Jan 20 2010

e85 Army Stickers – I heart e85!

e85 is the greatest liquid I know of.  What else makes C16 power at 87 octane prices.   My EVO loves it some e85 and 28 psi at the track making the horse powers.

So we need to let everyone know – especailly the guys at the track.  We need e85 pumps at the track.  What to do…. talk to people about e85, tell them why it rules.  Talk to your local track about getting e85 at the pumps.

And put some stickers on your machine to let the fools know where the power is coming from.

Thus…

Click here to order a kit yourself, $11 for the whole set shipped.


Jan 2 2010

Binary EVO – Motor Build part 1, taking stuff apart

This build started about a year and a half ago, and is still going to certain degrees .  It was fully documented on another website/forum, but this will be just my posts consolidated.

2.3L GT3076 Build

Well after having a little oil leak from my head for the past 2 years (ARP head stud install without removing the head – FTL!), I’m pulling the head to fix that and decided why not just redo everything. The car has about 100K miles on it right now as it’s been my daily driver with a nearly 100 mile commute. I do strictly road racing type of stuff with my car, no drag racing, so I’m looking for lots of torque, good spool-up and I’m not planning on revving past around 7800 RPM. I’ve always wanted to do a 2.3L and considered a stock-based turbo like a green, but they are super expensive, hard to get and I’m afraid run out of top end on a stroker. So a GT3076 seemed like a perfect fit. We’ll see I guess. I got a great deal on one from somebody here.

So I’ve been ordering parts for a few months and procrastinating doing any actual work. Well last weekend I finally got started.

Ready to DO WORK, hood off and lots of stuff to unscrew.

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White Trash temporary parts storage area. I should water my lawn more!

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Pretty much everything disconnected from the engine. Just need to unbolt the AC compressor and power steering pump. Unhook the T-Case and pull that thing out. Should have the motor out this weekend and start stripping it down to go to the machine shop.

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I’ll be interested to see the inside of the motor after 100K and see the stock clutch as well.

Here’s my pile of parts. Whenever I think I’m just about there I realize I still need something. Like the ARP main bolts I remembered I still need to order today:lol: I’m piecing together the turbo kit myself and still need a waste gate, oil lines, and parts to fab an O2 housing. I’m also looking at doing a side-by-side radiator and vertical flow intercooler, all of which I’ll fab myself with uber short IC piping.

I think I have enough stickers to cover a butt-rocker nova station wagon with a 454 in it{thumbup}

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Well I worked on things a little more over the week and into the weekend. I’m waiting on a friend to get back from Mexico to pull the engine out, so I haven’t been working too hard. I’m all ready to yank it now – everything is disconnected.

I test fit the new turbo so I could think about a vertical flow intercooler setup. I’m kinda over it now. Unless I remove the AC and do some serious hacking to the front end I can’t fit a properly sized IC in a vertical configuration. So maybe I’ll do it some other time. I’ll look for a good deal on a standard style intercooler to replace my stocker for the short term, and just build a new lower IC pipe.

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I’ve swapped motors in others cars before, but this is my first time on an EVO. It’s always a learning experience the first time. I might write-up a quick list of the general steps as I didn’t see one anywhere.

I didn’t have a slide hammer, and after trying to simply pull on the output shaft I could see it wasn’t just coming out. So I considered going and buying a slide hammer – a quick interweb search showed they were more money thanI felt like spending. And I felt like doing some welding. So I grabbed a few scraps of metal laying around my garage and fired up the TIG welder and built my own ghetto slide hammer. It dominated the output shaft with a couple quick wacks.

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Me fishing the impact gun into location to unbolt the transfer case from the transmission.

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I should have the engine out sometime this week when my buddy gets back from Cabo and brings the hoist over.

Whamo!

Turns out the engine just barely slips out from the top with the transmission still installed. I had to work to get it totally released from the TC and really angle it out to get it to clear. I had to remove the brackets for the AC pump from the block and some shift linkages from the transmission that were hitting things and holding up the show. I think I also successfully caught nearly every possible snag as I lifted the engine. First the shift lines, lower the engine , untangle… back up with the engine, snag the power steering lines, back down, adjust, back up. Crap like that. What sucked was that I had moved all that stuff into areas where they wouldn’t snag, but all the jockeying to get the thing out grab things with ninja stealth.

Finally got it out.

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Then came pulling the tranny. I had the engine hanging on the hoist while I crawled directly under it to fish a screw driver into the transmission and release the bearing clip. That was super scary. I kept seeing the engine falling off the hoist and literally smashing me into a bloody pulp. But I got it unhooked and yanked the tranny. But I’d release the clip with the motor in the car next time.

No motor.

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Got the motor mounted to the stand and ready to start taking it apart.

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Pulled some stuff off the motor today for a few hours. The whole thing is so dirty and caked with oil. Stupid leaky head gasket. It didn’t help that I sprung a fuel leak from my injector swap and sprayed the engine compartment with fuel as well. So there is dirt stuck to everything. You can really see how nasty the block is covered in grime.

I like to keep the separate parts in zip lock bags with their respective hardware, makes things easier going back together.

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I’m now at two tools I’ve had to build. Yesterday I welded up a little something-something to get my new #1 SOB bolt loose. Previously the cam gears bolts were first on the list for PIA. Anyone who has done cams knows how tight those cam gear bolts are. I had to go buy a serious impact gun with a special socket to break them loose on my first cam install. Here’s the one I have 600 ft-lbs

Well the impact gun had nothing on the crank bolt.

I’m not sure if NASCAR power would have broken it loose.

http://s7.sears.com/is/image/Sears/0…arpen=1&qlt=75

I had to build a 4 ft bar that I could bolt to the crank, since the engine was already on the stand with no flywheel. Then on the crank bolt I used a breaker bar with a 3 ft pipe extension. That finally broke it loose. I have pictures of that I’ll load later.

A high torque impact gun with a stubby 17mm impact socket with built in universal will break the cam gear bolts loose. But it took me trying a bunch of stuff to figure that out. I’ve used that setup on a bunch of different cam installs, always have got them loose.

The crank bolt though – that thing is solid. I banged at it with the impact gun, even after I built the 4 foot bar screwed into the crank. It didn’t budge. I had my Dad at the end of the 4 foot bar, and me basically jumping to load the 3 foot pipe I had on the crank bolt.

I wonder what others have done for this SOB of a bolt.

A few more pictures.

My stock clutch after roughly 100K. Looks ready for more, but an ACT will be taking it’s place.

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What my garage looks like when it’s time to ” build another tool”. All that to remove a pesky bolt

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4 ft bar to bolt to the crank in the flywheel position, this provides counter-force for removing the crank bolt with a breaker bar and 3 ft pipe extension.

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I got a few more of my outstanding required parts:
- Scored a brand new Tial wastegaste on Ebay for $150
- Oil lines, misc gaskets, and couplers from ExtremePSI. These guys have a really nice site for piecing together turbo kit parts. I got all the parts a-la-carte and ended up saving money over “complete kits”. The hardest thing is making sure all the fasteners have the correct thread sizes for your specific turbo etc. Their site allows you to pick from a list for each end of the oil line and everything fit perfect :thumbup:

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Some things I still need:
- flange and tubing to build wastegate dump tube.
- flanges and tubing to build O2 housing.
- ARP main bolts.
- hardware for turbo-to-manifold, wastegate-to-manifold, turbo-to-O2 housing
- figure out turbo cooling lines
- radiator hose (stupid sharp angle routing).
- fab lower IC pipe.

I’m also rounding up the tools required for the actual engine assembly. Things like bore gauges, dial indicators, feeler gauges etc. Being an engineer I have most of that at work to use. I’m going to go weight my pistons and rods today just for kicks and giggles, we have a high precision scale and the other engineer sitting next to me wants to see how good the parts are…

I just weighted my pistons and rods on a high precision digital scale here at work.

The Wiseco pistons were within .05 grams of the marked value on the bottom of the pistons (done in Sharpie by Wiseco) which is inline with scale-to-scale variance. And the pistons overall were within 0.60 grams of each other.

The Eagle rods with hardware were within 0.80 grams of each other.

Pretty good.

just ordered 1mm oversize valves, so it looks like my head will be semi-built.

I also grabbed some ARP mains, a flange for the wastegate dump tube, and the flanges to build the O2 housing.

I also talked with the machine shop yesterday and planned out the work. Bore, chamfer lower edge of the bores, deck, clearance for the 100mm crank. The head will be faced, lapped and given a value job for the 1mm OS valves and install some BC valve springs. The rotating assembly will be balanced including the flywheel and clutch. I should be able to drop off the stuff on Monday and have it back in about a week or so.

Pulled the head off tonight. Things look as expected, black; with signs of oil seeping out the head gasket. The slow leak from the good ol’ one-at-a-time ARP headstud install was really a BUNCH of small leaks.

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Got recommended clearance for pistons from Wiseco.

If broken in at low boost then .0025 clearance is fine. If going straight to the track or getting 20 lbs of boost right away then .0035 piston to wall clearance is recommended.

.019 ring end gap for upper ring and .023 ring end gap for the lower ring.

Regards,
Wiseco Piston


Ordered my valves on Thursday and they arrived Friday – Sweet. 1mm oversize, stainless steel – full set of intake and exhaust $115 shipped :thumbup:

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Often times major car projects come with domestic projects that get “slipped” in as a compensation for long periods of time spent in the garage. I was planning on working on the car over the weekend – in order to do that I was up until midnight Friday night painting :eek: I’ll run out of rooms to paint before I ever finish screwing with my car :lol:

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Down to the block now and ready to hand it over to the machine shop on Monday. Here the mess off final parts tossed about the garage.

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Looking at the stock bearings I found something a little scary. This is the main closest to the flywheel. Not sweet.

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Jan 1 2010

How this all got started

Looking through some old pictures I found this.  The day I got the EVO, look how stock it was, sitting next to my previous car an Impreza 2.5 RS.  I thought I wouldn’t need to modify it!

A couple days later I had painted the headlights and fixed the tail lights so they were red.  This was a no options 2003, no sun roof and no big rear wing.

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A few months later it had lowering springs, a swaybar, some boost control and intake and no more wing.

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Started doing some auto-x in it.

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A year or so later, more parts, and Miller Motorpark opened – finally a real track in Utah.

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Dec 31 2009

Installing Binary Seat Lowering Brackets

Installing [BINARY] seat lowering brackets is straight forward and can be done with hand tools

First things first – you need to be able to distinguish between Drivers Side Brackets and Passenger Side Brackets. There is only one bracket that is shared for both seats, this is the front center bracket. The same part is used on each seat. All the other brackets are unique to each side. Passenger side brackets have ONE chamfered (angled) corner, that is how you tell them apart from the drivers side parts.

The pictures below showing removal of the seat actually show the [BINARY] lowering brackets, not the factory brackets. This is because I didn’t want to re-install them to show how to remove them:eek:

1. Remove the center console by opening it up and removing the two screws at the bottom of the compartment. Then “pop” the front edge up by pulling straight up near the shifter. With the E-Brake up you can remove the console. You may need to disconnect the IC spray button.

2. With the console out of the way you can access and remove the center mounting bolts for the seats. Use a 14mm socket. Also remove the two front mounting nuts, and the outside mounting bolt. You’ll need to pop off the plastic cover from the outside. With the 4 mounting fasteners removed you can pull your seat out – once you disconnect the seatbelt warning harness (wire) underneath the seat.

3. With the seat removed from the car you can now remove the factory mounting brackets from the sliders. This is done with a 6mm allen wrench. They are pretty tight, so I use a crescent wrench for leverage. There are 4 bolts, the 2 fronts are easiest to access by sliding the rails all the way forward. The 2 rears are best accessed by sliding the rails all the way back.

4. Factory “skyscrapers” booo.

5. On the front of the sliders there are plastic caps, these are held in place by a small screw. Remove the screw, it interferes with the lowering brackets. This only has to be done on the FRONT of the sliders. The rears are ok.

6. Install the [BINARY] Lowering Brackets using the factory bolts and supplied nuts. USE BLUE LOCTITE. The images below show the correct orientation.

7. With the [BINARY] Brackets installed you can put your seat back in. Adjust each bracket so it aligns with the mounting stud/hole. The factory sliders use slotted holes to create some flexibility for alignment. The fronts slide side-to-side, the rears slide front-to-back. The [BINARY] Brackets also use slotted/square holes, like the factory brackets to allow for proper alignment. Once everything is lined up re-install the factory bolts/nuts, tighten with the 14mm socket. The bolts/nuts for the slider-to-brackets can be tightened in place also. Torque values for the fasteners can be seen in the images below.

8. Re-install the console.

9. Enjoy your EVO in a proper motorsports style driving position – the way it should have come from the factory.

UPDATE:

I’ve got some feedback about two issues: harness eyelets and the adjustment lever.  So here are some pointers for these two issues.

1. Some harness eyelets require modifications to create enough clearance near the center tunnel of the car. This can be done with a hammer, just make a slight impression in the tunnel where the interference is. A washer can also be placed under the rear center bracket to lift it slightly.

I also have compatible harness eyebolts available. They are custom made as the standard seatbelt ones that come with a harness are not the correct thread size. I tried to help a buyer find these and they weren’t readily available – so I got these custom built.

2. The seat has around 15 positions front to back, starting with position 1 at the full front orientation. Of these 15 there are some, around 5-9 that the adjustment lever interferes with the floor support a little. This can be fixed quickly and easily by slightly bending the adjustment lever.

First remove the adjustment lever by using a flat blade screw driver to pop off the C-Clips which hold it in place under the seat.

With the lever removed mark the spot for the bend at 4 inches from the front on both sides of the lever.

Use a vise or some large pliers to bend each leg of the lever around 10 degrees.

With the lever modified reinstall it on the seat and pop the C-Clips back on. You are good to go!


Dec 31 2009

Binary Recaro Seat Lowering Brackets for EVO VII-IX

Binary Recaro seat lowering brackets for EVO VII-IX

The Original – Binary seat lowering brackets for the stock Recaro Seats found in Mitsubishi Lancer Evolutions VII-IX.  These work on all global models of the CT9A Chassis, including: USDM, JDM, EDM etc; any EVO 7-9.

These brackets replace the existing factory mounting brackets and allow your seat to be dropped by 1.5 inches retaining the stock sliders.   The improvement in driver position IS MASSIVE.  The 1.5” drop makes all the difference and creates a true motorsports driving experience.  Your eyes will now look directly through the dash and make you focus down the track instead of directly in-front of your bumper.  Your arms will have a more natural path to the steering wheel and the shifter allowing you to comfortably perform fast paced motorsports driving techniques.  The lower position of the hips will create more clearance for your legs beneath the steering wheel giving you room for heel-toe downshifts, as well as better alignment to the pedals.  An obvious benefit is helmet clearance for us tall folks.  Overall the car will finally feel like a proper sports car, or even a go-kart, you won’t feel like you’re driving from a high-chair.

These are the original EVO seat lowering brackets – with hundreds sold and tested throughout the world.  These are not knock-offs made from cheesy unfinished stainless steel finish.

– CAD designed.

-  CNC laser cut.

-  CNC formed.

-  Powder Coated.

-  Included all required hardware.

-  Install with simple hand tools in under an hour.

-  Creates a true motorsports driving position:

- increased helmet clearance

- more clearance for heel-toe

– improved pedal alignment

– keeps eyes looking down the track

– allows for better turning and shifting response

HEAD TO THE MAIN BINARY SITE TO ORDER THESE!


NOTES:

A few positions fully forward (for really short folks) are not compatible with the brackets.  The sliders end up stopping against the chassis mounting hardware.  So be aware of that if you run your seat all the way to the front.  People 5′6″ have them installed and are still able to use them in their preferred seating position, so it shouldn’t really effect too many people.

Harness eyebolts from aftermarket harness may have clearance issues, it depends on the brand and your seating position.   This can typically be resolved by minor grinding of the eyebolt and belt mount bolt.  OR, you can use a Binary Eyebolt which replaces the chassis mounting bolt for the inside rear bracket – found under the center console.  This requires running without the center console.

Here are a few reviews taken from literally hundreds of satisfied customers.

Quote:

just put driver side in today. BEST mod yet!!!! I’m 6′3″ and can’t properly use the arm rest (I have to lean to the side). I have better visibility, and it “feels” better for me. Keep in mind I drive round trip about 100 miles/day, so I spend a lot of time in the car.
Mitch

Quote:

Installed my new brackets today and couldn’t be happier right now, these brackets are great. I love the new seating position, I’m 5′11″ and for me the driving position is perfect, puts the steering wheel in a much better position in relation to the seat. I dont know why the car didn’t come this way from the factory. I wasn’t sure that the 1.5″ change would be noticeable but it definitely is. Great mod for the $$ and if anyone in the NY area wants to sit in it to see for your self just let me know.

Originally Posted by injentech42

hey whats up i just installed mine on my ix ssl wowww they are awesome my car feels so diffrent, when i tell my friends they think im crazy but the car feels like a car now not a big foot lol, great product highly recommend

Originally Posted by redevo58

Just received and installed the lowering kit. talk about a great product! i always fell like something was off when driving my car, seat and shifter location always felt a bit odd. Now it feels like am sitting in a sports car instead of on top of it and shifter position feels so much better too.

Originally Posted by tanK

Just got a chance to install them today… must say, this is probably one of the best mods I’ve done in a while! They lower the seat to a great seating position (for me anyway). Can’t wait to use them at the track this comin Friday!

Originally Posted by module unknown

Yes it does! It’s amazing the difference it makes.

This is one of the first mods I’ve done to the Evo. Going back and forth from my DSM to the Evo, I felt like I was driving a truck when I’d sit in the thing. haha.

I’m enjoying the Evo even more now. I was so excited I was making people sit in my seat at a local evo meet last night. You might be seeing a few more orders coming.

Originally Posted by Akisan2

Well I got mine finally installed and….
!%@^#%!#& what a difference! The car feels like a new car with the lower seating positions and view. It brings out whole new perspective…
I’m heading out for track day on Friday so I’ll really be able test em out!

Thanks, a GREAT idea and GREAT product!

Originally Posted by gtfour43


Driving position is perfect for me now even being so short (5′6″). Today was the first time I used the armrest
. My arm is now sitting inline with the shifter too. Pushing in the pedals is also a lot easier now. I had to adjust the steering wheel all the way down to see my speedo though now

Overall……..excellent product Jared. I look forward to future products from you.