ProZac's other Starion.

[Guest ProZac]

This car is going in quite a different direction from my Black Starion, so I figured I'd make it it's own build-thread. This has to be oh-so-borderline of what is 'old-school'.... But I reckon it still qualifies .

This car had been for sale up in Auckland for quite a while. I'd umm'd and ahhh'd about it for ages. I finally snapped, bit the bullet, and had it shipped down. The main deciding factor was the body and paint-work. I'm pretty confident with most things automotive related, except paint and bodywork, its not my bag.... There is no way, for what I paid for this car, and to get it here, I could get my Black one looking anywhere near as nice.

It needs a bunch of work, but the bones look pretty good. I need to check over every nut and bolt, replace the suspension, change all the fluids, un-sieze the brakes, and all the usual stuff that comes with getting a car running after it's been sitting for a prolonged period.

While the car did come with the factory ECU, loom and injection setup, they're little better than a blow-through carby setup, and I wasn't keen to muck around getting it going. I'm updating the injection setup to a multi-point system, sort of on-the-cheap. I'm using an EVO V ecu, sensors and throttlebody, but modifying a SOHC optical distributor to output the correct triggering pattern. Should all work pretty well I'm hoping. These ECU's are re-tunable in situation via the diagnostics port, which is nice. They're not real-time tunable, which is a downside, but there is excellent logging support for them to help the process along.

Intake manifold selection is a little annoying. There are two available factory options that are usable, both have theirs advantages and downsides however. 2.4L injected L300 vans had an MPI manifold for a RWD setup, which means all the water plumbing is in the right place for a Starion, but the bolt pattern of the throttlebody doesnt match up to the evo unit I need to use (to get all the idle control stuff).

The other option is a converted SOHC Galant intake manifold. This entails moving the throttlebody flange to the other end of the plenum... But once you've done this, you still need to correct the water flow. In a RWD application, you want the thermostat housing connected to the water passage at the front of the head, the Galant manifold has it at the other end, can lead to hot spots.

I decided to make a manifold from scratch, it overcomes all these problems, plus it should be a bit of fun, something I haven't tried before .

Anyway, here are a couple of pics. I borrow DJZ's wheels for a try:

It really is pretty damn tidy, should be an awesome car once it's back together and up and running.

I've started making the manifold, I bought some pre-formed runners on trademe, and had a flange laser-cut. They kind of fucked up the flange, but I'll make it work.

As the ports are grouped in pairs, the runners needed a little clearancing to fit them together.

The length of them is determined by the required plenum space, and being able to install and remove the distributor.

I machined the ends down to fit inside the flange, this is part of the plan to rectify the fuckup autobend made. They cut the ports way too big, but the ID of the runners is pretty much perfect, so that should sort that!

I reckon it's looking pretty damn awesome .

[Guest ProZac]

Massive thanks to Martin up north, another major part of the puzzle has arrived:

Sweet sweet black leather front seats. They need a couple of minor repairs to the adjuster mechanisms, but nothing major, and are totally Awesome . I've always always wanted a set, and now I've got them! Whoopee!

The wheels for it arrived, thought it would be interesting to show the fitment:

They're Rota Torques, in 17x9.5 and 17x9.0, both 12P offset. I know, I know, photos of wheels without tyres are just plain dumb, but I didnt have time to get these fitted:

Nitto NT05 235/40/17 for the rear and Nitto NT555 215/45/17 for the front. Slightly smaller rolling diameter than the factory wheel and tyre setup, but once the car is a bit lower, it should look pretty cool. I would have liked the NT05's all round, but they didn't do them in that size... Plus, it's a street car, it's really not going to matter.

[Guest ProZac]

I've got a mid-term on thursday, so I'm studying pretty hard for that at the moment.. But occasionally when I encounter brain-fade I pop out to the garage for an hour or so. Not much time to get anything done, but it's nice to make little bits of progress.

Today I continued work on the manifold. I needed to cut the holes in the plenum baseplate for the runners to pass through. As these holes are pretty big, and overlap, it was always going to be tricky with a drill or similar. A friend of mine suggested using a chassis punch. He works at a hydraulic tool supply company, and loaned me the gear. The punch made short work of the job, and gave a bloody awesome result!

First job was to mark out where the holes need to actually be. This was pretty easy to do once I marked out a centerline. I used the flange as a guide, a little measuring, and the hole centers were easy to fine. I drilled these points out to 10mm for the chassis punch to fit through.

I checked these marks against the machined runners, and it all lined up.

This is what the chassis punch looks like:

The ram pulls the center support down through a cup that is marginally larger than the cutter, which is threaded onto the top of the support... Pulling the cutter into the cup, through whatever is in it's way. I first had to take my 10mm holes out to 3/4":

This was so I could fit the bigger center support in the punch, which happens to have a shaft size of 3/4". With the bigger chaft in place, I could use the correct size cutter:

After cutting all these holes, I was left with this:

lining this up on the flange showed everything to still be pretty concentric.

This is about where it will sit on the runners:

With it here, there is still enough room to get a decent plenum area in between the strut tower, yet still be able to install or remove the distributor.

I plan to do a bunch of study tonight, so maybe i can sneak a couple more hours in the garage tomorrow to further progress with these bits:

I also dropped my wheels and tryes off to be mated this morning, then picked them up on the way home. Please dont laugh, the car looks bloody awful at this height. When I'm back at work next week I'll order the D2's for it and sort that issue out! The wheels would look nicer in silver I reckon, but Bronze is fine for now .

There are 25mm spacers all round. I'll leave them as is till It's at ride heigh and I can see what sort of clearances there are. I bought 25mm spacers so I've got meat there to machine down to get them just right .

[Guest ProZac]

Today I swapped the suspension over on the cars, was actually quite a bit of work, I'm bloody knackered now.

Good new though, I reckon the red car looks awesome. When I first had the wheels on it with the stock suspension, I wasn't convinced they were the right choice, but now, they look kick-ass .

The wheels still wouldn't fit the front, even with the coil-overs, and needed spacing out. This meant I had to roll the guards, which didn't go so well, paint wise. Will have to take it to a body shop to get it all fixed up. It's also WAY to low, needs to be raised about half an inch, 5mm machined off the rear spacers and 10mm off the front, and I think it'll be pretty much perfect .

[Guest ProZac]

More pics with a still, but less, shit camera:

Shows fitment with 25mm spacers either end. Not quite touching in the rear, but too close and no room for suspension movement. Will machine spacer 5mm, roll goard and raise 1/2", should work hopefully.

Front guards are rolled now, but no room for suspension or steering. Will machine 10mm off spacer, raise 1/2" and go from there.

[Guest ProZac]

Slight mis-calculation today.... Bunnings, Mitre-10 and Placemakers are all closed, so no metal cutting jig-saw blades for me! Still made some progress on the manifold. Need the blades to cut the plates for either side.

Would have been easier to cut the doughnut sections with a jig-saw, but I made an okay job of it with the angle grinder.

Now that I can really look at it, it's apparent that the runners can be a good 40mm shorter and still leave clearance for the distributor, that puts them here:

Which looks much much better. Will shorten them at Dad's work this evening to fit the base plate properly. It's coming together though.

After this is done, that's the end of the fun stuff, as I'll have to figure out something for the water piping / thermostat housing.... Not 100% sure what to do there yet, but will figure something out

[ProZac]

Part of building the new engine loom for the evo V ecu involved tidying up the front body loom. I recently bought the mitsubishi workshop manuals for 86 australian, european and geenral export starions, including the wiring supplement. Armed with this information, I stripped all the insulation off the body loom from the driver side guard grommet forward, and re-routed things to make it a bit neater. Only had to adjust the length of a couple of wires.

 

I'm moving the alternator to the other side of the engine, so I ran new wires for the feed to the drivers side sub fusible links, and the main relay box. Battery is going in the boot now too, as I need the space it used to occupy for the intercooler piping. Ran some nice double insulated 35mm^2 cable, which I'll get a friend to crimp some nice terminals onto at some stage over the next week.

 

A bit tidier than factory. I'm going to leave it mostly un-insulated for the moment until it's running, so if I need to make any adjustments it wont be as time-consuming.

 

I tried to minimise the number of branches coming out of the main loom. The factory setup has stuff coming out of it at heaps of places, looks a bit mank.

 

Plugs I dont need: A/C condensor fan, A/C high pressure switch, and vacuum pump for the speed control system.

 

Another plug I dont need, the factory radiator fan and thermoswitch. Might end up using it however, having the ECU control one of the fans, and the other hooked up directly to a thermoswitch in the radiator as a backup? Nah, probably overkill.

 

Will get some more welding done on my intake manifold this afternoon, as the weather is turning crappy now, so best to be working inside. Ive hopefully sorted some storage for the black car, so I can get the red car in the garage sometime in the next month.

[ProZac]

Took a day off uni today and work on the car for what feels like the first time in ages.

 

 

Got all the brakes re-fitted. New discs, pads, re-kitted calipers and braided lines at each corner. Needed doing really really badly as the brakes were pretty fucked when I got the car.

 

 

Fitted an intercooler. I wasn't have a very good welding day, but its done and doesnt look too bad. Fills the air-dam out nicely, and you can see the pipe either side through the brake-vent holes, which I reckon looks pretty cool .

 

A final shot if it looking moody in the garage.

 

 

Engine is away at the reconditioners being bored to fit the .5mm over pistons. Plus a bunch of other stuff with them for cleaning. Hopefully might get it running sometime before the end of the year. I've got a wedding in december though... so that might be a bit of a pipe-dream, heh.

[ProZac]

Couldn't resist taking another couple of hours off study today while the car mojo was flowing. Made this, it turned out pretty nicely:

 

 

It mounts these:

 

 

Up here, behind the glovebox:

 

 

There is still heaps of clearance for the heater blower. Should keep the Fan, ECU, and Ignition relays nice and hidden. Fuel pump relay is getting mounted down in the boot to minimise the length of the power wires to it, as the battery is also in the boot. The original fuel pump wire can be used for the trigger from the evo V ECU, so no running extra wires the length of the vehicle .

[ProZac]

Another stolen couple of hours in the garage this afternoon, shhhh, don't tell!

 

Re-did a little bit of previous work, with is never nice. Much tidier result and this one will actually fit properly . Still have to put on the trim mounting bits, but that can wait.

 

 

[ProZac]

My car had a little too much to drink lastnight, and when I woke up this morning, it had spewed the contents of its body wiring harness everywhere!

 

 

The actual aim here, is to reroute things a bit to make it tidier. Plus, the original lighting connectors were missing, and the popup connectors were pretty corroded. Will replace them all with nice reliable DT items. It seems like Mitsy branches the loom out in heaps of different places, which then all end up going to roughly the same area? Will look much tidier soon.

 

I also removed the air con, coil power, original thermofan, and various other circuits, as I won't be using them. I'd love to remove the loom entirely from the vehicle and finish off getting rid of them entirely... But Ive just trimmed them off at the got fender grommet, sealed up the ends and taped them back into the loom.

 

Luckily, I managed to score the 1986 wiring supplement manual a while back. It covers European (which mine is), General Export, and Australian models. All wiring diagrams in awesome detail. Makes work like this just sooooo much easier.

 

 

I'd really like to scan this manual in its entirety, as good info on the Aus, Eur, and Export models can be hard to find, but its a bit tricky with every single page being a big fold-out item. Anyone have any ideas on how to digitize it?

[ProZac]

I've been doing the odd bit of work on this. I bought a set of autoliv generic replacement seatbelts (60-90, and 120-90 for anyone that needs them) and had a local company de-web them, and thread on the original emergency buckle fitting, and trim peices for where they pass through the door skins. I mucked about for ages carefully removing the upper mounts from the old belts, and grafting them onto the autoliv ones. It makes setting their operation angle super easy.

 

I managed to fit a set of factory central locking motors from a US widebody. Was super easy on the passengers side door, which is original to the car and has the later model internal pressing with all the correct mounting points in place... I had to make a template and invert it to transfer the mounting points to my drivers door, which is off and earlier model and didn't have them... It all worked out pretty nicely though. I also scavenged a whole bunch of Yazaki 58 Type S connectors from various mid 90's nissans at the local junkyard, so I can build new door looms following the factory specs.

 

 I really need to find a bunch of money to throw at it now, as there are several jobs I'm part way through that require purchases to complete...  First on the list is a pair of Nissan S13 D2 coilover lower mounts, as they're one of the major puzzle pieces to this swap:

 

 

I'm going about it the same way a guy in Aussie did back in the day, as its the only way to use an S13 rack that makes sense to me. Swapping in the entire front suspension setup means someone else (Nissan) has already did the math for me. By swapping to S13 stuff, I lose some of benefits of having the uber long control arms that Starions have, but as my front suspension will be working over a much smaller range overall, It should be fine. Plus I get access to the lego that is nissan brakes.

 

Or it'll be a complete clusterfuck, and I'll set it on fire and push it over a cliff .

[ProZac]

The S13 lower D2 mounts came in (thanks Scarles), got things mocked up again. It's as suspected, the S13 lower arms are just a bit too long. With the camber adjustability on the lower mounts all the way to positive, there is still around 3-4 deg of negative camber. I could correct this with the top hats, but it would add so much track to the front the wheels would no longer fit under the guards.

 

 

 

 

My internet research leads me to believe that R31 control arms should fit the S13 lower crossmember and knuckles, with the same angle on the balljoint, but are ~20mm shorter. I'll track down a pair of those and give them a shot. If they still aren't going to work, I'll shorten some and get them right.

 

The R32/Z32 brakes clear the wheel nicely, the wheel has full range lock to lock and clears the inner fender currently too. It's currently 5mm further back than when I started, but the crossmember isn't welded together yet, so I just need to nudge the base structure forward 5mm, and it should be copacetic

 

Getting there piece by piece .