Monday, July 30, 2007

Here is a pic of the "business" side of the engine. you can see my ebay special water to air intercooler in the top left. The compressor side of the turbo feeds into the modified intercooler through a short section of aluminium pipe. I also mounted the blow off valve in this pipe. The intercooler is sitting right over the hot turbo so i plan on adding a bit of heat shielding to it and also putting a heat blanket on the hot side of the turbo. You can't see it here but I built a complete 2.5" exhaust from the turbine outlet to the back of the truck. I even put in a high flow cat and a muffler so it is emissions legal once I put in the proper map in the ECU. Here in Texas they run the car based on the vin #. So instead of testing it like a '89 6 cylinder they test it as a '85 4 cylinder. The 4 cylinders have a higher emissions threshold than the 6 cylinders. I would have passed everything with flying colors except the low speed NOx under the 6cyl standards. I think it would have passed even that if the testing place had tested it when it was hot instead of letting it cool for almost 30 min.
You can see here that the engine is fairly close to the radiator. I didn't think i had enough room to put electric fans on the engine side of the radiator so i mounted them in the space between the grill and the A/C condenser. I had to cut the grill a bit to give enough room for the fans. Yes the A/C works but its just cool with the r134a refrigerant not cold. This system was originally designed for R12 but the EPA has passed laws that make it very expensive. I haven't spent any time trying to make it work better at this point. probably wouldn't hurt to flush the whole system and clean any dirt off of the evaporator.
This is the 2.5" exhaust as it comes down from the turbo, wraps under the oil pan, then continues off the the rear towards the cat. I thought I had ordered stainless pipe, judging by the straight section after the flange it looks like I did not. All the mandrel bends are still rust free at least.

I don't have any pics of it right now but the engine is running on a Megasquirt II Fully programmable ECU that I assembled and tuned. I still need to put it back on the dyno and re tune it again at 6 psi because I loaded a new version of firmware that runs MUCH smoother than the old version. Seems to be a little rich across the board however. If you have the know how and the time you cant beat a Megasquirt in price or customizability for a standalone ECU. I think i less have than $300 in mine. You would have to spend well over $1k to get something comparable. More info on the Megasquirt.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing! I'm about to start a swap myself, and I saw your post on supracharged.com. You mention Texas emissions...any chance you're close to Austin? :)

Todd said...

Close is a bit relative in Texas! I'm about 25 miles north of the Dallas area. A little town called Corinth.

Anonymous said...

True, true...it is all relative... :) Well, when I get closer to attempting my swap (next summer?) I'd love to check out your truck! Again, thanks for sharing all of this info!
shane_99ta-at-yahoo-dot-com