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| Once we got the car running it was a drive across town to Cobb SoCal to get our changes tuned. |
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| Mitch McKee quickly tuned our car with the new parts in place. What we like about the Access Port over the open source tuning solutions is that tuning can go much faster and you only have to flash the factory ECU once in the process. Mitch also installed the latest Access Port updates, launch control and no lift shift. |
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| The results of Mitch’s work were pretty impressive. 330 lb/ft of torque and 318 whp at the same boost level as before. That’s 20 more lb/ft and 20 more hp. Our gains are big and completely across the board. Our car was lean on the bottom end and once that was corrected we had excellent driveability and real sharp throttle response, particularly on the bottom and from low speeds. The ID1000 injectors are amazing and Cobb’s tune helps exploit them. Mitch tells us that this is one of the higher power 91 octane bolt on stock turbo STI’s he has tuned. The car is a lot more fun to drive with our latest round of changes. |
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| At this point we decided that we wanted to try one of Fluidampr’s performance harmonic dampers. Although the trend is to go to lightweight aluminum solid pulleys we wanted to experiment with a damper designed to attenuate vibrations better than the stock pulley. The Fluidampr uses a sealed and balanced housing containing a free spinning tuned inertia ring floating in a viscous silicone fluid, much like a viscous LSD. Fluidamprs technology results in a harmonic balancer that is capable of absorbing much more vibration over a wider rpm range than your typical balancer whose inertia ring is suspended by rubber and fixed in place. The Fluidampr is also amplitude sensitive, the larger the harmonic whip of the crankshaft, the harder it works to attenuate the whip. The folks at Fluidampr told us that we would probably experience some level of power increase but we were just hoping that we could reduce some of the Subaru’s odd vibrations from its flat 4 engine. The Fluidampr is SFI approved for safety as well. |
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| To remove the stock balancer without pulling out the radiator and intercooler, Howard Watanabe of Technosquare had this really cool and unique tool that we had never seen before. A low clearance manual impact driver! To loosen bolts you simply hit the end with a hammer. If you can fit a ratchet wrench into the space you can use this! |
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| With a whack of the hammer the pulley bolt is loose! |
