Anyway, enough moaning. Here are some pictures of the very few things I HAVE been doing recently in the few spare minutes I get to nip out to the garage.
First up, my trusty engine trolley has been given a facelift:
Looks technical, doesn't it?
Regular readers will remember it's untimely death here:
Seeing as I'm cheap, rather than getting a whole new board in 18mm OSB, I simply screwed a few offcuts onto the broken board to beef it up again
Good as new, I'm sure you'll agree!
I've also had another play around with turbo position after finding out a few things on my first test fit of the engine.
I HAD setup the turbo much like Bill does on his builds with the Nortech manifold and downpipe, with the turbo at a slight angle to the engine:
Not much, but you can see it here in the angle between cam cover and the exhaust v band face:
I've now tweaked it to sit basicaly square, like so:
The reason being, where Mark has made the top of my downpipe in 4", it sits very close to the runner on cylinder 1. With the turbo at a slight angle, this sat even closer, so I had to rotate the bottom of the downpipe backwards to gain some room. this then left the bottom part VERY close to the bulkhead, which clearly wasn't ideal at all.
Having now spun the turbo slightly on the manifold, the downpipe can run vertically downwards, clearing the manifold runner, and also gaining around 15mm of room at the bottom. Win win!
The heater pipes still fit very neatly around the inlet after some mild fettling too. I've now used the plunge cutter and removed the second small section of hard pipe on the heater line so make way for my new silicon replacement seen sticking up here on the right, yet to be trimmed down.
Happy that everything now sat nicely, I reclocked the turbo core to ensure the oil drain and water feed sat nicely around the collector, and folded back down the lock tabs on the hotside.
Just for a laugh, I offered the 102mm elbow onto the turbo (now that it's FINALLY arrived), and also stuck my Blox Racing 4" velocity stack filter on the end
And finally, most of my exhaust stuff has now arrived too!
The bends, straight pipe, and stock cat all came from Rich, a good friend of Bills who builds Tony Hutchings TT race car. I've got a stock cat so that I can make up a replaceable centre section with a cat in it for 'road use'
I've also bought all new stainless 3" v bands for the system too, and as I want it to be fully removable in situ, I've bought an additional 2" v band also so the wastegate pipe can be removed from the downpipe close to the DP, meaning I SHOULD be able to slide it up into place without removing anything else.
I'm trying to make it so that everything is as serviceable as possible on the car, to cover all eventualities in the future.
Slowly but surely, it's getting there!
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