Johnspin delivered his car to me a while back, for a turbo swap (straight swap, honest mate) and a trial inlet manifold. Took me a while to get around to it with the house and garage projects going on at the same time. Anyway. First off I tried up the inlet manifold.
Well, fuck. Obviously the notion of a tape measure was lost in the design LMAO. I took it off and hoofed it back in the boot. You wont see it again as in the meantime Lee A made >300hp on the OE inlet so we decided to sack it off and come back to it when the Turbo was fitted and subsequently the Adaptronic.
Next job was to swap in the TXi throttle body. Easy right? No. The weaker return springs on these suck ass, so I stripped the linkage apart and fitted the Turbo spring to the TXi body. Still not that simple though as the linkage fouled and didnt fully return right, which cost me an hour or two of messing about making small adjustments later down the line.
I whipped the turbo off, and discovered the T34 on there has the OE manifold fitting with the offset lump. I hoped it hadn’t, but still. Tough, gotta get on with it.
Decided the manifold would have to have the flange machined flat, and for that it needed to come off. You know what comes next, don’t you.
Yep, SFS hose falls apart and a few studs snap. Arse. This, coupled with the arrival with Johnspin of the uprated valve springs meant that the “turbo swap” turned into head-off-rebuild-time :dy:
Fast forward a few weeks and I pick the bits up. The head has been vapour blasted, broken studs drilled and helicoiled, resurfaced, valve springs fitted and valves lapped back in.
The rocker cover was vapour blasted and the crankcase breather plate was drilled off its press fit mounts, the filter was cleaned out and it was refitted with tapped screws. This I had done to try and help protect the GTX Turbo going on, and old shit thats floating about in there would pose a risk and I can’t mitigate that any other way.
I had this done on my own 12v rocker cover too. I rubbed WD40 into the rocker cover to help resist corrosion in the future and left it raw finish, as I think it looks ace.
Then the associated ancilliries, also vapour blasted.
In prep for the new Turbo, which would not fit ANY of the bastard fittings, water, oil, nothing, I had bought some new bits for the oil line. An M18 to AN4 converter from Germany, to convert the block oil feed to AN4.
I’d had to import the water fittings from the US as nothing over here seemed to suit, really. Cost mose and shipping took aaaaaaaaaages but it was worth it for the water fittings alone which are shaped and extended to exit away from the really hot bits. The oil return was also different to standard journal garrett units so I had that sent with the water fittings, you can kinda bodge the OE one to fit apparently but with a £1200 turbo thats not mine, I wasn’t rollin’ no dice!
Obviously now the OE Turbo support wasn’t going to fit. Hell, it didnt fit before and wasn’t fitted. Probably contributed to the cracked manifold to be fair. Decided to see if I could make something. Hacked up the OE support bar, to beand it back so it sat further out.
Everything else back in the engine bay, had more fecking about with the downpipe to get the right angle for the centre joint. Made a decent job of that but on the way to EFI Parts the local BP has a rude speed bump that clobbered the U-Clamp holding the support and broke it, so the centre section dropped a bit and it started blowing wasn’t happy about that! Asked Scoff to fit a new clamp if he had one.
Oh and while I was in there, I moved the fan switch module from the tophose to the bottomhose of the rad, rewired the whole loom as it was scrappy and didnt work on auto (was a switch inside the car. Once it was all working Johnspin professed the desire to have a manual override too so I reconnected the switch in the car as a switched earth off the back of relay pin 2. It’s now auto-with-manual-override. This is OK though as I can repurpose the override in the future to trigger off one of the Adaptronic aux-outputs.
Soldered the loom up, spiral wrapped it and added the all-important fuse for main power, which I took from the OE fan feed instead of having wires running over the battery like it was before. I thought it looked scrappy.
Didn’t take any pics of the finished article after all that! Fail! Anyway, It was run up and head bolts retorqued, valve clearences set, I dropped the prop off and it’s now at EFI Parts after a hundred or so miles running around to make sure there are no issues and settle the coolant level cos the fricking SFS bleed nipples are all fucked :dy:
It’s having a triggerwheel and wasted spark conversion, with the reprofiled cam and springs, decent exhaust manifold and turbo it should be capable of pushing 270, 280 or more but I asked Scoff to be careful as it’s still on an OE bottom end (Liners, pistons, rods). We will know in the next 10 days I guess I also don’t know how the paddle clutch with OE cover will handle torque, so again, err on the side of caution.
…I know this only really shows the exceptional stuff to the norm, I figured the usual processes and procedures were a bit samey Obviously it got new belts, coolant, oil (for running up and then final oil change) and blah blah blah.
Looking good, I can’t see half the pics though?
I’ve come up with a better solution to the txi tb for adaptronic users but still waiting on the prototypes from the engineers and trial it myself.
What’s the exhaust manifold, another fbi one?
I don’t think the web server can keep up with the requests. If you refresh the page, more of the images show up (sometimes). I think it’s not serving them up in time or something.
wasn’t happy about that! Asked Scoff to fit a new clamp if he had one.
