In later part of May, 2001, I owned a 1993 Mitsubishi Eclipse GS. It was powered by a 2.0L 16V DOHC inline four cylinder. It was a really nice car, with a sleek silver paint job, 5-speed transmission, black interior, and set of 17” wheels, but it wasn’t fast enough for me. It needed the turbocharged version of my same engine. I got on the internet and started looking for a cheap car with this engine.
My intent was to pull the engine out of the cheap car, rebuild it, and drop it in my Eclipse. If I had bought a whole car, I would have everything I needed for the motor swap. I came across a website that advertised parts cars for sale, “Buy one part or buy the whole thing!” I needed a 92-94 Eagle Talon, or Mitsubishi Eclipse to be sure everything would fit correctly. I emailed the owner of this website and asked him if he had what I was looking for. When he wrote back, he informed me that he didn’t have any for parts, but he did have a 1993 Eagle Talon Tsi AWD and he was asking $5350. Once I found this out, I was instantly curious. He told me that it ran good, it was really clean, never wrecked, and he had never had any problems with it, except the ABS was a little flaky. I asked if he could send me some pictures of it. I received the pictures a few days later and fell in love. It was a gorgeous car, and it could all be mine. I wanted to go look at it and test drive it, but it was in Tulsa, OK. I talked to my parents about it and finally convinced them to give it a shot. I called the guy and arranged a time when I could drive to Tulsa and look at it.
On June 1, me and my dad drove the three-hundred some miles to Tulsa. When we got there, we met the owner of the car, Darren King. He owned and ran a performance shop called Fast Forward Connections that specialized in Eclipses and Talons. I looked the car over and test drove it. It was just as Darren had said, very clean, and ran good. He informed us that everything on the car was original, except for the transfer case. He explained that it was replaced under the factory warranty. I would have bought the car that day, but he wouldn’t accept a personal check. We talked to him a little longer and found out that the title wasn’t in his name, but in his ex-girlfriends. So we told him to get the title in his name, give us a call, and we’d be back down for the car. A few days went by and I hadn’t heard anything from him, so I called him. He hadn’t even begun to file for title transfer, because he thought that we weren’t interested in the car. Finally on June 8, I get an email saying that the title is in his name. Here we go again.
On June 11, we made the 300+ mile trip to Tulsa, but this time with a Cashier’s check. We arrived in Tulsa and looked the car over one last time. I drove it again, just to be certain that everything was the same as before. Sure enough, everything was the same. Darren once again reassured us that everything was original, and the car had been in the family for so long that he knew everything that had been done to it. So we had our autograph party, swapping signatures, and shaking hands. On the way home, we found a few things wrong with it. First off, the radio didn’t work which was no big deal because I was going to install a new one anyway. Another thing was the drivers side window came out of the track when you rolled it up. These were both very minor problems. Then we got a taste of the ABS problem. The light would flicker and then stay on. When the ignition was turned off, you could hear a buzzing from under the hood. Sometimes when the car was restarted, the ABS light would stay off. After doing some research, I found that the ABS motor relay would fuse itself closed, causing the ABS motor to run constantly. From June 11 to August 17, the car more or less didn’t move, other than getting it inspected and getting tie rod end replaced. In this time, I had to replace the clutch master cylinder and the Mass Airflow Sensor (MAF). I also found out why the radio didn’t work. I was running power wire for my amplifier so I pulled my carpet up. I found a 3’ piece of 8 AWG wire that had been cut on both ends. When I removed my back seat, there was two strands of speaker wire that went directly to the back speakers, but they had been cut. I found two more strands that ran along the door sills and into the doors. I checked the front four speakers, two were nonexistent, and the two in the doors were blown. I removed the back interior trim to get to the rear speakers and found that there was an ARD component set on each side. I called Darren to see if there were still wires running to the front and rear speakers. He told me that he didn’t have any idea. He just drove it, and fixed it when it broke. I replaced the front and rear speakers and installed my JVC head unit.
On August 17, I finally sold my Eclipse to a friend and got my car licensed around 3 p.m. I loved driving it, until one ‘o clock the next morning. I was on my way home, listening to some music and I heard a noise. I turned my stereo down and listened closer. It was a noise that made me sick to my stomach. My motor was knocking.
After talking to several people and figuring my options, I decided to pull the motor and figure out what was wrong. A friend and I started working on it as often as we could. We finally got the motor out and apart. The problem seemed to be the 1/8” of crankshaft endplay and the thick layer of metal shavings in the oil pan. The backside of the thrust bearing was paper-thin and the side of the crankshaft journal that rides in the thrust bearing had a ¼” wide, 1/16” deep groove all the way around it. The #3 rod bearing had been freewheeling inside the rod. We both agreed that the reason the bearing toasted the rod is that when the thrust bearing was chipped away, it slung small slivers of metal towards #3 rod. One of these slivers must have become lodged between the bearing and the rod bore. I took the crankshaft to the machine shop and asked if it could be fixed. Nope! I had to fork out $495 for a new crank and $90 for a new rod. Boy I was happy. The worst part about the whole deal is I’d only driven the car one day before this happened. I got to looking at everything and noticed on the side of the oil pan it read “95 turbo talon” in yellow paint marker and on the underside of the intake manifold it read “94 laser” in red paint marker. I started wondering if Darren had put 2g crankwalking motor in my 1g. After disassembly, this thought perished because it was indeed a 1g block. I noticed when taking the driveshaft loose, there was something shiny on top of my rear differential. I got a light and looked a little closer. It was a 17mm socket still on a bolt head. How’d that get there and why is it there? I started looking things over and found that instead of a 4-bolt rear differential there was a 3-bolt in its place (90-early 92 AWDs came with a 3-bolt rear, while late 92-94 AWDs came with a 4-bolt rear). I emailed Darren King to see why there were miscellaneous parts on my car. He wouldn’t respond to my emails, so I called him. In the two and ½ months that passed, he must have developed Alzheimer’s because the car that he knew everything about, he suddenly knew nothing about. Finally after posting to a forum about what had happened and harassing him enough he admitted that he did replace the rear differential when the transfer case was replaced, but once again when asked about the oil pan and intake manifold, he acted clueless. He did offer to build me a race motor though, for around $2500. By this time I was not too happy about the whole situation. Some other indications that this motor had been out and apart are : the piston pins had been pressed to the centerline of the rod instead of the piston, and there were 6 or 7 temperature sensitive metal discs stuck in various places on the block.
Got the damned car put back together and running. Hooray, my $8000 investment is driveable once again. My FRANKENSTEIN (so I call it) was brought to life early one Saturday morning. I drove it that day, the next day, but then on Monday morning, I encountered problems on my way to school. I had my cruise set, doing 65-70 mph. All of a sudden , my cruise shuts down and I heard a clunking noise. I immediately turned my cruise off and pulled over. I checked underneath to see if I still had a driveshaft. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary so I got in turned around and went home. On the way home I had a hard time getting it to go in any gear. I priced getting my tranny rebuilt locally and the lowest price I found was an estimated $900. I was toying with the idea of ordering a remanufactured tranny from Team Rip, until someone from the Talon Digest emailed me about Tallahassee Mitsubishi. I called Tallahassee and got a price on a brand spanking new tranny. It was only a little more than the remanufactured from Team Rip, so I ordered it. I swapped the trannys a few days after it came. So finally, after my $8000 investment turned to a $10000 investment, I’m driving my car…
…Until my stock turbo crapped out!! It was leaking oil internally and I was burning 2 quarts of oil a week. After looking into a rebuild costs, I decided to order a small 16g w/o turbine housing from Extreme Turbo. After a few cuts and scrapes from removing the stock turbo, I noticed that my turbine housing was cracked. I found one on the internet that wasn’t cracked and ordered it. The new turbo came in, and a few days later, so did the turbine housing. After inspecting the used turbine housing, I noticed that it was cracked, but it had been hogged out, so I put it on. Since oxygen sensors (O2) don’t do well when coated with oil, I replaced it too. The next few days I was a little weary when driving. I wasn’t sure if anything else was going to go wrong. There was a strange noise when boost came up when the engine was cold, but it eventually went away. A week or so later I noticed a quarter sized spot of gear oil under my car. I crawled underneath it and noticed it was coming from the drivers side halfshaft output. I ordered a new seal, and installed it when it came in. Still, there is this spot. I looked a little closer and saw that it was actually leaking out of the transfer case, right below the halfshaft output. Once I replaced this seal, no more leaks.
Here it’s been about 1000 miles since my turbo install and it’s still burning oil, and I can’t figure out why. There is less than 5000 miles on the rebuilt motor, and it has a brand new turbo on it. The only thing left to check is internals. I did a compression check, and it was good all the way across (135-130-140-135). A cylinder leakdown test showed that there was very little leakdown. The paper test showed that it didn’t have any blowby. The only other thing is valve seals or guides. I ordered a set of umbrella type valve stem seals, and ordered a set of 546/547 grind WEB camshafts from Road Race, but neither have been removed from their packaging yet. I'll get them in one day. Until then, I'll keep on smokin'.
Well, both the WEB cams and valve seals have been installed, but I'm still burning oil. Now I'm convinced that my problem is the rings. The cams helped a little bit, but there is about a 1/4" crack in my turbine housing so boost is leaking off. I hit 10 psi if I'm lucky.
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