Flatisfaction And Other Tangents.

After the disastrous session on the rollers I headed home and promptly hit a wall of traffic on the way as they’d closed the road due to an accident.

Great.

This quadrupled my journey time and by the time I got home my ears were ringing and I stank of exhaust.

All because of this.



I’d ended the exhaust under the front wing just because it got me on the road quicker.
It was loud but not stupid loud and wasn’t to bad terrible going down the road either but stuck in traffic just had it echoing under the wing and exiting the exhaust under the floor boards which eventually made its way into the cab.

While I was waiting on the new injectors I grabbed a few bits to move it further down the car.
I will probably run it all the way to the back of the car eventually with another silencer added.
I’ve kept the 3” sizing from the turbo to the silencer under the wing and continued that with the new extension.



Sliding all the pieces together for an initial mockup showed it was all heading in the right direction.



Mmmm…. Just no… 😆



Trimming each section allowed it to pull in and up, under the running board.



I had a decent exhaust hanger, which I covered earlier in the thread, at the front of the running board but would need another one at the other end.
Not having a lot of faith in this being a final solution as side exit exhausts always suck on a road car, I didn’t want to be cutting, welding or drilling into the running boards.
The factory running board supports had these holes and wondered if I could make use of them.



I dug around in the bolt boxes and found this washer that fitted the hole perfect.



I then turned up this plug that sits against the hole in the bracket and registers to the centre hole in the washer with a threaded stud. It’s threaded M8 so it matches all the other hardware associated with the exhaust.



Here’s the assembly together with a penny washer I made to act as the second side of the clamp.



I now needed the hanger part which would attach to the plug.
I wanted the hanger portion to slide over the plug and be a perfect fit which meant not reaching for the hole saws. 🙄
Marked out the hanger on some 2mm plate and drilled the initial holes.
Using a gauge pin through the pilot hole I could quickly clamp the plate in the 4-jaw.
Yes it was frightening and no I didn’t stand in front of it. ☠️



Step drill used to quickly take it out to near final size.



And finish with the boring bar.



I can then take it back to the CAD template and trim it to the final shape.



Cut to shape and folded it was welded onto the plug.



The whole assembly located in the bracket hole.



And bolted up.
The most complicated exhaust hanger but no cutting, welding or drilling!



The stud hanging down from the bottom of the hanger in the previous photo is the cotton reel.
I could now build a bracket off the top of the cotton reel to the exhaust pipe, keeping the cotton reel in compression as it should be.
Some more CAD.



With that final piece in place it could all be checked one final time for straightness and squareness and all tacked together and dropped off as one piece for the first time for final welding.



Fully welded and a couple of fillet pieces added for strength.





Everything got coated in hi-temp paint and the final fit up.



You’d never know there was a 3” exhaust lurking under the running board.



With the injectors I got directed to a local guy who made “custom” injectors, anything you want.
Well, I rode the train for week and knew it wasn’t going anywhere so went and got all my stuff back.
It was proving difficult to find anyone in the UK who had my style of injectors in the flow range I needed.
I turned to looking in the US and after realising they rate their injector flow in lbs not cc I was finally able to find what I wanted.
Ordered Friday afternoon they arrived Monday morning.



To change them is just a matter of unscrewing the lid and pulling the injectors out.



Push the new ones in and sit the lid back on.
The throttle body doesn’t need to be removed from the engine but it was off already from before.



Before I bolted the throttle body back on I wanted to move the vacuum port for the MAP sensor located at the ECU.
I had the vacuum take-off placed in the carb spacer on the drivers side and with the vacuum hose running from the ECU under the dash, through the firewall, down the other side and looping around the engine it was quite a long run.
The problem with long vacuum hose runs is the increased volume. The bigger the volume that has to change, the longer the delay for the ECU to react to changes in the engine status.

I thought I could do better.

I realised I could relocate the vacuum fitting on the back of manifold allowing me to loose 9” of length which was getting on for a 1/4 of the original length.

Trying to drill and tap the new port wasn’t the easiest.



The old, now redundant port, got plugged.



The much neater, finished vacuum line.



The last job was the accelerator pedal ball joint that passes through the floor board.
I felt it catch the edge of the floor board once while driving which was enough warning for me so I widened the slot slightly for a little more clearance.
The witness marks can be seen to the left of the ball joint.



Time to head back to the rolling road…

I quite liked the exposed side pipe in a California Kid way

Back on the rollers for the third time… and yet more crushing disappointment. 😔

My man with the laptop had been thinking behind the scenes while I was sorting out the replacement injectors and his thoughts were to change tack with the mapping.
He had been tuning using volumetric efficiency (VE) which is the default tuning map with Haltech ECU’s but because of my cam choice was struggling with low down drivability.
The new approach was to map by throttle position instead which would allow a much smaller jump between load cells in the map giving much more “resolution”.

What all this basically meant was with the above plus the new, much larger, injectors that we would be starting again.

Cue many hours later and things were looking up.
Low down drivability was much improved and the deceleration settings were changed over to fuel cut rather than ignition which meant it didn’t pop & bang constantly on overrun and with that I was no longer down with the yoofs.

With the ground work in place we were back to where was all them months ago and could now start ramping in the boost and rpm.

Except now the motor/turbo refused to make anything over 1psi of boost and no amount of winding the engine up changed that output. WTF!!

Some trouble shooting on the rollers with searching for boost leaks which is a futile exercise in reality with all the noise and whirly things and disconnecting the wastegate which should ramp the boost up uncontrollably if it was at fault but produced no improvement and that was the premature end to the day.

There had been a number changes since the boost producing, non-intercooler runs.

New turbo which replaced the previous one that ate itself.
Wastegate was removed and refitted with 15lbs spring.
Intercooler fitted.
Intercooler charge pipes linking it all up.

To start from the top, the turbo. There’s no getting away from it being a Wuhan Wonder and is the first thing to point the finger at but where and how do you test the output of a turbo?

We’ll leave that for the moment and move onto the the wastegate.
Off it came again to check for anything obvious.



The ‘gate’ is fine. Sealed shut, not jammed open, sealing ring in place and moves freely when the spring tension is removed.

I tried a different method of releasing/holding the spring tension to be able to get the lid off. This worked much better than trying to do it directly in the vice.



With the springs removed I can check the diaphragm, which was working fine and sealing.



Happy with the wastegate being good that went back on.

Next was to check for leaks on the cold side from turbo outlet to carb hat.
I needed to do a pressure test and started with this.



A 4” poo pipe end cap from the DIY store, a tyre valve, an offcut of 2.5” exhaust tube and a disc of steel with a hole in it!

Out came the bead roller again (!).



The steel was welded together the tyre valve pulled through.



The poo pipe end cap goes over the turbo inlet.



And the end stop/valve into the joiner at the carb hat end.



Now I can use a tyre inflator to fill the system with ‘boost’ to check for leaks.



It worked great and I took it up to 20lbs which is way over what it should see in normal usage. A little scary to see all the joiners swell up with the pressure inside them and expecting a BANG but all the joints held firm.
I found a couple of leaks which were easily sealed with some giggling of the joiners and clamps but nothing I’d say that would loose all the boost.

Time for a road test but before that I needed an easy to read boost gauge.
I used my diagnostic gauge and the hose and fittings that come with it to quickly splice it into the manifold pressure.





A road test showed it still producing 1/1.5lbs of boost.
Ok, so now potentially looking at intercooler or turbo issue?

I had an idea of a way of eliminating everything and just testing the turbo output.
The idea was to spin the carb hat back around to its original position and connect it directly to the turbo with the original joiner, exactly as it was before and producing boost.



Back to the original setup and with the charge pipes still in situ but tied up, it was back out for another test drive.

Success!

All the boost is back.
I can now pretty much eliminate the turbo as being at fault but now the finger is firmly pointing at the intercooler with a keen eye still on the charge pipes not sealing.

Needing to isolate the charge pipes from the intercooler I thought I could spin the 90* joiners on the bottom of the intercooler around and loop out the charge pipes eliminating the intercooler.



I made up a joiner with an offcut of 2.5” aluminium tube and beaded the ends.



It wasn’t quite as easy as I thought and struggled for some time to connect it all up but the angles were all wrong and the joiners too short.
And then I ripped a hole in one of the joiners which was the straw that broke the camels back and I decided I’m done with cars and done with this car.

It might not seem like it now but it will be worth it in the end.
Leave it a couple of days and come back with a fresh head.

Lol, what swear words did you use? I see you didn’t try and put the forum swear filter to the test

But yeah, you’re SO close now.

As above don't give up, we need to see what that wuhan whirlyboi can do!

Thanks for all the feedback.

Sometimes I think the Gods of period correctness are just doing this to punish me.

You’re about 2 weeks out on real time. 🙂

No graph. The gauge is tapped into the line to the MAF sensor which is from the manifold plenum Under the throttle body. Should be accurate to what the engine is actually seeing.

It was where the wastegate and the like were being fed signals from and if there were any pressure taps available in other parts. If its all from the manifold then it would sound like the turbo does not have the grunt to move the air through the intercooler for whatever reason If the wastegate was referenced from the turbo outlet then all change again.

I cannot imagine you giving up, and being a couple of weeks in arrears you have probably already found the solution and on your way to rolling road.....again