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Subie Revived….

We’ve been getting our ducks in a row for another 24 Hours of Lemons adventure coming up.  We’re returning to Thunderhill in Willows, CA to race the Subaru again.  We’re using the same car as last year, our ‘95 Subaru Impreza L wagon, with some minor tweaks.  One of those tweaks is an upgraded engine.  Our car originally came with a 1.8 liter engine, something we were happy about last year because that meant we got the 5 speed and 4.11 differentials that came with the wimpy engine in the older Imprezas (instead of an automatic and 3.90 that came with the 2.2).  Even though the 1.8 had 300,000 miles on it, it held up great during the race last year, the only problems we had was a stuck thermostat that only ended up losing a handful of laps.  The car was a bit down on power, though, so we had to really work hard to keep position and stay competitive coming out of the chicanes.

This year, we still have some budget left to work with (remember, $500 limit).  We wanted to upgrade to a 2.2 to get a few more ponies and some torque to help pull us away from the chicanes and navigate traffic.  This year there’s supposed to be 100 cars on the course (compared to 70 last year) so traffic is likely to be pretty heavy, so that extra torque will be even more handy this year.  The Subie engine uses a MAF sensor, which I’m not a huge fan of as they tend to be less robust than a MAP sensor, but it works in our favor with the engine swap.  According to internet lore, the 1.8 ECU handles the 2.2 swap fine because it sees the increased airflow demand and compensates appropriately.  We’ll see how that pans out.  Enough of why we went with the bigger engine, that’s obvious enough, on to the swap details. 

We have gone through a slew of “spare” engines since the last race.  Shortly after the race, I got a spare transmission (with 4.10 diff and “crunchy” 2nd syncro), a 1.8 longblock, and some other goodies like spare electronics for a hundred bucks delivered up from Salem.  Craigslist, of course, and a deal that was too good to pass up for a bunch of spares.  That stuff got shoved into the back of the shop to take up space, it’s doing a damn fine job of holding the floor down too.  I kept my eyes open for a 2.2 on Craigslist and the Subaru forums for a while and finally found what I was looking for last spring.  There was a 2.2 longblock for $50 that the previous owner said was in fine shape except for some leaking cam seals that caused the timing belt to slip; he replaced the engine with a junkyard engine thinking that it was an interference engine, but didn’t find out until afterwards that it was actually a non-interference engine.  Wyatt and Dante helped to swap our running 1.8 for the myster 2.2…after a couple of days of messing with it, we had a rod knocking 2.2.  As it turns out, the guy was probably lying, or at least horribly off in his diagnosis.  This ended up decommissioning the Subie so we skipped the last couple of rallycrosses of the year (where the car was quite competitive in 1.8 trim).  The hunt continued for another 2.2…

Since we got officially accepted into the race a few weeks ago, we decided to kick it into high gear and get the car back on the road.  I went to the U-Pull-It in Damascus, OR two weeks ago on Saturday looking for a 2.2.  I’d been to this yard and they had quite a few Subarus, so I thought my odds were pretty good to find what we were looking for.  Sure enough, there were 4 Legacies with a non-interference 2.2 engine in the yard.  I ruled out two of them pretty quick, one had bearing material in the oil pan and the other looked like it had been poorly maintained.  Of the remaining two, one was an earlier (’90) engine with 140k miles and the other one was a newer engine with 200k miles.  I decided the lower mileage one seemed like the safer bet of the two, so I got to pulling it at the yard.  I am getting pretty good with the Subie engines, they are pretty easy to work on; I had the engine pulled in only an hour!  Jessica helped me load the engine into the back of the Volvo and we were on our way for only $155 (plus $50 core charge) with a 30 day warranty.

Last weekend came the true test, seeing if the engine was in good shape.  Wyatt helped me pull the knocking 2.2 out of the Subie and we stuck the junkyard 2.2 in.  The clutch had rusted together on the knocking 2.2 because we hadn’t used it in months and our hole in the hood (for lights at last year’s race) was allowing rain to soak the transmission area.  No big deal, of course, since we were pulling the engine anyway.  We had to swap the 1.8 intake manifold we had onto the 2.2 because the older 2.2 had different wiring and hose layouts than our car had originally.  Fortunately the intake gaskets were still able to be reused.  We got the engine install done in a bit over 4 hours enough to test out and make sure it didn’t knock.  It fired right up and was nice and quiet, so we finished installing the accessories and plumbed the radiator as it was getting dark.  After final assembly we let it idle for about a half hour and all seemed well.  There’s a little bit of lifter noise, but perhaps that’s normal and we just couldn’t hear it with our old leaking EGR port on the 1.8 head.  We were pleased to have no knocking, no leaking head gasket, etc.  There was a bit of an oil leak that I might look into later depending on how much time I have.

On Sunday we took our knocking 2.2 back to the yard for our $50 refund on the core charge.  I also noticed that they’re having a half off sale on Thanksgiving weekend, that would have been nice to know the other day!  Oh well, we have room in the budget so we’re ok, but $75 saved is another $75 we could have used on something else. 

All that we have left is to get our cage update finished, our new tires mounted up, and some alignment tweaking.  We also have a cheap 20mm rear sway bar we got off a WRX, but we’re debating if we should stick with the 17mm bar we have and hope for rain.  Jessica also wants to do paint, but we’ll see if the weather cooperates.  Since we’re working on the car outside it’s hard to do spray paint this time of year (cold and wet).  The pre-bent cage pieces to finish off our cage upgrades (adding front hoops that weren’t required last year) showed up yesterday, so we ought to be banging out that work the weekend after Thanksgiving weekend.