Some longer updates and edu-ma-cational stuff this time. Bear with me or choose to ignore.
First, I've been dealing with high oil temperatures for a while now-- at least a year and a half-- and I've tried numerous things to solve it but I'm 99.9% positive it's fixed now. The temp wasn't crazy, scary high, but the behavior changed which was my concern. Originally, it took some serious beating to get the temp over 70 C on the stock gauge but that changed at some point and it was going over 70 C with ease-- easily hitting 80 or 90 with just easy, city driving on hot days. I'd noticed some oil and dirt on the valve cover around the oil cap so I replaced the oil cap with a $17 unit from eBay, only intending to fix that little annoyance but that's what ended up fixing the oil temp too! My guess is the seal on the original stocker was broken and was causing a lean condition, affecting oil pressure, or some other wizardry-- I don't really care as long as it's fixed! I didn't make any other changes to change the behavior so it could have only been the oil cap. I never would've guessed, obviously.
Second, I got the car aligned at MAP and I gotta say I'm very pleased and would go there again without hesitance. I wasn't sure about going there at first, but I figured they've very likely aligned a few racecars and done numerous other cars to be well-practiced, plus they're only 20 minutes from my house, and I like going to a shop where I can connect to Wifi and get some work done, as opposed to taking a half-day of vacation just for an alignment-- I'll pay a bit more for things like that.
The experience was impressive; more impressive and detailed than I've had at other shops. They asked how much I weigh and added that weight to the driver's seat area (I've never had that asked or done before), they even asked what tire pressures I usually run to consider that factor as well. The printout of my results is below and this shows their detail as well: every measurement is carried to the hundredth (showing just to the tenth can make things look better) and, even so, those hundredths are very, very close-- I couldn't really ask for any closer. The greatest difference (which is still less than a tenth) is in the caster which isn't "directly" adjustable anyway; all others are within three-hundredths.
The top number is caster which shows I gained 1.5 degrees over stock with the Vorshlag plates. I know I've mentioned caster a few times in this thread but never explained it, so a really quick explanation is that, on the Evo, more positive caster is more better. To get to the point where too much caster is a bad thing on these cars, you have to do some cutting of the strut mount area. Mitsu built in another degree of positive caster on the 10's which shows some validity to adding more-- the 10's come from the factory with 4.5 degrees of caster compared to 3.5 degrees on 8's and 9's.
Vorshlag plates add caster without allowing adjustment of it. Ciro Design Racing plates are adjustable to add caster and are compatible with most struts (I wanna say even stock struts) and coilovers; Rick, the owner, will work with you identify compatibility and what's needed. I believe K-Mac also offer adjustable caster but are spendy, hard to find, and I've heard of reliability issues. I believe Whiteline had some plates (at some point, not sure if they still do) which added caster; not sure of others off the top of my head.
Okay, some progressively more techy explanations (as I understand them; anyone can feel free to jump in and adjust, correct, or clarify). On McPherson strut front suspensions like the Evo, caster is the angle from the top of the front strut mounting point through the lower ball joint, down to the ground. I mostly mention that because the Vorshlag plates add more caster by moving the top of the strut further back (closer to the windshield/cabin). Additional positive caster improves traction throughout the whole turn, improves turn-in, gives a bit more weight to the steering, and causes a centering effect which improves straight-line stability. The reason for better traction through the whole turn, which is my main goal, is that caster causes the outside wheel to gain camber (go more negative) in a turn, which is when you need camber most. If that wasn't techy enough, McPherson strut suspensions don't gain camber (go more negative) in a turn-- and I want to say some designs might even go more positive but I'm not sure-- so, to a point, front camber is essentially aiming to match/ compensate for roll angle. For an illustrative example, not necessarily exact numbers, -3.0 degrees of static camber (which is how the car is aligned) could result in a "flat" tire contact patch (0 degrees of dynamic camber; the wheel and tire are straight up and down) when the roll angle is 3 degrees in a turn. As the car rolls more than 3 degrees, the dynamic camber continues to go more positive and therefore make the contact patch smaller (in this example, 4 degrees of roll would result in +1 degree of dynamic camber, meaning the inside of the tire isn't making contact). Adding caster and therefore causing camber gain, changes that equation.
All of that is why my current -3.5 degrees of static front camber will behave differently than the -3.0 degrees I had last year with less caster. With more caster, you can run less static camber but have the same amount of dynamic camber in a turn which is why I'll test and tune.
Some more in-depth, but techy, resources on caster:
http://mitsubishi-club.ge/topic701.html
http://www.motoiq.com/MagazineArticl...and-Scrub.aspx