuck! Turns out I had setup the G3 to Close the butterflies at 4000rpm instead of opening! This was likely the restriction that gave the lower than expected dyno result! FFS! Too far into it now to stop though… The next logical purchase to solve the barrel cooler mounting problem and my inability to check the old manifolds cyclone wiring is of course a new intake manifold. Perfect sense. Only the best eBay here, but I had them move the vacuum port location from the top of the manifold the rear and to leave off the standard throttle body flange. I then ordered a Plazman 3” throttle boy and had the adapter flange welded to the new intake manifold. The throttle body, unlike the manifold is a work of art and has a cammed/progressive linkage to try and help with small throttle positioning. In the picture below I briefly consider mounting the barrel over the top of the turbo inlet and clocking the turbo. Eventually I decided against mounting the barrel high and used the original low route, I think it makes it look like there is more room in the engine bay. Here you can see the short outlet pipe from the turbo to the barrel, on the underside of that pipe is the blow off valve which just vents to atmosphere, though it does have a little filter on it to keep shit out.

Here is a picture with the rears adjusted as low as they go without touching the spring perch height. I levelled the ride height out and this is what I have been running since. There is a lot of room for camber adjustment in the front as well, this is with the camber set in the max position. I briefly entertained the idea of running some chromies on the car. Only Super Cheap’s finest would do. Now it was time to start wiring the Link Plus G3 and associated bits together. I distinctly remember this time in the build as I was literally dreaming rainbows of wire colours. With the dual twin ignitors, I had always planned to run sequential ignition vs the standard dual coil wasted spark setup of a stock system. This meant finding some coils that would work and again I turned to the US where there were off the shelf kits based of Chrysler 300M dumb coils. This was before the trend of using Yaris/Echo coils, which would have saved me installing the ignitors and also given me an option to buy locally. I do have a setup of Yaris coils waiting to go in at a later date. One of things I wish I could change is how I wired the ECU. At the time, I integrated the G3 into the stock wiring and wired the G3 to replace the stock ECU, instead of focusing on actually what the G3 was capable of controlling. What I mean is that the G3 can control the Radiator Fans, the A/C and has far more inputs for Oil Pressure/Fuel Pressure etc. Instead I focused on replicating the stock setup which has resulted in a configuration that’s not as good as it could have been. I needed to add a clutch switch for launch control to work in the G3 and after looking at how the pedal box had been setup it looked like I could use a normal brake pedal switch in the clutch pedal end stop. But alas the thread size was different, M12 vs M10 but I ended up drilling and tapping out the old stop and threading it for M12. This was not fun with the pedal box in the car, in fact I think my shoulder still tweaks when I think about it. After about 2 or maybe 3 weeks I had a finished loom on the living room floor for the G3 that plugged into all the standard harnesses and connectors. And this was all the standard wiring I removed and replaced… To my absolute amazement, after some basic configuration of the G3 the engine fired into life very easily. Over the next few weeks I roughed in an idle tune and checked everything was working as expected. At this point it was late 2008 and about 18 months since the car was last driving and here it was being flat bedded to be tuned. In 2008, not many people were tuning with Links in Perth, ViPec hadn’t been incorporated and they were still seen as an odd ball kiwi ECU to a few of the local tuners. I did manage to find someone willing to give it ago, I said to do a safe tune, 21psi or 350hp atw, whatever it makes first. After a few days, I had the car back. Well, that wasn’t what I was expecting. Sure, surfing the ramp is fun but at 20psi where is the rest of the power? The tuner mentioned that the way the car was behaving on the dyno looked like there was something choking it, perhaps the intercooler or just a shit turbo. It’s probably worth noting that this power level is pretty much what the previous setup on the little 16G could make and be significantly more drivable. Something wasn’t right. Back to the drawing board, well box of beer and contemplation. The car drove in that guise for about 6 months, it drove great, very economical under 4krpm but an animal above, very Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I couldn’t help but think something wasn’t right thought. Reading through the forums indicated that it probably wasn’t the turbo, it should be able to make 350hp at the wheels on 20psi quite easily. Perhaps it was the modified JDM VR4 Intercooler?

In a semi-serious continuing effort to stop the overheating when stationary on hot days I thought about adding some bonnet vents and in my opinion, the only ones that would be correct for the car are VR4 RS vents. I did consider some Evo 3 bonnet vents but I just didn’t think it would work right as they are much larger. I was pretty nervous doing those first few cuts into the bonnet, but in the end, it came up okay, not perfect but good enough. I did plenty of measuring to find the right spot for the vents in the bonnet, I’m not using the best position for heat extraction, but rather a position that is as close to where the vents sit on a standard VR4 RS bonnet. This puts the vents half over the radiator support and half over the exhaust manifold. With liberal amounts of Sikaflex I glued the vents into the bonnet and even after 8 years there has been no sign of movement. I went to super cheap and got them to mix up and rattle can of the standard paint and it turned out awesome. Until I applied the clear to them which made them go a milky colour. *sigh* I ended on masking them up and painting them satin black recently. I put the engine back in the car with the new clutch, gearbox, turbo. I had also entered into a group buy for some custom Front & Rear Strut braces which I finally got to test fit. Remember how the handling was pretty bad because of the shortened rear King Springs I installed? I bought a set of G4’s for a VR4, taking a gamble that I could adjust enough height out the rear to get the Cyborg sitting right. This wasn’t the case and the rears were far too tall but the G4 dealer in Australia was more than happy to help in customising the coil overs to work. I sent the rears back with some measurements and this was what the result is, one very shortened rear coil over which worked! Some of you might be thinking, “But G4’s are cheap shite” and, well yea they’re not the best, but they are light years better than what was there previously. There is a slight difference in the way the front suspension mounts between the VR4 and Cyborg. You can see in the picture above the standard front VR4 top hat is mounted with three studs and the Cyborg is mounted with 2 studs. The two stud tops hat do look similar to the later model CC Lancer/Evo 1-3 but it’s not quite the same. This meant I needed a custom top hat made. This was actually quite fun to do, we put the standard top hat onto a flatbed scanner to get the profile, did the same with the G4 top hat then superimposed to two together to get a CAM profile for the CNC router. All bolted in perfectly, like it was meant to be.

I replaced the twin plate with a Fidanza Aluminium flywheel, sintered puck friction plate and a something/something pressure plate – yes, I obviously had not learned anything from the twin plate fiasco. I got to thinking about why Mitsubishi rotated the engine and gearbox 180deg in the Evo 4+, common reasoning is that it removes a shaft in the gearbox. Earlier models need 3 shafts, Input, Intermediate and Output whereas the Evo 4+ have only an Input and Intermediate. Or perhaps it’s so if the flywheel explodes it takes the passengers nads out and not the drivers. Hrmm, think I need a scatter shield. Actually, I need a polished scatter shield. Next minute these goodies arrived. A set of Brian Crower 280 degree duration cams, matching heavy duty valve springs, titanium retainers, Fidanza cam gears, ARP head studs and ARP rod bolts. Totally over kill for a standard short block but, you know, why not right? Matchstick for scale, tissues for clean-up. To install the valve springs, it was easiest to take the head off for a freshen up. I used a local machining shop to clean up the head, skim, check the valve seats, install new guide seals, springs and retainers. Next up was a Cometic Multi Layered Steel Head Gasket along with the ARP head studs. Brian Crower recommend the 280’s to be installed straight up but at the time I didn’t have a dial indicator to check for actual Top Dead Center of the Pistons since the head and gasket height were different now. I have since checked with a dial indicator and it’s just under half a degree out, not enough for me to worry about cracking the Loctite on the cam gears retaining nuts. And another turn for the project, a local was selling this low km turbo and I had to impulse buy! Unfortunately, the standard unit of measurement, the Nokia phone was unavailable, I had to substitute with another period correct device. It’s a PTE SCM 6152E, in hindsight it’s a complete ass of a turbo, but it’s a bolt-on to the Mitsubishi mounting flange and well, bigger is better, right? Apparently its rated for 630hp, with a 3.5” Inlet, 56 trim compressor wheel with an Inducer of 61mm and Exducer of 82mm. What really lets it down is the custom rear housing made by PTE to suit the Mitsubishi flange and the 76 trim T350 turbine. But what’s done is done. With a bigger turbo, you need bigger injectors and I picked up a set of second hand SARD 800cc injectors and had them cleaned before installing. What’s annoying about these injectors is SARD don’t offer any decent specifications on them, just a vague Dead/Lag Time of 1.1ms, like at what voltage and fuel pressure? It turns out that at 3 bar fuel pressure these are closer to 855cc. Not quite enough for corn juice, but that wasn’t even available in West Australia when I was building this. Getting ahead a little here, but I recently purchased an oscilloscope and measured the actual dead time on the car while it was running. The Hantek DSO 6074BE IV is a kit specific for cars and makes testing this stuff easy. I varied the voltage by turning on ancillaries, disconnecting the alternator and running on battery power etc. then used a non-linear extrapolation to get the lower voltages. At standard operating voltages, the dead times are now exact and much closer at the lower voltages. I dummied the engine up on the engine stand to see how much additional clearance would be needed on the water pump inlet pipe which runs behind the turbo, fortunately none was needed. I also gave the exhaust manifold a heat wrap in the hope it would help with the overheating the car had while sitting at traffic lights. On a stock car, there would be some heat shielding on the manifolds and dump pipes and maybe with the tighter engine bay in the Cyborg compared to the VR4, the unwrapped manifold may have been radiating too much heat into the bay for the near stock cooling system to dissipate. It couldn’t hurt, right? One of the other changes here was that the oil feed for the turbo could not come from the stock location in the head as the oil pressure at this point is too low, PTE recommend taking the oil straight from the filter housing which is as close to max pressure you can get.

VR4 Brake conversion all completed, I ran a seal kit through the front and rear calipers while at it. With the new rotors and calipers, combined with a re-sleaved 1” VR4 brake master cylinder and the car finally stops reasonably well. It still feels like it needs a larger booster ratio as you still really need to step on the brakes to start hauling up – buts its much improved over standard. A month or so after doing the brakes I noticed a couple of drips of gearbox oil on the driveway. It seemed the 5th gear retaining nut had back out and cracked the end of the gearbox housing. A quick torque up again and a bigger hit with the hitting stick on the 5th gear nut crush points seemed to solve it for the time. A benefit of transverse mounted engine is that it is easy to replace the front gearbox cover, just jack the car up, take off the driver’s side wheel and there it is. Now as luck would have it, when you own an odd ball car, owner’s kind of group together and someone not too far away from me had two KM221 gearboxes for sale with transfer cases, these are the standard Cyborg gearboxes with the 2.844 ratio diffs. I borrowed one of the front covers from the gearboxes I had just collected, problem solved.   If you recall earlier in the thread I mentioned I had a habit of launching the car, well I had been itching to try this “stutter box” out and… well… when I did; 1. The output shaft of the transfer case snapped off. 2. A whole bunch of teeth on the rear diff crown wheel were ripped off. Seems the on/off nature of the twin plate clutch and fused center diff attacked the next weakest links in the driveline. It still drove that broken though, with the locked center diff it was just and open diff front wheel drive and it sucked, it would fry the front single wheel in 4th very easily and was basically unusable. Thankfully though, I had a spare transfer from the gearboxes I picked up earlier and I also managed to source a 2.844 ratio rear mechanical LSD off retardme.co.nz, I’ve never heard of one let alone seen one for sale, score! Speaking of ratios, VR4s/RVRs and Evo 1-3’s share a common set of rear diff ratios, 3.547, 3.909 or 3.312 for some Auto’s. The diff ratio doesn’t equate to the total final drive though as there is also a primary reduction ratio of 1.275 in the gearbox and a further 1.090 ratio in the transfer case which brings the total final drive 4.929 for 3.5’s and 5.433 for 3.9’s. Where am I going with this? Well the pre-1990 Cyborg’s were the only series that had a 2.844 rear diff ratio and this is because they used a KM221 gearbox which has a different primary reduction ratio of 1.640. With the transfer case ratio of 1.090 this brings the total final drive to 5.084 very similar to a standard VR4’s. Anyway, I digress, I put the spare transfer case in and swapped in the new rear LSD and it was good. For about a month, then I kept on hitting ignition breakdown, it would just start running on 2 cylinders, which in a wasted spark setup points to a coil. I swapped in multiple different coils, changed out Power Transistor Units (Ignitors), probed the loom looking for issues but I just couldn’t keep the car running reliably, it seemed to be spitting coils for some reason. Looking back at it now, this is where I think most sane people should have stopped and just maintained/fixed and enjoyed the car, but I must have been dropped on my head when I was a baby as I continued tipping money into this thing at an increasing rate. I cracked the shits at the ignition problem and then this happened. Innovate LC-1, Link Plus G3 with wire in loom, 7 bar Map Sensor, Dual – Twin Ignitors and a Jaycar kit to make a set of “Det Cans”. I bought the Link Plus G3 a few months before the G4 was released, but thankfully the hardware is the same in the G3 and you can unlock the same features as the G4 with a $150 software unlock. And so, begins the next round of mods, my solution to the ignition problem… At this time, I also pulled the engine and gearbox out again, this was so I can get rid of the twin plate clutch and put something in that would actually act as a fuse on the driveline, rather than the murderer. It was also a suitable time to swap in a gearbox that didn’t have a welded center diff. I didn’t drop in a standard gearbox though, I modified the center diff off one of the gearboxes I scored earlier for a 4-spider center. This is a rather simple mod that almost doubles the power holding of the center diff and also helps a little with shocking load capability. The mod is straight forward you machine the cross bar down… (machined left, standard right) …and then slide a set of additional spider gears on and machine a small amount off the side of the center diff housing. It was fairly expensive machining the crossbar as it was hardened tool steel but a local tool sharpener was more than happy to have a crack and he did a magic job. All bolted together an installed into another good gearbox. I’ve kept the gearbox with the locked centre for another time.

A few months later all was complete and with the locked center diff it made the car a bit of a fun to drive, the inside rear wheel would skip if turning at low speed or if trying to reverse and turn, the inside front wheel would drag. It did cause no end of a confusing looks at petrol stations from the local bogan’s. I entered Motovation 21 at Perth Motorplex with Old School Toys and apart from the blazing heat it was an amazing experience. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enter any events as the Fuel Pressure Gauge failed, leaking fuel everywhere and the car would overheat if it wasn’t getting enough air flow through the radiator. At the time, I thought the overheating was probably the dodgy super cheap slim line fans. First mod post Motovation was improving the Brakes. Standard Cyborgs run a Single Piston front and rears but they just don’t slow the car down quickly enough, especially now it has double the power of the stock motor. The obvious move is to install the VR4 braking system as its meant for a heavier car with similar amount of power – this is exactly what I did. CB Lancers and by extension, Cyborgs run a captive front rotor and there isn’t any option to increase the size of the rotor from 236mm to the VR4 sized 276mm. Removing the rotor also means breaking apart the whole hub assembly which means you may as well replace the hub bearings at the same time. Bugger. Thankfully a friend had been down this path before and the remedy is to disassemble the hub, replace the bearings and machine down the stub axle to fit inside the VR4 rotor. This is the stub axle, effectively I need to have about 3mm machined off the outer edge for it then to fit inside the VR4 rotor. This then turns the front braking system into a floating disk. Now some might be wondering why I don’t use a whole VR4 hub assembly? Good question grass hopper. The problem with swapping the whole hubs over if that the geometry is different and the mounting point for the steering arm is upside down, this all impacts handling and gives the car a tendency to tramline over any bump, not something I really wanted. Once the stub axle has been turned down it slots easy inside the rotor, problem solved? Nearly, but now the rotor is effectively offset by the rotor hub face thickness, which means the caliper is no longer centered with the disc. In the end, all that’s needed is some 6mm spacers behind the calipers to bring everything back into alignment.