Alright, the thing that got this snowball rolling, the turbo kit. When the turbo blew I bought a new one with the intention of just replacing the broken part. I should have picked up a the GTX4088R, but I had a moment of weakness and went bigger for no other reason than to do it. That's pretty dumb, kids, don't do that. I picked up a GT4094R.
It's basically a 4088 turbine with a 4294 compressor. I was looking for something that would hum along at 600HP, but be able to go higher without breaking a sweat. The map on it looks like this.
It was surprising how small it looked next to the Holset, a turbo it stomps on air flow. It looked downright compact in there!
[IMG]http://i119.photobucket.com/albums/o141/madatnico/IMG_0708_zps67321***.jpg[/IMG]
As I mocked it up, though, I encountered problems. First the manifold had been hacked up to mount the Holset because it had a different bolt pattern I didn't like that. I picked up another manifold from the builder that wasn't hacked up and had a GT v band wastegate, albeit a chi-com knockoff. That hurdled I moved on to discover the downpipe was a real clusterfuck and I didn't want to even try to reuse it. Now I had to have a new downpipe made. The GT was also water cooled which meant I needed to source all the fittings and hoses to facilitate that since the old turbo had no water passages. This is where my enthusiasm started tapering off and the long sleep began.
I had an epiphany and decided to buy a complete kit to make it as easy as possible to get the car back together. I went with the Greddy kit because it was so comprehensive and the T78 kit over the T88 kit for better response. "Response" on an old repackaged diesel turbo, funny huh? No, I had a plan. I had the kit upgraded to v band thinking I could then use it with the GT turbo. Nope. The V bands are not the same. I was a little discouraged, but while the T78 is not as advanced or powerful as the GT4094 it's still no pushover and could meet my goals so, screw it, I'll use it.
It's crazy laggy, but not as bad as the T88 and I can't afford to beef up the drivetrain yet past the clutch so having a lazy turbo might help keep my transmission from grenading. I'm not feeling the plastic air filters and because I don't need air flow meters I can run one big filter so these will get shelved.
My parts source is a great guy and when my kit was delayed to weld on the V bands he beat Greddy up about it. They threw in a surge tank free as a gomen-nasai. WHAT? That is not a cheap piece of hardware, AWESOME!
I'm not sure what color I will paint the car when it gets a chance to go back into the body shop; it's just getting the engine bay done now. As such, the color of the engine was hard to pick. I decided on black since that will go with any color. I started with the valve covers, coil cover and front cover, but after seeing them I decided to coat that nice Greddy surge tank too. It' bad ass looking IMO.
