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Welp, shop found the exhaust leak. It's at the collector side of the header flanges. Sigh.
Look like I'll be running the next event with a huge exhaust leak and then taking apart my exhaust system. Makes me wish there were CARB compliant headers on the market.
Dropped in the replacement sub, this thing only ran me $50m dual voice coil version. Any more powerful than this would require serious refactoring back there due to the rattling (read on). This required the usual: cutting out the middle metal panel, drilling mounting holes, extending the speaker wire, etc:
Getting rid of all the rattling back there is damn near impossible but a big source of it was the rear windshield curtain rightmost mounting bolt.
I doubt I *fixed* it but it seems to have improved. I undid the 4 bolts from the trunk side holding this entire bar in and stuffed some soft stuff under the left and rightmost mounting brackets. I used sound deadening cloth/fiber/matt that MB themselves use under the rear seats, just cut off small pieces.
As for the FMHE, I finalized the mounting today but cutting access ways in the bumper support to put the nut on the other side of the bolt (previously it was temporarily tapped into the aluminum bumper support itself).
The first hole I made was too big and I had to do extra work with that additional aluminum rib you see, separating it from the cutaway panel was annoying.
Here is the view of the bolt/nut from the side:
The entire bumper went on without any problems (after the plastic mounting bracket trimming I already outlined). Not entirely sure what people meant when they said there would be clearance issues.
September will be a VERY busy month:
- Looking to weld the differential and get rid of these asinine toe settings
- In talks with Eurocharged right now for a ECU/TCU/Pulley package, entertaining a custom TCU flag for actual gear-hold pending their engineer's review
- Some long overdue branding for the project, targeting rear quarterpanel/trunk/door area
- The damn headers
Eurocharged ECU and TCU tunes are in, but they experienced a supplier issue with the pulley, so that will be arriving late. However, going to test out the new camera setup tomorrow morning and grab some new footage, it's been a while!
Headers replaced, all new exhaust hardware, no more exhaust leak, sounds wonderful again.
Eurocharged 83mm pulley on, doesn't feel much different. Surprisingly, I had to remove all shims and I'm at the wide end of the gap spec on the clutch (0.35mm-0.45mm), engagement is noticeably smoother than then the factory pulley, had obvious wear marks on both surfaces, I gave it a very brief and light scuff.
All appears to be well, we can move onto other projects soon. Big ones:
Lincoln Locker differential
Branding the entire car
And some smaller ones in the meantime:
An aero piece here and there
Fixing that stupid drifter alignment, it's eating tire like crazy
Tuning audio: tweak crossover points, isolate and fix sailpanel rattles, re-wire speakers into parallel circuits
Making a mount for the old steering wheel buttons and creating an alternative CANBUS harness somewhere in the center console so I can navigate the cluster menus again.
Tried to disable the airmatic and telecom warnings, failed at both. It would seem this is something that has to be done before they are removed from the car, not after. Ah well.
Tried to disable the airmatic and telecom warnings, failed at both. It would seem this is something that has to be done before they are removed from the car, not after. Ah well.
There are two place a in STAR that you need to disable airmatic. You are probably missing the one under the Instrument Cluster menu. I can dig up the exact menu path if you need it
There are two place a in STAR that you need to disable airmatic. You are probably missing the one under the Instrument Cluster menu. I can dig up the exact menu path if you need it
That would help because I plan to rip into it and hook up the factory stereo and wire in the airmatic fuse again so I can do this, plus posting it in here won't hurt anything for helping others go through this. Thanks!
If you guys want to come shoot ****, take photos, get in the video, watch cars go sideways and overall just have a grand time, come hang out with me during the Winter Jam at Sonoma Raceway.:
Just copped my ticket: facebook.com/events/2000715766863310/
08-12-2017, 09:03 PM
