I got my car running today.
Eight years ago, I parked it. I'd won an autocross championship in that car. I loved that car. The clutch started slipping. The water pump expired spectacularly one day. I'd bought a 1990 Eclipse GSX for a song, you see, and the Colt needed a clutch and a water pump, and you may as well do the timing belt...
I drove the piss out of that GSX. Blew up the original turbo...and the Colt had a perfectly good ported 14b...wanted more power, got a 16g...
The GSX died a noble death. It's oil pan got smashed into the pickup on a low water bridge. The engine died of oil starvation a week or so later. Now I had two fruit and banana up Mitsubishis. And a few other stripped cars worth of parts.
I stripped the Eclipse to the shell, had it unceremoniously dragged onto a flatbed, and rode my motorcycle. This was in 2008.
I started getting serious about the Colt again early last year. I dug through the garage and took a look at what I had. I built a 2.0 block. I spent weeks preparing a head and intake. I assembled everything on the stand, then got married. It sat like that...
...until early June. With about a hundred bucks a paycheck, I had to get the Colt on the road by late August. The engine was hung in the bay, wired, plumbed. For some reason the previously perfectly fitting front mount piping was all wrong. The downpipe was all wonky. Cutting, welding, bullshit delays. I have four alternators, but none of them are good. I build one out of the good parts. I hope it's good. Get everything in, belts on, radiator in, I/C piping looking good. Fill the radiator...goddamn it, where's the drain plug? And no, it's not a normal size. I had to pull the radiator and take it to the parts store. Get everything buttoned up...again.
Last week I started it. It ran like shit. Was it my home cleaned fuel injectors? Had I used the wrong coil pack? The wrong ECU? Fuel pressure? Had the timing skipped? I checked all of that this morning. Everything was marked as having come from a running car. OK...
How about actually checking that the things are working now? One coil was dead. No problem. I have another "good" pack. That one was dead too. Working back, the power ignition transistor pack could cause that...sure enough, I had that too. Now we have a four cylinder! One that runs like shit. One that only runs if you hold the throttle open.
Timing is on. It won't idle. I hooked up my boost gauge, and I see 3 inches of vacuum. I'm searching for an open port, some sort of massive leak. I put my hand on the throttle body and hear a hiss. I move my hand and hear it change. WTF? The gasket I put between the throttle body and the intake manifold was the wrong one. The BISS did nothing because the chamber was open to atmosphere. The throttle had to be open to overwhelm the effect of the leak. I replaced the gasket with an original stuck to another throttle body from the pile. Hey, it still looked good. It did it. Steady idle at 800rpm.
The car purrs like a kitten. Like a kitten with a 2.0 and a 2.5 inch turbo back exhaust with no muffler. A stinky kitten that's been in the house 8 years too long.