The GT42's Turbine Housing

Build Diary / News

Dyno Time!

2008 Changes

It's been a long long time since I updated this page. I apologize :-) As is the case, life takes precedence every once in a while and those issues end up being more important than updating a website about a car, no matter how cool the car is. So, until I'm independently wealthy, I have to fit in updating the site when I'm not doing normal things required for life, or working the the car that this site is all about.

Speaking of the site, I have a lot of things swirling around in my head about what I want to do with it - I want to redesign it soon, but I don't quite have it set in my head, and I don't have the time to redesign it yet, so it will probably be like this for a bit longer. It hasn't hurt yet...

Oiling

You probably want to know what's happening on the *car*, don't you? Okay, I'll get to that. Over the past four or five months, I've been doing a lot of random work on the car. There are hundreds of tiny projects, from making brackets to getting the rear tinwork finished up. And this is all I've been spending time on.

This series of events is in no particular order:

I took the turbo off the car to find out that the turbo's sleeve bearings were leaking oil into the turbine housing (and the compressor housing - more on that later...) and that caused the car to burn quite a bit of oil. There are three things playing into this happening:

• Oil Pressure


• Oil Weight


• Oil Drain

The oil pressure on the car is extremely high when the motor is cold. And by "high", I mean around 85 psi. When I rev it, it shoots up to 90psi and higher. Why is it so high? ("Why wouldn't he just port the oil filter housing?")

My oil filter housing is ported. It's hogged out. The thing can't get much larger than it is and still allow the relief valve to stay where it's supposed to be without falling out.

I'm running 20w50 racing oil in the car. Racing is in the name, so it has to be good, right? No. That's not why I'm running it. I'm running it because people have issues with 4g63's and bearings getting beat up at high RPM with normal weight oil. Thicker oil seems to help with these issues. This doesn't even begin to explain some other issues people have with oil pumps and stuff like that, but that's for another post...

In addition to that, this engine has a natural tendency to want to run higher pressure. While that sounds naive, it's not. The balance shafts have been removed, and the rod bearings are on the tight side of their specs. So, this means the oil pumping to the balance shaft passages isn't being used, leading to higher oil pressure. It also means the oil coming out of the rod bearings has more restriction, even though it's marginal (we're talking a couple hundred thousandths) - and general engine freshness all lead to having naturally higher oil pressure. Even with a ported relief valve.

So, there are reasons that my oil pressure is high. Why would that affect my turbo? Well, I am running my oil feed right off the oil filter housing. This means that the turbo gets full oil pressure, instead of the restricted pressure that it would get if I fed the turbo through the head.

So, really what I'm trying to say is: the turbo was normally getting between 85 and 90 psi of oil pressure, since the engine is normally on the cold side of things when it's running, right now, when I'm playing with tuning and stuff like that in my garage. This leads to a lot of oil in my exhaust, all over my turbine and downpipe, and even a little bit in my intake manifold. Used burnt oil is gross.

Okay, back on track. Because of all this, I decided to find an oil pressure restrictor to put on the turbo oil feed line. After talking to Robert at Forced Performance, I decided to use an AN fitting I had laying around, and thought I would test some theoretical orifice sizing requirements. In order to do that, I'd have to have a way to independently measure the oil pressure to the turbo separate from the rest of the oiling system. This was accomplished by putting a gauge after the restrictor, inline with the turbo feed line. The result is another new gauge in the passenger wheel well, where I can see the turbo's oil pressure at all times. Handy. So, onto testing. Here's part of an email I sent to a friend:

I basically took an 1/8" npt to 4an fitting, soldered it shut, and then drilled holes of various sizes in it. rinse and repeat. I started out with a ~.093 (3/32" drill bit) orifice - and that resulted in about 5psi pressure drop around 80psi, but very little noticeable drop once the car was up to operating temp - full pressure was like 28psi. Then I went down to ~.078" (5/64" drill bit) but that was just around a 10psi pressure drop at 80psi, and about a 2psi pressure drop @28psi. Then, I dropped down to ~.0625" (1/16" bit) and now the oil pressure is 60psi at the turbo when the oil pressure is 80 psi. At idle, the oil pressure is 25psi when full pressure is 28psi. Anyway, I'm sticking with this for now. I don't have a smaller drill bit ;-p And, the only step that I can go down to is the FP filter's .030" hole. I'm not ready to drop that low.

So, there you go - This is with, as the email states, around 80psi of oil pressure. The car was around 150 degrees operating temperature at the time of testing.

In addition to the new turbo oil restrictor, I also replaced the -8AN oil drain fitting with a -10AN fitting, along with a new -10AN turbo drain line, and -10AN bung on the oilpan. That was an enormous pain in the ass, but you've got to do what you've got to do, right? If I had to do it all over, I would have started out with -10AN, and probably fed the turbo from the port on the head for the factory turbo oil feed line. It's still a possibility for the future, but right now, It's going to run how it's set up. As my email suggests, I also purchased a turbo oil filter from Forced Performance, which has a nifty built in restrictor for ball bearing turbos. Since I'm not running a ball bearing turbo, I will have to drill it out to the restriction size I feel like I need to use. At this point, my turbo on my engine will probably use a .0625" hole. It's hard to find actual pressure information from anyone online, so I'm hoping this will help someone Googling for it :-)

Turbine Housing

Oh, yes, I forgot about the Turbine housing. After taking the car down to the shootout, the turbine housing started to get a little orange. I am not a metallurgist, but the GT42 housing appears to be a cast steel housing (it could be cast iron, but I don't think it is - I think it's steel) and the evening of the shootout, it rained. A lot. The car was outside on the trailer, so that led to a whole lot of exposure to generally humid conditions. All in all, the turbine housing has held up great. I've seen housings on race cars used for three months that are completely rusty, so the fact that this housing went three+ years sitting in a modestly controlled environment without much oranging at all is really quite nice. Even still, aside from me having personal issues with rust, it was time to get the housing coated so that it was protected and would also help with the underhood temps.

So, after doing a bit of searching, I changed my mind and decided I wanted to go with someplace local - well, relatively local anyway. Kiggly suggested a place in Romulus Michigan called Exotic Coatings. And while I'm not so hot about their website, I'm very satisfied with their coating. They properly cleaned and media blasted my turbine housing, doing all the right prep work (they even understood what v-band flanges were ;-p) and then coated my turbine housing with a cast iron gray 2000 degree high temp coating. I'm very pleased with how the housing turned out, and they were even ahead of the schedule they gave me. they told me a week at least, but called me three days after I dropped it off and told me it was all set. Not only that, but their price was awesome - it cost me $75 to get the housing coated. Jet Hot's gaudy iced-out blinging silver coating would be $180 on a T4 housing, and this T6 housing is larger than most cute T4 housings.

The turbine housing is now nice and pretty. I can also hold my hand about an inch away from it after running the car for a short period of time, and before the coating the housing would just radiate heat for a long time. This is a very unscientific method of testing it, but if I can feel that it's cooler, then I know more heat is going through the header and *out* the turbine, not through it.

Switch Panel

Back when I put together the wiring harness, I spent a lot of time thinking about where I was going to mount the switch panel. It was clear to me early on that I didn't want to use an off-the-shelf switch panel, because they're generally setup for circle track cars, or cars with a dash of some sort. Plus, I've never been happy with rollbar mounted switch panels from Painless or Moroso or any other place - they seemed too large and inelegant. So, because of that, I made my own switch panel from aluminum. I also decided then that I wanted to mount the panel out of the way, but easy to get to if I needed to. So, I mounted the panel next to the shifter mount, located on the driveshaft tunnel. This was really kind of a pain because of the shape of the driveshaft tunnel, but I'm very happy with how it turned out. these brackets are going to end up with a brushed finish, because I had to weld on them to do what I wanted to do with them - they mount directly to the driveshaft tunnel. The good news, though, is that the switch panel itself comes right out with the removal of four DZUS fasteners. Neat.

Fire Suppression

How can I forget about the fire suppression? I have a lot more pictures that I took, but I haven't yet uploaded them to my server. Until then, you'll have to check out the panorama that I digitally stitched together above.

The fire suppression system was a long time in the making. The system itself is a Safecraft RS system - it has three nozzles, and three discharge outlets on the bottle itself. I'm using two of them - one of the outlets runs to a line routed up through the interior of the car to my feet, as mandated by NHRA rules. The other outlet runs to a T fitting on the firewall, which splits that into two lines running running around the firewall. They go through a bulkhead on each side of the car, into the front fenders, and then into the engine bay. The bottle is mounted where a passenger seat would be, and is out of the way, for the most part. I could probably actually mount a seat there if I wanted to, but I wouldn't be able to have passengers anyway ;-)

All in all, I'm pleased with how it all turned out. I will have to get those other pictures I've taken of the inner fenders uploaded soon.

Shootout 2007 Coverage

This past Friday, I get a random email from a really old Michigan club DSMer, Jason Brendel. He proceeds to tell me about seeing my car in Turbo Magazine! Hey, that's cool - I had no idea! We also caugh up for a bit, so that was cool :-)

After that, I started poking around to see if anyone else had pictures of my car. I checked out the usual suspects - modified.com had posted two pictures of the Talon in their DSM shootout 2007 coverage, both pictures of the car that I really like. Oh, and this is random, but a few months ago I found some pictures from Erica Marshall of Muddyboots Photography, and I really like the engine bay shot that she took, and think I should get an 11x17 of that to post in my office.

Oh, yeah, these aren't from Turbo mag like I was originally thinking about posting :-o Click on the image to the right to see the fullsize version of it. Turbo mag said some very nice things about the car while they were around. Once the Talon is making passes, who know, maybe they'll feature it :-)

Pre Shootout 2007

Okay, so it's been a week since the shootout, so it's about time to get a new post up on the
site ;-) I've had an entire week to get some other non-car-related things, and so now I'm
ready to post all about the shootout. This one should be a long post ;-p

I've spent about the last six weeks working on the Talon, and the week before the shootout was about the most intense period of time in which I worked on the Talon in a very long time. Mark has been in Oregon since the beginning of June, so it would be a little hard to get help from him ;-) Thankfully, Rick has been around and willing to drive out here to Howell a few times each weekend over the last two or three weeks. Rick has helped me tear the car down, clean it up, and put it back together, so I need to thank him for that. Without his help, there's no way the car would have been nearly as done as it was.

Two weeks before the shootout, the car was bare. And, I mean *bare* - no engine, no suspension in the car, no doors, no plumbing - nothing. So, Rick and I got to work putting things in the car. We started out getting a bunch of painting done on the car. Between putting new color on the cage, getting unpainted portions of the car completed, and getting the gas door cleaned up, we spent a lot of time getting that stuff squared away. That weekend, the car was still bare, but ready to put back together. Mostly. Oh, yeah, and I got the seat mounting done by the end of Sunday night.

I'm realizing more and more that as I type this out, the two weeks before the shootout is a little fuzzy. So much stuff has happened, that things may be a little out of order ;-p

Anyway, through that week, I spent time cleaning up the car, and doing a bunch of other things that I don't remember. By the time Friday had come, the car was still missing it's suspension, driveline, and everything else substantial. It was a good thing Rick was coming out to help ;-)

Saturday we started putting the car back together, in any sort of substantial measure of "putting together", anyway. So, we started by getting the front and rear suspension in the car. Once that was done, I wanted to make some measurements in order to do a rough alignment on everything. Well, I should say I wasn't expecting to have to align anything, but once together, there were some weird measurements, so we needed to get the suspension more-square than it was. So, off to work, right?

Rick and I measured suspension points from the rear of the car to the front, to verify that the chassis itself was square. Thankfully, it was dead on. Sure, years ago when this stuff was being fabricated, it was measured, and was built as square as we could, but years later you forget about actual values and figures, and you end up not knowing that the car is, in fact, square. That was a nice relief. After that, we started measuring front suspension components. Measurements on the front control arms and suspension points did not line up. So, after about two hours of working on this stuff, Rick and I got the front suspension *square*. And I mean *square* - to within less than 1/32" from rear suspension points.

After that, it was time to get the four link set up. We bolted the four link into the car, and set that up. It was uneventful, compared to the front end ;-) So yeah, the car now rolled. After that, it was time to put the plumbing back in the car. After the plumbing, the engine and transmission went into the car. Over the next few days, I would revamp the wiring harness, install the driveshaft, and did everything else that needed to be done - I can't even list it all there was so much stuff put on the car. (it's hazy ;-p)

In the end, Mark and I ended up spending about 5 more hours on the car than I originally inmagined. I took almost the entire night on Friday, the day before the shootout, to get the car ready to show (not even ready to race!) - We didn't even get weatherstipping on most of the car, which would come back to bite us in the ass a little later, but we did get the car together, started, and then rolled it up onto the trailer. We strapped it down, loaded up the truck, and then drove down to Norwalk - we left at 11:30pm on Friday, arrived around 1:45am Saturday morning.

DSM Shootout - 08/18/2007 - Dave Buschur's Place

After a very brief night of sleep, I awoke at 6:45am the next morning. Actually, I had set my alarm on my cell phone, but I had forgotten to enable it. Even still, my body naturally awoke. I think I was excited about it.

There's always something about the shootout that makes you a little bit apprehensive. Sure, you may have a nice DSM, but there's still someone else who has dropped money more than you have; or they have a nicer car than you do. There always will be - it happens in anything. Anyway, There's excitement, suspense, and a thrill that you get when presenting something to your peers. And, that's what I Was doing.

Three years ago, I brought the Talon down to the shootout. It was nowhere near as done as it is today - and it was missing... everything. We had the backhalf done, and the engine and transmission in the car. Other than that, it was bare. No manifolds, no tin work, no bumpers, and not very much else. Sure, Saturday wasn't *the shootout*, per se, but this year it ended up being the only shootout that was had. And this year? It was as crazy as ever. Dave posted in this thread that there were over 300 cars present, with over 1000 people attending the car show / dyno portion of the shootout. Needless to say, it was a little nuts at times during the day.

So, we got there in the morning, said hello to Dave, and then after getting some crap from him about *still* not having a running vehicle, we rolled the Talon off the trailer. Then, we pushed it around until we got it into a parking spot. We ended up in the grass right across Dave's driveway from the Dyno. So, if you got the chance to see a dyno pull, chances are good that you also got a chance to see the car.

As I was pushing the car into place, it occurred to me that I knew there was something up with the car that we should have been able to fix easily. The night before, we had flooded the engine trying to get the car to move under it's own power. It didn't really move up onto the trailer, but we were simply out of time, so we pushed it instead of driving it. Anyway, now it was the next morning, and there was no reason the car shouldn't be running under it's own power. So, we tried to start the car. It ran like crap, and then stalled. Hrm... I pulled the plugs out of the car, and sure enough 2,3 and 4 were drenched with gas. So, Mark went and got a new set of plugs for the car, while I checked out some other things, and got the laptop to adjust some settings on the the Haltech. Mark came back with the new plugs, I pulled fuel out of the coolant temp maps of the Haltech (it was still quite cold outside) and we started the car up. It started right up, but was very lean. And it ran like crap. It totally wasn't running on all 4 cylinders. Thankfully, it was still early in the morning, and there weren't too many people there standing around while we were trying to get it running, so it wasn't too embarrassing ;-)

So, we started troubleshooting. First, we thought that it may be spark, so I borrowed a power transistor from Daniel Buschur to see if I had inadvertently fried the one on the car. This turned out NOT to be the issue. Okay, what next? We pulled the plugs again. 2,3 and 4 all had carbon on them - they were firing. Number 1? It was completely white - you could still see the porcelain. Crap. Okay, well, it should have been getting spark, but may not have been getting fuel. I poked around a little bit, and found the problem. My #1 injector plug had come un-crimped. Yeah, how does that happen? So, I sent Mark on another wild goose chase to look for an injector pigtail. While he ran across the street to the local Wakeman auto parts store, I went into Dave's shop to return the power transistor to Daniel, and also managed to pull the sloppy pin out of the injector pigtail from the Talon. I also managed to borrow a crimp tool from Daniel, which was cool, but I also got crap from him about not knowing how to crimp connectors ;-) It was okay, I deserved it. So, I crimped the #1 injector properly, and put the harness back together.

Finally! All four cylinders were firing. It was great to finally have the car running properly :-)

More Tuning

We're still working on it. Two minute video:

:-)

An amazingly long post follows the video:



So, this post needs quite a bit of explanation. Or, I should say that I *want* to explain more of it :-) Last Sunday, the car started. It was around 5pm. In order to get that to happen, I had spent the previous week and a half getting things done after work, and on the previous weekend. Generally, I would work until around 11pm. It was quite an accomplishment. The sheer number of things done on the car, however small, all still had to happen before it could run.

So, flashback to a few weeks ago. After getting the dash fabricated, welded up, fitted, sanded, painted, and to the point where I called it "done", it was time to take it all back apart. I had to replace the Sport Comp fuel pressure gauge with a new phantom gauge so that they all looked identical - all except the AEM UEGO. After that, there was a fair amount of work to get all the plumbing done - all the plumbing on the car is AN, including the vacuum lines if you haven't already noticed. So, it was kind of a clusterf*ck to get that all worked out. I also needed to get a fuel pressure isolator, and I was looking for one compatible with alcohol, in case I decide to run methanol, ethanol, or e85 in the future. And, for what it's worth, you generally can't find them. Malory makes one of them - it's about $65. So I get the plumbing knocked out, and what's next?

The gauge wiring harness. This thing was actually a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be. The gauge harness actually a series of four harnesses: one for the AEM UEGO that connects to the o2 sensor, one for the lights (+12V switched on the switch panel,) one for the Tachometer & water temp gauge, and one for power to the AEM UEGO gauge and the EGT gauge. So, Why did I essentially make three harnesses? Well, the gauges need to be able to be *removed* from the dash, and without splitting the harness up, I would never be able to take the damn thing apart. The EGT gauge and the Tachometer have permanent wires coming out of the back of them, so they were good candidates for a base harness. the UEGO gauge has two connectors on the back of it - one with 6 wires going to the o2 sensor, and the other with four wires: power, ground, o-5V out and serial out. I ran the 0-5V out to the Haltech's o2 input, so that I would be able to log voltage on the Haltech. Anyway, I took the UEGO's power side harness, and merged it with the EGT harness, and used a 6 pin metripack connector to get all of those bundled into one harness. The other harness was similarly bundled: The water temp gauge has three spade connectors on the back of it, power, ground, and temperature sender. These were bundled with the Tachometer which also has permanently affixed wiring. to differentiate these, I used a 5 pin metripack connector. the last bundle was the lighting, and fortunately all the lighting is removable from the gauges that I have, so the lighting circuit was a much simpler circuit than it could have been :-o Anyway, while doing that, I had remembered that I had no TACH signal, so I would have to run one from the factory power transistor back into the car to the gauge cluster. That was a pain to do, but only because it was time consuming. so yeah, no big deal, right? ;-)

Next up on the list was hooking up the Fuel pump. I'm using an Aeromotive A1000 pump, but it hadn't yet been wired in the back of the car. So, I broke out some connectors and wired it up to the battery shutoff switch. It was one of the simplest pieces of wiring on the car :-) The pump is controlled through ground by the Haltech, and because I wanted to have some control over it, I ran a switched +12V signal to it. So, the Haltech has to be on and want to control it, and I have to allow the Haltech to control it. If I don't, then computers may take over the world and all hell will break loose. In addition, the "rear wiring harness" (as I call it) also has a circuit for the lighting that runs to the center brake light in the wing. This will allow me to race at night :-)

After the fuel pump was done, I started on the oil pump pickup. I already had a version that I was going to use, but it needed some adjustments because I had created it before deciding to go with a kiggly racing girdle on the car. After deciding to use the girdle, I had to shave the supports off of the pickup tube and remake them. So, Monday night rolled around and I pulled an old greasy block out of the shop. I threw it up on the engine stand, pulled it all apart, and fabbed up the brackets for the oil pickup tube.

Tuesday night rolled around, and now it was time to get the oilpan installed. I put the newly fabbed oil pickup tube on the car, and then test fitted the oilpan on the greasy engine-stand 4g63. Everything was set. So, I RTV'd the new oilpan and the engine block. And then all hell broke loose. First, the stock pan bolts were too short to fit with the new oilpan's flange, which is significantly thicker than a stock flange. No big deal, I have other bolts. So, I break them out and start bolting the oilpan to the car. Except I can't bolt all the damn bolts to the car - some of the holes in the pan won't lineup. Crap. Okay, now I have about 16 out of the 20 bolt holes all lines up, but I cannot get the holes on the front and back of the back to lineup, and I have to be careful because they bolt into aluminum :-o So, I had to take the pan back off and cleanup *all* the RTV - off both the pan and the block. Then, I had to ream the oil pan bolt holes just slightly to get them to allow me to bolt them all up. But, it all bolted up to the mockup! Tolerances are a bitch sometimes. Anyway, got the holes reamed, and then did a complete test fit on the block under the car. All in all, I removed and replaced somewhere between sixty and eighty M6 cap head screws that night - not fun!

Wednesday rolled around and it was now time to get all the cooling system tightened and squared away. I started on the coolant neck - I pulled it off the car, made a restrictor plate to put between the head and neck, and then got all that RTV'd together. After that, I removed all the 12AN lines, and lubricated them before going through and getting them all tightened up. It wasn't hard, but it was time consuming. After I was done with that, I pretty much called it a night, I think. If I didn't, I just did other random stuff ;-p Oh, yeah, I ported the oil filter housing.

Thursday was my wife's birthday. You can't work on the project on your wife's birthday.

Friday was a day of complete random stuff. I don't know what I did, but I spent most of it working. I think I finally got the turbo support bracket mounted to the car, among everything else. I also worked on the Haltech software on Friday, and found out something I didn't want to know. The E6S, which is an older Haltech model, requires pullup resistors on the Ign Out and the Aux out 1 in order to be used with the stock power transistor units. I didn't have these resistors in the car. Okay, to clarify, I didn't *know* that these were required - the manual says nothing about them - but I found information that said that they were.

Saturday morning I spent the day running around - I went out and got a belt for the Alternator, new bolts for the oilpan that were 8mm longer (to allow room for lock washers,) and a few other things. Friday night I had already picked up oil, ATF, gear oil, a filter, distilled water, and some other things. By the time I got back, it was past 2:00, and Mark still wasn't at the house. He finally got there, and we spent the rest of the night getting more stuff buttoned up. I replaced the oilpan bolts, and then we pulled apart the exhaust side of the engine apart. We had to reassemble it with gaskets. then, we put the flywheel on the car, which is an event in itself. We ended up working until about 10:30pm, and called it a night.

Sunday morning Mark got to the house around 11:00. I started working on the final maps for the Talon while Mark ate breakfast, and then we got to work. We started the day by getting the oil system all squared away - I put oil in the Talon, changed the oil filter, and pulled the timing belt off the car to prime the system. About 10 second into priming, oil started leaking out of the head where the stock oil feed bolt to the turbo goes. Oh crap - I completely forgot about that. So, Mark cut and fabbed up a bolt for me because we didn't have anything short enough. It didn't make too much of a mess, thankfully. Oil bolt plug in, we could now move on to the cooling system.

As I filling the cooling system, I started to go over all the connections in the system. Unfortunately, I forgot about two of them in the CSR water pump. The pump has two inlets and two outlets - I'm only using one of each. Because of that, I didn't tighten the two plugs in the unused inlet and outlet. I discovered this when water started pouring out of the pump. Oops. Unfortunately, the plugs needed a 3/8" hex wrench to tighen them, and I didn't have one. I did, however, have a 3/8" nut that I welded onto a bolt, and used that to tighten the whole mess. After that, the system was sealed :-) Sealed so well, in fact, that we couldn't get an air bubble out of it :-( Damn! the not-so-quick fix we came to was simple. We jacked the front of the car up, pulled the jackstands out from underneath it, and lowered the front end of the car down to the ground. This gave us just movement of the cooling system to release the air bubble, and allow water to get to the water pump. Once we did that, I had to add the rest of almost two gallons of water. At this point, I have no clue how large the cooling system is, because I can't tell you how much water we sopped up off the floor. I imagine it's around a gallon and a half. Anyway, good riddance! That took *forever* to get done. Next on the list?

The Powerglide. The powerglide in the Talon is from Dave Buschur. I bought it off him back when he sold his tube car. So, it's filled with previously used fluid. Getting the PG in the car was a pain, too. it's difficult to lift, and I honestly should have just lifted the car up on the jackstands more than I did to get it in the car. Instead, I tried to lift it up while standing in the car. This was a mistake. I tilted the PG, and about 3 seconds later, ATF came pouring out the back of the transmission, all over the floor and under my shows. Argh. So, we cleaned that up (that's three of three fluids on the floor for those of you who are counting) and then managed to get the PG in the car. Thankfully, I spent adequate time making sure that I didn't get ATF all over the interior of the car.

While installing the PG, Rick showed up to lend a hand. I immediately put him on the laptop to check out the maps, and to compare them to a base map that I found. He spent the majority of the time working on that, but lent a hand when we needed tools or rags :-)

After the PG was installed, I continued working under the car by getting the transmission crossmember bolted in and getting the driveshaft installed. While I was doing this, Mark started filling the rear differential with gear oil. Right around this point, the fact that I only had a small set of hex wrenches bit us again. This time, Mark couldn't get the fill plug out of the moser diff cover. So, he started fixing this issue by sanding down a 10mm nut, so that he'd be able to weld that to a bolt and be able to extract the plug using the method in which I installed the water pump plugs. Unfortunately, after welding that up for him, he broke it. Inside the diff plug! Argh! And, to make matters worse, he wasn't able to get the nut out of the diff - it was completely smooth, and there was a ridge in the diff plug so he couldn't get it out by any means :-( So, I took my time under the car with a piece of tig filler rod and the mig welder. I mig'd the filler rod to the broken nut, and extracted it carefully. Mark got it really really stuck, and it was very hard to get it back out, but I was thankful that we didn't make too big a mess. At that point, it was time to run up to the store and buy a proper hex wrench set. $8.99 solved that problem. I came back from the store, and filled the rear diff with fluid. It's *large* - I put 2.5 quarts of cheap 70w140 into the rear diff. I used cheap fluid because the differential needs a break-in, and then I will drain and recycle the old fluid, and put some quality fluid in it's place to replace it.

Ahh... Okay, now what? It was time to install the fuel system. This, fortunately, went without a hitch! How it that even possible? It's not. Upon turning on the fuel system, I found that one of the lines that was previously tested was leaking. You don't want fuel leaks in general, but because it was just weeping, we decided that we'd let it slide and fire the car anyway.

So, we verified that the fuel pump worked, the water pump worked, along with the fan. We then made sure the Haltech had the correct settings, and then plugged in the power transistors for the coils and the cam angle sensor. Then, we tried to fire it. It didn't fire. We quickly discovered that the injectors were working by using a spare CAS to simulated the engine cranking. The Haltech saw RPM, so we knew that coils were the only issue. Right here, I remembered that the Haltech needed 1000ohm 1/4 watt resistors. Mark wanted me to show him the ignition schematic, so I whipped it up on paper for him. It would be a crime for me to get amnesia ;-) Anyway, After I whipped it up, I grabbed a handful of resistors, and went soldering away. Sure enough, the car fired right up. But, it was only running on two cylinders. Okay... a quick wire check showed that I inadvertently wired the aux out 1 (the second coil trigger in this case) to the ground - I added a pull-down resistor instead of a pull-up resistor. I soldered a new resistor in place, and we fired it back up.

I would have loved to talk about how we got the map spot-fricking on and it purred like a kitten, but the fact of the matter is that wasn't what happened. There was surge, and some sputtering at times, but nothing that we can't tune. And actually, the car does start right up, but stumbles for a few seconds because I have to mess with the post start map - after about 10 second, it actually does run very well for just eyeballing a map out of it. It will get a whole lot better with one or two tuning sessions, but I didn't want to make any of the neighbors angry ;-)

Squirrelpower

How much squirrelpower does your car make? Figure it out using our Squirrelpower Calculator! - and if you like it, tell your friends about it ;-)

Summit Order

05/14/2007 - So, over the weekend, I got a little bit of work done on the Talon. I painted up the dash, so that is looks all nice and spiffy, and I also worked on getting the wiring in the dash done up. I spent about 4 hours working on the wiring for the dash, and it's almost all done. The lighting was cake, and the gauges requiring other electrical are almost done. the I have to dig through the Haltech manual to find a tach signal somewhere (can I just use one of the ignition outputs, I wonder? No, it looks like a tach adapter is available - okay, then I will just have to hook up the tach signal from one of the power transistors and that will work as a tach signal.) and I also need to get the Autometer EGT box hooked up. Oh, and I need to hook the AEM UEGO wideband 0-5V output up to the Haltech to be able to log that data for tuning.

I should also note that I have a new laptop. The pisser about it, though, is that it's a Dell Inspiron 6400, and they have no serial ports. "Just get one of those USB to Serial adapters!" you're saying to the screen right now. Well, I would, but I haven't found one of them that is officially supported in Vista, and that's what came on my new laptop. So, I can't use one. I actually have one, and Vista recognizes it, and it *appears* to work properly, but it doesn't appear to pass any data. It didn't even work with my old Laptop on Windows XP, even though the real serial port on that machine works without a problem. In addition to that, I'm using the E6S, and that's got ancient DOS software. and, it must use some special VESA mode, because it won't run in Vista. When I try to run it, I get an error that says "This program cannot run because your system does not support running in FULL SCREEN mode" or something to that effect. So, that would also have to be fixed, too. It has been. I found an ExpressCard from Startech.com that you actually has a port dongle hanging off the side of it, and purchased it because it claimed to have support for Vista. And, amazingly enough, the driver CD that came with it works. So, I now have a one-port ExpressCard slot, which completes the Serial communication need of the computer. Now, I needed something that would actually allow me to use the E6S software. This was accomplished using a piece of software I found called DOSBox. DOSBox allows you to emulate DOS under Windows XP/NT/2003/Vista/Etc and even has serial port support. I quickly found a shareware software serial port sniffer, and started it up. Then, I configured DOSBox to use the new ExpressCard serial port, and bingo, it works. So, the computer is finally squared away, too! (and it only took a month and a half!)

But, this post isn't about any of that stuff - it's about the Summit Racing order I just made at lunchtime today. I ordered up a Kirkey Pro Street Drag seat and seat cover. Because there were issues with fitment of the Corbeau Racing seat, I started to think about selling it. So, I asked Warren if he knew anyone who wanted to buy it after seeing his Corbeau seat in a picture he sent me. Well, Warren took it off my hands for me :-) He wants to scare passengers in his FWD racecar. That's crazy ;-)

Oh, yeah, I also ordered up a few small bits and pieces - a new fuel pressure gauge, a fuel pressure isolator, and some fittings. they should be here tomorrow. Although I will say that I will be amazed if that race seat shows up tomorrow. I imagine it's over UPS's girth limit. I guess we'll see :-)

Gauges

05/09/07 - Well, I've already written this up for a few friends, a few times, so I should post it here too. I've been working at nights on stuff for the Talon, and last night managed to get the new dashboard all welded up. I made up the front plate a few days ago, and have managed to cram 7 gauges in an amazingly tiny space. Thursday I decided on an AEM UEGO gauge-type wideband, and ordered it up from Summit Racing. Then, I got to work on the new dashboard.

The old dashboard for the Talon was just a piece of .120" 6061 aluminum that I bolted to stock locations on the stock dash bar. And actually, it worked great. I had four 2-1/16" gauges, along with two 3-3/8" gauge holes - one for the tachometer, and one for a speedometer that never made it into the car. I never ended up getting a speedometer. Now though? Hell, now I know if I'm at 9000RPM in second gear, I'm doing better than 185mph :-o that's what a powerglide, 4.56's and 29.5" tall tires with growth will do for you. Anyway, last night I welded it up, and am happy with the results. I'm going to end up sanding on the weld beads to make it one continuously smooth surface, and then I'm going to paint it up so that I don't get some shiny sunshine right in the face when the car finally sees the light of day and I'm trying to check my gauges. It should look good when I'm done with it :-)

05/03/2007 - Okay, so some of the things I'm going to talk about are a little bit overdue. First, I went around the car the other night and snapped a few pictures of things that I may have done a long time ago, but didn't really cover very well, or that you've never seen a picture of. Anyway, the following are a bunch of pictures and explanations - click on a picture for a fullsize view:



A guy who lives here in Howell, Matt (One of the only active participants of the Eagletalon.net messageboard too ;-) ,) mentioned that the back of the car looked a strange not having any taillights, and asked what I was planning on putting back there.

The plan has always been to put the stock taillights in the back of the car, and I even went as far as putting the rear end of the car together at one point in time. But for some reason, I had never taken a picture of it all together. So, there it is. :-)

I also hadn't actually taken any pictures the water pump and water pump bracket. The water pump is in relatively the same spot as the stock factory aircan, if you can imagine that. It's a CSR racing electic pump, mounted to an aluminum bracket that I wanted to make sure was nice and beefy. And, well, it is. I can stand on it. And it's light. It's amazing how strong you can make things. And actually, now that the water pump has power to it, the water pump bracket is probably way overkill, but I would rather have it be light, strong, and never have to worry about it. And It's mounted to the framerail on a series of bolts that've been mounted in the framerail. You can see that I actually took a sheet of 1/8" steel and welded that to the framerail. Again, this is probably all overkill, but it works well.

The other thing I haven't really shot any pictures of is the front strut assembly. Now, the pictures that I have now aren't the final version of the assembly - I actually have to replace the upper mount with a set of billet aluminum mounts that I got from Ty at RRE, and I also have a new set of Koni struts, and strut bodies that will be all cleaned up and on the car. Basically, all the rusty shit in the next picture will be replaced ;-) In the background, you can see the -4AN turbo oil feed line, the -4AN oil pressure gauge line, and the -8AN turbo turbo line. You can also see the sweet ass header (ahh, modesty ;-p) Plus, the big cool damn Wilwood dynalite front brake kit.

The next item on the list is something I actually finished up this week. Tuesday night, I finally put together a drill press that I got for Christmas. I guess it was only a matter of time before my Dad wanted his borrowed drill press back, but it was nice of him to get me one of my own for Christmas. this post isn't about that though ;-) It's about what I did with it. I took my SX Fuel pressure regulator, and finally made it AN Compliant. The SX regulator, by default, has an 1/8" barb on the side of is for the vacuum port. You hook that up to your intake manifold, and that's the vacuum / boost reference. All the other holes machined into the FPR are either 1/8" NPT or AN Port. And, my master plan is to have all the plumbing on the car to be AN - So, the FPR needed to be modified. I drilled out the 1/8" barb, and tapped a 1/16" NPT hole into it. I got a 1/16" NPT to 4AN adapter fitting, and threaded it in. So now, it's all set, and most of my plumbing is set. I still have to figure out the Wastegate setup, but almost all of the vacuum and oil pressure lines on the car are now AN.

And, this is the rats nest of a wiring harness. In this picture, you can see the bottom of the intake manifold, which is where all the plumbing and wiring for the engine is hidden. The wiring is okay - most of it has been tested, and all I need to do is find a way to mount it to the intake manifold - no big deal. The main trunk sort of has all these things coming off it. I've spent a lot of time making it as tidy as I felt I could. Anyway, you can also see the aluminum mounted on the side of the engine - that has the MAP sensor and the two mitsubishi power transistor units mounted to it. They're wired into the Haltech harness, and determine when the COP ignition is fired. The car has two Power trasistor units because each unit contains two transistors - and instead of hooking them up in parallel, I wanted the coils to have their own ignitors. The "proper" way to do this is really to run a CDI ignition box, but I want to see if this can work because it's a more simple solution. I guess we'll see ;-) In this picture, you can also see all the mad AN plumbing action, with the exception of the MAP sensor. It's a standard GM 3 bar map, so it has a 1/4" barb fitting on it, with no option of anything that I can convert to AN. So, until I upgrade to something like an AEM 3.5 bar sensor, this is just going to be the setup. I guess I can live with it. You'll also see the 2 gauge wiring going to the starter. And, the alternator is also hooked up. I actually managed to use the stock alternator plug connector, and was able to remove and replace the stock spade connectors in it with new locking spade connectors that also work with my modular relays that I'm using in other areas of the car.

Ugh - okay, carpel-tunnel setting in ;-o Last but not least is a picture of the back of the front upright setup. About 14 months ago, we finished this project up, but aside from some pictures of the front uprights bare, I had never really posted a picture of the whole assembly. Well, here you can see it. The upright has the Chromoly kingpins, which is what the Wilwood brakes connect to. And, as you can see, the Wilwood has been all safety wired so that none of those Really Important brake bolts will come loose. Also, you can see the steering arm welded to the rest of the upright, along with the spacer underneath. All of these have been designed to minimize bump-steer, which is generally considered to be something somewhat misunderstood by a lot of people. Anyway, you can also see all the grade 8 hardware mounting the Wilwood caliper to the upright. And, of course, the 3AN teflon lined brake lines. "For offroad use only" :-)

04/23/2007 - So sometimes you just get down about a project. Saturday I worked on the Talon for a little bit, but as usual; other things were pulling at my time. My brother needed me; my wife is painting. If this keeps up, I won't ever get this car done. I did, however, get to catch up on a little reading of my chassis book. Dave Morgan wrote a book on chassis's back in the late 80's, but it's still a great book in my opinion. The book is called Door Slammers: The Chassis Book, and it's a great great resource for me. It's a short read, but has technically complicated descriptions of how things work in a door slammer. And that's perfect for me. Anyway, if you're trying to figure out how to setup a four link or ladder bar, and need some insight or assistance, then you should check this book out. I've read it cover to cover, and am now going to go through the numerous setup sidebars that Dave provides. And, if you want to buy it through that Amazon link, that helps me out a little bit :-)

Back on the topic of the car: I worked on a bunch of random things on Saturday. I replaced a few sensors that I didn't care for; installed some more plumbing, and started mingling in getting the gauges setup - although I called that off for the day because I didn't have the required hole saws. Anyway, after that I worked on the wiring harness. I feel good working on the car, in general.

I told my friend Kevin that planning a life and a racecar at the same time is generally a bad idea. Since he's building himself a car, too, he totally agreed with me. I will hold this belief for the rest of my life. I will also have the experience of actually doing this and understanding what it really takes to do this. Most people will never experience it. I even thought I'd have an idea when I started this project - I was mistaken. Sure, time, money, time and time are easy things to consider, but that's only the tip of it. There are things that have drained me so much more than just time and money. It would be so much more simple if my priorities were the car, but they're not. I have responsibility to other people - my family; my friends. I also have things like bills, and a normal 9-5 job. Even without the car, I have little spare time. Things come up, people want things, or I inevitably have something to do. On top of all that stuff, I've dreamt of just getting the car done for the past three years. that'll affect you without having these other factors.

And sure, I've taken my time with things. I want to build this right. I don't want to have a great car with a rat's nest for a wiring harness. I don't want a four link to run 12's. I don't want to compromise on many parts of the car because of the integrity of the whole thing. because of that, I've spent much more time on this car than most people do on their doorslammers. And the flip side of that is, of course, that other people do a much nicer job on their cars than I have on mine. and I can't even imagine what they go through. I know one guy who's six figures into a new car, and it's not ready to run yet. That takes balls. And cash :-o

04/04/2007 - I've been doing an extremely unrealistic amount of work with other things lately, so work on the Talon hasn't happened. It's a shame, but looking outside and seeing snow and high 20 degree weather doesn't exactly kick me in the ass and make me want to get it running, either. The truth is, however, that I would love to. But, for the past three or four weekends (I can't remember anymore,) there've been way too many things going on. Weddings, family coming into town, helping other people with things, stuff at work coming up. And now, this weekend, it's Easter and we're going down to Tennessee to visit family. Okay, so next weekend we'll work on the car.

03/13/2007 - Well, work has been slow lately, but it's still coming along. Mark is going apeshit on his house, and I've had things going on over the weekends, but we're still trying to get some stuff done.

Last time we both worked on the Talon, we started knocking out the turbo support. 42 pounds of GT42 needs to have a sufficient mount, or it will want to destroy the header. So, that's coming along. We also finally finished up the oil pan - I added some baffling which should help with oil crawling up walls and generally going places I don't want it to go. So, that stuff is getting worked out.

Last time I worked on the Talon myself, I finished up some more wiring. Someday, the wiring will be done ;-) I literally have one more wire to run in the engine harness, and then I'm going to sheath it up. I've already sheathed part of the harness in the engine bay, although there's still a lot more to do. I also confirmed that the Haltech that I have does, in fact, work. I was worried that it might not. I purchased it off some guy who was putting it in a Supra, but his plans changed, and he no longer needed to use it. Anyway, it was pretty much all wired, but never used. Because things belong in different places on a Supra, I basically went through the whole thing and pulled the plugs off the original harness, and created my own. Anyway, the whole point to my story is that I've finally successfully connected my laptop to the Haltech, and I can see that sensors are working. Unfortunately, the engine RPM is still at 0 ;-o

Anyway, I just want to finish up this post by mentioning a visit by a guy named Dexter. He stopped by one night to pick up an engine block from me. I opened up the garage door, and he and his friend proceeded to oogle over the Talon for about half an hour. He said something about the website not conveying the complexity and the sheer awesomeness of the car... or maybe I'm just mis-remembering that? ;-) Anyway, he seemed to really like the car, but the website needs work right? Fair enough I guess. Anyway, I'll work on the website. In the meantime, you guys should check out the Eagletalon.net Forums where you can create new topics and discuss stuff. The more you guys post, the more questions I can answer about the car :-)

02/25/2007 - Pedals, Wiring and ordering - oh my!

Over the weekend, Mark and I worked on getting the Gas pedal assembly all cleaned up. For the most part, it's done. I'm waiting on some things from McMaster, and once they're here, we'll be able to finish it off. I added two tabs to it for an upper pedal stop, and a lower pedal stop so that I can smash the pedal as hard as I want to and not hurt the throttle body ;-)

The throttle cable is also done - it fits nicely, and even though I've tarnished the finish on the intake manifold because I had to weld a bracket to it, it still looks really nice. I'm happy with it.

And the gas pedal? Well, it's just cool :-) It looks like someone spent way too much time on it - and we did, so it's about as nice as we both expected it to be. I'm happy with it.

I'm also in the process of wiring up the sensors on the car. I worked on it a little yesterday, but it's still got a ways to go before it's finished up. The ignition is well on it's way, but the injectors need some work, and the CAS will also need some work. It's wired, but the wiring is way too long for what I want to do with it, so it needs to be shortened. Things in general are coming along well :-)

02/04/2007 - Cleaning up!

So, we've been doing a lot of small things lately. Mark and I made The Master List - basically, a list of everything that had to be done on the car. Then, we started knocking it out. Recently, we've finished off the following:

Header: We needed to finish weld the turbo cflange on the header. There was one weld that needed to be finished up. After that, I cleaned up the ports on the head flange. The only thing we'll probablt add to it is a stainless EGT bung. Other than that - it's done :-)

Exhaust System: The 4" exhaust was mostly done, but needed to have hangers mounted to it, and we needed to finish integrating the wastegate outlet into the system. This has now been all welded up, and we've added stainless hangars to the system. It's now considered done, too :-)

Wiring: I haven't talked about it at all, but the wiring on the Talon is well underway. Originally, it was going to get a Painless Wiring harness, but with the nature of the rest of the car, that just didn't seem right. So, I took the harness from the Haltech, and integrated it into a bunch of new wiring that I created for the car. This new harness has a switch panel that will mount next to the shifter, well within my reach, and has a 20 circuit fuse panel. It's been built and mostly tested. There are a few things left to hook to the Haltech harness, consisting mainly of Injectors, AIT, CAS and the ignition system. This stuff will go quickly, but I'm waiting on sensor bungs, and waiting to get some other things finished up before this wiring is finished. After that, I have to manage how I'm going to mount the battery and wire that up to the rest of the electrical system. Cool stuff :-)

Coil on Plug: This is one of the things that I have to finish up. I bought the coils, and the electrical connector for the setup, along with making a mock up COP plate that will mount to the spark plug cover. I'm in the process of cutting holes in this in order to mount the coils, and have a complete COP setup. This looks very nice so far - I am happy with how it's turned out. Once this is done, I will be able to finish up the ignition wiring.

Map Sensor / Power Transistor Mount: I made a nice aluminum plate that the MAP sensor and power transistors now mount to. This plate mounts underneath the engine, and provides not only support for the MAP and transistors, it also hides them, and keeps them close to the engine wiring harness, but out of the way. This looks nice, and is easy to access if I need to unplug things from it. It's bolted to the block, with the sensors bolted to it.

So, as you can see, we've actually accomplished a lot of small, rather mundane stuff. Right now we're working on the gas pedal, and throttle cable. Can't anything be easy? ;-)

12/26/2006 - An addition to the family!



It's a 1991 Eagle Talon Tsi AWD from the south. It needs a little work, but it's reasonably clean. It's going to stay stock - I have enough work to do on the Talon :-o

11/27/2006 - The DS