Ten Pounds of S*** in a Five Pound Bag – My Big Turbo Streetcar Build

Hi everyone,
I thought it was about time I document my build and all it’s been through over the last couple of years.
I’ve been building the car for the last 3 years and wanted to create a thread to show the different stages it’s been at.

From the very beginning, I’ve wanted this to a good street car more than anything. Meaning it has to be somewhat quiet, reliable, decent ride quality, and excellent drivability and manners. I would say HALF of what I’ve done has hurt all of those goals and the other half has tried to make it better.

For the most part, this build has happened in 3 phases spread over 3 years and 3 winters to build it. I bought the car as a bare roller for $800 from some redneck in Kentucky who blew up the engine. It was an original, unmodified 1988 TII in black with grey interior and 165k on it. Being a southern car, it had no rust but the paint was (is) in rough shape.

 

I've been to your youtube and seen the work you did with the diesel turbo. That was pretty cool stuff. Based on your sig, it looks like you have aimed much much higher.

 

Phase 1: 2014. I had just graduated college with a B.S. in Mech Engr. and moved 1000 miles from my lifelong state of Indiana to Connecticut. After finding a workshop to rent in CT, I towed the car east and began building it.
Here are the specs to the first phase:

S5 6-port engine, large street port and 9.7 rotors
Port-marched TII intake manifold





Ebay “log” stainless undivided T4 turbo manifold
Holset HE351VE VGT turbo (science project!)
Tial 46mm WG / Tial 50mm BOV





Megasquirt MS2v3.0 DIY ECU.




Homemade exhaust: 4” DP, 3” Vibrant Ultra-quiet res, 3” Borla XR-1 round muffler


Water-to-Air Intercooler: Ebay core, 2003 Cobra pump/heat exchanger/expansion tank


ACT Street/Strip PP, un-sprung 6 puck, ACT Pro-Lite 9# flywheel


Because the original engine was so badly overheated and left to rust, I wasn’t really able to reuse anything.
In college I was buying junkyard 13Bs and cleaning, inspecting, and selling parts here and on ebay. I was able to keep enough good parts to build one engine and this is what went in the car.
It was a S5 6-port with TII housings, NA rotors, TII oil pump, RX8 stat gears and crank, FD reg, and just about every hard seal was used from multiple engines.
It had okay compression but ultimately had a lot of blow by and wasn’t the best starting engine ever.
The drivability with no 6-port sleeves and a large street port SUCKED. It was a dog out of boost and got poor mileage.

The VGT turbo was what I was most excited about. It was a used turbo off of a 2007 Cummins 6.7L.
The exhaust housing (HUGE) had a variable A/R that allowed the turbo to spool quickly and stay strong through the RPMs – in theory.
I tried 4 different setups trying to make this work on a rotary. Ideally, you could use the OEM stepper motor CAN-controlled actuator to adjust the VGT. This actuator is enormous and simply wouldn’t fit. I deleted it and connected a pneumatic cylinder to the VGT. This worked okay, but the extreme exhaust back pressure of a rotary would overpower the actuator and force the A/R larger and slow spool. Adjust the starting A/R smaller and it would help, but either act like an exhaust brake or surge the compressor. Too large and it was laggy.
The best part about the VGT was that it made the car QUIET. Like stock quiet. Once the VGT opened it was nice and throaty, but not bad.

The biggest downside to the VGT was it’s weight. The whole turbo weighed 50 POUNDS! Once winter come and I began pulling the engine for a refresh, I discovered that it had actually cracked my exhaust manifold almost in half. I’m sure this didn’t help spool, but at this point I was done with this turbo.

The water-to-air was nice because I did not have to cut up the bumper or block radiator flow, but it wasn’t perfect. I would see ~130F IATs (+50F above ambient) at the end of a 1-2-3 gear pull. Not really dangerous, but not great. I was running approx. 13 psi of boost with no water/meth injection. The car was “quick” but not really fast. Probably somewhere in the low 300 whp range. It really felt strangled by the 70/60mm turbine wheel and VGT A/R.

Overall, the worst part about driving the car was the clutch. I live in a very hilly area and the light flywheel and grabby disk made daily driving the car a pain. Regardless, I daily drove it 5 miles a day for almost 6 months. As soon as it got sub-zero in the mornings, the car got parked and stripped down in preparation for Phase 2.

 

Yeah, all of my friends have turbo LS's. I had to do something lol

 

Phase 2: 2015
Over the winter of 2014, I found a great deal on Craigslist for a S5 JDM TII engine and trans. $500 for the whole pullout and I had a nice foundation for the next phase. Fortunately when I removed the transmission, the engine had a nice OS Giken twin disk clutch/flywheel. Unfortunately, the engine had a cracked apex and one rotor and housing were toast.


I was able to find a NA housing in good shape to swap sleeves and use. After about 3 broken drill bits, I ended up just grinding the NA exhaust diffuser out and using it as-is. I no longer had a good pair of TII rotors, so I reused the rotors from the NA engine (9.7:1). Connecticut doesn’t have readily available E85 like the Midwest, so I also bought a water methanol kit (AEM V1 kit). I bought a Pineapple Racing TII “Large” street port template and ported just the secondary irons. I reused the apex seals (third engine lol) and mix/matched side seals until I was able to get corner seal clearance within spec. I used an Atkins soft seal kit to close the engine and had the car back together in about 3 months total.


I found a GT4088R on the forums for $350 with a chipped turbine. I figured it wouldn’t hurt performance too badly and I was trying to do this on the cheap. As soon as I started the engine for the first time, the turbo smoked like a steam train. I pulled the CHRA and the exhaust housing and downpipe were full of oil. Garrett offers a CHRA exchange for their BB turbos. I believe it was $650-700 for basically a brand new turbo. So, for $1000, I had a $1800 turbo. Still not $350, but at least it was an upgrade.


I also bought a $100 ebay FD turbo manifold. I figured I’d have to modify it to work, but it was cheap enough I didin’t care. I was able to reuse my Tial 46mm WG and blow off. To clear the TII LIM, I had to add a ½” spacer to the flange. Because the manifold had the **** D-style T4 flange, I just booger welded a blank T4 flange directly to the manifold. It didn’t leak or break, but as you would imagine, this manifold sucked. It creeped to about 17 psi by redline with a 13psi spring. And the sound of an external WG gets old fast. I ended up adding a muffler (lol) to the WG dump to try and quiet it down, but it just changed the tone and made creep worse. I had the best result plumbing it back to the DP and it creeped LESS! I definitely feel a bit more choked up replumbed though.



Unfortunately, after about a month of driving, I cracked BOTH the front and rear irons from detonating. I was using an Aeromotive regulator that had previously been ran on ethanol. The diaphragm had completely dried out and cracked, leaking gasoline down the vacuum reference hose and not rising the fuel pressure. The car went 13:1 at 14psi in 1st gear. Cracked the irons, lost all oil pressure and wrecked every bearing in the engine. Dead.

I was able to find some FD-style dowel S5 TII irons and get the engine back up and running within 4 weeks. I didn’t bother to street port the engine and just left the tiny stock NA intake ports.
I re-re-re-reused the hard seals and the engine started right up, made almost 20” of vacuum and ran great. The only issue I had with this engine was low oil pressure and high oil temps. I ended up dailying the car with this setup for approx. 7 months until winter 2015.

 

ooooo!!! I got the chance to see this in person in progress, so I'm really looking forward to the story with pics.

 

Phase 3: 2016 (ongoing)

After last year, there were several aspects of the car I wanted to improve.
Engine:
I was tired of the stock ports. The power band fell flat early and I missed the feeling of a ported engine. I also love the idle of a ported rotary. I ported my FD-dowel TII irons to Pineapple “Large” spec, primary and secondary. And opened the exhaust ports about 4mm earlier.


I also planned on upping the boost this year and was able to find a mint set of S5 TII rotors for a good deal. After tearing down my previous engine (2015), I found an apex seal cracked LENGTHWISE! Who knows how long it’d been that way since I reused them so many times, but it likely happened when I knocked hard and broke both irons last year. I ordered a set of new Atkins 2mm apex seals and reused the Atkins solid corner and FD side seals and springs, making sure everything was on the tighter side of OEM spec. Another $160 Atkins soft seal kit wrapped up the build.


I mentioned that my last engine had oil pressure and temp issues. After disassembling the 2015 engine, I noticed that my “crushed” pressure regulator had failed. The spring inside the regulator had turned sideways and seized. Oil pressure was around 20psi at hot idle and would spike to 60 at 3krpm, but would spike up and down. I believe oil was getting recirculated and less oil was flowing through the rotors, causing it to heat up. I switched to a FD regulator and the new engine has great oil pressure.


Please take a moment to admire my beautiful engine mounts made from hockey pucks and proton exchange membrane electrolysis hydrogen manifolds

 

Do I spy a scatter shield around the bellhousing?

 

I DID have it installed, but I couldn't make it work with the fuel system. If anyone wants a Goopy FC scatter shield, it's available!

 

This is the best "ghetto" build I've ever seen. Who re-re-re-reuses seals LOL. Great work I'm looking foreword to this.

 

ECU:

For the past 2 years I have been on a Megasquirt MS2v3.0 DIY ECU. It worked great and I really enjoyed learning more about EFI and tuning. As I spent more and more money on my engine and turbo system, I felt like I would be handicapped by a relatively entry-level ECU. It did everything I needed, but I wanted more bells and whistles. I really loved the Megasquirt software package and the community is absolutely amazing. I ended up finding a good deal on a used MS3X on a Tacoma forum of all places. I bought all new crimp-on connectors wire. No solder, no butt connectors, and no pigtail harnesses. Everything got sleeved in expandable mesh and heat shrunk ends. It’s definitely not Milspec, but I’m happy with how it turned out and everything worked on the first try.

Here is a quick list of all the features I have wired in and plan on using (once tuned!)
Traction Control (using front ABS sensor and speedometer for rear wheel speed)
Allowable Slip% for Traction Control adjustable by a **** on the dash
Boost-by-gear
Launch control/flat shifting
Rolling-launch control (no more brake boosting!)
Loggable inputs for fuel pressure and oil pressure
Progressive water-methanol injection with level switch for safety shutdown.
Loggable water-meth flowrate via AEM Water-Meth Failsafe gauge (0-5V output)
Sequential Injection (no more batch-fired bullshit)
“Coil-on-plug” – No more waste-spark. Now using Chevy LS coils.
Basically every other feature a modern ECU would have








YIKES! There’s a diagram for it, I promise!








Fuel:

For the past 3 years I’ve been running a Walbro 400LPH pump with great luck. It flows a ton, it’s relatively quiet, and it is cheap.

For injectors, I switched this year to 4X Bosch NGI-2 2200cc injectors. These are the base injector Injector Dynamics uses. They buy these injectors in bulk and test each one for flow rate and response time. Then they lump the into tightly-matched sets that have very similar properties. I, on the other hand, bought the OEM injector for a fraction of the cost and crossed my fingers that they’d be close. To be fair, they have a similar tolerance to other OEM injectors that people use without question, just not to the standard of actual Injector Dynamics. This is definitely more injector than I need, but they have very low dead times (.45ms!) and are linear enough to get a good idle.

For lines, I am using the OEM hardlines to the engine bay and flared the lines to adapt to 6AN. All braided PTFE line to and from the stock S4 rails with a pulsation damper T’d in to the primary rail. All that goes through a Aeromotive FPR with a 0-5V transducer that logs fuel pressure through the Megasquirt MS3X ECU.

 

You are a good person.

 

Exhaust:

I live in town that is mostly retirees and yuppies and having a loud car gets you lots of dirty looks. My old exhaust with the XR-1 rear muffler sounded fantastic but was pretty loud for my taste. I ended up replacing it with a Magnaflow 7”OD x 16”L perf-tube muffler. This helped quiet it down, but it still droned and the sound wasn’t very pleasant.

Over the winter, I was able to find a great deal on a oldschool Racing Beat 3” turbo-back exhaust. I have no idea how old it is, but it is not stainless steel and the resonator has a badass rotor logo stamped into the steel. I decided that the resonator was probably too much restriction for what I plan to make, so I made a new midpipe using my old 3” Vibrant Ultra Quiet resonator.

I also wanted to get the most spool from my new turbo, so I made a 4” downpipe that has 3” V-bands at each end for quick removal. It bolts right up to the EFR turbo and my 3” homemade midpipe.

All of this new exhaust sits above the frame rails and out of harm’s way. The Y-pipe to the RB cat-back is the lowest part of the car and it has brand new hangers!
This exhaust is QUIET! It has a great tone and sounds nice under throttle, but is way, way quieter than my single 3”.

Everything got a coat of high-temp black header paint and then a wrap of DEI Titanium wrap.

 

Turbo:

I had 3 goals when selecting a new turbo system-

1. Eliminate WG noise. Either by recirculating the gates or IWG.
2. Better response and lower boost threshold.
3. Make more power


The GT4088R I had could have been turned up to make more power than I was making, but it was slow to come on, especially in lower RPMs. I had already recirculated my WG in 2015 but that manifold was junk and I would likely have to go twin gates to get the low boost I’d want. Ultimately, there was only one answer – Borg Warner EFR.


I was sure that the EFR 7670 was going to be too small for my goals, but the 8374 makes similar power to the GT40R with much better response. I wanted to buy one turbo to suit any future goals and went with the EFR 9180 IWG.



For the price and quality, I chose the Turblown IWG manifold. I know it is designed for an FD but can fit an FC/9180 with “slight modifications”. I was not able to make it fit straight out of the box. The instructions do recommend using Turblown’s Inconel T4 gasket for FC applications, which I forgot to buy So, I shimmed the manifold 1/8” to simulate a thicker style inconel gasket and began clearancing the LIM to clear the compressor housing. I ended up grinding through the LIM before the compressor V-band clamp didn’t hit!

What ended up working for me was buying a Tial ½” milled T4 flange ($45) and 2 gaskets. Most T4 flanges are only machined on one face since the other side will just be welded to. The Tial flange was machined on both faces which made it an ideal spacer. With the spacer, the turbo fit just fine and cleared the LIM and WP housing.


I was able to get a great price on ceramic coating and had the entire exhaust housing and turbo manifold done up with 2000F coating. I used some sanding disks on a 90* grinder and cleaned it up with red scotch brite wheels before coating. Really happy with the results. I can’t definitively say how well it works, but it definitely feels like less radiant heat in the bay with my last setup. The next turbo purchase would probably be a PTP blanket for the B2 EFR housings. As far as I know, it’s the only blanket made to fit the IWG 9180 housing.


For intercooling, I wanted to stay with water-to-air but make some upgrades. First step was to increase the heat exchange size. I was using an OEM 03/04 Cobra HX core. It was maybe 26” wide, 5” tall and 1.25” thick. It worked okay, but with the smaller intercooler, I was seeing 130F IATs by then end of a 3rd gear pull. I was able to find a smoking deal on a brand-new heat exchanger from a Roush Stage 3 Mustang. It is a 25x18x2” heat exchanger. WAY bigger than my old one. Best part, it was $43 shipped on ebay. I mounted the HX under the rad support in front of the oil cooler. I would really like to cut out and change the oil cooler mount/support and run dual oil coolers for better airflow through the HX and rad, but for now it will work fine.


I also wanted to upgrade the intercooler. The old intercooler was a Frozen Boost “Type 4” which has 3” inlet/outlets and a 10x4.5x4.5” core. I upgraded to a Frozen Boost “Type 15” intercooler with a a10x9x4.5” core size and 3.5” inlet/outlet. It is HUGE and only $79 on ebay. I was able to reuse my Bosch Cobra pump and Cobra expansion tank with this setup. So far, the IATs are about 15F above ambient when heat soaked and I have not seen over 110F under boost (no stock undertray at the moment). Plans are for a pusher fan and better ducting in the future




Mock-up spacer


With spacer















Roush heat exchanger:



Final Install

 

Nice to see it coming together!
By the way, your old Cobra heat exchanger mounted up really nice in my car.
I'm working on converting an aluminum 1/2 gallon gas tank into an intercooler reservoir, and I picked up the same Bosch pump you have!

 

Good to hear! I highly recommend the OEM GT500 expansion tank. It has ¾” barbs for the return line (high) and the outlet to the pump (low). It also has a nice cap and a couple mounting tabs. I think I paid $25USD for mine.

 

Plans for the hole in the LIM?

 

I already had the hole welded up. Good as new

 

How is the dyno coming along?

 

I was able to street tune the car to about 16psi last weekend. The plan is to dyno this weekend, weather permitting. It's been abnormally hot recently, so hopefully that lets up. I've been daily driving the car 60 miles a day for over a week now. I also ordered a pressure transducer for the water methanol system so hopefully that'll be here before the weekend.

 

blivit

what did you make to the wheel at 16psi

 

It's only street tuned and pretty rich, at that. It feels stronger than my GT40R on 18psi fwiw.

 

So you made ____rwhp?

 

Your guess is as good as mine. Probably low 400s whp

 

Oh you said street tuned. I see. My bad