Righty its about time I did a build thread for this I guess.
Spotted it up on here for £200. Having always fancied an early metro and always loving white cars with red interiors I had to have it. It had running problems, bald tyres and has a rusty front valence. Short MOT and short tax but I had to have it. Gave the guy £150 for it and drove it home about 30 miles with it missing and farting about, stalling at every junction, hard to start and no power but I absolutely loved it! Not to mention it has only covered 45k, aside from the front valance is solid as a rock! no rust anywhere else at all really. The drivers side rear arch has had a big of a bash at some point but that will all be fixed and painted in the near future.
How I bought it:
The next morning I got straight out of bed and started making it work properly. It had new points and a new condensor but the points were barely opening, put it this way none of my feeler gauges would fit in the gap! So I set them correctly. Cleaned the plugs up and gave the carb a tweak. It was instantly better! it was like a new car, drove great, pretty nippy for such little power and gave great mpg. Changed the oil filter and some fresh oil and I thought that was going to be it, just smoke around in it now and again as it was number 3 in my little fleet didnt expect to use it much but somehow I managed to fall in love with it and started making plans. Engine swap was first on the agenda I went through lots of options, honda single cams, k series, tuned bigger a series, metro turbo engine but on a little ebay hunt I came across part of a supercharger "kit" which consisted of the inlet manifold, some curse word gaskets, a belt that was too small, half of the bolts and fixings I needed, a tensioner and a horribly bent bit of pipe with some crappy looking flanges either end. Believed to be a jonspeed kit but no way of knowing for sure I guess. Well I paid £260 for it and ive modified pretty much all of it and used hardly any of the original bits so not sure how great of an investment that was. Found a charger for £170 that was in pretty good shape.
The biggest challenge came when I was trying to find a crank pulley. There are some off the shelf from jonspeed, vmaxx etc but all varying prices, varying quality of customer service(from poor to awful!) All of them were far too big and would create around 22psi+ of boost with my set up which is ridiculous! I did the calculations and it came out that an 80mm pulley would give me around 10psi after losses. Got some quotes from various engineering companies to make a complete custom pulley, quotes came in from 150 - 300 which I wasnt prepared to pay as I was trying to do this on a budget. A friend of mine suggested a guy he works with who is great on the machines. So after having a chat with him we decided to machine the standard pulley to accept a bolt on pulley to drive the supercharger. This meant less cost and if I ever wanted to change pulley sizes another one could be made easier to bolt onto the stock crank/v belt pulley. I had this made wider incase I wanted to ever run a more "man sized" belt in the future.
I was very impressed! the finish and quality was fantastic! Very tightly machined even with the bolts removed it takes some force to seperate the 2 faces I cant do it with my bare hands and I'm a big guy! This pulley and he machined the inlet flange on the supercharger flat(as it normally has a lip to accept a rubber hose on the cooper S) and he only charged me £80 so I was chuffed to bits. Will most definitely be using him in the future for any bits!
Again as this is on a budget I kept looking at the inlet manifold/exhaust manifold combo thinking surely I could just cut off the inlet part, bit of grinding and it would be just like the mg metro item? It uses a twin downpipe and looks like it would flow pretty well so this saves me money on buying an lcb manifold, standard exhaust will do for now(back box has been removed and straight piped with 2.5" upswept polish tailpipe, not loud at all sounds nice). Did a little bit of porting work on it too to smooth flow out a bit. and open it up to gasket size(looks rough in the picture but is just dirt/reflection in the picture)
From the start of the project I wanted a big polished open trumpet on the end of the carb, so I bought one. Looks awesome I think! I really have a passion for carbs, they are such an engineering masterpiece and can look fantastic! Especially a polished SU
After some trial fitting of the supercharger it looked like I was going to have to modify the blower unit as the pulley almost sits on it. After looking inside and seeing there is a lot of room between the duct and the fan blades I think I could be able to cut the offending area out, flip it over so rather than it being convex it will be concave and plastic weld it back in. Should look pretty factory but give the room I need for the belt and pulley to be safe.
The red line is where it will need cutting
The next thing to do was drill and tap the end of the supercharger to accept the 4 m5 bolts to hold the carb to supercharger pipe flange. There isnt much "meat" here to get a good bite but some of them I can get a nut on the back and some I will just threadlock in.
They wont be the only thing holding the carb on anyway as I plan to make a nice bracket to hold the carb to the engine. These supercharger setups always suffer from carb icing. This is due to the absurdly long pipe they use to connect the supercharger to the carb which puts the carb right down near the distributor in the direct cold air flow. Doesnt take a genious to work out this is going to cause the fuel to drop out of suspension in the super cold air and cause carb freezing. Id say the piping is a good 2 feet long! I didnt want all this and I wanted the carb in a different place anyway. So I cut the pip down and angled it so it would sit about 4 inches from the supercharger meaning the pipe should warm up nicely. The bracket I plan on making will bolt to the 2 bottom carb mounting bolts and then to the exhaust manifold studs so this again should transfer some heat. This should completely eliminate the carb freezing issues. Not to mention looking a lot better.
Flange bolted on looks good(even if the flange shape is a little poor by the kit makers)
Hmmmm perhaps not, that doesnt look good for flow
see how much of the supercharger inlet blocks the inlet on the flange? I will mark this and port it out to match the profile of the flange, unless it will make the material too thin on the charger in that case I will just get it as close as I can and smooth and polish it to make the best of a bad design for now.
Once that was done I did a mock up of the supercharger to see where I could mount the carb and what I needed to do.
inlet on
Charger, crank pulley and belt on
There was a perfect space between the mastercylinders, battery and coil that I was looking for to keep the pipe work short and simple! So I cut the pipe at the right angle and went to weld it up.. Great no gas, So I couldnt weld it up nicely but I could make a couple of crappy tacks to get the fitment right and see how it was going to look. I'll get another bottle of argoshield after christmas and weld it up nicely.
sits quite high though... Of course I wont be cutting a silly hole in the bonnet for the dash pot to sit out of. I think the best thing to do will be making some bonnet raisers to make the bonnet sit up at the back, should aid cooling a little bit more and put the bonnet vents a bit more direct in the flow so that should help too. (i think it looks cool too but shhhhh thats probably the inner chav)
And I really need to get a new front plate, but what a cool front view
With that done and airhose from my compressor all over the floor I needed to make a hose reel. I have my "tester" wheel from when I made some reversed steels so that was it! a cool deep dish steel hose reel
Hopefully everybody who is reading this is still awake, sorry for the long first post but wanted to get it all up to date. I will carry on from here now. Videos when its running of the noise will be of course provided!
Spotted it up on here for £200. Having always fancied an early metro and always loving white cars with red interiors I had to have it. It had running problems, bald tyres and has a rusty front valence. Short MOT and short tax but I had to have it. Gave the guy £150 for it and drove it home about 30 miles with it missing and farting about, stalling at every junction, hard to start and no power but I absolutely loved it! Not to mention it has only covered 45k, aside from the front valance is solid as a rock! no rust anywhere else at all really. The drivers side rear arch has had a big of a bash at some point but that will all be fixed and painted in the near future.
How I bought it:
The next morning I got straight out of bed and started making it work properly. It had new points and a new condensor but the points were barely opening, put it this way none of my feeler gauges would fit in the gap! So I set them correctly. Cleaned the plugs up and gave the carb a tweak. It was instantly better! it was like a new car, drove great, pretty nippy for such little power and gave great mpg. Changed the oil filter and some fresh oil and I thought that was going to be it, just smoke around in it now and again as it was number 3 in my little fleet didnt expect to use it much but somehow I managed to fall in love with it and started making plans. Engine swap was first on the agenda I went through lots of options, honda single cams, k series, tuned bigger a series, metro turbo engine but on a little ebay hunt I came across part of a supercharger "kit" which consisted of the inlet manifold, some curse word gaskets, a belt that was too small, half of the bolts and fixings I needed, a tensioner and a horribly bent bit of pipe with some crappy looking flanges either end. Believed to be a jonspeed kit but no way of knowing for sure I guess. Well I paid £260 for it and ive modified pretty much all of it and used hardly any of the original bits so not sure how great of an investment that was. Found a charger for £170 that was in pretty good shape.
The biggest challenge came when I was trying to find a crank pulley. There are some off the shelf from jonspeed, vmaxx etc but all varying prices, varying quality of customer service(from poor to awful!) All of them were far too big and would create around 22psi+ of boost with my set up which is ridiculous! I did the calculations and it came out that an 80mm pulley would give me around 10psi after losses. Got some quotes from various engineering companies to make a complete custom pulley, quotes came in from 150 - 300 which I wasnt prepared to pay as I was trying to do this on a budget. A friend of mine suggested a guy he works with who is great on the machines. So after having a chat with him we decided to machine the standard pulley to accept a bolt on pulley to drive the supercharger. This meant less cost and if I ever wanted to change pulley sizes another one could be made easier to bolt onto the stock crank/v belt pulley. I had this made wider incase I wanted to ever run a more "man sized" belt in the future.
I was very impressed! the finish and quality was fantastic! Very tightly machined even with the bolts removed it takes some force to seperate the 2 faces I cant do it with my bare hands and I'm a big guy! This pulley and he machined the inlet flange on the supercharger flat(as it normally has a lip to accept a rubber hose on the cooper S) and he only charged me £80 so I was chuffed to bits. Will most definitely be using him in the future for any bits!
Again as this is on a budget I kept looking at the inlet manifold/exhaust manifold combo thinking surely I could just cut off the inlet part, bit of grinding and it would be just like the mg metro item? It uses a twin downpipe and looks like it would flow pretty well so this saves me money on buying an lcb manifold, standard exhaust will do for now(back box has been removed and straight piped with 2.5" upswept polish tailpipe, not loud at all sounds nice). Did a little bit of porting work on it too to smooth flow out a bit. and open it up to gasket size(looks rough in the picture but is just dirt/reflection in the picture)
From the start of the project I wanted a big polished open trumpet on the end of the carb, so I bought one. Looks awesome I think! I really have a passion for carbs, they are such an engineering masterpiece and can look fantastic! Especially a polished SU
After some trial fitting of the supercharger it looked like I was going to have to modify the blower unit as the pulley almost sits on it. After looking inside and seeing there is a lot of room between the duct and the fan blades I think I could be able to cut the offending area out, flip it over so rather than it being convex it will be concave and plastic weld it back in. Should look pretty factory but give the room I need for the belt and pulley to be safe.
The red line is where it will need cutting
The next thing to do was drill and tap the end of the supercharger to accept the 4 m5 bolts to hold the carb to supercharger pipe flange. There isnt much "meat" here to get a good bite but some of them I can get a nut on the back and some I will just threadlock in.
They wont be the only thing holding the carb on anyway as I plan to make a nice bracket to hold the carb to the engine. These supercharger setups always suffer from carb icing. This is due to the absurdly long pipe they use to connect the supercharger to the carb which puts the carb right down near the distributor in the direct cold air flow. Doesnt take a genious to work out this is going to cause the fuel to drop out of suspension in the super cold air and cause carb freezing. Id say the piping is a good 2 feet long! I didnt want all this and I wanted the carb in a different place anyway. So I cut the pip down and angled it so it would sit about 4 inches from the supercharger meaning the pipe should warm up nicely. The bracket I plan on making will bolt to the 2 bottom carb mounting bolts and then to the exhaust manifold studs so this again should transfer some heat. This should completely eliminate the carb freezing issues. Not to mention looking a lot better.
Flange bolted on looks good(even if the flange shape is a little poor by the kit makers)
Hmmmm perhaps not, that doesnt look good for flow
see how much of the supercharger inlet blocks the inlet on the flange? I will mark this and port it out to match the profile of the flange, unless it will make the material too thin on the charger in that case I will just get it as close as I can and smooth and polish it to make the best of a bad design for now.
Once that was done I did a mock up of the supercharger to see where I could mount the carb and what I needed to do.
inlet on
Charger, crank pulley and belt on
There was a perfect space between the mastercylinders, battery and coil that I was looking for to keep the pipe work short and simple! So I cut the pipe at the right angle and went to weld it up.. Great no gas, So I couldnt weld it up nicely but I could make a couple of crappy tacks to get the fitment right and see how it was going to look. I'll get another bottle of argoshield after christmas and weld it up nicely.
sits quite high though... Of course I wont be cutting a silly hole in the bonnet for the dash pot to sit out of. I think the best thing to do will be making some bonnet raisers to make the bonnet sit up at the back, should aid cooling a little bit more and put the bonnet vents a bit more direct in the flow so that should help too. (i think it looks cool too but shhhhh thats probably the inner chav)
And I really need to get a new front plate, but what a cool front view
With that done and airhose from my compressor all over the floor I needed to make a hose reel. I have my "tester" wheel from when I made some reversed steels so that was it! a cool deep dish steel hose reel
Hopefully everybody who is reading this is still awake, sorry for the long first post but wanted to get it all up to date. I will carry on from here now. Videos when its running of the noise will be of course provided!