Most liked posts in thread: Hit a milestone and still making changes.

Problem with the twin charge system is again the S/C, it ends up becoming a bottle neck and limiting your boost potential, that and not alleviating the parasitic loss from driving the pulley off the engine, like turbo only does.

Honestly the only real advantage to twin charging is not losing torque, but with today's tech in turbo chargers, that isn't near as much of an issue as it used to be.

 

Unfortunately I only ended up with 1 day to work on the car this past weekend, so didn't get near as much done as I wanted, but the car is together, and out of the carport, starts and idles perfectly normal.

Only issue is a simple mistake on my part, I neglected to add the intake manifold vacuum into my external vacuum manifold, therefore not enough vacuum for MAP Sensor, BOV, and more importantly for now, the brake servo, so I was only able to drive a block and back.

At idle the cooling system is working perfectly, and it only took 1 Qt to top off. Idled for 20 min, up to 185° fan kicks in, thermostat opens, and right down to 165° .

Sorry, but only a couple of pics:

Here's why I keep the "good" packing foam...



This way the air is forced through either the Radiator or the I/C.





It's always satisfying when the inner fender wells go back in...



Fortunately adding the vacuum line shouldn't require any disassembly and be pretty easy, I will however have to wait a week or so for a piece of tuning hardware I need upgraded, but no big deal, still have those other jobs to finish, plus I want to form some shrouds and covers for additional air flow management under the hood.

Big outdoor project this coming weekend, so I'll just have to work on things when I can.

 

Well, it's been a while since an update.
Everything is moving forward with only minor issues, but nothing more than expected.
The engine movement and radiator hose issue was an easy fix with the flex hose install.

Tuning is coming along well and hopefully won't be long until we can start on the power aspect of things.

I've been driving the car back and forth to work and I'm seeing under bonnet air temps and even intake air temps of only 10-20° over ambient with normal everyday driving, even in the 95° heat, so the I/C setup is working phenomenally.
But I am seeing under bonnet temps in the 150-175° range if sitting idle in traffic or a drive thru for more than a few min., so I'm thinking about some kind of system to help pull air from under the bonnet for those occasions, but again, space is an issue...and while it's probably not absolutely necessary, couldn't hurt if I can come up with something, I'll let everyone know if I do.

I've also added a manual boost controller and temporarily mounted it in the engine compartment, along with the new wastegate I ordered. (I still plan on an electronic controller and gauge so there's no reason to permanently mount this one)
While the new wastegate helped, I was still only seeing 16.5 psi (granted it was only with ¾ throttle in second gear) but again it wasn't what I was looking for, not with this engine, so the boost controller went in.
With the heaviest spring and opened all the way, at ½-¾ throttle in 2nd gear it's giving me about 26.5 lbs, so it's just where I want it to be, and of course it can always be turned down. (Which I may just have to do, since that pull was up a ramp onto the highway, and at 5k rpm the tires broke loose.)

Had a small setback with a minor oil leak at the turbo return fitting, (the first couple of hundred miles always brings out the bugs) causing me to have to replace the blanket due to oil getting into the original one.
Pulled everything apart, and since I had to wait on parts, I also studded the exhaust manifold just to keep everything as secure as possible. While disassembly is simpler than an S/C, it's still a pain so I also replaced the two piece oil return flange and fitting with a billet part that has the fitting machined into the flange, just to alleviate one unnecessary junction point.

With the repair time slowing down the tuning, I have decided to wait on the shifter and BBK install until tuning is done, just don't want to slow things down again unnecessarily.

Next will be the W/M install and the engine cover for rainy weather, plus I still have to do the fire extinguisher brackets.

My other project at the house got more involved than first expected, but it's finally almost done so I can hopefully devote more weekend time to finishing the car at a quicker pace than lately.

Again thanks for reading, and there's only a couple of new pics because of the recent changes not really changing the appearance of things that much.

First to the left is where the AFR and EGT gauge now live:



New wastegate actuator:



Temp Boost controller:



Turbo Blanket and new additional heat shield wrapped under the cowl:



R56 turbo studs and nuts:

 

It's a 2.25 gallon Devil's Own tank, I of course wanted the one that Howerton used to have, but they've been sold out for a while now.
I was going to put it on my seat delete panel behind the drivers seat, but besides being safer than having 2 gallons of methanol sitting right behind me, it's also more convenient to fill. Plus it fits in well enough to have complete battery access without moving or disassembling a thing.

It's absolutely a blast, not to mention a real eye opener to others....

 

Under the bonnet is finally done, decided to take the long way around when doing the I/C horn & take it off, instead of the ole "stuff a rag down it & use a vacuum" trick. I decided to just take the time & remove it, that way there was no chance of getting any metal shavings into the S/C. And while I had it off I also drilled & tapped it for my pre-I/C temp sensor. (was just reading incoming air, pre S/C)

So here' the final results of the engine compartment: (still needs a good cleaning though)

Both sensors in, battery junction box re-mounted.


Nozzles & Lines attached.


Just have to finish the gauges & wiring in the car, and mount the bottle & line.

 

Of course another woulda, shoulda, coulda w/e, either the weather sux, or it's so nice you gotta do something else. (70*+ on Sun. so just had to take the bike out....at least that's what I was "told" anyway.)

But, did get all the gauges in & all the wiring done, except for the push buttons, (gonna take a little more research for what I'm trying to do), also got the bottle mounting board, cut and ready for fabric. (gonna just mount everything to a board so that the whole thing can be taken out for easy battery access.) I'll get the fabric this week.
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Complete shot of the finished dash & gauge setup.


Found something else to do with those plugs, if you have the craven cups & don't like the backs left open, the plugs I used give a pretty clean finished look on the back also, here's the difference.

 

Steering wheel project is done & ready for install, after I got the wheel I was able to make my pattern & fab up my push button panel, here's some pic's of it's progression:
(my only regret is that I don't have any "real" metal working tools, I just wish some of the lines & corners were more symmetrical)

The wheel itself.


Button panel pattern & fab work.


Finished product.


Now all I have to do is wait for the hub to get here, it's supposed to be available 01/31 to ship, once it gets here I need to sort out the wiring for the buttons & then the rest of the install is pretty straight forward.

The black butrons in the panel are simply replacements for the factory cruise & radio controls, the red buttons on the wheel itself are (left) Nitrous & (right) Horn.

 

Well, bad news all.

The motor finally faded on me and it's going to be a few months until I'll have enough for the rebuild. (Going all out so I'm looking in the neighbor hood of 6-7k)

Here's the way it went, couple of weeks back I noticed a "very slight" miss or flutter if you will in the exhaust note when the car was idling, it was barely noticable and started right around the time I was trying to find the right point for the Nitrous WOT pedal wiring, and in that process the Management Units dumped some fuel into the I/C so I assumed that the miss was from this, just thought it over fueled a couple of time @ start uo & I fouled a plug or two, because the car seemed to run just fine, just sounded a little off at idle and it wasn't wanting to fire off on the first try when it was warm

Well apparently it was more serious, I spent all of last week doing your basic trouble shooting, plugs, wires stuff like that. Plugs did help, but not for long. So when it started acting up again I pulled the plugs & did a compression check & #1 was really low, so without pulling it apart I'm figuring I burnt a valve there somehow, the reason I say this is that nothing else seems amiss, still didn't make any noise or pass any oil by the rings from what I can tell, as far as I can tell the Crank & bearings are just fine, no noise, no drop in oil pressure, nothing.

So, I know some of you are thinking, why not just re-do the head & go with it, honestly, it would prob. just be what I think would be a very temporary fix & not worth the effort, here's why.

When I parked the car it had 211,975 on it, and even though we did rings & rod bearings at 80,000, all we did was a bead clean on the cylinder walls nothing more, so all the tollerences & clearances were still factory spec.. So back when I was still playing with my Cam issues and only using the 70mm pulley (basiclly this time last year at about 185,000) I had run a compression test and while it was considerably lower than it should be (125 ft/lb across the deck) everything was still working well enough, so I just went for it. (This, and early tuning issues was why I never posted my actual dyno #'s from the the Sprintex project, the #'s were lower than they would have been with proper compression & I didn't want the Peanut Gallery jumping on the band wagon & blaming the S/C, hell all things considering, compression & all I was really happy with 221whp on a DynoJet, (64mm pulley) but I just didn't want to deal with it/them) Anyway, now with 211,000 even though #1 is shot and down to 60 ft/lbs the rest are all down to 110 ft/lbs, there just plain ole Wore Out, the wild thing is, as I said earlier, even at that from what I can see, there still not passing oil, these damn motors really are put together well! And even with it the way it is, the damn thing would still break the tires loose @ 3500 in first gear, just by standing on it, it did it just before I parked it...

Oh, almost forgot...NO, I never even got to spray it once!, really sucked, the final parts arrived Mon. the last day I drove the car....:argh: I just wish I didn't need this block for the rebuild, I'd clean the plugs & Shoot it with a 250 shot just to see what happens... :lol: But no use crying about it now, and it might even be a blessing, would have really sucked having this happen right after a couple of sprays & thinking that the Nitrous was to blame, at least now I know it had nothing to do with it and am not affraid of using it on the new motor.

And it would have really sucked having this happen @ MOTD and having to get the car 500 miles back to the house. BTW, I'll still be there, Cooking Supplies, Giant Mug & all, not missing it car or not.

Thats about it, new motor will be built specificlly for Big Boost & The Bottle, I'll keep everything updated as it progresses but will prob. be sometime in June, Between the built short block & new head, it's just going to take a while to get the funds together, I'm in the process of getting a new DD right now to save me money on my everyday commute so hopefully everything will go according to plan.

Later all, any questions, fire away, I'm defenitely not going anywhere, I love this stuff!

 

NP, just come by for lunch one day.

 

My first Sprintex actually "worked" well, but it did have the oil seal problem, this one was just one of the bad ones from back then. Honestly it was just a "gift" that I shouldn't have even gotten, so between that and me sitting on it for three years, I simply couldn't get that upset.

I almost considered a new, second gen unit, simply for ease of getting the car back on the road, the second gen units have been much better, but I just couldn't see spending what it would take, and not upgrading the power level to have much more than I already had, so between that and those being my original plan, just seemed the right way to go.