Riley's CE Coupe 1.8L Build

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Thought I'd finally start posting my build up after constant procrastination lol.

The reason/s as to why im creating this thread is firstly bc I want people also building their lancers' similarly to understand the what, how and why, and to just show off my car hehe.

Here is when I first bought the car in May 2021. Owned by a grandma with just 74000km since 98. Also every ding and scratch u see on the car has been done by the previous owner (im not THAT bad of a driver).

 

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The first mod i ever did to the car was move the front plate from the middle to the right side. Although this looks a little 'ricery', I decided to do this as the intake id bought from Hens Performance goes to the front bumper behind the covered up vent looking things so I wanted to put the plate there to block large debris from directly hitting the filter and instead hitting the plate. Function over form lol.

 

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Next up, i decided to change out the steering wheel and shift knob as they just weren't doing it for me and they looked quite ugly. Also grabbed a saas boss kit to mount the wheel.

 

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After this, I went and got some nice sticking rubber. When I bought the car the tire tread was still in tact but it was too many years old and was starting to crack and would easily lock up when braking lightly and I dont even know how it would've went in the rain so I went and got some nice street tires that handle the wet rlly well and grip fairly decent. I dont have any photos but i know they have a good reputation. Oh and I went with Dunlops if you guys ask. With the nice rubber I went and got a set of rims. The puny disgusting 13 inch stock steelies had to go and in replacement I got 15 silver alloy wheels. They were dirt cheap and I got what I paid for as the paint is peeling off them and have a bunch of curb scraping on them but I dont care, I will end up refurbishing them one day. Just anything beats 13 inch steelies. It also dropped the ride height a little bit too so it looks less like a monster truck.

 

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With it now actually sticking to the road, I got my mate to come help me strip the interior. As they say if you don't have power, compensate by having low weight. It only took 2 hrs to completely strip, apart from the speakers, headliner and door cards. Keeping the door cards as its illegal to remove em and keeping the headliner on for some extra safety for my head. Speakers were to come out another day.

Car weighed stock 960kg as per the registration information and ended up losing about 50kg just from carpet, seats, spare tire/ jack and all the interior plastics. So at this point it weighs around 910kg.

Noise did become a lot louder in the interior but idc cus weight reduction bro

 

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Soon after this, I went and took out the front and rear speakers. I dont want and audio equipment in the car as I dont listen to music in my own car and the car came with its original cassette player so its useless anyway to keep the speakers. The front two were kept in the door panels and the rear two were in the parcel shelf. Thoight itd weigh more but less weight neverthelessnevertheless. Also these were posted on my indta so that's why there's text in them.

 

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Next up i bought a small, subtle lip spoiler for the rear. I plan to paint this in the same colour as the car one one day. Used 3m adhesive to mount to the car and doesn't look ricery when mixed with the other stuff you'll see later on. I didn't want the mr spoiler on it as I think its too big for a fwd na car like mine and I wanted something different

 

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Straight after the photo I removed the glxi badge and mitsubishi logo as the adhesive was becoming too old and badges were about to come off with or without me removing them anyway so might as well do it. Kept the lancer badge on as it was still in good condition

 

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Soon after this, I went and took out the front and rear speakers. I dont want and audio equipment in the car as I dont listen to music in my own car and the car came with its original cassette player so its useless anyway to keep the speakers. The front two were kept in the door panels and the rear two were in the parcel shelf. Thoight itd weigh more but less weight neverthelessnevertheless. Also these were posted on my indta so that's why there's text in them.View attachment 8682View attachment 8683View attachment 8684View attachment 8685

So at this point the car is weighing about 907.5kg

 

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So at this point the car is weighing about 907.5kg

I forgot to weigh the new wheels before fitting them but I estimate atleast 5kg to 7kg less so maybe 902.5kg at this point

 

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With wanting more exterior mods before going towards some performance stuff again I went and bought new evo 5 rear reflectors. The original mounting idea was to cut a large hold either side of the boot to fit them but I didn't wanna do that so I just marked out the two bolt holes for each reflector and drilled into the boot.

The reflectors rlly made the car look more aggressive then the cutesie thing it was before

 

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My next mod was to put front and rear strut braces in to improve rigidity and stiffness, plus it looks mad. For the front, I bought it second hand off a guy who owns a 4g94 swapped mirage, and for the rear I bought a new ultra racing brace in white to match my interior

 

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In the front strut brace photo you can see the intake installed. I actually installed the rear brace first before the front as I had to install an intake system first before fitting my front brace as I ran into clearance issues. With this said, I now move onto the intake from Hens Performance which arrived a whole 3 months after ordering . Fitting it was extremely easy other than a few very rusted bolts.

I could feel a little extra mid to high rpm oomf but nothing extensive as its just an intake without any other mods to help it out.

 

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Inside the package of the intake i bought also came with a black plastic cased ecu from the later model lancers which I needed for tuning later on. It came with a tune and a mild crackle tune and after installing it I could feel a vast improvement over stock, especially 1st gear. Couldn't hear much though, and especially couldn't hear any pops with the asthmatic exhaust.

 

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To fix the asthmatic exhaust, I went and and bought a set of used headers. Luckily for me they already already had a flex pipe made up and fitted to it making it cheaper for me. The guy I bought it off stupidly used just regular matte black paint instead of proper high temp exhaust paint so it came off in smoke as soon as it was installed so ill have to repaint them one day so they won't rust. With the headers I got a custom 2 inch exhaust as the headers internal diameter is only 2 inches so no point going bigger. I also got 2 resonators installed to reduce drone and make it more street friendly

 

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Now that I've got the ihe mods installed I needed to get it tuned so I went down to see Luis at LLT Racing to get it put on the dyno. The car before Luis tuned it was running pretty lean so the tune from Henry probably wasn't doing any good for my engine so I'm gonna stay clear from his stuff from now on as I just don't know how much quality his stuff is.

Anyway the car made a whopping 113hp and 156nm of torque at the wheels, big thanks to Luis, id highly recommend him to any one. I got the extensive popping removed as I just got sick of it and didn't wanna be like all those gay golfs u see with a stupid amount of pops. Its still pops a nice amount naturally so I'm quite happy with it

 

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Since the car going on the dyno, I've been slowly removing all the interior sound deadening. Has taken me weeks to get it off with a heat gun and some scrapers as I dont have access to dry ice which needs a commercial license in nsw to buy it. Overall I removed about 8kgs. Not much for all the effort it took but whatever it atleast looks way better and is a little lighter

 

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I never really liked how the side indicator plastic are orange/ amber and the front indicator plastic are clear as it isn't cohesive so I decided to buy some orange indicator paint for plastic and it ended up turning out rlly cool and saved me like 60 bucks to buy orange indicator housings off an evo or lan sedan.

Also, I finally cut the two holes into my front bumper for the extra airflow and agressive look. Its a little scuffed around the edges and needs a bit of touch up work with a paint brush and some more cutting but it turned out alright and much cheaper than a whole bumper with inserts/ holes for fog lights

 

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When I first bought the car, it was fairly rusty everywhere, in the boot well, in the engine bay and so on. Apparently the battery had leaked and corroded a lot of metal that were nearby as the car had been sitting a little while before being sold to me. So, I got my wire brushes and went to work on a few areas.

I used rust primer on any area of metal I was trying to clean up to kill any remaining rust and let the paint stick to the surface better. So far I've restored the chassis area underneath the battery, the wheel wheel in the boot and the rear chassis brace and real control arms which are connect to it.

Im quite happy with how the control arms and chassis mount ended up. It makes it look like a nice new performance one kinda.

I still have many more areas to fix but one step at a time aye

 

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Since all the painting, I've gone and bought a *poo* tonne of performance parts. So first up I've gone and bought a pair of T2 slotted front discs and a set of intima street performance and track pads to go with it.

Then I decided to go down the route of building up my cylinder head for some very needed extra power. I went and ordered a fat stage 3 naturally aspirated cam from the guys at RPW. To adjust cam timing I bought a vernier cam gear also from RPW. Sadly it only came in purple but eh whatever.

When speaking to Luis at LLT Racing he said he had a ported and polished head from a 4g94 sohc (which is exactly the same as the 4g93 head) at his shop with larger stiffer valve springs from RPW with net lift of 11.5mm, 63 exhaust valves and 3 angle valves. 500 bucks for the ported head which saves me a crap tonne of money. This combined with the stage 3 cam should hopefully see around 110 to 115kw at the wheels hopefully.

I will also need larger injectors to compensate for the increased amount of air coming into the engine so I decided to go with the 275cc yellow injectors from the magna v6. I maybe could've gone with 240cc from the 4g94 sohc lancers but I wanted to have a little bit of headroom and some extra safety.