Well, I only was able to ground 2 points, the strut tower and the point on the manifold, didn’t have enough wire to do the others. But just from that I noticed a huge difference. Before the mod, I was getting hesitation between 2,000 and 3,000 RPMs, now it’s almost completely smoothed out. And on my voltmeter, it’s staying constant at 13.7-13.9 volts. Where before it would drop to like 13.1-13.3 volts. And now with the lights and AC on, it stays around 13.5 volts, where before the mod it would drop down to like 12.8. So yes, this does work, and would recommend it to all. The Subaru grounding system really blows.

It will last for about two weeks then go back to normal..... :(

really? what have you experienced?

hahah - ECU reset, perhaps? Dunno, but that's probably what WRXVII is alluding to. Somebody did a REAL test once tho, w/o an ECU reset, and claims it worked for them too.

I'd say from my reading it's about 50/50 -- some people are thrilled, others believe it's snake oil.

Originally posted by WRXtreme02
Well, I only was able to ground 2 points, the strut tower and the point on the manifold, didn’t have enough wire to do the others. But just from that I noticed a huge difference. Before the mod, I was getting hesitation between 2,000 and 3,000 RPMs, now it’s almost completely smoothed out. And on my voltmeter, it’s staying constant at 13.7-13.9 volts. Where before it would drop to like 13.1-13.3 volts. And now with the lights and AC on, it stays around 13.5 volts, where before the mod it would drop down to like 12.8. So yes, this does work, and would recommend it to all. The Subaru grounding system really blows.
What mods (if any) do you have?

Originally posted by Rich10

What mods (if any) do you have?

Turbo XS Unichip, Stage 2
AEM CAI
Vishnu Up-pipe
Godspeed Downpipe
Tanabe Catback
Blitz SBC-iD

snake oil

at least you didn't buy one of those kits:lol: :lol:
i had a hard time beliving that this would work but some thread convinced me to try it( i allready had all the wire and ends) but all i did was add a little extra weight

really?
i heard this was a pretty good mod...:confused:

i was thinking about buying the splitfire grounding thingy or some other brands...

damnit...now i have to think it over...:(

Well, whatever you do, I would think a safe statement would be: DO NOT SPEND A LOT OF MONEY ON THIS!!!! It's not necessary to purchase an $80.00 "earthing" kit -- go buy some decent wire and connectors for $10.00 and it'll be just as good!! Those kits are ridiculously priced (in my opinion) in an attempt to take advantage of people who don't know any better!!

I can officially say this grounding mod stuff is JUNK. It is the Unichip closed/open loop transition you are feeling. I pulled the Unichip, popped in the UTEC, and it's as smooth as silk. Ask anyone at the Subaru Challenge in Jacksonville and I think they might agree after running my car.

Shawn

The grounding mod worked for me.

I agree with CirrusWRX though--just use appropriate wire (I used 12 guage with THHN insulation), proper size ring terminals, and some conductive/anti-corrosive paste. There is no need for a "kit".

I also cleaned up the stock grounding points at the same time. I found at least one that had the terminal positioned over painted sheet metal.

The Grounding "Mod" is junk or not depending on whether your car is grounded well or not.

Let's start with the simple fact that the car has a grounding wire system in place - it's attached to the manifold. Now, before the current WRX, or in Japan, before the Legacy Rev. D, there was roughly 1/4 the amount of wiring used in grounding the car's systems as there is now. Between the outbreak of the grounding mod in Japan and the current Subaru models, Subaru themselves decided to upgrade the wiring.

Because of this upgrade by the factory, the results of the grounding modification on a new Subaru are minor in comparison of the grounding on older Subaru's. There's 3 different revisions of Legacy B4 twin turbo's that we've got on hand, and the results of the mod between the A and B revision compared to the D revision vary wildly. It has a large effect on the A and B revision models, very little on the D (no C available for testing).

If the grounding modification *does* have a large effect, it's because the factory system isn't doing it's job, and that can be from a variety of causes - old age is always a major factor. A poor connection at one point in the system may or may not effect things. The grounding mod will help this point, but you could probably do away with the grounding mod by simply cleaning up all your current grounding connections and making sure they are properly tightened down. Of course, there's a lot of wires under there.. ;)

The reason it's could be snake oil for some people is simple - it is, for their cars. It's not a 100% guaranteed-to-work modification, since it's simply helping an already present system that may actually be doing it's job, especially with the new WRX's and other Subaru's with their beefed-up factory systems.

And the point isn't that you are gaining something over any other stock WRX with this modification - if they are just fine from the factory, you are simply bringing your car up to within standard operating parameters.

OTOH, if you own a older GC8 WRX or STi, twin-turbo Legacy, Lancer Evolution and such, it may have major benefits mainly because of the age of these vehicles. Of course, the major benefit is to bring it up to spec output, but when you've got an older car, that's good enough!

Cheers,

Paul Hansen

Informative, logical, non-confrontational, and well written.

Nice post, Paul.

Well, if this is snake oil, then explain the difference in voltage? For some that say this mod was junk, was your car running fine before the mod? then what difference did you expect to feel? This is in no way a HP add mod.

Oh well :rolleyes:
For some it will work, and some it won't....

Good luck to all...

Frank

I own a 94 WRX GC8 you think it would be better to clean up the grounds or just do a build it yourself ground kit and redo it? I refuse to pay used $50 and new up to $120 do earth this thing. Just wondering I have heard it works and it doesnt work so much my head spins. From what I gather I should just wire brush the grounds and put some anticorrosive chemical on the terminals.

I will have to check it out man when I can catch you around.

my grounding wire kit cost me $10


Jumper Cables
Electrical wiring kit

shirokuma - EXCELLENT post! That is probably the one that best sums up what I have read.

Unless you take the time (like some people have ACTUALLY DONE on this forum) and your little volt meter and SEE what state your current grounds are, and THEN try the grounding mod, and SEE if there is a difference, doing this is going to be a subjective thing. If it works for you, by golly, DO IT! Let's put it this way, buy the cheap wires and connectors, get them in cool colors, so at least it dresses up the engine bay a little bit, and it most CERTAINLY can't hurt anything - doesn't weigh enough to be a concern, won't "cause problems" with other things, is easy to do, etc...

Like I said, just DO NOT spend the money on those $80+ earthing kits - THAT would be dumb!!

okay, I nominate shirokuma's post to be a sticky. It was VERY well written, informative, non-judgemental, un-opinionated, and more useful than some of the other "grounding mod" posts that have littered this board.

shadowcat

Thanks everybody. I always feel a certain responsibility to post on this. I and the rest of the apexjapan.com crew didn't discover this modification - the Legacy B4 club in Japan did - but we may have inadvertantly been the ones to first promote it to i-club.

We've spent a lot of time researching it, at least in our own humble and not terribly proficient way. Club Legacy magazine in Japan covered it extensively and I've used their information as a base to do our own hands-on experimentation.

We think we've narrowed down the start to this all, also. It looks like an audiophile discovered the side effects of grounding when he or she was upgrading the wiring and grounding on their audio system in their Legacy B4. When the B4 came out, one of the most noteworthy features (besides the twin-turbo, of course :) ) was a $500 MacIntosh audio system option - a very decent setup, specially done from the factory with extra sound deadening for even better effect. When it came out, quite a few audiophiles jumped on that, and then decided to clean up the sounds system even more. The rest, as they say, is history.

But that was on the early revisions of the Legacy, and since either the C or D revision, Subaru beefed up the grounding on their own (well, there was some input from outside sources that got them to look into it). We noticed when we first test drove the GD-series "New Age" STi that they had upgraded the grounding on that vehicle. I haven't seen an American GD WRX turbo personally, but I've got more than a strong notion that it has the upgraded wiring also, given the time of it's introduction, and since nobody has complained about a real lumpy idle (A and B revision Legacy B4 has the most lumpy idle pre-wiring mod).

Cheers,

Paul Hansen

Bump - push for adding shirokuma's post to the FAQ!!!

I agree that Paul's synopsis is excellent. A friend whose a EE (and long time car nut, and audiophile) had a couple of things to say when I asked him about it...
a - Proper grounding is one of the easiest things to lose track of or overlook in electrical design

b - The mod my "work" even if there's no visible or easily measurable difference, e.g., the voltage diff mentioned above.
c - The 2 ground points at the front corners of the WRX intake manifold are cases in point: the driver's side grounds the individual spark plug coils; the passenger side grounds the shielding for several of the engine sensors (I forget which; it's easily tracked through the factory wiring manual.)

If the coils aren't sufficiently grounded you can obviously get erratic or weak spark. If the sensor shielding isn't properly grounded you could get a variety of subtle effects, depeding on the amount of interference available and its characterisitics Unless you were looking at these specific points, with the right instrumentation, you'd never "see" the beneficial effect.

d - Don't daisy chain the added grounds. E.g., don't run a new wire from the passenger side manifold ground to the driver's side, and then tie that to the body ground by the battery. Run individual wires from each of the manifold grounds to the body ground.

e - Another thread on this topic mentioned that someone has measured a lot of noise being fed back into the ground system from the alternator. While this might not make it out of the engine system enough to affect audio, it could easily affect such sensitive areas as the shielding mentioned above.

Grounding the case of the alternator is easy, and certainly won't hurt. (I took out one of the long case bolts and put a ring terminal under the head of it.)

f - Regular #10 automotive primary wire should be entirely sufficient...and it's readily available and relatively cheap.

I soldered all my terminals after crimping them (and added solder to the factory ground lugs also), and used a dielectric paste (Loctite) also from the auto parts store.

As many have noted, this is probably a situation for which the "ymmv" phrase was invented :p

Why ground the struts?
I think I am going to do the grounding mod tomorrow (sp) but I am definately not going to ground the struts!

Excellent post. Your friend sounds like he knows his stuff.

GravelRash-

Nice post.....I too am a EE and I agree with everything he said there. I am just confused as to what do ground again? Should separate wires be run from the neg. terminal of the battery to various places around the engine bay?

Ah, yes, there have only been 40/11 variations on the mod posted, haven't there? :lol:

I only grounded 3 locations: the 2 ground bolts at the top front of corners of the intake manifold, and the alternator case. I ran 3 separate wires, terminating all of them at the body ground that's on the fender right next to the battery - and is tied directly to the neg terminal by a short ~#4 wire.

As noted I soldered all the terminals, and used the dielectric paste at all the connection points. I also verified that the fender surface under the battery ground was free of paint (it's not shiny, but rather a dull gray; probably the galvanizing?).

None of the other ground locations made much sense to either of us so I left it at that. (Strut tower to battery ground? Uhhh...there's nothing but one solid sheet of steel between those 2, not to mention that the strut tower isn't exactly an electrical component...;) )

A side note: you can't always rely on a good current path from terminal > bolt head > through bolt > whatever the bolt's threaded into, i.e. the terminal should always be making solid contact with a metal surface under the bolt head at the desired location.

I added some Hella horns recently; tried grounding them to some convenient bolts that hold part of the plastic parts on next to the grill opening. These bolts are threaded directly into part of the front steel structure, no separate nuts. But the bolt head rests against plastic. I couldn't get enough of a current path through there to ground the horns, even after carefully brightening up the underside of the bolt head.

The reason I added this is because those 2 ground points on the intake manifold are relying on a good ground path through the manifold, into the heads, and out to the body via a ground wire to the front "frame" rails, and/or into the block and thence to a different body ground (rear of block to firewall).

But all those pieces are separated by gaskets, especially the intake manifold from the heads. So the only ground path is through the bolts into the heads... (Yes, the steel rings on the head gaskets should provide a path as well.) One would hope there would be sufficient ground path that way, but quite a few people are reporting major improvements from this mod, so...

um did I do that:lol: :lol:
glad to see some good responses
hope I didn't step on anyone's toes

My mods are-
TXS Stage II Unichip
Blitz Axle Back
TXS Turbo-Axle Exhaust
Blitz Intake
Samco Hoses (woop-de-do)

I wasnt really getting any choppy acceleration or anything previously, but I decided to do the grounding mod anyway for the hell of it! Cant be bad right?

I used the HKS Circle Earth system, which looks beatiful. Nice purple wires, and Gold distribution block. Only bad part was getting the main distribution block to stay on my negative terminal! Had to use the small side screw to dig into the negative battery terminal. Then I could clamp it all together and it held.

Anyway, my car feels MEAN now! Accelerates smooth and rapidly! My car sounds so much meaner now though, I just dont understand. Really sounds like it made a difference, and I can even feel a little more power from the Butt-Dyno! Again, my car was in perfect running shape before, but after this mod it just got improved!

I did this too. Went to the local Car audio shop bought 25 feet of cable. Went to Napa and picked up ring terminals. Total cost about $40.00. Oh yeah and a longer screw for my negative terminal. Does the same thing as the distribution block without the extra cost. I hit the firwall behind the IC, the both strut towers, the passenger fenderwall ground point, and the intake manifold. I was a bit skeptical, because I thought the difference I felt was all mental but when my wife said she even noticed a difference I was sold. The ECU will eventually figure it out, so reset it once a month.

Paul

I just performed this little mod 2 days ago .. I have an my03 wrx and after checking scooby mods and the diagrams I found several other places I noticed that the my03 seems to have 1 possibly 2 more grounding points from the harness than the my02 wrx had from the factory. Maybe it was just the angle of the pics .. but it appeared that way to me.

I added the standard $8 worth of wire and ring connnectors and spent about 25 minutes connecting ends and routing wires ... seemed to smooth out the 4200ish hesitation I had prior to the mod .. but I also reset the ECU for the first time ... I agree with most of the others .. its not worth more than maybe $20 worth of wire and connectors ... to each their own

Fej

http://www.5zigen.co.jp/product/proracer/lineup/index.html

I'm bumping this excellent thread (thanks Paul Hansen) with a post about exhaust earthing. I think the idea is to use the entire exhaust (which goes from one end of the car to the other, and comes within centimeters of the spark plug) as a ground.

I like the idea of this mod. It might help keep the exhaust from rusting or falling off of the car even if no power is gained.:)