Tagged: DC Sports

Too much torque.

One more thing that needed doing on Kyle’s EP3 after we changed the exhaust was fit some Energy Suspension Torque Mount inserts to stiffen the mounts. Apparently it’s under the conditions of the warranty from DC Sports to fit them and failing to do so could cause you to travel back in time when you hit 88mph. That might be pretty cool but the other downside is without the inserts the manifold is at risk of cracking a weld. The Energy Suspension inserts just push into place to fill any gaps in the rubber mount and eliminate a lot of movement from the engine. Nobody likes a cracked manifold.

Kyle popped around again and we set to work. He’d managed to find a guide online for fitting them and well, I realise how ironic(?) this is going to sound but you shouldn’t believe everything you read in an online guide. We had two mounts to remove and refit. Nothing more and nothing less and the guide suggested starting with the front mount. The front mount is held onto the engine/gearbox by three bolts and has one more through the centre and all the guide really said to do was unbolt these bolts, wiggly the mount around a bit, swear a bit and it will come free. I can tell you this, no matter how much you swear and wiggle that mount there is no way it is coming free! From side to side the mount is held in by the mounting on the chassis. Above the mount is a tiny bracket and another part. Below and in front of the mount is the gearbox and behind the mount is the radiator fan. That mount was not coming out as suggested so we moved onto the back.

Now this one was easier. It has three bolts underneath and one through the centre but the mount itself is also pinned down by a big bracket on the back of the engine which can be removed by undoing three bolts. After a bit of trial and error and ignoring the pointless guide we came up with a really easy way to get the rear mount removed and refitted.

First we removed the air box. You’ll have to undo two jubilee clips and remove two pipes before going around the box and undoing five screw/8mm bolts and lifting the lid. There is then two 10mm bolts and one 10mm nut to remove before pulling off the pipe for the cold air feed and lifting the box free.

With that big chunk of plastic out of the way you’ve got plenty of room to remove the rear mount and the big bracket it’s attached to in one go. Start by undoing the one 17mm bolt at the top of the bracket before sliding under the car and undoing two more. Then it’s just a case of undoing three 14mm bolts from underneath the mount and lifting the whole thing up and out of the bay.

The whole thing will come out like this (ignoring the red mounts already inserted)

Undo the 17mm bolt through the centre and free the mount. You can see the gaps in the mount that the inserts fill and it looks symmetrical but there’s something I didn’t notice until taking the first couple of photos. There’s a small recess in each insert which have to go in on the leading edge of the mount to go over a small lip. Make sure you get it the right way around.

Refitting everything should be the exact reverse of removal. Stick the mount and bracket back together loosely and lower it back into the engine bay. It took us a lot of playing around (because the mount is now wider and thus sits slightly distorted) but we eventually found a good order to work in. If you’re extremely lucky every bolt hole will line up as soon as you drop it all back in but for us, nothing did. We first aligned the top bracket hole and fitted that bolt, and then went onto the bottom bracket bolt. That got the bracket back on the engine but then the mount didn’t line up with the subframe so it took a lot of pushing and pulling of the engine and twisting of the mount to get the other three holes aligned. It’s not as simple as his guide made out…

Anyway back onto the front. It wasn’t going anywhere with all the gear around it. We’d took all the bolts out but the space was simply too tight so in order to free it we had to remove the front bumper, remove the radiator mounts and carefully work the radiator out of it’s mounts so we generated enough space for the mount to lift up, backwards and out (before coming back out under the car). Contrary to what the guide Kyle found said, there was a lot more work than a little wiggling and swearing. Anyway, with the mount out we quickly pushed the inserts in and got it refitted to the car. Again it’s a bit of a pain because the inserts widen the mount but by loosely fitting a bolt at a time you can work them all in….eventually.

Job done.

Standard disclaimer:
Oh and just a little “disclaimer” in case anyone sees this, tries to copy it and it goes horribly wrong. I’m not responsible for your work. That was just an explanation of how I carried out work on my car. It’s not to be taken as an all singing all dancing guide to show you exactly how it’s done. It’s just a basic guide of my experience. You are responsible for your own work. Thanks

A few edits later.

I promised a video with before and after clips from Kyle’s exhaust swap and here it is. It hasn’t been a simple process though. I wanted to produce a basic edit with clips taken from the raw film, a simple process, or at least I thought.

I filmed everything on my GoPro HD Hero and (so I’m told) the format that the GoPro records in is really hard to work with so it needs converting first. Luckily GoPro do offer some free software to do this. I downloaded it from their website and set about cutting out the clips I needed and converting them to .avi files to work with. Easy, that process worked really well however “step 2” failed miserably. The software is meant to allow you to then process your clips into a simple edit where you can drag the clips into a story board and tweak a few settings. When I came to that step though, there was no story board in sight. After searching Google for a solution and finding hundreds of people with the same problem and very few “solutions” I gave up on the GoPro software, or at least the ability to edit with it. The issue is apparently with graphics card compatibility, or drivers, or some other random computer crap that I have no idea about.

That left me in a bit of a mess. I could upload the single clips but that seemed a bit pointless. I tried Windows Live Movie Maker with the .avi clips and that worked for a few minutes until trying to preview the videos resulted in a stuttering picture, then complete loss of picture, then loss of audio and ultimately the program froze. Trying to find a key for my old copy of Premiere Pro CS4 didn’t work either but there was on suggestion that worked. Download and install the latest Adobe Premiere Pro and use the free trial.

The program looks so complicated when you first go into it but there are so many YouTube tutorials around you’ll soon pick it up. I managed to work out how to add blank screens, transitions and titles and I was happy with the basic edit so onto YouTube it went.

Presenting my first Premiere Pro GoPro edit:

Unfortunately the 1080p recording quality vanished in the edit and I was at a complete loss as to where I went wrong. That was, until I turned to Facebook again. After being offered help I presented my problems and got a solution. It turns out Premiere Pro’s “default” setting for .avi files is a low quality so to match the GoPro’s HD recording I had to change the sequence and export settings to a DSLR setting to match the 1080p and 30 FPS of the recording. I’m positive that last sentence just sounds like a load of waffle but it worked. I made a quick new edit comparing the stock exhaust system of my Corolla to the stock exhaust system of the EP3 and voila.

This video actually rendered a hell of a lot quicker and had a much smaller file size than the last despite the increase in quality! And with that, my editing for the weekend is done. Hopefully I can find a key to activate the program after the free trial so I can keep on using it. I think it’s going to come in very handy.

Bank Holidays, Pizza, Sunshine and Exhausts

I love bank holidays, especially the two bank holidays around Easter. I get the chance to catch up on any jobs that have always “slipped” my mind or, like today, I get the chance to sit out in the sun all day, crawl around under a car, swear a lot at seized bolts and eat pizza.

Today I spent the day helping Kyle swap the entire exhaust system on his new EP3. (I say new… I think he’s had it for around a year now?) “No drama”, I thought, “The exhaust system will get done in no time, it’s just the manifold I’m not 100% sure on”. I took those words back almost straight away. As soon as I got the car in the air and had a look around the standard system I saw we were going to have a fight on our hands. Some of the bolts looked more like blobs of dirt than a lump of useful metal. Thinking cap on, I broke out the PlusGas, wire brushes and chisels to clean up the bolts as much as possible. It didn’t really work…

I attacked the back box while Kyle dealt with the manifold end. At my end, there was only two bolts and two rubbers. EASY. No. When I ran the wire brush over the bolt head and threads to clean them up I saw that half the threads just fell off. The heads weren’t much better either, both had to be chiseled free from their rusty case so that the socket could stand a chance of being hammered on. It was a good fit, a six sided socket for a six sided nut. It wasn’t going to round the head and it didn’t. The first bolt snapped and the second had to be cut free. Two bolts out, zero survivors. Luckily some new bolts were sent with the new system! Even the rubbers put up a fight but that was mainly down to me trying to cut a corner. I could have taken the bumper off to start with and have complete access to the rubber mounts but instead I tried to fight, one handed with a stiff rubber mount I couldn’t really see. That didn’t work and eventually I had to spend 60 seconds removing four bolts, two screws and one plug to remove the bumper, slide off the mounts and free the old backbox. Lesson learnt. Don’t try to be a hero.

And Kyle’s end things weren’t going much smoother. The two bolts holding the centre section to the manifold were stuck solid and he was having to fight the bolts with a hacksaw blade to free them. The blade won the battle eventually but that meant we still didn’t have a survivor in terms of bolts. Up top things got a little better. The manifold cover came off relatively easily. Two bolts came out with little effort once I’d got a proper socket on them and a breakers bar but the last one, well, let’s just say the shield some how managed to work its way around that bolt… All that was really left now were five bolts holding the manifold to the head and with the help of a proper six sided socket they all came undone without any bother.

So the back was now free, the front was free, it was just the middle left to go. Really all we needed to remove was the rubber mount at each end and unplug the O2 sensors and it would drop down and slide out. Glossing over the fact that even those pesky plugs put up a fight we had the whole system stripped before the pizza arrived. Pizza, pizza, pizza. Thank you Dominos. (Pepperoni, thin and crispy before anyone asks).

Back to work, bellies full, the last thing to really free from the car was the manifold. In standard form it’s not very big at all but with it being at the back of the engine on the EP3, it’s in a really awkward place. Kyle had read that it may be necessary to remove the subframe but I wasn’t going to fight with that. Once we’d removed all the bolts from the head mountings and fought with the support bracket I could see that it was possible to remove it without taking the subframe apart. I had to remove a heat shield and a guard for the driveshaft but with some careful planning, spinning and maneuvering the manifold was free. Cheers all round, we were now on the home straight!

Taking a second to compare the two systems it’s easy to see a big difference. Rust and age aside, the OEM system is small, oddly shaped and well, it seemed quit restrictive. I didn’t like the look of the bends in the system at all. They aren’t smooth, they aren’t consistent. Some parts of the system, in the bends were compressed and were clearly causing restrictions. The new DC Sports system however, apart from being a slightly bigger diameter (60mm internal) was actually that size the entire length. The bends are beautifully crafted and not one restricts the size of the pipe or airflow. Having no catalytic converter in the system helps out too but it will ping an error code for the second O2 sensor…

Anyway onto the fitting. Manifold first and straight away a “problem”. The OEM manifold was tiny and allowed us to rotate it to work it loose. The DC Sports manifold incorporates part of the exhaust system into it to make it a better flowing 4-2-1 design, however this meant we had more manifold to get in the way and try as we might, it wasn’t going back in. There was a simple solution though and that was to unbolt the anti roll bar D brackets, remove the bushes and lift the anti roll bar up slightly to give more clearance. It worked a treat and the manifold went straight in.

The back box was simple as well. A bit of lubricant on the rubber hangers and it was slid into place. With just the centre section left to do we were feeling confident. I bolted together the two sections, slid under the car and offered it up to the manifold. The bolts that are supplied with the exhaust system are only just long enough to go through both flanges, the gasket and the nut. There’s nothing spare past the end of the nut once it’s done up tight. This might not have been an issue but combined with the zero play in the bolt holes meant it was an absolute pain to get it all attached. 10mm bolts, in a 10mm hole, zero play and a gasket that seemed slightly out of shape managed to rework the frustration back to the surface. We ended up fitting the backbox end first before going back to the manifold end and using slightly smaller (and longer) bolts to secure the joint. The supplied gear just didn’t work for us.

Done. Well almost. I’d been soaking the O2 sensors in the old system with plus gas since removing the old gear. I hate O2 sensors with a passion. They always seem to be super tight, seized and only accessible to an open ended spanner which encourages rounding. You can buy specialist sockets for them (to feed the cable through) but I don’t have one. I only have my trusty 22mm spanner and the hope that PlusGas really will do what it says. The car gods must have been with us today because they came undone with barely any effort. Not one wiff of a rounded corner or seized thread. A quick crack with the spanner and they came out by hand. They fit perfectly back into the DC Sports manifold but you do have to add some loom extensions to them (which are supplied).

Everything done. Everything sealed. Bung removed from the back box for extra VTECs. Kyle started her up and after a quick once over I didn’t find any exhaust gases leaking from the joints so we dropped her down, tidied up and headed out for a bit of filming. The filming will come soon once I’ve ended it all but once again I’ve done a before and after comparison, as well as a few drive by videos using my car as the camera car. GoPros are awesome.

So that’s what we got up to today. Shitty bolts aside it was a good day and it was nice to put some good hours into working on a car again. I ope Kyle enjoys the new ASBO cannon on his car and I hope you enjoyed this post. Look out for the videos soon!