Hello,

Got my new FMIC from pace at the weekend and spent saturday afternoon... I have a couple of things to mention that may help people with fitting and deciding if it's the right item for them. My car is an MY95 WRX

1) Laid the kit on the floor and all items were present and correct, looks excellent and very well made and even had a few mystery extra parts.

2) I've re-written the pace instructions as they were pretty bad [at least for my car] i'll post the link shortly.

3) The runs for the pipe work were questionable - on my car i had to bend a large intercooler pipe out of the way on the passenger side of the engine. On the drivers side the large intake pipe fouled the brake lines and these also had to be persuaded into place.

4) The intercooler fouled the slam panel, slam panel/cross member brace bar, and bumper support bolt all of which had to be cut/hammered/removed to suit

5) The aircon rad has some tabs on it's lower face which prevent it from fitting up against the intercooler so these must be removed with a hacksaw

6) There were no M8 bolts for the pass side rad bracket, luckily i had some in my tool kit. You also have to beat the hell out of the bracket to make it line up with the IC one. Then you have to drill thru the crossmember and use a nut and bolt to secure the IC/Rad - the original mount for the rad is a good 5" away.

7) The intercooler locates in some holes which [on my car] were covered by a bit of black plastic, as the picture in pace's instructions doesn't have arrows pointing to the right place it took a while to find these. Once we did we had to trim the black plastic back to get it to sit down poperly.

8) You CANNOT fit the fans to the rad and the fit the rad to the car the fans must be fitted with the rad about 3/4 into the engine bay with an OPEN ENDED 10MM spanner

9) The Turbo Compressor Outlet and the Throttle Body inlet pipes are very vey very tight to each other and getting te jubilee clip on is hard work.

10) Some of the hoses are a bit of a poor fit and take a lot of work to remove kinks etc.

Anyways there's my list of stuff that went wrong. It wouldn't have been a problem had the instructions made things slightly clearer but all that said and done.... how did it drive...

First drive from London Center [Blackfriars] to Catford no over heating, all seemed fine. There a nice wastegate chatter noise if you back off at 2500rpm, if you keep the hammer down to the 5000-7500 RPM range it pulls well and the dump valve sounds awesome.

Sunday took it from London to Hastings, was flying down the A21 at a resonable pace... suddenly loads of traffic.... we'd had the A/C on as it was pretty toasty outside. I nipped off at an exit as i didn't want to sit in traffic and promply got stuck behind a ford transit down some country lanes... i was trying to get past him so was sat in 3rd at about 3000-4000 RPM. Anyways i couldn't manage to get round him but he soon turned off... and to the water temp gauge. It was reading 3/4 and i wasn't too happy [had switched the a/c off when we came off the A21]

So i pulled over into a pub car park and let it cool down, we removed the front grill and then made our way to hastings [about another 30 miles] without further mishap.

We had a drive around hastings in resonable traffic and had no problems. Parked up for a bit. Then we did about another 30 miles after replacing the grill - the temp was ok for most of it but reached 3/4 at the end of the journey [30-50 mph]. After stopping for bit took the grill out and returned to hastings without any problem. So i'm thinking the grill must be preventing the air flow [i have a mesh one on order from TSL].

Then for the next chapter - the drive from hastings to London, no grill at all this time... but after about 20 miles of 30-70mph driving the car gets hot again... but only when doing around 30. If it sits at idle tha temp drops and if you reach 50+ the temp drops. This time i though sod it and kept going and eventually the temp dropped back to normal. All i can put it down to is that the amount of stuff in the way of the rad and the poximity of the rad to the engine doesn't really help it too much but it is generally ok. Nothing to worry about in traffic cos the fans seem to cool it down enough and at speed it is ok. London driving it's passed the test and on hot days as well.

It's all a bit strange and i can say the water temp at points had been higher than with the stock items. But generally there is no difference. The car feels to make more power and pull stronger, but this i can't confirm as it hasn't made it to the rolling road. I am very happy with the install sounds and looks excellent and would reccomend the kit, but be-ware of the install pitfalls at least on a WRX [not sure if other early classics are the same]

I just wanted to give an insight of what was involved, I should have the new instructions done shortly.

Anyone else had any experiences with the pace kit?

Cheers

Dave

 

I heard that they were ****!! Sounds like you just confirmed that.

 

Sorry to read this report, I would have hoped their parts had improved after people like me complained...

Yes, had the same (and other) problems installing the Pace on my MY99 3 years ago... Had some custom alu welding done to make it fit, brackets were wrong, etc etc...

The FMIC works OK-ish, I'm not really complaining, it certainly works better than the standard TMIC, but there are better options out there.

Mind you, the temp gauge part does seem strange. Although you do get higher water temps, I've never seen the water temp gauge from from the middle position. (I have aircon as well)

Are you sure you have put in enough coolant ? Maybe there is/was an airlock somewhere ?

 

Not too sure if there is an airlock - do you know how to bleed to cooling system correctly?

The reason i went for a pace - i built my own turbo system on my Nova [yeah yeah i know] and used a pace FMIC - the build quality of the universal intercooler i got was excellent and the price was great. So when it came to the scooby i looked at the options and theirs seemed excellent - nice "high efficiency rad" etc, fitted the car and the dyno results they show looked excellent.

And I must say the performance now it's fitted is really good, apart from the cooling problem = which may be an airlock come to think of it.

 

T M R there were alot better options when it came to intercoolers, a little searchinging on here would have confirmed that the "Pace" stuff is CR*P to be polite in both performance and fit. For new age cars APS intercooler is the way to go, for classics you cant beat the Lateral Performance Intercooler / Radiator combo.

 

have you any info on the lateral performance setup. the website isn't working?

 

Kevin, have a look in my project mach 1 thread in projects, there are pictures there. its basically the biggest core you can fit into a classic, comes with an oversize rad and new fans. Performs well on 500+ motors (charge temps of 4 degrees over ambient)

Also pictures in 22b.com Projects thread - mini project newage engine - classic wagon shell

Value for money and out performs HKS and certainly the pace stuff. I will be selling mine probably for an adapted version of the same unit.

Give Mark a ring on 0208 420 5444.

 

Well the Pace has never been that good imho, especialy in the coolant temp department, you could box in the rad from the intercooler, that may help, but, to be nonest, you are only experiencing the sort of problems seen on everal occasions in the past.

APS is the "standard" imho on any model year, marks kit looks good for classics though has to be said.

bob

bob

 

Oh well guess i can live and learn - I'll see how it goes and if it's crap get the lateral performance item.

I went for this as i have the early turbo inlet with the lame 90 on it and the kit was supposed to fit without cutting the bumper, etc.

 

Well the Pace has never been that good imho, especialy in the coolant temp department

Any idea why it has temp control problem?
Is it a smaller/thinner core than the original? or..... what?