One of the first things that was lacking, was a good battery. The old lead acid one, like maybe 10 years old, and long dead. The dirty yellow top is also mostly dead and not up to the task. You may have noticed I went with the Optima D51R this time instead of the normal sized battery. It actually has plenty of cranking power, and weighs 10 lbs less. I also am not planning to have a banging stereo in this car.
Ultimately the battery will be mounted in the trunk, probably in this spot, but standing up.
The green plug in the center is the flashing mode jumper from the 03 WRX harness. As you may guess, it needs to be in test mode for the Tactrix cable, plugged into the OBDII, to read and write the ECU ROM. We actually had a few problems getting it working in the first place. Brydon actually had a bug in the write up, and a few of the pins were swapped in the OBDII connector. Once we fixed that, the ECUFash tool was working perfectly.
Still pending on the harness, are the AVCS solenoids are throwing faults, so maybe there is a nother bug? Also the O2 sensor is reading 0. Oh well, we are almost there.
Another large gap was the exhaust system. Luckily I had an extra turbo back laying around from my other car that I could cut up and make work. I also had a Kinugawa twin scroll bell-mouth elbow that they don't sell anymore. I had to cut the single scroll elbow that was on there off, and swapped it for the Kinuagawa one. Then the midpipe was shortened by like 1.5", and then the transmission brackets were adjusted. Voila, I now have a custom turbo back that is compatible with a GM chassis and a JDM EJ207 twin scroll motor.
The other part of the story is that it was really hard to find a place that would work on a catless exhaust. Even when I got there they didn't want to do the work. Eventually I convinced them, doing the work, but reinstalling the OEM catted downpipe so that I would leave complaint with emissions. They still charged me for installing a full turbo back all the same. Then I just spend a few hours putting it back on later that night.
Next up, suspension setup.
