Turbo – Chamber of Understanding

RX8 Project – Part 22, Engine Rebuild

To preface this I am not an engine builder, this is just the approximate process I followed more to give you all some handy reference photos and some info that might be helpful to someone. Please don’t take any of this as gospel! I still don’t even know if the engine will actually work!

Anyone reading this blog may have noticed that the mechanical work on the car seemed to stop a very long time ago. While there has been a bit of a gap due to other aspects of life getting in the way there was more progress than it may have appeared. Back in 2018, some 3 years ago as I type this, I took my recently stripped engine parts (ostensibly the block and crank) along with the custom flywheel and spacer to be checked and relevant parts balanced with a view to rebuilding the engine.

With little surprise I got a call back shortly after to tell me the pistons were not serviceable and would need replacing. Following my earlier research (mentioned in a previous post) into the Noble M12 and later cars I decided that for the power point I was aiming for (300 bhp approximately) the stock cast type pistons should be up to the job with Noble moving over to forged parts with the M400 model and target power above 400 bhp. Online I’ve seen many people reporting the cast pistons hitting their limits up around 500bhp but what their life expectancy is at that point who knows. With some luck I manged to find a set of +0.5mm oversize stock replacement pistons online ( part H663CP ) so sent these up to be checked for balance with the engine. The thing Noble did upgrade was to upgrade the factory rods with forged ones so I had already sourced some suitable rods although even that was a bit of a challenge. The ones I bought were from XPOWER Engines in Essex and are still listed on Ebay as I type this as ST220 3.0 H-section EN24 steel rods and come with ARP 2000 bolts. I’d not come across this company until this point but some research showed they are quite well known so I felt pretty confident they’d be ok.

So now I’ve got these parts all shipped up to MJA Automotive in Bromsgrove who would rebore and hone the block to match the new oversize pistons as well as giving everything a proper clean, checked and completely balanced. They’re a small firm but attention to detail was great, they even sand blasted and repainted the original crank pully because it was a bit rusty.

So now I had a pile of goodies to put together :

This picture is another good indication of how small this engine block actually is for the potential power output. You can see all the goodies here and basically everything that should be replaced was so new pistons, rings, rods, clutch, upgraded engine bearings (more on this later) and then obviously the custom flywheel and cleaned crank. This means only one thing, I had to build up the engine. Now when most people rebuild their own engine for the first time they start with something like a lawnmower engine but not me…In retrospect I probably should’ve just paid MJA to build it but I like a challenge!

First things first I decided to assemble all the pistons on the rods to have a quick win. This is as simple as taking the ring clip and pin out of the piston, putting the rod in place, sliding the pin back through and putting the ring clip back in. Add a dab of lubricant inside the small bearing before you put it together. The pin should be a slip fit on this because its a fully floating arrangement and so the rod bushing may need reaming to fit correctly if this isn’t the case. It’s also with noting these rods are not handed because in this engine they all have individual locations on the crank and do not touch each other whereas some engines have paired locations leading to the rod big end bearing having a flat side and a curved/chamfered side on the outer faces. If you see this the flat faces of the rods should be oriented to touch each other in the pair.

Comparison of used stock piston and rod and new piston and forged rod

Here you can see the state of the old pistons and the massive difference in the size of the rods. The keen eyed amongst you may notice this piston has the rings installed, what I actually did was installed all the oil rings at the bottom of the pistons but left the compression rings of so they could be correctly trimmed and fitted to the engine later. The ones show I’d slotted on for my own curiosity about how it all went together and removed shortly afterwards.

Box of assembled pistons and forged rods for S-type v6

That all looks rather shiny, I’m not used to car parts being this clean!

This was around the time I tried to find a manual for how to actually rebuild this engine with all the tolerances allowed for all the various parts and after a brief search found the S-type workshop manual located on jagrepair.com . This manual is massive at some 3300 pages and covers basically every aspect of the car but obviously since I don’t have the rest of the car I concentrated on the engine section which for this engine starts on page 635. I can’t add much on the instruction in it – it really is step by step so that’s the place to go for the detail!

So back to the things I did differently and some gratuitous photos of shiny stuff. while We’re still on the subject of piston rods I actually found and ordered some Mahle motorsport “high performance” racing bearings but curiously I found out shortly afterwards that Mahle Motorsport don’t sell a kit for this engine. After a concerning period waiting to see what would turn up and if I’d just been conned what actually arrived was the following :

Checking the Mahle racing bearings catalogue I’d already found told me this was actually a bearing for a 2.3L Duratec which is a 4 cylinder engine and I’d been shipped one complete 4 cyl bearing kit ( kit number VC1013) and half a second one to make up a complete set for the V6. Checking it all out sure enough they do seem to be the correct dimensions for this engine.

Rod bearing installation detail for S-type V6

They fit well but the only bit of strangeness is racing bearings don’t have the location notch usually found on rod bearings so a lot of care must be taken to make sure they’re correctly centred in the rod when it’s assembled. Apparently this is because the notch reduces the bearing area adjacent to the notch. More info about this can be found from Mahle themselves here . Contrary to common belief the notch isn’t there to prevent the bearing from spinning and is purely to centre it on assembly. Once the rod is assembled the the hoop stress in the bearing produces so much friction it will stay in place with no issues. Spun bearings are caused when the bearing seizes onto the crank, this is usually caused by insufficient lubrication and if this happens the bearing will spin whether or not you have the notch.

So back to the block, once it’s mounted upside down on the stand go ahead and drop the block side halves of the crank bearings in place. The parts I used here are King bearings kit number MB4056SI :

Crank bearing installation photo for S-type V6

Crank bearing photo at an angle, S-type v6

Also don’t forget to add the thrust bearing on the flywheel end. It’s a bit hard to see in the photo because I haven’t got a photo without assembly lubricant but it’s there.

Apply assembly lubricant to all the bearing faces

Now drop in the crank, carefully! then go ahead and apply assembly lubricant to all the running surfaces. In the photo the middle two rod locations aren’t lubricated yet because they’re at the back and needs rotating for access.

Next take the lower block housing and install the other bearing halves into the appropriate locations. As above apply assembly lubricant on the bearing faces.

Check the bearings are holding on as the next step involves dropping this section downward onto the upper block so make sure they don’t fall out. If they wont stay put you can lift the crank back out, drop it on this section then use it to hold the bearing shells in place when you flip it over and put it on the upper block. Run a bead of RTV along the mating face of one the two block halves before you put it together. Read the instructions on the RTV – usually you need to let it partly cure before pushing the parts together. Remember the RTV goes to the inside of the bolt holes otherwise oil will weep past the bolts. This is also why the flange is wider on the inside.

Hopefully you should have something that looks like this. Note the locations of the bolts with the M6 thread on the reverse side – these are the ones the the windage tray bolts onto so they have to be in the right positions. Torque all the bolts down following the workshop manual.

Now for the top side. We need to set the piston ring gaps which will involve working out what your gap should be (there are various online calculators now which make this easy). We need to be looking at larger gaps due to running a turbo and I wanted to make sure I had some headroom to run higher boost later without issues so worked on the side of going a touch larger. I ended up with a number of 0.57mm on the top ring and 0.72mm on the second ring but I think this is probably overly cautious. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll run nitrous. The rings are measured by inserting them into the bore, making sure they’re totally parallel to the block deck using some sort of depth tool, this can be done with a vernier caliper or a variety of other methods. You then measure the gap with feeler gauges when in this position and file back the ends of the ring as necessary to get the required gap. The filed ends need to be totally flat and parallel to each other. I put a flat file in a vice and carefully filed it down. Be careful, you can’t put it back if you go too far. Also piston rings are very brittle. Don’t mix up your top and second rings of install them wrong. I suggest buying a cheap piston ring installer plier to get them on easily.

It’s quite common to lubricate the cylinder walls prior to installing the pistons but some ring manufacturers actually specify not to do this now. Check the instructions on your rings. I used a light coat of some slightly thicker engine oil I had lying about and wiped it off with a rag. The general guidance here is assembly lubricant shouldn’t be used on cylinder walls as it prevents the rings bedding in correctly.

Next up you need a piston ring compressor to tighten up the rings to fit into the cylinder bore. Make sure you get this tight enough because why you try to tap the piston into place if the ring is sticking out relative to the bore it’s possible to break the ring. Traditionally people drive the piston in with the wooden handle of a hammer to avoid damaging the piston face. I came up with a different solution tapping a section of silicone hose to avoid damage. Be careful to line the piston up with the bore. If you can rotate you engine stand such that the piston you are trying to put in is vertical then do so, this way you are less likely to scratch the bore with the rod as you lower it in.

Using a section of hose to install pistons

The pistons should have an indication mark on it which shows which side should point to the front of the engine. In this case this is the drilled mark but on other pistons it can be an arrow on the piston face or other mark, make sure you get this right!

Once the piston is fully in the bore go underneath and carefully guide the rod onto the crank then bolt the end of the rod back on (with its bearing inside) and do up the bolts. At this point they only need to be tight enough to stop it all falling apart so even finger tight is probably enough or a little over.

Now that’s quite shiny!

One question that comes up all the time is the correct socket for ARP rod bolts. after a lot of searching I’ve found according to their catalogue they do them with two common sizes of head, either a 3/8″ AF or a 7/16″ AF, both of which are of 12 point type so standard 6 point sockets will not fit. I’ve seen numerous reports online where people are saying it’s a 10mm metric. It isn’t, a 12 point 10mm will fit over the 3/8″ head but it’s a very sloppy fit you’d be only contacting the bolt on the very top of the points making the risk of stripping the head quite high. The correct socket should be a very nice slip fit.

I’m not sure exactly which kit the rod bolts are from (or even if they are from one) because they came assembled into the rods to keep them together. ARP themselves don’t seem to to a specific kit for this engine so I would assume much like the rod bearings (which I bought from the same company) they’re actually repurposed parts from the Duratec 2.3 kits or something similar. With the forged rods they could be almost be anything just selected to fit the rod so I suggest either buying them with the rods or you can buy ARP bolts by thread and length to suit whatever you have.

Once you’ve put all your pistons in and torqued all the bolts up we move on to new head gaskets. First of check where the location sleeves are – as you look at the mating faces of the block two of the holes are larger, these are intended to have steel sleeves in which locate the head relative to the block. I installed these in the block but if you do the next few steps the same as me you might find it easier to install these into the head to make the assembly easier. The head gaskets I used were genuine Ford originals parts (actually badged FoMoCo) but sold as Jaguar parts they are specific to this version of the engine because the Ford version of the engine has different water flow routes open/blocked to make the coolant flow differently. The parts I used are as follows :

RH Head Gasket 2.5 Jaguar – C2S44649
LH Head Gasket 2.5 Jaguar – XR857984
Head Bolts (Single) – XR85387

You might want to order an ARP head stud kit at this point rather than the standard head bolts. I didn’t as at the time it was an expensive add-on (around £300) for what was supposed to be a budget project but in retrospect it might have been a safer option. I don’t have the part number for the kit noted anywhere.

Bolt on the water pipe pipe on the top front of the block at this point. It’s much easier than doing it later! Don’t forget to install the O-ring on it and for belt and braces it might be best to add some RTV round it because fixing it if it leaks is a big job involving removing at least one head.

Now the next bit is something people will probably hate me for but whatever, as I’ve said before this was supposed to be a budget build with the potential for later upgrade if it ever worked. What I did was get a decompression plate cut to space out each cylinder head a little because these engines are 10.3:1 as standard and I wanted to run a not insignificant amount of boost through it. Because my plan was to have the best response I could from the engine I still wanted to keep the CR as high as I could while having a safe enough margin after a discussion with Mike at Ferriday Engineering. While I write this in 2021 his website is giving me a security warning so I don’t know what’s going on there but his email is mike@ferriday.co.uk, I can only assume (and hope) he’s still operating because he’s a very nice and knowledgeable guy. He told me that standard 1.5mm plate would give a compression ratio of 9.1:1 which should be fine. We started under the assumption the mating face would be the same as the Mondeo V6 he already had on file but that turned out to not be the case and he ended up taking my old gaskets as a template and then during a couple revisions by email I highlighted some holes that didn’t exist in the head so could safely be taken out of the decompression plate.

The decompression plate gets bonded to the face of the heads and effectively forms an extension of it, there are a few sealers used for this but the most widely regarded of them seems to be Stag Wellseal which is a form of high temperature non setting sealer resistant to fuels and oils. It is initially quite liquid but goes very sticky rather quickly and after that its quite challenging to remove. Get a suitable plastic spreader and move quickly! Despite various tales on the internet of people using the plate with two head gaskets (one each side) that’s not how these are supposed to be used generally. The idea is the face of the head is freshly refinished and so is totally smooth and flat and the decomp plate will be the same so the actual thickness of sealer will be negligible. Add to this the plate, head and block are all aluminium and so there shouldn’t be any differential thermal expansion issues. So yes it’s technically a bit of a bodge, but it’s done in the best way we can and by all accounts should hold up to my use without issue. Plus I always have the option to get custom forged pistons made later if I want to throw lots of money at it. At the end of the day this is still a cheap engine so if it does all go wrong I’ll do something else!

S-type v6 with decompression plate test fitted

Here you can see the decomp plate in position for a trial fit before being bonded onto the head. If you look carefully you’ll notice the cylinder bores in the plate aren’t round, this is because they’re not actually round in the head gasket to provide clearance for the valves.

Its probably worth highlighting here that on this engine the head bolts are under the cams so you have to assemble the head after bolting it in place. The head bolts are M10 with 6 point hex heads but with a reduced size hex. They are recessed in narrow deep bores, I used a standard 15mm deep impact socket but it was very close to not fitting so worth checking this though if yours doesn’t fit you probably found out when you took it apart!

The head bolt tightening sequence and procedure are detailed in the workshop manual but long story short I suggest getting an angle gauge for this as they’re specified as a torque + angle. These are torque to yield bolts and so you get one shot to get it right since they’re single use.

Once the head is bolted down install the cams. At this point is doesn’t matter where in their rotation they are as we will set that later but try to put all the cam retainer pack in the same positions they came out of. Make sure to coat all bearing/contact surfaces with assembly grease.

Next if you are re-using the S-Type water fitting on this engine (though I think this applies to others as well) you will want to install this now if you haven’t already, if you don’t you won’t be able to with both heads bolted on so this is your last chance!

Now just rinse and repeat for the other head…

Once you’ve done that slip the oil pump onto the crank and bolt it in place. Hopefully at this point you should have an engine that looks a bit like this:

S-type v6 front of engine (no cover) with both heads in place

If you’ve got to this point I suggest going and having a break. This assembly will be continued in my next post…

Living with a Scirocco 1.4 TSI 160 (118kW) – Part 2, Turbo Replacement

It’s been a little over a year since I posted the introduction blog article on this car and more specifically on the unusual twin charged engine it has. Unsurprisingly over the last year or so I’ve found a few things that need a little work but generally the car has been excellent, needing minimal thought but certainly has some aspects to be aware of for prospective owners to keep the the engine working correctly.

When I bought the car it was a bit lacking power compared to what I was expecting and when accelerated hard in one gear (which due to a seemingly large gap between the supercharger and turbo rev ranges required revving it high) and changed up it would randomly have no power at all. I managed to trace this to a couple problems both related to the turbo wastegate. Firstly the requirement to rev it high was caused by serious wear on the wastegate pivot meaning the wastegate didn’t fully close so the turbo wouldn’t spin up properly. A temporary bodge to get round this is to tighten up the actuator rod to take up the slack but while this sort of helps it actually wears the housing even faster but it can get you by while you wait for a replacement. The second problem of lacking power after a high RPM change was that the wastegate actuator rod was actually bent and touching the turbo housing so it was actually getting temporarily stuck when fully extended so going into the next gear the turbo was basically just dumping the exhaust out the wastegate rather than doing anything useful. So this definitely needed looking at!

First off let me just say I initially looked at the position of the turbo nicely sat at the top front of the engine and thought a couple hours and it’d be done. I was wrong, very wrong! It looks lovely and easily accessible but it just isn’t as easy as it looks for many reasons mostly relating to it not being a turbo mounted to a manifold. the entire exhaust side manifold and turbo are a single unit so you need sufficient clearance to pull the whole unit out.

There it is under the heat shield – looks simple right?

I used various guides to do this swap and generally was in a rush (that didn’t work out so well) so I have very few photos of this but the information is fairly widely available anyway (try searching for guides to the mk6 Golf with the same engine) this is to highlight a few points people may find useful. I suggest referring to workshop manuals for a handy guide with diagrams of each section you need but strongly recommend an ad blocker before you do.

The hard plastic boost pipe which runs from the supercharger to the turbo inlet is retained at the turbo end by a single M6 torx bolt with the threads tapped into the aluminium casting. On the rebuilt unit I bought this thread turned out to be ruined to the point it was impossible to tighten. I suspect this is because undoing the captive fastener during disassembly tries to push a metal sleeve out of the plastic. This is fine in itself but I think it wears the aluminium, similarly tightening it back in will also be hard on it. The reality is the pipe should be pulled back a little at a time as the screw is undone to prevent the load on the threads but this is a bit awkward to achieve as the pipe has very little ‘give’ in it. I strongly recommend checking this before you start – I had to call in a favour because having spent a lot of time swapping the turbo it was rapidly approaching closing time for all the shops to get anything to repair this and without it the car shouldn’t be run. If you’re in any doubt just buy an M6 helicoil kit and put a shiny new insert in place in the aluminium casting because there is only the one screw and if it fails your car will not be happy! Helicoils in softer materials are actually stronger than directly tapping the material the right size because the insert is a stronger material than what it’s going into and because they’re fitted by screwing into a larger thread in the parent material than the desired final thread they have a larger contact surface area in that material.

2. To fully undo all the bolts of the manifold flange you have to undo the alternator mounting bolts and twist it out the way. To do this you have to take off the alternator belt by releasing the tensioner then remove the top mounting bolt for the alternator entirely and slacken the other. This requires removing the engine bay undertrays as well but if you’re doing this job save some time and just pull them all off now. The alternator can then be rotated down and away from the block to get at the bolt. Someone out there might have some creative way of getting at that bolt but I had nothing that would get at it from any angle and couldn’t see any other way if could be done because it’s in a recess with manifold one side, oil filter casting the other and alternator in front of it.

3. Remove the radiator fans. In the picture above you can see how tight this is relative to the turbo and so you need to do this to have enough clearance both to get tools in to undo the manifold nuts and also to remove the the turbo itself from the exhaust studs. Removing these is done from the underside and also involves removal of the pipe between the turbo outlet and intercooler to give sufficient space. You need this removed to change the turbo anyway so it’s no inconvenience.

You’re looking to remove pipe sections 15, 16 and 17 for clearance. Item 11 are two bolts holding the charge pipe to the engine. The radiator sits between the charge cooler and this charge pipe.

The fan module can be removed as a single unit downwards with both fans in place by simply removing the four bolts holding it to the radiator and unplugging it at its electrical connector (item 13 on the bottom edge in the image above).

4. Buy a fitting kit off eBay or somewhere – there are load available but this is the simplest way of making sure you have all the replacement seals and gaskets you might need. Get the most comprehensive one you can find if you can’t easily go to get more parts once this car is apart!

5. The oil drain hose from the turbo is an absolute pig to get at.

The part I’m referring to here is number 12 above and consists of a section of solid pipe at the turbo end with a very short section of hose crimped on. I used a socket on a series of extension bars to get the bolt out of the turbo end but the block end is very awkward to get at because you can’t see it from any angle and the access is tight because the bolt sits virtually under the downpipe. Good luck! When you’re struggling to put it back on after changing the turbo don’t forget the gasket. Also this pipe is apparently common for leaking because the bolt doesn’t get put in sufficiently tightly or the gasket gets damaged during reassembly. I’ve highlighted this below in red.

6. The coolant hard line on top of the turbo needs to be removed which leaves an open rubber hose end. An M8 bolt fits perfectly to block this and stop coolant pouring out over everything so have one to hand before you take it off.

7. Carefully check the boost control hoses – apparently these commonly crack and certainly in my case they were quite degraded around the turbo. You can buy the proper replacement VW part if you wish but it may be cheaper to just order some 5mm vacuum hose and put a run in. In my case I didn’t notice the damage until I started taking it apart and managed to get a random bit from a friend. His wasn’t the common stuff it was thin walled and reinforced so the standard clamps didn’t fit but luckily with some persuasion I managed to fit the thin hose into an offcut of the original one. When combined with a suitable hose clip it’s working fine and has been for ages – that said I do not recommend this option!

Damaged section of hose in red above. The image below shows the hose I replaced marked in red going from the turbo housing back to the boost control solenoid and then the second similar line from the solenoid to the wastegate actuator marked in green.

Unfortunately as I mentioned earlier I didn’t take extensive photos of this replacement but I hope these few points help someone out there!

Good luck!

RX8 Project – Part 15, Engine Strip #2

So having removed the timing chain and tensioners (see part 1) next we need to start looking at removing some more major parts of the engine.

Having already removed the cam covers already you should be looking at something like this:

Thanks to the Jag Motor Project for the image – hopefully they don’t mind me borrowing it! It seems I have misplaced my own photo of this!

You need to remove the cam bearing housings because the design of this engine has the head bolts directly under the cam making it impossible to remove the head with the cams still in place. This is worth remembering and is at least part of the reason stretch bolts are used for the head – it is impossible the re-torque them after an interval of use without removing all the timing gear. As you can see in the photo these are three smaller housings and one larger one at the front each held on with two small bolts. Basically you just need to carefully remove these bearing housings in order. I suggest marking the direction and its position on each one before removal. The position could be achieved by putting each into a small tub which is numbered. However you do this you need to know which is which and which way round they go. Remove them carefully and make sure you don’t drop any bits! Once you have removed the housings you’ll see this:

Now we have clear access to the head bolts which as you can see in the photo there are eight of. These are fairly easily removed except for one thing – the bolts are set well down into the head and there is very little room in the recess to put in a socket. You will need a 15mm socket for these bolts and a small breaker bar (or an impact gun) as they will be quite tight.

These bolts are not reusable – I mean you can but it’s a terrible idea particularly in such a critical location because odds are high it will not be up to the job. This is because “stretch” bolts rely on the material of the bolt reaching the yield point of the material at which it begins to exhibit a fairly constant elastic stretch. In effect once they start to deform they behave a bit like a very stiff spring and so if tightened correctly will hold a very accurate load without loosening and so do not need to be re-tightened after a run in period. That said hang onto them for now so you know what to order to replace them!

You can see how tight the casting is around the socket! Once all the bolts are gone you can lift the head away. It might take a little persuasion with a mallet. Make sure you have a suitable clear space to put it on once you remove it.

Now you should have this level of grime:

Obviously you can just pull off the head gasket now to improve the situation quite a bit and you can have a good look at the state of the engine:

Here you can see the cylinder bore actually looks in very good condition and even still has the factory honing marks on the bores which is a good sign it’s been working well and shouldn’t have suffered wear issues.

Now do all of that again for the other head and you should have something that looks a bit like this:

Congratulations now you have an engine with no heads but since my plan was to upgrade the rods I still needed to remove more so flip the engine over and we can get to it.

In the picture you can see the oil pump is just held on by four small black bolts. I put the crank bolt back in place just so I didn’t lose it but you would have removed this a long time ago. Once the four small bolts are out the oil pump can just be slid off the crank and put aside.

Next we need to remove the con rod bolts and this is where having the crank bolt comes in because you can put it back in finger tight and once it snugs up a bit you can turn over the engine to get access to all the rod bolts. Mark up each rod with a cylinder number and arrow for the front of the engine. I put sharpie marks across the split line of the rod to make it easier to match them up later. I had to use something to knock the piston out of the bore use something non metallic otherwise you will likely damage a surface you don’t want to damage. I used a length of wooden dowel. Do these carefully unbolting and removing one at a time. When knocking the piston out don’t forget to catch it before it falls on the floor!

So all we have left is the crank. If all you wanted to do was straight swap the rods this is as far as you need to get. Well I wanted to do a few other while I was at it (more on this in another post) so I carried on to remove the crank. This is actually pretty simple at this point, you just take out the 16 main bolts holding the lower block to the upper block along the bearings. The other thing you can see in the picture are the engine mounts, the rubbers here aren’t stock s-type, they’re actually from a V8 Land Rover (Discovery among many others). The reason for this is they’re very strong, extremely cheap (£7 a pair delivered from eBay) and have a stud each side which will fit straight onto the factory cast aluminium mounting arms and also make mounting onto the car really easy when we get to that stage!

It’s worth noting in the above picture not all the bolts are the same. This is because some have small studs on the top to allow the windage plate to be mounted (blue). Note which goes where so this can be put back later! Next you also need to remove the 6 outer bolts (red) before the block will separate.

Once all the bolts are out again you might need a gentle tap with a mallet and/or a scraper to get the block apart. Don’t drop the crank bearings!

If you’ve done all of this you should have something a bit like this in front of you:

And a heap of bits you just removed:

More to come on this project in my next post!

RX8 Project – Part 12, Turbos #3 – Flanges

This is a step that most people won’t need to do. Or rather there are usually easier alternatives to! When most people build a turbo manifold they simply buy pre-cut flanges for both the inlet and outlet and weld them onto the ends of whatever intricate bit of welded pipework they have devised and all is well. This is fine for the vast majority of turbos currently available but what if we have one that’s a bit more unusual, say one that most people would never even dream of using for a custom setup. For example the custom housing GT15 turbo used on a diesel Rover from about 20 years ago. That would present more of a challenge! Why do I never make these things simple!

So what we need to do is make some flanges, this isn’t a technically complex task but does take a little thought.

The first step is to carefully measure the size of either the fixed studs (or bolt holes). These are commonly M8 and so the bolt OD will be just under 8mm and if the flange has the holes will be more than the bolt size as they tend to be quite generous to aid alignment. M8 clearance hole might well be as much as 9mm but note these all down.

Next measure the distance between each of the holes/studs, adding half of each hole/stud diameter on these numbers will give you the distance between the centre of each fixing position. This gives the fixing positions and would allow a template for these to be drawn. If doing the job this way you just need to measure the main port diameter and its distance from the centre of each hole/stud position to the centre of the port. In my case one port was handily central in a triangle so I could just measure half way between each pair of stud and draw a line to the third stud and where they cross the port centre goes.

I also tried another approach which involved taking a thing piece of aluminium and physically imprinting it with the studs using a mallet. This can be handy for really irregular patterns but does mean you don’t have a nice dimensioned drawing to keep, but you do get an aluminium template. Basically you take your aluminium, lay it over the studs and tap it with a mallet. This leaves an impression for all the fixing positions. What you’d normally do here is just drill a small pilot hole where the centre of each stud is to use to mark up your steel. in my case I didn’t want to have to remove the studs from the turbo so I drilled them out full size.

At this stage I used the same method to indent the sheet metal for the port which was then drilled with a 3mm hole for later transfer.

The port mark was critical because the port was the largest hole and most likely to go wrong! After marking it up on the 10mm thick steel plate I was going to use as the flange and looking at my pillar drill I decided I needed a substantial clamp for safety! While I could have bought a suitable clamp kit I decided that since I already owned suitable tee nuts for the bed I could make it safely.

So this was the final drilling arrangement – and yes that is a hole saw! I feel at this point I should point out that not all hole saws are created equal. Most commonly found at DIY shops are only suitable for wood/plastic/plasterboard and maybe aluminium sheet which not unreasonably are the sort of things used in DIY. Proper tool shops will supply hole saws rated for steel but they will cost a little more the set I used was this one. It’s certainly not the most expensive out there and probably won’t last terribly long with this level of use but it’s rare I use them for anything like this and I can replace the individual saws in the set fairly cheaply.

You need to centre punch where the port centre is to locate then mount the plate onto the drill. Put a smallish drill bit (don’t go really small as you risk breaking it, I started at 3mm but you could easily go a little larger as this isn’t really precise work) into the chuck and carefully align the punched mark on the plate with the tip. Once you are happy with the location tighten the clamps down. Tighten a little each side at a time if you have an arrangement like mine as otherwise the high pressure on one side will tend to make the place slip out of position during tightening.

Next you need to lubricate! This is absolutely critical drilling metals otherwise you will spend a lot of time either sharpening worn drill bits or trying to extract broken ones! There’s a lot of debate on whats best, for most light work I use WD40 but you will get through it quite quickly as it will tend to vaporise with the heat, this is good in that it helps cool the metal and cutting tool but it must be replaced with more. With deeper holes or larger diameters I tend to use 3in1 as it seems to work well. For the hole saw here I actually started using car gearbox oil, this slows the cutting but protects the tool.

Once you have a pilot hole swap the small drill bit out for the hole saw, make sure you have the speed slow, cover everything in lubricant and gently start to cut. This will take a considerable amount of time, be patient and regularly stop the drill and clear the cut debris away from the saw. Try to avoid using your fingers to do this as the edges can be very sharp. An air compressor is great for this but I have found that cans of computer air duster work pretty well.

Once you have your main port drilled remove the plate from the drill and file back any sharp edges then use your template to mark the centres for all the other holes, these will then need to be centre punched as before and drilled out to size in stages, I went 4mm, 6.5mm, 8.5mm from what I remember. The only critical one being the final size with the earlier steps being arbitrary. If smaller increments are used the cuts are normally quicker and easier but it adds more operations and so will likely take longer. Also I drilled all the stages on a single hole and then moved the plate which adds many more drill changes but you could also drill all the holes to one size then change drills but this has the added risk of the alignment being off which increases the chance of the bit chattering and potentially breaking but can be done if you’re careful. For the level of precision we really need it doesn’t really matter.

By now you should have something a bit like this! At this stage with the new flange seated in place marking the outside edge of the flange becomes much easier – you simply bolt the flange in place and draw (or even better scribe) round it on the mating side. The flange then needs to be removed and trimmed back to the mark. I rough cut the bulk off this with and angle grinder and then tidied the edges back with a bench grinder. Again working 10mm plate takes a little time but it’s not too bad and the outside edge doesn’t need to be perfect just not look silly or clash with anything and still be wide enough to hold a gasket.

Here’s the result, two respectable looking turbo exhaust inlet flanges. The process for the exhaust outlets was exactly the same but the main port was 55mm diameter rather than 36mm diameter making the process take even longer! If you’re in a hurry get them laser/waterjet cut!

In another entry I’ll be looking at the process of making the custom exhaust gaskets I need to match.

RX8 Project – Part 11, Turbo’s #2 – Wastegates

So now the project is going in the turbo direction I need to be a bit wary with how I do it. The GT1549 turbo’s I chose had positives and negatives. They looked to be exactly the right size for the engine I had, they were fairly common in one form or another and importantly the price was spot on! I still don’t understand quite how but I managed to find someone on eBay with a matching pair of these turbos fully cleaned and rebuilt for £65 each delivered! So that’s the positives, now the negatives, firstly rather than the normal bracket bolted to rear of the compressor housing to hold the wastegate actuator. On these turbos it is actually cast into the housing and so it would make rotating the housing to fit the application considerably more difficult. The second problem is they have a factory fitted actuator which isn’t adjustable more than a small amount and I really didn’t want to start tweaking a completely untested engine with no idea what was going to happen with no way of keeping the boost below the 18 psi wastegate pressure!

So getting over these problems. Having looked at the rotation problem I came to the conclusion I should be able to make them both fit with no rotation changes needed. The backup plan here was to grind off the cast in mount and custom make a bracket using a bit of steel plate if it turned out I needed to later on. This takes us to the wastegate problem. I looked at a number of ways of providing a reduction in the actuator pressure including adding springs to the rod side of the actuator and even bolting the internal wastegate solid and fitting external wastegates to the manifolds I came to the conclusion the only real way of giving a wide but reliable range of adjustment while keeping the package as small as possible would be to replace the stock actuator with an aftermarket adjustable one.

Now this is where the plan goes a bit wrong about – after looking about for ages to find a sensible option at a half sensible price the best I could come up with was this : Kinugawa Actuator

I’m under no illusions here, this is a a cheapo unit! But I strongly object to spending the cost of the car on each wastegate. The problem is even though I got these for £68 each which really is very cheap they actually cost more then the pair of turbos! Considering all this it’s still a pretty good option because it is a ‘universal’ version. It comes with a range of springs for different pressures so I can start at just a few psi and swap the springs out as needed and also comes supplied with four different actuator rods.

So here we are – actuators!

So at first glance they look ideal, but don’t let that fool you! There’s a couple engineering problems to overcome.

The first problem is this; the hole in the supplied rod end isn’t large enough for the flap actuator on the turbo. The solution is simply to drill this out to fit. I didn’t note the sizes, but it was a standard drill size.

Next up was that this ‘universal’ actuator was never really intended for a turbo this small and as such the shortest actuator rod is too long to allow the wastegate flapper to close so I had to modify that as well. The rods are nominally 6mm diameter but the end the rod end has a fine pitch thread meaning modifying that would need me to buy a fine pitch die to extend the thread. Luckily the end that goes into the actuator is a standard M6x1mm metric thread so that was the easier option.

I measured how much I needed to shorten the rod to allow the flapper to just close at one end of the rod ends adjustment. The opening pressure of the actuator is set by preload so the more it is tightened greater the boost pressure. I then simply cut the thread down to the required point and then trimmed off the excess. The good news is if I made the rod too short I three more tries for each one!

And here is the difference – it’s actually about 25mm less than it started out! Reassemble the whole thing and magically it now fits where it needs to!

The other thing you will need to do potentially at this point is change the spring. Once the actuator rod is in the actuator this is actually not too bad but be a bit fiddly. First of position the actuator so the rod is sticking downward between the jaws of a vice. Tighened the vice to hold the rod in place then undo all the housing screws. Lift off the top housing and carefully remove the diaphragm underneath. Next you need to carefully release the rod to take the load off the spring. then you just unscrew the rod and take the aluminium piston and the spring underneath out the housing. Reassembly is just the reverse but the key is to put tension on the rod again and clamp it in place again before refitting the diaphragm and cap otherwise it’s very difficult to get the diaphragm correctly positioned without any wrinkles that could cause damage or leakage.

So now we have two turbos with adjustable wastegate actuators with a potential working range covering something like 3-30psi!

RX8 Project – Part 10, Turbo!

So this is about the time this whole project started getting a bit out of hand, when I decided I was going to need more power…significantly more.

I looked into what options I had –

Option 1 – I could stay naturally aspirated and probably skim the head to increase compression a bit and get more out of it but tuning in this way can be very intricate and looked to be more involved than I wanted for the amount of power I could expect.

Option 2 – Supercharger, there are a few options here. Realistically the most common supercharger these days the Eaton M45 found on the modern Mini cooper S is just too small for this so sticking with the positive displacement type we can get an M62 from a mercedes CLK230 and with the right pulley ratio it would probably be ideal for moderate improvements. For real degrees of silliness an M90 might well be needed and these are a little harder to find.

Option 3 – Turbo, this gives a huge amount of options due to the prevalence of turbo engines at the moment and would give potential for significant power gains comparatively cheaply and without needing to align belts.

After debating for a very long time the best way to go for a road car I settled on option 3 primarily for the simplicity aspect – I know very little about the intricacies of high compression engines and I know superchargers require a level of alignment very difficult to achieve with DIY manifolds! The next obvious question is how much power? Well following finding out from Noble that the rods in the engine fold up at something a bit over 300bhp I decide that from a cost and complexity point of view I’d aim for about 280bhp as a limit so I could keep the amount of parts I needed to a minimum – famous last words!

Now there’s a huge online argument about whether two smaller turbos or a single larger one gives the best throttle response and performance. This isn’t an argument I want to get into but in my case I decided twin turbo was the way to go for two reasons. Firstly because I could close mount them under the engine to keep the overall engine package as small as possible and so simplify the pipework on the exhaust side. Secondly because due to the government publicising the benefits of diesel there are now loads of small cheap turbos about for very little money..

Getting into sizing most of the information is that Noble used two T25 turbos. Taking a look at http://www.boosttown.com/forced_induction/air_amount_calculator.php

We can see that for this engine at 6000 rpm and 0.7 bar of boost we need about 27 lbs/min of total airflow. Next we need the T25 Map for a common inducer size:

Looking at the map for the normal T25 turbo we can see that with two turbos to share the load and so only needing about 13.5 lb/hr at 1.7 pressure ratio the turbo is right in its optimal zone. Not a bad choice all in all but these are old design turbos and as a twin turbo configuration the actual amount of available exhaust will be limited so the turbo may not spool until a bit high up the rev range so I started looking at other options which would give a good improvement across a wider rev range. To achieve this a smaller exhaust housing was needed and this is where the diesel engines come in. Turbos used for diesel engines tend to have smaller exhaust housings for this very reason and they’re abundant. This led me to the GT1549, this is a manufacturer specific version of the GT1548 turbo, people have reported them to be good for 180-200bhp which is right in the area we want.

In many ways a similar map to the T25 but the spindle speeds are noticeably higher. The unit as a whole is much smaller but will have less weight in the rotating components and as a result of the smaller exhaust housing the turbo should generate boost at lower RPM. I used to have a map for the exducer which confirms this but have since misplaced it. Now before anyone tells me “you can’t use a diesel turbo on a petrol” consider this – this same turbo was used on both a huge range of diesel engines but also on the Saab 9-5 V6 petrol. That said there is also a VNT version of this turbo (GT15xxV), VNT turbos don’t last long on petrol engines by all accounts.

So here we are, the turbos :

So there you have it, a short post but a complete change in the direction of the project from where it started off and we’re only just getting started!