First time GT Turbo owner

[Chesney84]

Also bought a used but mint Forge twin core intercooler. The only issue is that it had a slight leak from around both lower locating posts. These were welded then I re-pressure tested it and straightened out a few fins on the core. Held pressure so gave it a good autosol. This will eventually, when fitted, have proper ducting/ cold air feed to it, and possibly a fan fitted behind it.


Have decided I'm going to make hard aluminium boost pipes from the turbo to the intercooler and from the intercooler to the carb top. These will be fitted at all four junctions with wiggins sleeves and clamps on o-rings. I'm going to rotate the elbow to make the run from the intercooler to the carb as short as possible to minimise heat soak on the pipe. My thinking being that the shorter and hard boost pipes make the boost crisper by taking away the damping effect the silicone boost hoses add when they pant and expand on boost.


Will be getting some ends turned up and order some aluminium tube to start mocking and scheming it up.

[Chesney84]

Also ordered a trigger wheel, bracket and sensor from EFI parts for the No-Diz conversion, already have a 3-Bar Map sensor, water temp sensor and intake temp sensor. Just slowly building up my parts.


Also bought off a chap called Chris from the Facebook page a Prima Racing bottom pulley. Iwill need to scheme up a way to allow the tigger wheel, the pulley and the cast hub to all locate on each other to prevent them rotating and unclocking over time. Will need to turn up some spacers as well to space out of the bracket and sensor as the Prima pulley is slightly thicker than the original pulley meaning the trigger wheel will be out of alignment with the sensor.


I have also fitted a Forge boost controller to the "5" and wound up the boost a little and checked with an AFR meter. Still running rich throughout the rev-range at 14 psi. Give me enough of an increase to keep me entertained whilst I'm waiting to build this engine. Also bought another TDC sensor to fit to the 5. Steve made an interim loom, meaning that when this is fitted it switches the wires around. This means I can fit it/ remove it as and when I please to increase, decrease ignition advance. Will try and get round to fitting it this weekend.

[Chesney84]

And finally, for now at least, I bought myself a Carburetor so I can start mocking up my R21 Turbo elbow:


Work required on this is an adaptor plate which will be drawn up this coming week, this will bolt to the carb which in turn the elbow to bolt to. This will rotate the elbow through 90 degrees towards the LHS of the car, with a short alloy boost hose from the Forge intercooler. I will try to incorporate a funnel/ venturi shape to encourage airflow through the carb. The carb will have the choke flap removed with the flat section the flap used to locate against machined out. Also between the base of the carb and the inlet manifold I will be machining up a insulating Phenolic plate. This will aid in reducing heat transfer between the inlet manifold and carb to help (albeit it in a small way) keep the fuel in the carb a little cooler by reducing some of the heat conduction between the two.


I will be having a boss machined and then fitted to the spare port in the elbow for the water-meth injector. The two spare ports on the reverse of the elbow will be utilised for an intake temp sensor and the usual take off from the RHS of the carb top.

[michael tierney]

did you check for bonnet clearance.....there isnt much!

[Chesney84]

Will bring some plasticine home from work tomorrow and check the height with the bonnet closed on the forge lobster I have fitted by comparison to this. It will be ‘effin close, but looking at the two there didn’t seem to be much between them in total height! If needs be I’ll drop the insulating plate between the carb and manifold!

[Chesney84]

Hey up!

So its been a while since I last posted on here. Life got in the way of progress on the 5 somewhat last year, I got divorced and found myself in a position where I needed to prioritise my expenditure - not least to cover solicitors bills but also to remortgage the property. However, 2019 is so far looking more positive, everything is now pretty much resolved and amicable, and best of all I managed to keep hold of the 5!

It was good to meet so many of the members at Santa Pod last year, put some faces to the names/avatars on here and get advice and chat shit whilst getting more and more inebriated!

Many will have read my posts in this thread and noticed I was forever changing my mind on the spec of my engine build, going back and forth with different states of tune etc. I was toying with the idea originally of keeping both the carb and Renix unit but lightly upgrading the rest of the engine and T2 turbo, then I decided to go for electronic ignition, T25 turbo and but still staying with the carb.

However, I have now decided to go balls deep and fully commit to a serious engine build to produce serious power. The spec below is what I’m working to, but these are just the big ticket items that are key to this build. Most components under the bonnet will be rebuilt or replaced throughout the build and it is likely it will be another year from now before its completed due to funding etc. I’d like to think by Summer 2020 this is the engine will be in my 5.

Anyway, final specification of my build:

Original C1J block and cylinder head
77mm Wossner Pistons - New capacity 1.434cc
Westwood Ductile Liners 77mm bore
Raised compression ratio to 8:1
Garrett GT2256 Turbo
Custom manifold and down pipe to suit turbo
Fuel injection manifold courtesy of Michael Tierney
Adaptronic ECU
Piper 285 camshaft reprofile
AEM water methanol injection
PWR barrel water to air charge cooler kit

Feel free to pick holes, make suggestions, offer advice and troll as you so wish...

Oh and my GT22 turbo is being delivered tomorrow so will endeavour to post some photos of it uploaded asap!

[Chesney84]

So today I took delivery of another part of my engine build jigsaw- my Garrett GT22 turbo. The spec of the turbo is as follows:

0.37A/R turbine housing
42mm exducer ~ 25% larger than the stock T2
Internal wastegated T3 flange

0.61A/R Compressor housing
40mm inducer ~ 15% larger than the stock T2
80mm ported anti-surge inlet

Should be good for the power levels I'm aiming for with some in reserve and is capable of over 2 bar of boost.

Left to right below is GT22, T25 and T2 in order to get a sense of scale:


Next photo is of the T25 compressor housing placed onto the GT22:


And finally direct comparison of GT22 and T2 side by side:

[Chesney84]

Some close up photos from when I got home tonight









Really looking forward to start picking up and moving this build forward now that things have settled down a bit!

[Matt Cole]

Excellent this is! Really interested in the CC increase to see what difference it makes overall.

[Chesney84]

Unfortunately I don't think I'll ever know what the impact going 1mm larger in bore will have in terms of the overall performance because the rest of the engine spec will be radically different. However, even if its negligible any increase in capacity can only help towards power - like the old saying "theres no replacement for displacement!"

[Chesney84]

So whilst I was on my spending sabbatical I thought I'd make a start on some of the stuff that needed to be done but wouldn't cost me much - starting off with mocking up a baffled sump kit.
I know these are readily available quite cheaply but I have access to sheet metal, welders, flypress' and guillotines so thought I'd give it a go myself. Here it is at mock up stage:





This is the kit fully cut, just need to get the slots machined in for the rubber baffles then I can fold and tack it together and make some tabs with captive nuts to bolt it into the sump.



Aiming to get this finished soon!

[Chesney84]

As I decided I was going electronic injection quite some time ago, before I got to the specification I've finally settled on I decided to do away with the distributor, but need to keep the lower part of the housing to locate on the top of the oil pump drive. I'm not a big fan of gaskets when you can use an o-ring instead, so after some measuring of both the bore inside the block and comparing it to our stock of o-rings in stores I found one that was a perfect match, the shaft requires a groove yet but will then have a retaining snap ring fitted and an ally cover to seal the top.

Before:


Now:


(I should also add that the remaining shaft protruding from the dizzy still needs shortening down some more)

[Chesney84]

As I'm sticking with the standard flywheel still, I decided to reface it by putting it on the surface grinder and trued up the face and give it a decent finish. Again, as I have no need for the trigger wheel due to ditching the AEI unit with this engine I machined the teeth off to save some weight. I'm planning on taking some weight out of the back of the flywheel with some further machining work but just haven't got round to it yet!





And finally (for tonight at least) I colour coded some of the brackets and ancillaries for the engine with some more red and black VHT wrinkle paint:



I have a few more updates on progress made on the engine build and in general on the 5 but that will have to do for today!

[Chesney84]

So, tonights update: The company I work for has close dealings with Australian cooling specialists PWR, who if you are unfamiliar with them, manufacture cores as well as finished radiators, intercoolers and charge coolers. The quality of their work is fantastic and the cores they make are among some of the very best in the world. Using our contacts we have with them I began directly discussing the options they have available and what my requirements and expectations are.

After these discussions I was steered towards one of their chargecoolers kits. They very kindly sent me over the heat rejection and pressure drop data along with a whole heap of other graphs, plots and tables from wind tunnel tests of the various size charge coolers at a range of ambient conditions, boost levels and inlet charge temps. Long story short, the numbers are impressive. Now I'm not going to bullshit you, I don't fully understand it all 100%, I have general grasp of the fundamentals but thats about it. Fortunately for me though our cooling engineer does this sort of analysis everyday and was happy to look into it and run the numbers for me. At this point its hard to put an exact figure on charge temps without running complex simulations, however he has reassured me that chargecooler over intercooler is a viable option and also potentially an improvement in certain conditions.

Heres the kit in question that I'm currently leaning towards:



You get the radiator, fan, water pump, small header tank and charge cooler barrel and some other fittings etc.

The main drawbacks for the charge cooler system are:
* The minimum inlet charge temp achievable is never going to be as low as an Air to Air intercooler
* Additional systems required (electric pump and fan, plumbing in a separate radiator) with increased chances of things to go wrong
* Weight is likely to be as much if not more than a large front mount I/C

Where a charge cooler benefits over an I/C:
* A much smaller volume of the C/C and shorter pipework runs reduces any possible issues with lag
* For an equivalent surface area as the C/C you'd need a much larger intercooler
* Although inlet charge temp will never be as cool as an I/C can achieve the peak temp will be much lower
* The thermal mass of water means that as a rule of thumb it conducts heat not only about 25 times more effectively but also 25 times faster than air (apparently)
* Also due to the heat capacity of water even if the charge temp goes up massively (for example after WOT) the water temp change is minimal (literally single digits)
* The above is also true for after being sat in traffic or stationary - heat soak into the C/C will be much less than an I/C

Basically from what I can understand you effectively have a much narrower operating window of inlet charge than you would with an intercooler. This I feel will be a benefit as the inlet charge temp I map the car at will not deviate anywhere near as wildly as it would with an I/C. Seeing as my car gets used for 6 months of year from end of Spring to early Autumn (even though our summers aren't reliably hot) I'm likely to spend more time driving my car in warmer conditions than cold.

Obviously all of the above benefits and improvements I'm championing are all dependant on spec'ing everything right first time - correct size core, correct size radiator, air flow to and after the radiator, pipework runs etc. I'm sure someone will be along soon to counter these with their own opinions and suggestions. Don't get me wrong I'm a fan of I/C's and know that they can be equally if not more effective than C/C's if certain conditions are met. Half the F1 grid either run one or the other showing that there isn't a hard and fast rule of which is best. PWR even suggested that they can provide me with seriously effective I/C cooler core but that it may not be suitable both in terms of packaging (size available to me) and also at price point - an average core supplied to an F1 team is in excess of 5 figures for one - thats just for the core - no tanks - no pipework, just a box with some core in for you to manufacture it yourself!

Anyway heres tonights job of mocking-up the installation of the charge cooler and radiator:



The cardboard tube is the same OD and length of the barrel I have been recommended to use by them, the donkey dick (ducting) is very close to the inlet and outlet diameter of the barrel. At least I know with a bit of relocation of a couple of items I can get the barrel I require inside the engine bay. The radiator is a struggle as I want to retain the standard water rad position.They suggest a 10x10" radiator but after using a cardboard box I'm going to ask if they can manufacture a 9x11" rad instead, that way I can use the standard I/C bottom mount.

More to follow...