The Lavogue Customization Project: A Journey of Perseverance and Progress

As our team began working on the customization project of our Lavogue car, we knew that it was going to be a challenging and complex process. With a plethora of modifications to tackle, we had to approach each task with patience, persistence, and a willingness to learn. In this article, we'll take you through the journey of our project, highlighting the various stages, obstacles, and triumphs we encountered along the way.

Welding the Fitting Onto the Engine Block

Our first major undertaking was welding a fitting onto the end of the engine block. This task required us to have more flexibility for the drain that would run into a fitting on the back of the rocker cover. We successfully completed this stage, and with it, we gained momentum in our project.

Installing the Cooling System

Next, we focused on reinstalling all the small pipes that divert water in and around the engine block to feed heaters, throttle bodies, and turbos. This involved keeping these pipes out of the way of important components like turbo manifolds. We employed a Bend with some heat to get the job done efficiently.

Wiring and Electrical Work

Meanwhile, Dave from Haltech was working tirelessly on the wiring, doing an amazing job as always. We were engaged in some fiddly stuff under the car with our radiator hoses, thermostat, bolts for that, the pipe carrying water from that area up to the back of the engine, and ensuring the cooling system functioned properly.

Installing Exhaust Gaskets

We also put in exhaust gaskets, which we hadn't originally had when we assembled the car. To address this, we pulled off all the manifolds, installed the new gaskets, and modified the way they attached to the motor using bolts instead of studs and nuts, as per the factory's arrangement.

Progress Update

After a considerable amount of work, we reached a point where we had made significant progress but were close to running out of tasks. We had managed to complete many jobs, including welding, installing cooling system components, wiring, and exhaust gaskets. However, there were still some items on the list that needed attention, such as tapping the thermostat housing with the right tool.

Conclusion

Our Lavogue customization project has been a marathon, not a sprint. With perseverance and teamwork, we've made substantial progress and are now poised to complete the final stages of our work. Although we're still in the process of figuring out the last few details, we're excited about what's to come and can't wait to see our customized Lavogue on the road.

Personal Asides

As we continued working on the project, our team couldn't help but reminisce about their own experiences with similar modifications. For instance, one team member mentioned having attempted a helicopter skid system, akin to those used by rally drivers, and had adjusted the setup to better suit rear-wheel drive vehicles. This experience highlighted the importance of being flexible and willing to experiment when tackling complex projects.

Final Thoughts

As we reflect on our project's journey, it's clear that there's always more to learn and discover in the world of customization. With this article, we hope to share some of the insights and lessons gained from our own experiences, in the hopes that they may be helpful to others embarking on similar endeavors.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enon this episode of Mighty Car Mods I'm working on the engine swapped Subaru levorg and me and me still here this is turning out to be one of my favorite builds of all time why because all the best expertise stuff that I've learned and some of my best mates have learned over the years is being applied into this car it looks really clean it looks Factory but there's some really really cool stuff going on here with a fully built motor there's a whole video on how I built it over in New Zealand with possible Motorsport we've got a big Pulsar G35 900 turbo on there we're going to retain our carbon intake from Cobb a big front and intercooler it's just all looking really really cool so last time the boys were down here to give us a hand that was just a bit before Christmas we got a fuel system done we've got the engine mounted we've got a lot of stuff mounted but now we need to plumb it last episode you might have seen that awesome custom exhaust that Al made so that's now in and ready to go but we really want to hear it but we can't hear it until we've got all the plumbing and then all the wiring so Dave's also here to give us a hand with that I've got a whole big list of stuff in here I think we have done precisely none of it oh no we've done that there you go one out of all the things on that list have currently been completed so everything else that's on there is what we're going to get done today you're going to come with us on this excellent Subaru Journey did you know that builds can take ages I always think it'll just be a few days and we'll smash it out yet even though everyone is working solidly for hours and hours it still isn't finished it's like we tell ourselves it's easy when it's actually not luckily for me I've got some great mates who also suffer from this Distortion of reality and are here to give me a hand bringing the Flat 6 Turbo level to life we have lots to do and a lot of it is small fiddly jobs but I'm excited to get stuck into it so we can get just that bit closer to turning the key so we have this oil sandwich plate that we're going to use to make our oil cooler and our remote filter work but it's covered in anodization which is where they like plate the aluminum and we need to get it off Benny has a mad hack which is to use oven cleaner is that right yeah it works pretty good I've done it a few times now uh basically for this exact reason you can't really weld through or to anodizing so uh yeah the oven cleaner I haven't used a specific brand before but as far as I know they're all pretty well the same deal six bucks yeah six bucks don't go wrong um I did see a video recently on Instagram I think it was and the guy had some pretty nasty chemicals and it started to actually eat the part that he had this will eat aluminum as well so don't leave it in there longer than it needs to um but yeah I kind of normally leave them for about sort of 15 to 20 minutes and but observing it the whole time too don't don't just leave and walk away because fair chance you'll ever too long this thing won't exist anymore um so you basically want to as soon as it strips out the anodizing off of it um give it a good wash out with some water to neutralize it all otherwise it will keep eating or eating stuff away and things that are critically Dimension like threads or bores of things will obviously change shape and size and we're chucking in this because it's like a solvent bucket basically so you'll be fine I'm gonna give it a bath don't recommend just holding it and spraying it because it is pretty nasty chemical um yeah I'm gonna throw it in give it a squirt and uh I'll breathe it because it's gnarly an oil sandwich plate made for your car that you don't have to drown in oven cleaner is obviously a better choice but in our case we have a very specific space constraint that means we're going to have to customize this one all right so the brains of this operation is not just my mates who are here it's actually this thing uh we haven't seen one of these on the show before have we oh this is a Nexus this is this hasn't been seen anywhere hasn't been seen anywhere this is the first one that's been allowed outside of haltech oh that's exciting maybe I'll see one in person before but um here we go that is a Nexus R3 Dave tell me one not a display one tell me tell me why and what okay so this is the Mini R5 yeah which we're calling R3 because it's got three connectors on it uh-huh pretty self-explanatory yep uh we've got a built-in map sensor we've got four 25 amp outputs just like the R5 does a couple eight amps here to help power things in the car like your 12 volt sensors and your can uh Wi-Fi antenna and USBC so why does it have these things on it because it also is like a power distribution module beautiful so we can control things with power and with ground pretty significantly so that's why we've got the big uh Sherlock system back in the day like when we did super grants we used a haltech elite 2500 which incidentally was one of the first cars to have that ECU in it and now this car is one of the first to have an R3 which is pretty cool like eight years later roughly um in that situation you've got to use lots of relays to do your power switching which is fine but it's a big box that hangs around this is like a more modern neater way of doing the same thing so much easier so we're gonna we're gonna run off here less connections oh less wiring command for every relay how many connections are there going to be five four down to four yeah right so it just that's 20 that's eliminates complexity failure points and this will run our engine the same way as an Elite Wheel with more inputs and outputs way better way faster I always like to talk about ecu's a bit like phones um oh yeah would you use your iPhone 3 or your under to run your new complex 50 000 engines so no in terms of how we're going to wire it we're going to utilize some of our original engine lens so this is actually the levorg loom and we're going to be able to plug it in up where the original one was plugged in and then this is a patch on it this is a patch harness for this generation ish Loom yeah um Benny and I are going to go through it pin by pin and we're going to sort of use what is here and then we're going to add a couple of extra things obviously we need two more injectors yeah we need two more coils we are going to run a whole host of sensors that we can see over there which we will now need to account for as well so all these wires in theory should be here for us to use I just need to hijack them on this side because there is nothing worse than having to run extra wires through the firewall yeah so we should be able to utilize all the factory stuff to not have to do a custom learn yeah well that's what we're going to go for things across fingers across that we don't have to make any extra holes in the firewall yeah we can use everything that's here it just it's a bit of extra work now but it just saves messiness I love it it's waterproofing holes and making more holes yeah no nothing worse than drilling through something else I'm a huge fan of your work I'm excited to see what happens and I'll work experience it tell me anything you need me to do mad sounds good let's do it all right the ej25 wiring loom is pretty neat and importantly it's only a few years old which means there's less chance of heat cycled and brittled old wires causing its issues the Flat 6 engine requires two extra injectors and two extra ignition coils but otherwise most of the sensors are the same and there should be enough Factory wires to hijack for our other purposes we also have a spare ez30 Loom which will have the required connectors for all those extras essentially we'll be combining the two and then re-pinning inside the car to match up with the haltech if it looks complex that's because it is but we only have to do this once and it will run the car forever we just laid out the original ej25 Loom over the top of the ez30 partly to look at the path of it but also to actually basically Buzz out or pin out the loom so Dave's gone as far as putting the haltech patch Loom under the dash and we're actually pinning it out from the physical ECU connector all the way back to the wiring we have here so so far we've confirmed all of our ignition and injector wiring we're actually going to check Cam and crank next then we'll start to check all the other little connectors before we start basically cutting the Luma part and repurposing it once we target exactly what we need we'll work out what we can repurpose basically anything with electrical tape that's red on it at the moment where earmarked for repurposing but we do want to buzz it all out and check it before we go cutting it up I have been guilty of cutting looms up before and not completely testing them and Dave will attest to that being not a fun time my Lexus did suffer from Benny wiring butching chop lighters yeah and ah it was a fun time for all but so we're not going to do that today because I have learned and I am trying to learn wiring so Dave's going to help me make this thing work and it's going to be a good time hopefully so we just need to call the kit which is great because it attaches neatly to the front of the car fits behind the bumper bar whatever but it's designed for a four cylinder so there's a few differences is that correct there certainly is there's two more cylinders to get in the way of the intercooler pipes so right we're going to work our way around them some of it actually fits all right yeah this bit looks like it's okay yeah so this side's pretty easy we're just going to go straight across avoid all this yep plug it in cool and then the other side looks like we might change it completely yeah yeah we've got a big chunk of front of engine right in the way of where the pipes used to go so we're just going to divert around that no big deal no big deal my favorite part is that we're retaining our mad carbon fiber intake is just a nice neat looking thing it sounds really good and also it's we're going to be able to make that happen by joining the intake to the turbo so I can suck some air through there but the only thing we have to keep in mind is there's no breathing Plumbing there's no wiring in the way yet so it's a bit of a battle for Real Estate is that right yep uh Subaru engine Bays they look great when there's no wiring or Plumbing and they look like a mess afterwards so you've got to have some shiny stuff and that distracts you from all the wiring and plumbing is there a particular order that you like to do it's or you just work it out as you go not really you've already done sort of the initial part of fit and intercooler up so this cold pipe I've sort of roughed it out a little bit already and it should be pretty simple the only thing we've got to watch out for is yeah the fact that there might be a hose there and another hose there and a battery over here so we kind of got a account for that on the way everything from this point on though is custom so the good thing is aside from the echon lines but even they will probably have to be customized everything else we're making so if something's in the way that's fine and also I feel like we've got a bit more height on this than we've had on other Subarus like it looks like that's like there's more room here than that there's no silly intercooler and stuff there yeah and this these things are a bit different because of the CVT maybe I don't know there's more room back with a dump pipe room there because of the tunnel yeah that's working our favor all right let's do it let's go traditionally I've always gone for stainless steel intercooler pipes because in the past I'd struggled to weld aluminum these pipes are always front and center in an engine bay so messy worlds are easily picked out by people and could distract from how cool the rest of the car is however after years of convincing from Alan I now appreciate how light and easy to cut this stuff is and is absolutely the way to go if your welder can do AC for the Breather System this engine is going to breathe a lot more air than it used to because we're stuffing all that boost into it and you've also got the pumping that's going on inside the block I was saying before these have like a distribution system sort of within the engine so as long as you can use the breathers it doesn't really matter what configuration of it you do just use as many as you can so this tank has three inputs it's for an EJ so normally you'd have cover cover and uh crankcase in our case we've got lots more on the covers so we're going to use all three and Plumb them in luckily it's reasonably simple I'm just using raceworks push lock an a fittings which is the right size that's on here and also happens to match which I think that's about half inch it happens to match the Breather that is on the side of the covers there so it's pretty simple that just goes in there that goes in there and as we're saying before we are going to end up fighting for space between intercooler pipes and wiring and breather hoses so I'm going to try and sort of rough this in so that we know where everything else can go because if I get in there first then they have to customize more than me using a combination of the tubes that came with the intercooler kit I got and some fresh tube bends will help make this all fit be careful with intercooler kits that come with coated or anodized tube as they can be a real headache to wield and are often coated inside and out Al is tucking the pipes in as close to the Bodywork as you can get them so we don't have to cut up the car or the bumper too much so I currently have two to three people all spouting jargon at me and I'm reasonably up to date on this stuff but I just got it wrong because an M10 by 1.0 ported after the suit Bosch sensors has an inverted flare to suit M12 to m10bk white but another one one eighth not a 1 8 npt because that's a different adapter that's in this one which is not the right adapter we needed a different metric adapter because bsp is not metric but M2 just open it up and I just said that's it no but you said it was the one eighth and then you said this is to one eight so I got very confused but you you said okay you said M12 by 1.5 to 1 8. which is not that that's that because that's not 1 8 that's metric also it saves you making a Christmas because boss fittings because that came from Germany right I'll be poking out the bonnet by the time you put six different fittings on it so you just use that because it goes straight onto it because this came from Germany therefore metric yeah they wouldn't use that bsp rubbish well I head off to you need to start my prerequisite engineering degree progress on the wiring is continuing Dave is making a breakout cable using a Deutsch connector that will allow us to easily disconnect the extra sensors that we're using things like oil and coolant temperature and pressure fuel composition and fuel pressure once it's all been mapped out the loom tube can start to be removed we're making some excellent progress my next job is to work out what to do with the thermofan so this original of org one actually fits which is great so that goes into that hole there and I've just whizzed off the little standoffs here that hold at the top because it was in the wrong spot that sits really nice and they flow lots of air the factory fans are actually really really effective this side is just not going to fit because of the shape of the engine and the shape of the engine bay so it had gone for like an aftermarket in which you'll need to go there so I'm going to make the factory one fit and then we'll come back to this one later but we don't need to worry about that to start it and test that it works there's radiators happening wiring happening and Alan has done an amazing job of the intercooler piping he's worked out where it's going to go and now the question is block valve so we're going to use a gfb response which is an adjustable blow-off valve so you can bias between the whoosh coming out that side or the return we're going to do both and there's also this cool little fitting kit that has a v-band and it's already sort of cut to the right shape so you can just put it on there and then we'll probably put it right about there in that space and then we'll do a Plumb back line that goes into the intake as well just so we can choose between how noisy it is without it it's going to make huge pigeon dose noises with the bias to full wash noise it's going to have your classic blow off sound or you can go somewhere in between which is what I'll probably do because we're running a remote oil filter due to the header design we've got a an oil filter remote mounting kit so this part here screws on to the the block and then has a couple of an fittings the only problem is that they're not really designed that well the the fittings that screw into here as it's only maybe a 12 mil thread or something so it really reduces the actual flow capacity of the of the oiling system so what we've done is uh drilled out all those holes we've actually trimmed it off as well because we don't have much room in against the header to so the the fittings can fit we're not we're obviously not going to use these silly looking things we're going to use proper black raceworks fittings but they're there to make sure that we can screw these back on after I've welded them on so that fitting is going to go there and then this one's going to be next to it so it gets pretty tight and we've also obviously taken the anodizing off here anodizing and Welding don't really go well together so sometimes you can have a fitting that like this that is silver and it's still anodized so if you have a trouble welding it that's probably why so anodizing bad for welding so hopefully this goes well we've we've taken off the anodizing as well as we can it's actually been pretty well done because the oven cleaner struggled a bit but we'll give it a crack and see what happens foreign setup is starting to take shape we've still got to do a bit of work on this one which holds our oil filter we can use the standard ez30 oil filter on that which is great to make any changes because I find these systems a little bit confusing because you've got three components you've got to work out where everything goes I like to draw it as a diagram I also like to include important things like the turbo but I thought Alan um could you help me work out where this goes oh we got two colors red and we got red for hot and green for cold so after the cooler is green and before the cool is red engines over here which way does it go so the the middle part that's that's your oil gallery so that's going into the bearings and so we want cold cold oil cold oil going into the spun bearing we're not going to spin a bearing so oil pump picks up pumps out it comes out through the side port of the well basically it would go into the oil filters multiple little holes on the holes yep so then we we've got to go from there to a to the filter so we kind of run across and we go into in terms of going to the filter we want to go to the same position so if we're coming from the outside we want to go into the outside so that's like that right hot oil still hot oil coming out too so it goes in all these little holes through your filter medium in here then comes back out back out of there middle back out of there and then we're going to go into the oil cooler sweet cool is easy in and out all the British thermal units are dissipated and it comes back down here into the spun bearing cool oh sorry it's not an e-jerk sorry it's an easy all the EJ people not loving that all right so that helps because now we can work out which hose goes away so it's fairly simple to go from the middle of this filter adapter up to our cooler out of the cooler into here filter plate get it and just make sure the hose is going the right side yeah okay so you've got an oil leak he's up already we haven't even started it yet don't be a hater foreign foreign so I'm going to take off our injector rails because the adapters that we needed to make our injectors fit with the aftermarket rails have arrived with the stock rails the injectors that as they came from fic would fit but because we messed around with the rails they don't but luckily it's like a standard thing that turns out three-quarter length injectors into full length injectors and they will fit straight in luckily for us car modifiers fuel injectors are usually only a handful of different sizes and shapes so it's not too hard to swap and upgrade them with the new adapters installed and some rubber grease on the O-rings it was time to fit them up to the engine only they don't fit again I'm putting my little cloth blockers back in because I got the wrong size adapters while my fuel Odyssey is off to a shaky start Dave is having way more luck with the wiring so run the battery cable through the fender we actually took the cover off the inside ran the battery cable up under and there was a grommet that happened to go inside the cabin so I just chopped the little dick thing off just a little rubber and then there was a hole and we just ran it straight through in and then that will plug into the positive of the R3 so this will be our power supply for the ECU itself anything we want to drive positive with 12 volts particularly the fuel pumps in the back so we've got two in the back so this will be the main power for them and we've still got two left over one day we might do the two Thermo fans up the front we could do recycle control them and do them however we like still there's so many different things we could do we could also run an R3 with this power cable as well because it's probably just a bit of Overkill so plenty of spec there for the future I've done most of the engine wiring so far achieved everything I wanted to do today which is basically figure out every single connector run the extra injectors and coil that we wanted to supply in this four-cylinder Loop we've got a whole bunch of auxiliaries left over Benny and I will probably just need to do a bit of multimeter tag team in a couple of days time we've just got to get on the same page there together and then we'll be able to finish this up probably another day or two in wiring and then we should have it up and running don't you wish you knew a davo I mean I know what Devo and you guys sort of know a davo through this but if you know a Devo in real life like not Davos particularly but a davo like he's just the best give him a pat on the back not me but Davido okay cool thanks man no you're welcome love it anytime uh we are now hunting around to supply the turbo with everything it needs we've got the exhaust gas going in and out with the dump we've got the front mount pipes for the actual charge air what we don't have is the oil feed and the oil drain so our's going to make an oil feed we're going to borrow some oil off the top of the ABCs solenoid which is like the VTEC basically where there's an oil feed he's used that a few times before it's nice and close to the turbo and I am going to plumb some water in I'm going to use these raceworks fittings these are an6 to 5 16 so the heater hoses or the the small hoses that normally go up to the throttle body to keep that heated that's the right size so we can borrow that to keep our turbo cool which is what we're going to do with these fittings that means the turbo has to come off which thanks to our v-band setup isn't too difficult Al has removed a banjo bolt from the side of the head welded on a stainless Dash 4 fitting and that will take care of the oil supply via a Teflon line that will make ourselves later on we also need to get oil out of the turbo which thanks to the flat design of this engine is a little bit more tricky we've opted to use an old Subaru turbo drain that will weld A fitting onto the end of giving us more flexibility for the drain that will then run into a fitting on the back of the rocker cover which can now go back on with a brand new gasket next we can focus on our cooling system reinstalling all the small pipes that divert water in and around the engine block to feed heaters throttle bodies and turbos we do need to keep them out of the way of important things like turbo manifolds and in this case a small Bend with some heat will get the job done foreign for you Dave has been working away on the wiring doing an amazing job as always we've been doing some fiddly stuff under here with our radiator hoses a thermostat the bolts for that the pipe that carries the water from that area up to the back of the engine so we can feed our turbo making sure the cooling system is going to work properly that we've got a heater now we're going to put in some exhaust gaskets we didn't actually have these when we're putting this together so we're going to pull all the manifolds off put our gaskets in and then also change the way that they're attaching to the motor using bolts instead of the studs and nut Arrangement that it comes with from the factory I was going to leave in probably about half an hour's time so we're going to crank through as much of this as we can but we've actually run out of things to do anyway we don't have the right tap to tap this thermostat housing and there's a few bits and pieces that just aren't here so that's probably as much as we'll get done today but we have made a lot of progress and pretty Stokes without turning out let's whack these in these gaskets shouldn't ever need to come off as the cast iron manifolds can be separated by the v-bands we're also going to remove the studs and use bolts which fit the casting better it has been a massive couple of days working on the lavogue thank you for coming down and helping Al no problem much appreciated you only had a bit of time to uh to spare to get it done but also with the help of Dave and Benny we have smashed through a bunch of things which I'm now going to ceremoniously cross off the gravel V3 list so front mount they're ex-wiring not done no oil cooler not done oil filter relocation I'm going to say yes because we welded all the stuff onto that and made that whole setup just needs to actually be like screw in keypad howtec y Bank zulk's currently still happening Dave's right there wiring it up oil temp and pressure that's in cooling pressure it was in for momentarily oh we broke the fitting oh I'm gonna half do that one air intake sensor you need a bung for that fuel pressure no but it's right there aircon lines that's a later thing catch Cannon lines yes you can cross off a job that was my job our fan and shroud yes that's been installed heat wrap no thermostat and hoses yes yep injectors wrong part Huff ordered the wrong part half uh turbo drain yes half half and turbo feed yes yes that's that's pretty good what what you are probably getting the uh the idea of right now is that when you customize stuff this heavily it takes ages doesn't it just keep plugging away until it's fixed the only way to eat a mountain is to get a spoon and start shoveling that dirt into your mouth otherwise you ain't never going to eat it that doesn't sound very but he's gonna be a chocolate mountain all I'm going to say is work's going to continue on the lavogue in what form we don't know depends if our we're going to work that out later but all I'm going to say is when we get to the end of this list that's a bit I'm excited about I wrote skids but I actually mean Dino because the Dino's a bit I'm really really interested in but there's a few jobs that I will finish in my spare time and uh Dave from haltech will give us a hand Benny's going to be back as well to help do some plumbing and we're going to get pretty close people and we're going to start it I just don't know when so thank you for watching thank you Alan for all your help for traveling all this way anytime any final thoughts about this have you ever done those helicopter skids like rally drivers do yes pirouette ones in this yeah oh so good do it okay can you adjust the thingy so it's more rear drive certainly can the pirouette skid right where one wheel doesn't move in the rescue yard dude except last time I think it was in the wet this time it's going to be in the dry sick good job see you next timeon this episode of Mighty Car Mods I'm working on the engine swapped Subaru levorg and me and me still here this is turning out to be one of my favorite builds of all time why because all the best expertise stuff that I've learned and some of my best mates have learned over the years is being applied into this car it looks really clean it looks Factory but there's some really really cool stuff going on here with a fully built motor there's a whole video on how I built it over in New Zealand with possible Motorsport we've got a big Pulsar G35 900 turbo on there we're going to retain our carbon intake from Cobb a big front and intercooler it's just all looking really really cool so last time the boys were down here to give us a hand that was just a bit before Christmas we got a fuel system done we've got the engine mounted we've got a lot of stuff mounted but now we need to plumb it last episode you might have seen that awesome custom exhaust that Al made so that's now in and ready to go but we really want to hear it but we can't hear it until we've got all the plumbing and then all the wiring so Dave's also here to give us a hand with that I've got a whole big list of stuff in here I think we have done precisely none of it oh no we've done that there you go one out of all the things on that list have currently been completed so everything else that's on there is what we're going to get done today you're going to come with us on this excellent Subaru Journey did you know that builds can take ages I always think it'll just be a few days and we'll smash it out yet even though everyone is working solidly for hours and hours it still isn't finished it's like we tell ourselves it's easy when it's actually not luckily for me I've got some great mates who also suffer from this Distortion of reality and are here to give me a hand bringing the Flat 6 Turbo level to life we have lots to do and a lot of it is small fiddly jobs but I'm excited to get stuck into it so we can get just that bit closer to turning the key so we have this oil sandwich plate that we're going to use to make our oil cooler and our remote filter work but it's covered in anodization which is where they like plate the aluminum and we need to get it off Benny has a mad hack which is to use oven cleaner is that right yeah it works pretty good I've done it a few times now uh basically for this exact reason you can't really weld through or to anodizing so uh yeah the oven cleaner I haven't used a specific brand before but as far as I know they're all pretty well the same deal six bucks yeah six bucks don't go wrong um I did see a video recently on Instagram I think it was and the guy had some pretty nasty chemicals and it started to actually eat the part that he had this will eat aluminum as well so don't leave it in there longer than it needs to um but yeah I kind of normally leave them for about sort of 15 to 20 minutes and but observing it the whole time too don't don't just leave and walk away because fair chance you'll ever too long this thing won't exist anymore um so you basically want to as soon as it strips out the anodizing off of it um give it a good wash out with some water to neutralize it all otherwise it will keep eating or eating stuff away and things that are critically Dimension like threads or bores of things will obviously change shape and size and we're chucking in this because it's like a solvent bucket basically so you'll be fine I'm gonna give it a bath don't recommend just holding it and spraying it because it is pretty nasty chemical um yeah I'm gonna throw it in give it a squirt and uh I'll breathe it because it's gnarly an oil sandwich plate made for your car that you don't have to drown in oven cleaner is obviously a better choice but in our case we have a very specific space constraint that means we're going to have to customize this one all right so the brains of this operation is not just my mates who are here it's actually this thing uh we haven't seen one of these on the show before have we oh this is a Nexus this is this hasn't been seen anywhere hasn't been seen anywhere this is the first one that's been allowed outside of haltech oh that's exciting maybe I'll see one in person before but um here we go that is a Nexus R3 Dave tell me one not a display one tell me tell me why and what okay so this is the Mini R5 yeah which we're calling R3 because it's got three connectors on it uh-huh pretty self-explanatory yep uh we've got a built-in map sensor we've got four 25 amp outputs just like the R5 does a couple eight amps here to help power things in the car like your 12 volt sensors and your can uh Wi-Fi antenna and USBC so why does it have these things on it because it also is like a power distribution module beautiful so we can control things with power and with ground pretty significantly so that's why we've got the big uh Sherlock system back in the day like when we did super grants we used a haltech elite 2500 which incidentally was one of the first cars to have that ECU in it and now this car is one of the first to have an R3 which is pretty cool like eight years later roughly um in that situation you've got to use lots of relays to do your power switching which is fine but it's a big box that hangs around this is like a more modern neater way of doing the same thing so much easier so we're gonna we're gonna run off here less connections oh less wiring command for every relay how many connections are there going to be five four down to four yeah right so it just that's 20 that's eliminates complexity failure points and this will run our engine the same way as an Elite Wheel with more inputs and outputs way better way faster I always like to talk about ecu's a bit like phones um oh yeah would you use your iPhone 3 or your under to run your new complex 50 000 engines so no in terms of how we're going to wire it we're going to utilize some of our original engine lens so this is actually the levorg loom and we're going to be able to plug it in up where the original one was plugged in and then this is a patch on it this is a patch harness for this generation ish Loom yeah um Benny and I are going to go through it pin by pin and we're going to sort of use what is here and then we're going to add a couple of extra things obviously we need two more injectors yeah we need two more coils we are going to run a whole host of sensors that we can see over there which we will now need to account for as well so all these wires in theory should be here for us to use I just need to hijack them on this side because there is nothing worse than having to run extra wires through the firewall yeah so we should be able to utilize all the factory stuff to not have to do a custom learn yeah well that's what we're going to go for things across fingers across that we don't have to make any extra holes in the firewall yeah we can use everything that's here it just it's a bit of extra work now but it just saves messiness I love it it's waterproofing holes and making more holes yeah no nothing worse than drilling through something else I'm a huge fan of your work I'm excited to see what happens and I'll work experience it tell me anything you need me to do mad sounds good let's do it all right the ej25 wiring loom is pretty neat and importantly it's only a few years old which means there's less chance of heat cycled and brittled old wires causing its issues the Flat 6 engine requires two extra injectors and two extra ignition coils but otherwise most of the sensors are the same and there should be enough Factory wires to hijack for our other purposes we also have a spare ez30 Loom which will have the required connectors for all those extras essentially we'll be combining the two and then re-pinning inside the car to match up with the haltech if it looks complex that's because it is but we only have to do this once and it will run the car forever we just laid out the original ej25 Loom over the top of the ez30 partly to look at the path of it but also to actually basically Buzz out or pin out the loom so Dave's gone as far as putting the haltech patch Loom under the dash and we're actually pinning it out from the physical ECU connector all the way back to the wiring we have here so so far we've confirmed all of our ignition and injector wiring we're actually going to check Cam and crank next then we'll start to check all the other little connectors before we start basically cutting the Luma part and repurposing it once we target exactly what we need we'll work out what we can repurpose basically anything with electrical tape that's red on it at the moment where earmarked for repurposing but we do want to buzz it all out and check it before we go cutting it up I have been guilty of cutting looms up before and not completely testing them and Dave will attest to that being not a fun time my Lexus did suffer from Benny wiring butching chop lighters yeah and ah it was a fun time for all but so we're not going to do that today because I have learned and I am trying to learn wiring so Dave's going to help me make this thing work and it's going to be a good time hopefully so we just need to call the kit which is great because it attaches neatly to the front of the car fits behind the bumper bar whatever but it's designed for a four cylinder so there's a few differences is that correct there certainly is there's two more cylinders to get in the way of the intercooler pipes so right we're going to work our way around them some of it actually fits all right yeah this bit looks like it's okay yeah so this side's pretty easy we're just going to go straight across avoid all this yep plug it in cool and then the other side looks like we might change it completely yeah yeah we've got a big chunk of front of engine right in the way of where the pipes used to go so we're just going to divert around that no big deal no big deal my favorite part is that we're retaining our mad carbon fiber intake is just a nice neat looking thing it sounds really good and also it's we're going to be able to make that happen by joining the intake to the turbo so I can suck some air through there but the only thing we have to keep in mind is there's no breathing Plumbing there's no wiring in the way yet so it's a bit of a battle for Real Estate is that right yep uh Subaru engine Bays they look great when there's no wiring or Plumbing and they look like a mess afterwards so you've got to have some shiny stuff and that distracts you from all the wiring and plumbing is there a particular order that you like to do it's or you just work it out as you go not really you've already done sort of the initial part of fit and intercooler up so this cold pipe I've sort of roughed it out a little bit already and it should be pretty simple the only thing we've got to watch out for is yeah the fact that there might be a hose there and another hose there and a battery over here so we kind of got a account for that on the way everything from this point on though is custom so the good thing is aside from the echon lines but even they will probably have to be customized everything else we're making so if something's in the way that's fine and also I feel like we've got a bit more height on this than we've had on other Subarus like it looks like that's like there's more room here than that there's no silly intercooler and stuff there yeah and this these things are a bit different because of the CVT maybe I don't know there's more room back with a dump pipe room there because of the tunnel yeah that's working our favor all right let's do it let's go traditionally I've always gone for stainless steel intercooler pipes because in the past I'd struggled to weld aluminum these pipes are always front and center in an engine bay so messy worlds are easily picked out by people and could distract from how cool the rest of the car is however after years of convincing from Alan I now appreciate how light and easy to cut this stuff is and is absolutely the way to go if your welder can do AC for the Breather System this engine is going to breathe a lot more air than it used to because we're stuffing all that boost into it and you've also got the pumping that's going on inside the block I was saying before these have like a distribution system sort of within the engine so as long as you can use the breathers it doesn't really matter what configuration of it you do just use as many as you can so this tank has three inputs it's for an EJ so normally you'd have cover cover and uh crankcase in our case we've got lots more on the covers so we're going to use all three and Plumb them in luckily it's reasonably simple I'm just using raceworks push lock an a fittings which is the right size that's on here and also happens to match which I think that's about half inch it happens to match the Breather that is on the side of the covers there so it's pretty simple that just goes in there that goes in there and as we're saying before we are going to end up fighting for space between intercooler pipes and wiring and breather hoses so I'm going to try and sort of rough this in so that we know where everything else can go because if I get in there first then they have to customize more than me using a combination of the tubes that came with the intercooler kit I got and some fresh tube bends will help make this all fit be careful with intercooler kits that come with coated or anodized tube as they can be a real headache to wield and are often coated inside and out Al is tucking the pipes in as close to the Bodywork as you can get them so we don't have to cut up the car or the bumper too much so I currently have two to three people all spouting jargon at me and I'm reasonably up to date on this stuff but I just got it wrong because an M10 by 1.0 ported after the suit Bosch sensors has an inverted flare to suit M12 to m10bk white but another one one eighth not a 1 8 npt because that's a different adapter that's in this one which is not the right adapter we needed a different metric adapter because bsp is not metric but M2 just open it up and I just said that's it no but you said it was the one eighth and then you said this is to one eight so I got very confused but you you said okay you said M12 by 1.5 to 1 8. which is not that that's that because that's not 1 8 that's metric also it saves you making a Christmas because boss fittings because that came from Germany right I'll be poking out the bonnet by the time you put six different fittings on it so you just use that because it goes straight onto it because this came from Germany therefore metric yeah they wouldn't use that bsp rubbish well I head off to you need to start my prerequisite engineering degree progress on the wiring is continuing Dave is making a breakout cable using a Deutsch connector that will allow us to easily disconnect the extra sensors that we're using things like oil and coolant temperature and pressure fuel composition and fuel pressure once it's all been mapped out the loom tube can start to be removed we're making some excellent progress my next job is to work out what to do with the thermofan so this original of org one actually fits which is great so that goes into that hole there and I've just whizzed off the little standoffs here that hold at the top because it was in the wrong spot that sits really nice and they flow lots of air the factory fans are actually really really effective this side is just not going to fit because of the shape of the engine and the shape of the engine bay so it had gone for like an aftermarket in which you'll need to go there so I'm going to make the factory one fit and then we'll come back to this one later but we don't need to worry about that to start it and test that it works there's radiators happening wiring happening and Alan has done an amazing job of the intercooler piping he's worked out where it's going to go and now the question is block valve so we're going to use a gfb response which is an adjustable blow-off valve so you can bias between the whoosh coming out that side or the return we're going to do both and there's also this cool little fitting kit that has a v-band and it's already sort of cut to the right shape so you can just put it on there and then we'll probably put it right about there in that space and then we'll do a Plumb back line that goes into the intake as well just so we can choose between how noisy it is without it it's going to make huge pigeon dose noises with the bias to full wash noise it's going to have your classic blow off sound or you can go somewhere in between which is what I'll probably do because we're running a remote oil filter due to the header design we've got a an oil filter remote mounting kit so this part here screws on to the the block and then has a couple of an fittings the only problem is that they're not really designed that well the the fittings that screw into here as it's only maybe a 12 mil thread or something so it really reduces the actual flow capacity of the of the oiling system so what we've done is uh drilled out all those holes we've actually trimmed it off as well because we don't have much room in against the header to so the the fittings can fit we're not we're obviously not going to use these silly looking things we're going to use proper black raceworks fittings but they're there to make sure that we can screw these back on after I've welded them on so that fitting is going to go there and then this one's going to be next to it so it gets pretty tight and we've also obviously taken the anodizing off here anodizing and Welding don't really go well together so sometimes you can have a fitting that like this that is silver and it's still anodized so if you have a trouble welding it that's probably why so anodizing bad for welding so hopefully this goes well we've we've taken off the anodizing as well as we can it's actually been pretty well done because the oven cleaner struggled a bit but we'll give it a crack and see what happens foreign setup is starting to take shape we've still got to do a bit of work on this one which holds our oil filter we can use the standard ez30 oil filter on that which is great to make any changes because I find these systems a little bit confusing because you've got three components you've got to work out where everything goes I like to draw it as a diagram I also like to include important things like the turbo but I thought Alan um could you help me work out where this goes oh we got two colors red and we got red for hot and green for cold so after the cooler is green and before the cool is red engines over here which way does it go so the the middle part that's that's your oil gallery so that's going into the bearings and so we want cold cold oil cold oil going into the spun bearing we're not going to spin a bearing so oil pump picks up pumps out it comes out through the side port of the well basically it would go into the oil filters multiple little holes on the holes yep so then we we've got to go from there to a to the filter so we kind of run across and we go into in terms of going to the filter we want to go to the same position so if we're coming from the outside we want to go into the outside so that's like that right hot oil still hot oil coming out too so it goes in all these little holes through your filter medium in here then comes back out back out of there middle back out of there and then we're going to go into the oil cooler sweet cool is easy in and out all the British thermal units are dissipated and it comes back down here into the spun bearing cool oh sorry it's not an e-jerk sorry it's an easy all the EJ people not loving that all right so that helps because now we can work out which hose goes away so it's fairly simple to go from the middle of this filter adapter up to our cooler out of the cooler into here filter plate get it and just make sure the hose is going the right side yeah okay so you've got an oil leak he's up already we haven't even started it yet don't be a hater foreign foreign so I'm going to take off our injector rails because the adapters that we needed to make our injectors fit with the aftermarket rails have arrived with the stock rails the injectors that as they came from fic would fit but because we messed around with the rails they don't but luckily it's like a standard thing that turns out three-quarter length injectors into full length injectors and they will fit straight in luckily for us car modifiers fuel injectors are usually only a handful of different sizes and shapes so it's not too hard to swap and upgrade them with the new adapters installed and some rubber grease on the O-rings it was time to fit them up to the engine only they don't fit again I'm putting my little cloth blockers back in because I got the wrong size adapters while my fuel Odyssey is off to a shaky start Dave is having way more luck with the wiring so run the battery cable through the fender we actually took the cover off the inside ran the battery cable up under and there was a grommet that happened to go inside the cabin so I just chopped the little dick thing off just a little rubber and then there was a hole and we just ran it straight through in and then that will plug into the positive of the R3 so this will be our power supply for the ECU itself anything we want to drive positive with 12 volts particularly the fuel pumps in the back so we've got two in the back so this will be the main power for them and we've still got two left over one day we might do the two Thermo fans up the front we could do recycle control them and do them however we like still there's so many different things we could do we could also run an R3 with this power cable as well because it's probably just a bit of Overkill so plenty of spec there for the future I've done most of the engine wiring so far achieved everything I wanted to do today which is basically figure out every single connector run the extra injectors and coil that we wanted to supply in this four-cylinder Loop we've got a whole bunch of auxiliaries left over Benny and I will probably just need to do a bit of multimeter tag team in a couple of days time we've just got to get on the same page there together and then we'll be able to finish this up probably another day or two in wiring and then we should have it up and running don't you wish you knew a davo I mean I know what Devo and you guys sort of know a davo through this but if you know a Devo in real life like not Davos particularly but a davo like he's just the best give him a pat on the back not me but Davido okay cool thanks man no you're welcome love it anytime uh we are now hunting around to supply the turbo with everything it needs we've got the exhaust gas going in and out with the dump we've got the front mount pipes for the actual charge air what we don't have is the oil feed and the oil drain so our's going to make an oil feed we're going to borrow some oil off the top of the ABCs solenoid which is like the VTEC basically where there's an oil feed he's used that a few times before it's nice and close to the turbo and I am going to plumb some water in I'm going to use these raceworks fittings these are an6 to 5 16 so the heater hoses or the the small hoses that normally go up to the throttle body to keep that heated that's the right size so we can borrow that to keep our turbo cool which is what we're going to do with these fittings that means the turbo has to come off which thanks to our v-band setup isn't too difficult Al has removed a banjo bolt from the side of the head welded on a stainless Dash 4 fitting and that will take care of the oil supply via a Teflon line that will make ourselves later on we also need to get oil out of the turbo which thanks to the flat design of this engine is a little bit more tricky we've opted to use an old Subaru turbo drain that will weld A fitting onto the end of giving us more flexibility for the drain that will then run into a fitting on the back of the rocker cover which can now go back on with a brand new gasket next we can focus on our cooling system reinstalling all the small pipes that divert water in and around the engine block to feed heaters throttle bodies and turbos we do need to keep them out of the way of important things like turbo manifolds and in this case a small Bend with some heat will get the job done foreign for you Dave has been working away on the wiring doing an amazing job as always we've been doing some fiddly stuff under here with our radiator hoses a thermostat the bolts for that the pipe that carries the water from that area up to the back of the engine so we can feed our turbo making sure the cooling system is going to work properly that we've got a heater now we're going to put in some exhaust gaskets we didn't actually have these when we're putting this together so we're going to pull all the manifolds off put our gaskets in and then also change the way that they're attaching to the motor using bolts instead of the studs and nut Arrangement that it comes with from the factory I was going to leave in probably about half an hour's time so we're going to crank through as much of this as we can but we've actually run out of things to do anyway we don't have the right tap to tap this thermostat housing and there's a few bits and pieces that just aren't here so that's probably as much as we'll get done today but we have made a lot of progress and pretty Stokes without turning out let's whack these in these gaskets shouldn't ever need to come off as the cast iron manifolds can be separated by the v-bands we're also going to remove the studs and use bolts which fit the casting better it has been a massive couple of days working on the lavogue thank you for coming down and helping Al no problem much appreciated you only had a bit of time to uh to spare to get it done but also with the help of Dave and Benny we have smashed through a bunch of things which I'm now going to ceremoniously cross off the gravel V3 list so front mount they're ex-wiring not done no oil cooler not done oil filter relocation I'm going to say yes because we welded all the stuff onto that and made that whole setup just needs to actually be like screw in keypad howtec y Bank zulk's currently still happening Dave's right there wiring it up oil temp and pressure that's in cooling pressure it was in for momentarily oh we broke the fitting oh I'm gonna half do that one air intake sensor you need a bung for that fuel pressure no but it's right there aircon lines that's a later thing catch Cannon lines yes you can cross off a job that was my job our fan and shroud yes that's been installed heat wrap no thermostat and hoses yes yep injectors wrong part Huff ordered the wrong part half uh turbo drain yes half half and turbo feed yes yes that's that's pretty good what what you are probably getting the uh the idea of right now is that when you customize stuff this heavily it takes ages doesn't it just keep plugging away until it's fixed the only way to eat a mountain is to get a spoon and start shoveling that dirt into your mouth otherwise you ain't never going to eat it that doesn't sound very but he's gonna be a chocolate mountain all I'm going to say is work's going to continue on the lavogue in what form we don't know depends if our we're going to work that out later but all I'm going to say is when we get to the end of this list that's a bit I'm excited about I wrote skids but I actually mean Dino because the Dino's a bit I'm really really interested in but there's a few jobs that I will finish in my spare time and uh Dave from haltech will give us a hand Benny's going to be back as well to help do some plumbing and we're going to get pretty close people and we're going to start it I just don't know when so thank you for watching thank you Alan for all your help for traveling all this way anytime any final thoughts about this have you ever done those helicopter skids like rally drivers do yes pirouette ones in this yeah oh so good do it okay can you adjust the thingy so it's more rear drive certainly can the pirouette skid right where one wheel doesn't move in the rescue yard dude except last time I think it was in the wet this time it's going to be in the dry sick good job see you next time\n"