16 January 2022
It's been a few months since I have posted up. There's still stuff happening. Some good, some not so good. Regular and non-routine maintenance came around at the beginning of December. Simple stuff, like change the oil, and while the oil is out, change the faulty oil level sensor. Fix some minor stuff in the engine bay, and general look over of things. Simple enough. Work was accomplished, and the car was driven about 100 miles, with seemingly no issues, until the next day. Went to go to work, started up normally, backed out of the garage, went to close the door, and noticed a great big puddle of oil on the ground. Shut the car down, open the hood look around, and it would appear that the oil cooler gaskets gave up the ghost. Order gaskets and a thin wall 48mm socket to pull it all apart. That's when the fun began.

Replacing the oil cooler gaskets was straight forward enough. Put the -10AN lines for the oil cooler back on, started the car, steady stream of oil from the top -10AN fitting. GRRRRR..... Take it apart, notice that the fitting has a nick in it. Order a new fitting, replace it, check for leaks, all good. Degrease the engine bay. Long day at work, plus hours of this, I pulled out of the shop, and put the car in the garage. Good night.

The next day, Donna decides to drive the car, takes it on about a 10 mile run. Brings it home, and I happen to be in the garage when she gets back. As she pulls in, I see oil dripping at a good clip under the car. Ughhhh.... Pull it back out to the shop, oil pan is leaking. Park the car. Christmas goes by. New Year's arrives, and then work re-commenced. Pull the pan down, see where it was leaking in the straight RTV gasket. As I am looking at the pan, it seems that the shape is familiar. On the shelf is a lower oil pan gasket for a M112/M112K V6. Inspecting the gasket, it is determined to be the right size/shape for the M113K. Since this is a far better option than straight RTV, the surfaces are re-cleaned, and the new gasket added. Change the oil again, and no leaks. Perfect. Let's not stop. For the next two weeks. So what all happened?

Time to fix an old annoyance at the bolted down front header panel. To remove/replace this panel, there are two small brackets running to the top of the radiator that 'hook' around the top of the header panel, and bolt through the fan assembly brackets and to the radiator. The brackets sandwich together, securing the radiator and fan to the header panel. The problem is that running the two 6mm bolts through those brackets, and lining it all up, and tightening them was a royal pain in the rear! Sometimes it would take 45 minutes just to line up those two bolts. Also, the two -10AN oil cooler lines had to be removed. Easy enough, but the lower one would dump oil all over the belts. So, after much measuring, and about 6 failed sets of brackets, a solution was made.

Next, I noticed that the fan was rubbing on the upper radiator hose. Actually, it had worn a pinhole through it, and it was now leaking. Time to fix that more permanently. With a piece of 36mm aluminum pipe, a saw, and some patience, the thermostat housing was cut, sectioned, and this pipe added. The pipe was smaller diameter than the rubber hose, and it also fit against the engine tighter. This eliminated the rubbing, and some of the rubber hose that had to be cobbled together to fit this wild routing.




I really like this solution, as it should eliminate all future issues surrounding the upper radiator hose. It also eliminates two short sections of rubber hose (with two curves) and a piece of metal pipe joining them. It clears all of the belts and the power steering puller neatly. Time to fix the next problem of a similar type. As stated in the thread earlier, a mid-term future project is adding a LCD based digital instrument cluster, and it will add sensors like a wideband O2, fuel pressure and an oil pressure sensor. Tapping the oil pressure port out to 1/4" NPT, and then adapting to the 1/8" NPT of the sensor worked find, but the sensor is right in the middle of the belts, and while the sensor is safe, the wiring to it would be in the way all the time, and in mortal danger, if the belt ever broke. To fix this, the sensor was simply relocated, with the use of a couple of fittings, and a 12" run of -3AN hose. (Forgive the oil and dirt all over the place. The engine was in need of degreasing again, which happened later on.)





So, the maintenance was complete, and a few long standing weak spots were addressed. Shall we stop? Nah! Took very few pictures, but there was a pile of high performance parts waiting, that needed installed:
- Needswings stainless steel downpipes
- Bosch 630cc fuel injectors
- 82mm Throttle Body (and VRP adapter plate)
- LM21 supercharger scatter shield
- Eurocharged 77mm Supercharger Pulley
- Creative Steel Belt Wrap Kit

The downpipes went on in about an hour, with no major issues, although there is some rubbing of the right side pipe. I will address that in a few weeks, when the next round commences. More on that later. My ignorance hit on the throttle body. When I jumped into this, the intention was the throttle body only, at this time. The rest would wait. Naively, the thought was, remove the supercharger snout, port it with a hand grinder (carbide bit) and then put it together, the rest of the mods later. Instead, I was educated.

The snout cannot come off with the intercooler in place. The whole supercharger has to come out. Good grief! OK. It looked like an awful job, but it was actually pretty easy. In fact, it was way easier than removing the four (of five) bolts I managed to get off of the snout with it all in the car. I also offered an opportunity to look at the "V" of the engine, and clean out all of the leaves, dirt and other junk accumulated in there.



The supercharger separated from the intercooler with some minor persuasion. Porting of the throttle body snout took all of 20 minutes. And I did not manage to grab a pic. The main bolt of the supercharger pulley required heat from a propane torch to break down the thread locker. Once off, the pulley was swapped. Shimming seems to be the same between the stock pulley and the Eurocharged, as it turns out. Reinstalled the supercharger onto the engine, and buttoned all of that up. Swapped the injectors on the fuel rail, reinstalled that. No drama. Found that the belt wrap kit (BWK) was the next item, and there was drama. Clearance at the front of the engine is about nil, anyway. With the BWK, the fan blades would hit the hardware for it, and would rub on the cross brace. I marked on the fan where it was hitting, and after a bit of trial and error, and some work with the carbide cutter, notches were cut into the back sides of the fan blades to clear the hardware. The hardware was also ground down for clearance. Upon reassembly, and tightening everything up, the outer hub of the fan barely rubbed on one of the BWK bolts. The right side fan/radiator/header panel bracket was reworked a bit to push the top of the radiator forward slightly, and now there is nearly 1/2" clearance. In this car, 1/2" is a lot!

Buttoned it all up, with the LM21 shield in place, and then degreased the engine. Here it is complete, but still wet from the bath.




A new tune was applied to properly take advantage of the pulley and injectors. Idled well, but noticed a new rattle that seems to be the exhaust rubbing somewhere. The exhaust does not quite fit right in the rear, as the bracket that holds up the SRT-6 exhaust resonator is in the wrong location on this car. On the SRT-6, this bracket bolts to the rear subframe, but the 04 subframe had no provision. During the initial build, a best guess was taken, and the bracket was welded to the subframe - in the wrong place. Now, the exhaust rubs and rattles.

So next came the obligatory test drive. Normal driving seems pretty well the same, except that the car feels more 'anxious' to take off. Perhaps the larger throttle body, or the tuning is responsible. It's not hard to drive. Well, until wide open throttle (WOT). OK, driving with traction control off is no longer a possibility. The car lurches forward, burning the tires wildly, straight through 4th gear! Like catching a tiger by the tail, the car is very hard to keep moving in a straight line. Like, *very* hard. Good grief! I think we have finally reached a level of performance that matches the Neon SRT-4 I last built. And it is just as wild a ride to control. Rolling back past where I made my first WOT attempt, I see a single very thick black line on the ground, followed by a pair of lighter marks further down the road. Launch was obviously a horrible 'one wheel peel' and then it sort of caught up in 2nd. Not going to work. Honestly, while the power is a huge thrill, the car drove better with less power. So, do I put the stock pulley back on? Heck no!

So now, the next big project will finally be that HAG215 differential and the limited slip differential (LSD). I'm on 3.06 gears right now, and am seriously contemplating dropping to 2.82 or 2.62. The car certainly does not need any more low end "go". On the bright side, I will be switching to a 2005 SRT-6 rear subframe, which will allow that misplaced exhaust mounting bracket to finally be in the correct spot, and maybe the exhaust won't rattle anymore.