Building New Engines

It has been a busy few weeks for us at Subiesport. As we put another issue to bed we decided to take a day and take our project cars out to our testing facility. We had all done a fair amount of modifications to our cars so it was time to see how they measured up. My wagon had a new suspension setup and a new clutch, Ryan’s Legacy GT was sporting a new set of coilovers and of course we had the new 2008 WRX project car with to test. It was looking like it would be a full day.

But that is where the trouble started. To begin with, the Dreadnought, my wagon, never made it to the track. It seems that after almost 200,000 miles of driving and boost and other full-throttle shenanigans, the head gasket had let go and was sending coolant into the overflow tank with every little trip down the road. Instead of driving the car to our remote testing location and risking a hefty towing bill, I decided to leave the wagon at home.

Then there was the Legacy. To say Ryan is hard on cars is like saying Mussolini was moderately arrogant. Ryan has two ways of driving: parked and flat-out, hell bent for leather. To top it off, we were testing out a new version of AccessPORT specifically for the 2007 Legacy GT and resident tuner and Technical Editor, Tim Bailey, had his hands full reigning in our fearless publisher while trying to tune the car on the track; not an easy task.

While we were able to get some impressive numbers from the Legacy, at the end of the day the car was smoking heavily and starting the car revealed the tell-tale dead hole. When you start a car with a bad piston, there is a very distinctive “thud” when the engine turns over on the bad hole, like that cylinder is not holding compression. That is precisely what the Legacy did.

In fact, the only car to walk away from the day completely unscathed was the only stock car in the group, the 2008 WRX which proved to be faster around our test track than the Legacy was when it was stock.

To fix these issues, two ailing engines, we took the Legacy over to PDXTuning, in Portland, Ore., to have them pull out the bad block and drop in a fresh STI shortblock with forged pistons (a full write-up will be in a future issue of Subiesport).

As it turns out, a broken piston was the only damage so we decided to shore up the Legacy’s EJ255 block, also with some forged pistons and drop this engine, complete with EJ20G heads with Delta Camshaft regrinds, into the Dreadnought (also in a future issue). While PDX built Ryan’s engine, I had the privilege of learning to build my own.

As of this writing one car is back on the road and getting broken in. The other is still being pieced together but we will of course be bringing you the results of both in the very near future.

-Travis Geny