TommyC

I'm surprised that there is a bedding in period, but I look forward to another improvement 😀
It really wasn't that bad at all, they balanced/rested nicely on my thighs. Replaced the speakers with one arm round the side and one arm underneath the door card. Could only really see what i was doing with one eye, but it was enough 😁

Give them a week of use to loosen them up and there will be another improvement again.
I'm struggling to imagine how much of a pain it must have been to do without disconnecting the door cards, but fair enough under 1 hour is quite good!

After the beneficent recommendations of those here, I ordered the IS165TOY kit (£130) made by Focal, along with a bumper pack of Silent Coat "noise isolator" foam from Audiovisual world. Shipping was prompt but package went AWOL, Audiovisualworld very quick to ship another after I informed them that I hadn't received anything. Annoying but all was well.
I took some photos, but in the end there were other photos of the same stuff on this very forum, so I've neglected to upload them.
On me:
I am a poor man's audio nut, liking classical, jazz and some occasional punk or rock. I've got some B&W speakers in my lounge and an amp to match, and my ideal instrument is 500kg of piano. I love it when the music grabs and involves. Not fond of massive volume but love quality. With that in mind, the GT86 is a dreadful place to spend lots of money on audio when I could be investing in my home setup instead! It's quite noisy, the speaker positions are a bit whack, and I like listening to the car as I drive. Therefore, I opted for the cheap-ass upgrade, as the default audio is truly painful to my ears.
Opinion on Toyota OEM system:
Barely tolerable, crashy treble, needs silly volume on the motorway to be enjoyable, and then it's exhausting. Headunit does ok, even over bluetooth, but doesn't do very well when you connect a different phone. That's what I thought before I took the door cards out and beheld the papier maché equipment they fitted! The tweeters look cheap, the rear speakers are like listening with your head under water, and the woofers... oh the woofers. They weigh next to nothing. I'm amazed they achieved as much as they did. Toyota obviously spent at least £3 on each of these.
On the Focal replacements:
The replacement tweeters are sturdy and much nicer than those they replace. Their better build unfortunately means they don't click fully into the speaker mounts, due to being a bit tall. I'm leaving them like that for now, but might want to look into more sturdy attachment.
The woofers are fibreglass affairs with more than twice the weight of the OEM. Much bigger magnet on the rear, a bit more depth to the assembly, but plenty of room in the door cavity. There is a foam layer where the mount fits around the cone which is very thin. I added a bit of extra material to make sure it seals properly. I'd have like something in kevlar or similar, but that would need more wiring, sourcing mounts etc. Lots more dosh!
A bunch of fittings are included in the box, but they're mainly intended for other Toyotas. The only bits you need are the wires (which only fit in one configuration) and the block which mates with the Toyota wiring.
On the fitting process:
Online videos quite informative in getting the lay of the land. I tackled the tweeters first. Nylon trim tools very helpful indeed! The dash material is weirdly spongy and very easy to scratch. Out comes the speaker cover with speaker stuck into it, now lots of swearing trying to release the tweeter cable. Likewise getting the tweeter from the grate is a forceful and made me nervous. New tweeter snaps into place, but not as securely as the original. Must be able to do this better!
At this point I had to stop and drive away to dinner. Just the tweeters alone made a big improvement to clarity of the audio!
Next to the doors. More action for the nylon tools. The door handle trims came away without feeling like they'd snap, but it would dead easy to scratch them. Door card needs to be pulled free from its mountings with moderate force. I found it easiest to start at the hinge side of the door and work outward. Then the whole card slides up and off its lip. Now comes the fun - unclipping the puddle light cable (easy), the window switch cable (easy once I used a large flat bladed screwdriver to release the plug), and the door handle/lock cables. I had to do this alone, but it would be a lot easier if someone could support the weight of the door card while you unplug everything.
If you take the door too far from the card without disconnecting the cables, they'll pull off the plastic liner which separates outside from inside. Driver's side is harder because of the mirror controls - that plug is connected in the most awkward position possible. Tricky on your own!
Speaker removal an absolute doddle, likewise fitting. I took some time to feed some noise-absorbing foam into the cavity behind the speaker, but didn't do the whole door because I didn't want to disturb the waterproofing - it had some moisture on it, so it has a purpose! Re-hanging the door card was nice and easy.
On the matter of sound deadening, dynamat etc.
While the tarry mass loading material provided by Dynamat or silent coat is useful for adding weight to a panel and damping resonance, I felt it would add both a lot of cost and weight to the installation. Some people suggest roofing material, but that will stink out your car with tarry odours. Don't go there! Yes, the boot floor and door skin boom like a drum when tapped, but as above, I didn't want to mess with the waterproofing and wasn't sure I would realise the benefits. Maybe I'm wrong!
The isolating closed cell foam is for taking out higher frequency noise, and I figured it was ideal for dropping the ambient volume of the car on the move so I could enjoy the music more. I placed some in the door cavity, while mainly focusing on the rear wheel arches.
On adding sound absorbing material to the rear passenger space:
Unbolt seat. Just one 10mm bolt per seat! Makes those rear passengers feel all the more wanted as they lose sensation below their knees. Push down at the rear centre of the seat pad, where a single loop is hooked onto the chassis. This is tricky and took me a while. It doesn't help that you can't see what you're doing, and the seat is flexible. Now you can see the entry points to your fuel tank! Peel back door rubbers from top of door frame to the bottom, where you will have to lift the lip trim. It interlocks with the rest of the trim, but it comes up easily enough Unclip two trim clips that are behind the rear seat. You can do this by dropping the seat, or through the boot. Starting at the door, give it a heave-ho and pop the trim out. Force applied just right will pop one out, rather than trying to get them all at once. I found it easiest to pop the forward bits out, then half-drop the rear seat to release the rear portion and then slide it into the boot. You can also take the boot lining out to get to the rear part of the arch, behold the top of the teeny tiny rear suspension, and attend to some of the rattly wiring. You may now disable, or just plain remove the rear speakers and use them to occupy space in the refuse. and so the results:
Decent step up in clarity, especially the treble, almost to the point where it rather exposes the lack of mids, and the fact that you are much nearer one tweeter than the other. Once the system had run in a bit, these issues were less obvious, but I definitely get the feeling a second speaker on top of the dash would help with integrating the sound. There's plenty of low end, but obviously not on a par with a dedicated sub. Sound is still lost a bit at high speeds, but you don't feel so aurally violated by winding up the volume.
+ Very happy with return on investment, listening pleasure is up, it lifts it from "car sound" to "hifi".
+ Easy fitting, provided you have a good way to avoid scratching stuff, and a helper at times
+ Focal have some credentials in audio gear manufacture
- Still far from premium speakers
- GT86 cabin is a poor environment to install in, and would take proper wonga and time to sort out.
+ Subaru/Toyota snap-together design is pretty easy going for strip-down and refit of interior. It's nowhere near as involved as some other cars I've crawled around inside.
As for the sound isolation, it's still plenty noisy at speed but I think some road noise is gone, helping to expose more of the creaks and ticks of the other flimsy interior parts! I didn't do a superb job, and certainly didn't cover every inch with the stuff, but it has made a difference. I was foolish not to try a controlled measuring of the ambient volume on a known piece of road! Putting the sticky stuff in place is a time-consuming job, so I'd not recommend it unless you know that you need it, or are going for installation to the max! I'll refine my opinion over the next few weeks as I persuade myself it was worthwhile.
Who is it for?
Budget-minded people who can't stand the OEM audio setup. Maximum bang for buck, really very easy installation, no messing about. £130, job done. Limited extra weight needed.
Who is it not for?
People who must have banging choonz - fit a sub in the boot. People willing to get into the wiring, mounting cross-overs and supplementary amps. I reckon £300-£500 and some graft will yield another step up in quality. Think hard about adding a mid-range to the dash to compensate for speaker separation. This is what I would have done if I had more time and money to burn. People who want high volume - The standard mountings are flimsy, and many body panels are completely undamped. You should be spending time and weight on the full damping and isolation in all key panels. This will add tens of kilos. Full-time petrolheads. Rip it all out, swap out manifold and muffler for maximum brap brap bang rumble. You won't want that damped out with noise isolation!

We have a set of these beautiful Gram Lights 57 Getter, including centre caps & "hub" caps.
18x7.5 ET40 in Sunlight Silver (18x7.5 just like TRD Wheels)
£1400 Delivered 
Clearance offer - £999 Delivered
£835 + DELIVERY








 

I'm trying not to be anecdotal, as to be honest individual reports of "mine is fine after xxx track days", "I drive hard" - aren't very helpful in the grand scheme of figuring out what causes it. A trend is.
From reading reports plus my own experience it seems to be more likely to happen when shifting at/near the red line, when there is a lot of heat in the engine bay (i.e. during a track session). If you're shifting at 7k rpm it's less frequent. Once it's happened once during a trackday it will come back a lot easier.
There's some concensus from the US contingent that coil packs are near enough a consumable if tracking the car on a regular basis, although they tend to have warmer ambient temperatures which can't help. Some advocate wrapping the outer in gold reflective heat tape to help them last longer.
The last time I had one pop up was at the end of a Nordschliefe lap when I decided to give it full beans on the huge Dottinger straight. Hot engine bay, first 7400rpm shift and there you go. Not seen since. Annoyingly I bet it will pop up at Oulton next week, but I can't warranty it as I can't reproduce it on the road.
I may put a poll up or something!
 
Edit -
 

Current plan: "Mod the shit out of it."

Induction kits are about induction noise, that's the reason for getting one. I quite like how my now rusty Injen one sounds. Also just to point out (another annoying Americanism), is that there is absolutely no such thing as a 'cold' air intake, it can only ever be ambient temperature, i.e., whatever the air temperature happens to be.

Gives you the fuel level. 

New brakes post bedding in.
IMG_5057 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr

Went out for a drive with a friend who has a rather nice car. One of many.

Sodding Photobucket!

I wondered if you would make an appearance 😋 Now then, about these oatcakes, as all of England and Kent knows the best come direct from my kitchen and I have the waist line to prove it. Staffordshire oatcakes indeed... counterfiets 🌯🌯🌯

Not just here in England but in Staffordshire too!
Ooo the bloody cheek!, and by the way those Derbyshire oatcakes are "pants" nowhere near as good as the authentic North Staffs oatcakes 😜

Reliability is one thing, but it is inevitably going to eat through consumables faster.
 
I have another foot in the Saab camp which for much of its recent history basically ran the same engine, boosted or not boosted in various states of tune. The highest strung variants run up the same epic mileages as their n/a brethren but tend to wear through clutches etc as you'd expect and you get more gearbox issues. Interestingly 270bhp seems to be the sensible limit for reliable daily driving on those too.
 
How you drive it is the biggest factor though. Some people just drive unsympathetically. Dumping all the torque through the transmission in lower gears as a matter of course and unleashing 270bhp through a cold engine is going to screw anything up.
 
My last Saab was a 15 year old £1500 tweaked 9-5 with 120k miles, 270bhp and a string of fastidious owners. Gave me a year of 100% reliable commuting then sold it for what I paid for it. Purred like a kitten.
 
FI holds no fear for me - just treat it nicely :-)
 
 
 
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

If built and looked after properley its more likely to be reliable on a daily/high mileage car than one that does low but lots of hard/track miles, only thing to watch for is cooling down a turbo before switching off engine if you have had spirited run out,  this just means sitting with it idling for a minute or two before switching off car if its just been used hard to allow turbo to cool and stop it cooking the oil, otherwise no issues and likewise no issue like that with a supercharger, although i tend to anyhows due to years of turbo cars and with my current cosworth charged 86 i try and do last few miles before getting to my destination very sedate to let all temps cool and then i can just switch it off.
Im doing nearly 1k miles a month in my car since buying in April and had no issues, previous owner did about 5k miles in 2 years i think but lots of that was track and never had an issue, a well built and well setup/mapped charged car should give no issues if treated/serviced accordingly.
 
Ian
 

Superb, thanks! I've ordered a variety of copper crush washers from eBay, so that's good. I think I've got a lifetime's supply for a touch less than £22 asking price of the Unobtanium Toyota ones. 

It's been a few months since the last update, but my latest addition to my car is a set of AP Racing 4 Pot calipers with 330mm grooved discs. How this came about was in part due to a recent track day I did at Oulton Park. Whilst attempting the 'Island bend 100mph challenge', it became brutally apparent that stopping in time for Shell Oils Hairpin was a growing concern. I've been running stock brakes with Project Mu HC800 pads. These are actually pretty good, having a really nice level of feel to them, but I was murdering them on track. Now,  I'm not the last of the late brakers, but I really like to trail brake which requires a consistent and good feel from the brakes and they do actually need to work. I was finding that after two or three laps they were really struggling and well, not sounding that good. All said and done I felt I was going over the limit for what was achievable with a stock setup. 
I admit there was  big part of me thinking just how good the car would be if I had brakes that could take a bit more heat and provide a greater level of consistency whilst on the track. I'd also noted when sprinting that I felt like I was just killing the brakes. Whilst it's only one flyer of a lap, you tend to brake later to try and save a few hundredths of a second absolutely anywhere you can. 
So, I went away and had a think about it. The only thing really that was putting me off, was the price. They seemed to come out at £2K+ which is a lot of money. I thought about the cheaper alternatives, like K-Sport with their seemingly over engineered 8 pot setup. Willwood also do a 4 Pot setup for around £1K. But again whilst I've heard nothing bad about Willwood, racing teams don't tend to use them. I didn't consider shite like D2 and all that, but still I was put off by K-Sport being a sub-premium brand and well it came down to the AP's and Brembos but they were even more expensive. It was only after posing the question to the forum that got the link to Reyland Motors who did an AP 4 pot setup with their supplied discs. This brought the price down to a far more appealing £1500. Still a lot of money and yes it is. But my thinking with my car is that I'm careful about how I modify it and when I do it, I only want to do it once. I don't want to mess around endlessly swopping parts and inevitably wasting money in the process. I admit, though, I'm quite good at talking myself into stuff. 
There were a few options on the Reyland site, see; http://www.reyland.co.uk/subaru-impreza/ what with for another £250 you can have AP discs to really go for it, or for £150 you can having floating discs which expand more freely than a fixed disc to the bell. But having considered my usage, I felt that it was key to get the AP 4 pots and well I can always upgrade to a floating disc setup or go full AP on the discs in the future should I wish. Something to note, you have to call Reyland using a phone, you can't order online, so it was slightly unsettling to hand over £1500 on my card with no email confirmation or anything! It's what we used to do, but it's feels odd after years of just clicking the mouse and getting your order details instantly. 
I naturally chose Toyota RRG Macclesfield to do the work and I knew the Master himself, Gary would be doing the work and I knew he'd really enjoy doing it. Stuff like this matters. 
Here's what the calipers looked like out of the box: 
Image 17-11-2017 at 22.02 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
Discs wrapped up: 
IMG_5049 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
The kit came with braided brake lines, all bolts needed, CNC aluminium mounting bracket to fit the calipers to the hubs and Ferodo DS 2500 pads which are a street/track type pad:
IMG_5049 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
Gary got on with the install. Richard commented that one of the mounting brackets didn't have it's thread tapped properly. No problem though, Gary got out his tap and die and sorted it. It's for reasons like this I use RRG Macc. Gary sent me pics on Facebook of progress: 
23621988_1774765709209175_2878800822716104916_n by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
Here's the caliper mounted with the disc. Looking good. I went for black calipers as they were cheaper than red and wouldn't clash with my red wheels:
23621988_1774765709209175_2878800822716104916_n by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
Setup on the car when I picked it up. Note the colour of the discs. 
IMG_5049 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
Richard kindly lent me his 2017 Clubsport GT86. It hasn't been leant to anyone else before which was noted when they were doing the loan car agreement! 
It's interesting to drive the newer version in stock form to compare to mine.
IMG_5049 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
I was really interested to what the car felt like on the drive home, but it was in rush hour traffic, so no heavy braking at all. It felt good, pedal pressure is a little reduced, though I was recalibrating myself after driving the demonstrator which felt different from my brakes did and were a bit more grabby on initial bite than my previous Project Mu's. I decided to after rush hour had subsided to bed the brakes in. I took the car out on a national speed limit dual carriageway and started to heat the brakes by braking firmly at around 60mph and repeated this around 15 times. The instructions say to use 50% of the braking power and repeat 25-30 times. Seems like quite a lot. I then moved onto increasing my speed and braking harder and harder another 20 times or so. It's definitely not an efficient way to drive! I did this until I could smell the brakes and then I knew I was done. The brakes felt a bit glassy when I started but I could really feel them starting to bite greatly improving the stopping of the car once I'd done 20 runs or so. 
I stopped at the local Shell and as you can see the discs have gone a bit blue. This shows that the pad material has transferred to the disc and increases the friction. 
IMG_5057 by Lauren Blighton, on Flickr
I've driven the car for work today covering about 50 miles which is pretty average for a day. No real hard braking. I've noticed that initial bite when cold is better than the Project Mu's, but probably similar to what the demonstrator GT86 I had felt like. Except the progression was better which made it very easy to modulate. I'm really interested in how much feel I will get out when on the track and how repeatable it will be. Certainly in town driving there is no fuss, the brakes work well but just feel a bit 'stronger' than stock brakes. 
The real test will come when I'm out on track at Oulton Park on the 9th December. I am rather looking forward to it.
 

Forgot to update. I have had no recurrence of the issue since the oil switch was replaced so I'm happy and im happy that the gauge I installed is bang on according to Toyota after their testing.

Can't afford to do anything 'til January... Curse responsible spending *waves fist*

If only it was UEL 😩 could have saved myself a few quid 

I’m just cutting up my credit card to stop me spending...

Assuming your car is still under warranty or the dealer actually want to change it... which my dealer didnt and preffered to be teapots about it.
There is no official recall or TSB on the batteries so its at the dealers discretion.
Personally I didnt want to chance it anyway with only a 65ah and an appox 50% improvement in capacity. I wanted twice the capacity and this 80ah battery is the closest thing I could find that still fitted within the factory battery tray.
if you’re gonna do a job, do it right I say

Forced induction intercooler usually comes in front of main rad just behind front grill anyway, doesn't it? And even if not FI, stock air intake is cold air intake, whose inlet/snorkel is before engine compartment, above crashbeam. Vents may help lowering underbonnet temps, but how much they matter for moving car? How much actually gets heatsoaken with air passing at big flow speeds through plastic tubes? Imho not enough to care much about it. Main cooling also has more capabilities and is not limiting factor. There is thermostat in coolant loop and electronic regulation to electric fan, if needed to be it can stay longer spinning and get more out of existing cooling system/capabilities. But oil temps often get on the high side on our cars. Often even if iddling in traffic standstill or if tracked in hot summer day. So for extra engine reliability/longetivity it's oil rad that i'd add to more heavily used car (track and/or FI).
If i'd think of adding vents .. they would come after oil rad, after oil catchcan, after stronger engine internals. And vents in fender after hood's vents.
BTW, my own choice would be leaving all those mods for later if not abandoning them at all .. but rather spend that money on actually tracking car and/or maybe some slight suspension/tires/brakes upgrade. You'll spend less, spend on actually having fun, and you'll gradually upgrade main part of them all - yourself as a driver.