serialk11r's FR-S

[Aozora.BRZ]

Exhaust tube looks good after your work but have you considered getting an actual tip to bolt on? I think it would look better.
There is also a cover available for the side with no tip made of the same bumper plastic
Here http://www.ft86speedfactory.com/exha...le-covers-215/


The transmission being notchy and strong to shift is normal. If you live in a cold area just wait until winter and your idea of hard will be redefined. It is a very tough built transmission and made so you feel everything
More reads here
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=87744
http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9707

If you havent ordered your LEDs yet I recommend you look at DiodeDynamics. Good reputation by the members here and I love mine

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by Aozora.BRZ

Exhaust tube looks good after your work but have you considered getting an actual tip to bolt on? I think it would look better.
There is also a cover available for the side with no tip made of the same bumper plastic
Here http://www.ft86speedfactory.com/exha...le-covers-215/

Yea I considered it, but I saw an old Alfa Romeo go by once and it had this long "pea shooter" polished steel pipe coming out the back and I wanted to imitate that look. Old school and functional? Though admittedly, the pipe being the same diameter from the hanger all the way back does look a little awkward when you look closely, I should've had the exhaust guy use a pipe expander on it first.

I know there's a cover, but I wasn't trying to pay 70 dollars after shipping lol. I'm really hoping this looks good when I take the newspaper off.

Picture of the cover (from close up it doesn't look great, I'm going to try sanding the paint a bit when it hardens a little more):

[Rampage]

Originally Posted by serialk11r

The thing I like about the 1ZZ now that I have one of these is that the mechanical noises from that engine just sounded much smoother, minus some lifter noise (because they needed adjustment). Even the gear noise was a pretty cool soft whining sound. The FA20 is more powerful, much more responsive, and more fuel efficient, but it sounds awful, like a tractor engine powering a blender full of marbles.

Yep, that is one of the very few things that I do not like about my son's FR-S. I described the engine noise as a washing machine full of rocks. The 1ZZ is much better and the 2ZZ is better still. No other 4 cylinder sounds as good as a Honda 4 though.
Nice to see you making the FR-S your own.

Edited to clarify.

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by Rampage

Yep, that is one of the very few things that I do not like about my son's FR-S. I described the engine noise as a washing machine full of rocks. The 1ZZ is much better and the 2ZZ is better still. Nothing sounds as good as a Honda 4 though.
Nice to see you making the FR-S your own.

A Honda 6? The J35 in an Odyssey or Pilot even is just so smooth, and makes such a great sound with so little NVH when you let it rev to its pitiful 6k limit.

Tuning is so addicting, I'll try to post some maps when I sort them out. I really don't like the VVT maps on the off the shelf OFT stage 1, there's unnecessary enrichment at low load, and I don't like the throttle map at all. The stage 1 map basically makes the first 10% of the pedal useless, and the values aren't scaled quite right so if you step on it lightly the revs will go up and down, which is super annoying.

[serialk11r]

Okay, since I couldn't figure out if Requested Torque A or B was the right table to change, I just did both. I noticed the OFT stage 1 tune only changed the A table, but it felt like the stock tune was using the A table and when I flashed the OFT tune it was using the B table...

6 hours of work later manually typing in numbers:


I also made a hybrid of the stock and OFT stage 1 fuel and ignition maps, I basically copied over the OFT map's cells that were leaner, and then since the OFT map uses less knock correction in some places, I used the stock knock correction and added enough timing to get 0.35 deg less than the OFT map (just to be safe and if I adjust the AFR mixture further which I will) with ignition advance multiplier at 1.0. Since there's less timing than the OFT map it should hopefully be safe for 91.

EDIT: just took it out for a drive, throttle is still a little "soft" in the first bit of travel but now the response is just right, I'm super happy! Tweaked it a little more and now it's spot on.

[serialk11r]

Some goodies came in the mail today



Yes, those are Ebay LED headlights, an assortment of Ebay LED replacement bulbs, and a 17 dollar Ebay catch can.


Yea, that's not going to be condensing much blowby or oil. I drilled the holes out a bit:

Not shown is some ugly removal of material from the slightly longer center tube and the hole it goes into so that it'll fit some 1/4" plastic tubing stretched over it. If the PCV gases go down into the can and then back up, they'll have plenty of time to condense on the walls of the can which being aluminum should cool them off. I'm going to pick up the tubing and install this in a few days.

LED reverse light vs. incandescent:


You can see the incandescent is brighter, but honestly it wasn't very bright in the first place and one was already burnt out.

(30W per bulb claimed) LED headlamp next to stock (upside down):

To the human eye they look about the same because the halogen bulbs have a yellower color. Color of these bulbs is a nice pristine white, no stupid blue or purple tint. The beam pattern is extremely clean and it sends more light downward towards the road. Super happy with this purchase for 50 bucks. I don't think they're actually 30W, they look more like 20W each, but that's why I bought the "60W" kit instead of the "40W" kit.

I was going to take more pictures, but I did the license plate, trunk, and dome lights. I got a 9 SMD dome light and it is almost uncomfortably bright for nighttime use. License plate and trunk are way better illuminated now. So what happened was I was trying out the cheap amber turn signals, which turned out to be pathetic (they were so dim the housings might as well have been smoked), so I tried to take it out and it got stuck:

Since this looks absolutely embarassing, I'm going to motivate myself to take the whole thing out...by ordering some Valenti lights sooner lol.

I will do front markers and turn signals when I have time to pull the fender liners out.

[serialk11r]

Dipped in titanium flake + white:


I was hoping it would turn out a little more silvery, but the yellower "titanium" color does look pretty cool. The car gets a LOT of stares and comments now lol. A female friend also told me the car looks way better than my old MR2 -_-

I used Meguiar's Ultimate Protectant on it and royally screwed up by not following the directions and spraying it directly on. That stuff dries quite fast and I got a bunch of visible wax spots. I'm sure as dirt accumulates that I have to clean off the excess will wear down soon enough but don't be stupid like me!

[serialk11r]

Gonna take the car to get recoated in a slightly lighter, more silvery color. I decided the titanium color looks a little funny, but a little bit of the yellowy tinge is not bad.

Today I installed this:


10 dollar Ebay "Momo" shift knob (lol). Quality is actually pretty good, but then again it's just a piece of plastic with some metal and leather bits glued on, how hard is that to make...

Most people go for short shifters but I like how my MR2's long throw shifter didn't take much force to put into gear and how gears were easy to find. I didn't realize this knob would make the shifter this tall, as the reverse lockout ring is a little harder to get to now but this knob feels so much better in the palm and the reduced shift effort is great. I have to be lighter on the clutch because it's now way easier to put into gear without a perfect rev match.

[serialk11r]

A bunch of mods happened in the last week:

Drilled aluminum "Momo Italy" collar on the shift knob out to 3/4" with my 5 dollar Harbor Freight bit that lost all of its TiN coating in the process (lol):

Unfortunately this hole was barely not big enough to let the reverse lockout ring's top plastic piece slide through it, so I used my 9 dollar HF dremel to grind the hole out a little, and now the knob sits a little lower, and the shifter height is about perfect IMO


(I installed it backwards in the last post lol)

Valenti lights arrived, installed them last night.


Not gonna bother posting the one with the lights on because my phone camera just sees a giant washed out blob of light, but this just improved the looks of the car by 10x. The light output of the Valentis is pretty good, but one of the tinted/red lens ones wouldn't have cut it IMO. Glad I got this color combo.

[serialk11r]

Ebay catch can installed:


I signed up for an autocross and decided I should probably do the catch can since I put it off for so long. I couldn't find a small piece of aluminum tube so I glued some aluminum foil together into a slightly more rigid sheet and used heatshrink to attach it to the aluminum barb thingy. I didn't snap any photos since it was ugly, but the makeshift inlet now reaches around 3 inches into the can which gives the gases more space to condense on the walls of the can.

I couldn't figure out a good spot for the mount to use bolts with so I wrapped the strut bar with electrical tape, then used my last ziptie and some steel wire to tie the thing to the bar.

The PCV hose was really freaking oily so I checked the oil level (got too lazy to do that too haha), and it was near the bottom hole in the stick :/ I just added the half quart of cheap oil I had around since it's at 4000 miles already.

I was extremely conservative on the ignition timing for my map, I might try bumping the advance up a little now that the PCV is presumably not sending as much s*** into the intake.

If I cared more, I think brakes + coilovers + aluminum flywheel would be a good place to stop. Those combined would make the car maybe 5-10% faster off the line which is as good as you can expect without forced induction. Since moving to SF this car has turned into a very occasional people hauler, so putting more mods on doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

[serialk11r]

Well, yesterday I took my FRS out to my first autocross ever! Went with a coworker who had a tuned Integra who gave me some tips. The fastest guys in low powered cars were hitting ~52 seconds on the course during my work shift, so I was hoping I wouldn't be too horrible when I went out for my first lap...(there was a guy in a Caterham pulling 47s without even trying, no tire squeal, chilling in a higher gear the whole time, those things are SO fast)

Driving all out was super strange since I never really did it. First lap I kept on shifting gears and pressing the clutch in instinctively and coasting when I got scared, got a dismal 65 second first run lol.

It was pretty hard to really hit the brake hard because everything looked so slow, so I was entering corners too fast for a while, couldn't break 60 seconds. My coworker sat with me and instructed me with "brake...turn...gas...brake...turn", which immediately shaved 4 seconds off.

Last run of the day I managed to get under 57 seconds, lost a bit of time because I dropped the clutch when shifting to 2nd and almost spun the car (but kept it under control), but I was pretty proud of myself for going from total s*** to faster than like 10% of the people there -_-. My horrible driving punished the front tires pretty bad though. Super fun day, definitely gonna sign up for more of these events. Seeing some nice cars there is an added bonus, there was a supercharged NSX, a 991 GT3 (wow that thing sounds good), and on the track day event there were tons of Ferraris, McLarens, GT3s, Lotus, etc.

Ending thoughts, I really wish I could take an MR2 or Cayman to one of these. The FRS is really not that grippy overall, and mid-corner at least on my car I found that between letting off the throttle and barely touching it is the range you get to play with if you don't want a big drift. I like how the throttle plays a much bigger part in a rear heavy car.

Pictures to come.

[serialk11r]

Ah, forgot to put this up, you can watch my horrendous second run here along with my coworker driving his Integra much better.
[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzlBR2ZMB-A"]Trackmasters Autocross, 11/21/2015 - YouTube[/ame]

Ever since the autocross my driving has gotten a lot more aggressive and abusive to the clutch. I did used to wind the engine out but using the engine at high rpm for half a day made me addicted to the power, and after having too much fun doing a few 3000+ rpm launches I'm starting to slip the clutch more :/ The other day it was raining and I was trying to pull out of the crawling traffic into the exit lane that was moving quickly, I pressed the two buttons that disable traction control and whatever so I wouldn't lose power for multiple seconds, and tried a modest 2000something rpm launch. What I got was both tires spinning like crazy from 0 to 25mph, which took a while. Made me miss my MR2 again, even the shit all seasons on the rear just never stopped gripping.

[Compelica]

Originally Posted by serialk11r

Today's update:
Passenger seat rail latch sliding adjuster thingy fix:

Cut a piece off one of the PVC stick on bumpers to make it thinner:


Somehow managed to stick it onto the metal tab that blocks the rail (the passenger side adjustment handle has a second bar that's actuated when the seat back is all the way forward, but they chose the same springs to hold the heavier bar up so it rattles):

Sorry to bring this up after so long but could you explain more on how you managed to resolve this? The picture is dead and I'm not having any luck on fixing that rattle

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by Compelica

Sorry to bring this up after so long but could you explain more on how you managed to resolve this? The picture is dead and I'm not having any luck on fixing that rattle

Ah crap, I don't have the image anymore. Take a flashlight and study the mechanism that the slider latch handle/bar attaches to, you should find a tab that it's supposed to rest on. When the car is moving and bouncing, the latch will bounce around on it because it doesn't have enough spring tension. If you glue something soft there, it will stop rattling.