Winter Project is Complete

Now that my “little” winter project is done I figured I would share some of the details, the progress pictures and results.

The project began as a replacement of shorty headers that were starting to rust out, removal of my meth injection kit and change of my front mount air-to-air IC with a water-to-air unit. The project ended up with all of that plus new supercharger with the associated all new intake tube, intake plenum, discharge plenum, IC tubes, return plenum, extensive mods to the intake to make this all work, electric water pump, new radiator, new fuel injectors (twice since I discovered that 80s were to small), new fuel rails, relocated the alternator slightly and got rid of the big clunky alternator bracket, new 3” dual exhaust that dumps out in front of the rear tires and a host of other small supporting mods along the way. I’ve been dabbling in fabricating various parts for a few years but with fabricating everything except the new fuel rails myself (thank Ken for help with the rails) this project was a real challenge.

The picture with the old polished blower is my 1.7L AR and front mount IC.


This picture with the new black blower is the huge new 2.6L Kenne Bell.

First thing I did was look at fitting the blower on top of the motor. The new blower is significantly longer than the 1.7L and I wanted a massive inlet plenum so I needed to make up a lot of space. I had previously modified the rear of the lower intake to fit a big inlet plenum on the 1.7, those mods included extending the air inlet on the intake back towards the firewall about 3” and making some percussion tweaks to the firewall to make even more room behind the motor but even with the extra length in the rear the new blower still extended about 3” further towards the front than the 1.7”. I needed a shorter drive (70mm) for the blower and I needed to delete the thermostat housing and rework the water passage connections.

Looks awesome Brian. Are the numbers in you signature with or without methanol injection and what fuel are you running now? Wish smog laws weren't so crazy in Cali

Originally an electric water pump was not part of my plan but as I was making the mods so the blower could fit going the remote water pump route just seemed to make sense. In the pics you can see the modifications made to the lower intake, the adapter plate for the water pump, the new radiator and the radiator mounted electric water pump. The fittings on the intake are -12AN and the fittings on the adapter plate are -16AN, I originally had the fitting threaded into the 3/8” thick adapter plate but I found the threads did not seal well and I had to take it all apart and weld those on. The pump is a Meziere WP362 rated at 55gpm and I thought it was pretty cool how it mounted on the radiator. I also decided not to have a mechanical thermostat and went with an electronic PCM pump and fan controller. This controller runs the water pump at about 15% when dead cold then ramps the pump up to 100% based on input from a temperature sensor, it also controls the fan in a similar manner. One nice added feature of the controller is a switch I mounted on the dash from which I can turn on both the pump and fan at 100% for some quick cooling in the pits.

Once I was confident the blower it I worked on the three plenums and the IC tubes. The inlet plenum was by far the most difficult since it has a lot of functions, TB mount, mount to blower, secure blower to motor, bypass valve, etc. The plate that attaches to the blower and TB is one piece of 3/8” AL and the bottom is also 3/8”, I made these beefy since they were the structural parts, the rest is 3/16” and 1/8”. The bottom was a little tricky since the bottom of the blower was about ¾” below the hard connection to the lower intake so I needed to incorporate a funky little step in the bottom plate, and the transition from the big box behind the blower to the area over the fuel lines and valve covers to the TB took some detailed coordination. The unit looks like a box on the outside but I cut some radiuses out of 4” tubing and welding them into the square corners to help with flow. The plenum attaches to the blower via bolts that are installed though access holes with plugs in the back of the plenum, kind of a ~~~~ but hopefully I won’t be doing it too often. I think the piece is very functional but lacks some of the sexy aesthetics of the cast inlets, maybe I need to do something to dress up the big flat area on top.

The blower top plenum and return plenum were fabricated out of heavily modified 3” cast aluminum elbows…..I really like the way these turned out.

At this point in the project I was cruising along….everything was fitting nice and I was feeling pretty good about the quality of the parts I was making then I got to the fuel rails. I had found these really sexy stainless steel injector cups, ½” stainless tubing for fuel rail, and weld in adapter fittings for -6 & -8an to the tubing…..the grand plan was to weld it all together and have nice slick rails that were much less bulky than the extruded aluminum options. Talk about an epic failure…..TIG welding the stainless was just simply beyond my abilities, I could get decent “looking” welds but they leaked under pressure and when I went back with the welder to touch up the leaks everything just cracked. After about 2 weeks of pulling my hair out I gave up and Ken Wagner helped me get a set of extruded aluminum rails machined. These rails were physically quite a bit bulkier than the stainless rails I had mocked up with so some rework was required but in the end it all worked out OK.

I still needed to plumb up the water tank and pump for the new IC and I also decided to change my old 16gal fuel cell that hung under the trunk to a 5 gallon cell in the trunk next to the water tank. The water tank and fuel cell were custom ordered from Dad’s Custom Tanks. The guy was very helpful, allowed me to customize fitting and configurations with no problem and the prices I thought were very reasonable for the level of service and quality of product they delivered. I mounted the fuel cell and water tank in the trunk with a Meziere WP136 water pump and ran the -12an push-loc hoses from the trunk, under the back seat then out and along the drive side frame rail, up into the front wheel well the to the IC. All that stuff went really smoothly and looks decent. The pump is controlled by a switch on the dash with a control relay under the trunk behind the drivers rear tire.


http://www.sccoa.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=56067&d=1363007925

http://www.sccoa.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=56068&d=1363007925

http://www.sccoa.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=56066&d=1363007925

Next was the headers and exhaust. Headers are Kooks long tube stainless that Bill Evanoff was great about helping me custom order. I got them with 1-7/8” primary tubes, 3” slip on collectors, v-band clamps on the collectors, EGT bungs on all the primaries and two O2 bungs on each collector. I wrapped the headers with lava wrap and they fit pretty well but clearances are really tight maybe 1/8” in one area, the wrap actually just touches the frame rail at that spot but I think it was ok. The side exit exhaust was next it used the typical Magnaflow dual 3” dual 3” out center muffler and two super turbo mufflers. The hardest part of the setup was I wanted to be able to have removable cats with straight pipes in their place. Getting all those flanges to line up right was finicky but I liked the way it came out. I wasn’t sure I liked the looks of the dumps in front the rear wheels but the look is growing on me.

http://www.sccoa.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=56242&d=1364222396

After the car was running I needed to make some changes. The blower was making HUGE amounts of boost (off the gauge) with a 3.5” blower pulley, 10% jackshaft, and stock crank pulley. I swapped out the jackshaft and got it to settle in at about 26psi, then I discovered that the brand new 80# injectors were too small so I had to swap them out with 95s and my water pump adapter plate leaked so I pulled that off and welded the fittings on. Chased lots of little things but all and all it was working OK, except that I couldn’t get the tune adjusted so it would idle.

Last weekend I hauled it to Ohio to let Dave Dalke work his magic on it. After some idle and street tuning we went to the dyno and fine tuned things until we wound up pulling 514rwhp, 460rwtq at 6400rpm we had about 23deg of timing in it, made between 25 & 26psi boost the entire pull and power was still climbing at 6400rpm when we stopped. We decided to keep the tune safe and give me a chance to figure these new power levels out at the track before really pushing things.

The blower in currently pulley’d for the vary minimum boost so I know I’ve got boost in reserve, we never reached MBT with the timing so I’m sure there is more power to be had with more timing and we never reached peak power so I’m sure with more rpm there is more power to be had.

All in All I’m very happy with the car and itching to get to the track.



Of course after all this typing I forgot the dang dyno sheet at home!!!!

SCrazy said:

I had previously modified the rear of the lower intake to fit a big inlet plenum on the 1.7, those mods included extending the air inlet on the intake back towards the firewall about 3” and making some percussion tweaks to the firewall to make even more room behind the motor

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What about your wipers?

edit: fix the 414 typo in the above post.

Kurt K said:

What about your wipers?

edit: fix the 414 typo in the above post.

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Don't need no stinkin' wipers.

thanks for the heads up on the typo

SCrazy said:

Don't need no stinkin' wipers.

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I thought your car was still a street car

Kurt K said:

I thought your car was still a street car

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Riiiiiiight!! Wink, wink

Looks like you are giving the blower crowd something to shoot for. Look forward to lining up next to you at the shootout Nice job

Ken

Wow! You was busy.

Sweet work Brian, I wish I had your skills...............and pocket book..............

SCDan35thANV said:

Looks awesome Brian. Are the numbers in you signature with or without methanol injection and what fuel are you running now? Wish smog laws weren't so crazy in Cali

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I scrapped the meth injection and replaced it with the water air IC, I discovered last fall that the meth injection while doing a great job with my IATs was killing my 60' times.

I'm running straight MS-109 for fuel.

nickleman60 said:

Sweet work Brian, I wish I had your skills...............and pocket book..............

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The $$ on this thing definitely got way out of control. I'll be honest I can't be certain what the total project cost was but it was somewhere around $6,500 and that of course was doing all the fabrication myself. There were more than a few Monday's where I placed a $300 order to Jegs for miscellaneous parts. I can't imagine what it would have cost to have the work done in a shop.

I do know this......whatever Dalke was charging for kits he had to be working for pennies on the hour. Building this took incredible amounts of time.

Very impressive Brian ! Looking forward to seeing how much higher it yanks the front wheels off the ground with all this extra power.

David