1985 Fiero build

[ejs262]

Your welding looks GREAT !!
I don't have much experience with thin wall tubing. Had a whole BUNCH of Knowledge Knocks welding the body of the Indy Racer Project.

it's schedule 10 pipe(.109" wall), so I don't think I'd go as far as to call it thin wall... lol! this has taken alot of practice to learn, and watching lots of videos. I have to give Welding tips and tricks, and The Fabrication Series on youtube a plug here, because without them, these would look like hot garbage, the amount of instruction and demonstration provided for free by those guys is insane.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqq70AnPkj4-UApS_m_6mPw

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcxlBLmujrjTVSSUkzZ2Jlg

I highly recommend anyone learning to weld watch some of their videos.

[ejs262]

what a day... Called my metal supplier about the pipe for the rest of the hotside:

"it'll ship out sometime late next week..."

WTF. I ordered it last week. I called around, and Online metals, which has a warehouse about an hour and a half from me had it! I placed the order for pickup, and they said they would email when it was ready.

1 hour, nothing...

2 hours, nothing...

3 hours,... OK I'll call them...

We're having trouble locating all of the order, we'll call you when we find all of it.

an hour later, I figure I better start on the way to pick whatever they do have up so I can get SOMETHING done this weekend.

hour and a half later, as I'm pulling up to the warehouse, I get an email:

"Hey, we don't have any of it..."

!

Keep in mind, I drove the pig rig over there, so there goes 3 hours of driving, and a 1/2 tank of gas... I emailed them back, telling them I just canceled an order because it would take too long, and now (4:00 PM) even if I could find someone else kinda local, there's minimal chance I'll get there before doors close. thankfully they were understanding of my frustration, and they offered to overnight my order to me from one of their east coast warehouses. unfortunately, I still won't have any material until Wednesday, because their office was closed over there, so the order has to be placed, then get to shipping, then to me... DOH.

tomorrow, I plan to work on a mount to hold the turbo, I plan to bolt it to the top of the trans on the ecotec front mount boss, and maybe make a trip to the junkyard to try and find a better pedal for the DBW throttle. I might also notch the front engine crossmember to allow more clearance for the exhaust. the other big ticket I need to tackle is the shifter, my current one won't work with the new turbo kit, but that's ok, because it was kinda ugly anyways. the new one will have the cables approach from outboard on the driver's side, so they allow a ton of clearance, instead of my old setup that cut down the middle.

[SuperBuickGuy]

what do you need?

[ejs262]

what do you need?

2" schedule 10 304 SS pipe. it's what I'm fabricating the hotside of my turbo kit from. I have just about everything I need otherwise.

[SuperBuickGuy]

how much? I may have a few pieces....

[ejs262]

how much? I may have a few pieces....

I ordered 6 feet of it, I knew it would be WAY more than I would need, but I also didn't want to end up 1/2" short. If I had a planned future use for the same material, I'd take you up on whatever you could find, but I'd rather not end up with too much extra material laying around, my shop is too small for extras, and I have plenty of other stuff to work on in the mean time. Thanks though.


I did almost nothing to the car yesterday... today I made decent progress though.

Turbo is mounted, the oil feed is threaded, so I don't need a flanged fitting, I'll just thread in a AN adapter and call it good.



The turbo will be pretty much right behind my head, before I go any further, I need to make sure it will clear the decklid there, or only require a tiny notch.



I did a mock up of the front bank up pipe, it'll need more tape to keep the exhaust in there...





The rear bank will be a pretty straight shot to the turbo



Other than that, My carbide burrs came in, so I got the manifolds hogged out, that took a good bit longer than I expected. tonight I'm going to work on a drawing for the new shift mechanism, and the plan for tomorrow is to mount the flexfuel sensor like I said I would the other day.

[ejs262]

some of the night's progress on the shift linkage (after I said 5 more minutes for the past 3 hours...)



The idea is that this will replace the stock F23 shift mechanism entirely with the exception of the select arm, I still need to draw the shift arm, and nail down the cable dimensions. if anyone didn't know and needs to, the select movement at the shifter, is approximately 50mm, and the shift movement is approximately 90mm, and the stock F23 select arm is about 45mm from fulcrum to input.

[Captain]

Your CAD pix make my hand drawn Ideas look like "Stick People" on Cave Walls.......

[ejs262]

Your CAD pix make my hand drawn Ideas look like "Stick People" on Cave Walls.......

LOL, thanks!, your hand drawn parts take a much higher degree of skill though, all my stuff is just measure and click...



some more progress on the shifter

The circle is the radius the shift arm ball stud has to rotate within, the arm itself will swing in 40 degrees of rotation, with a total length of throw of about 46mm. To minimize cable wear, the centerline of the cable should ride through the center of the arc, this results in the cable being offset from tangent of the radius of the throw by approximately 3mm. that way through the length of throw, the cable swings from applying slight pressure to one side of the cable sheath, to slight pressure to the other, and back, crossing centerline of the sheath twice



Here is the almost complete shift arm, all that's left is to make the hole for the ball stud, I haven't done it yet, because I'm waiting to hear back from the cable manufacturer on the options for attachment.the shift arm is weighted, in a manner similar to the stock F23 shift arm.

[ejs262]

I made a little bit of progress on the hotside, I tacked the front bank up pipe together, I'm not going to fully weld it until I test fit it in the car, hopefully tomorrow. while it wasn't a design constraint, it did conveniently workout that both up pipes will be almost exactly the same length.



unfortunately, there's a casualty, can you spot it?

yep, there it is...



I saw this coming from the begining, and decided to ride it out and see what happens, and well, it happened... Not to worry though, I have plenty of room to route the thermostat outlet other ways, so I'm not going to worry about it just yet, I'm going to focus on other parts of getting this car together.

I have a flex pipe that I had planned to install in rear bank up pipe, but I'm starting to question how necessary it would be.



the way the front bank is curved, it should allow for quite a bit of expansion, and be able to compensate for the lack of a joint in the rear bank by the nature of it's design.

here's a shot from the start of the rear up pipe looking towards the turbo, you can see it's a very straight shot, unfortunately, I need almost exactly 12" of pipe that I don't have, to get this thing buttoned up...





The merge for the two up pipes will take place at the inlet to the turbine, the wastgate will be mounted there as well.

the shifter I've been working on will go right here, with the cables pointed in the general direction that my finger is pointing, they'll go under the decklid vent, and into the passenger compartment. near the center of the car, more to follow on that.

[DanStokes]

I'd get that bellows in there somewhere. Turbo pipes have a definite fondness for cracking and need all the help they can get. If you look at the factory systems you'll see a bellows in critical places - they're there for a reason.

Dan

[ejs262]

I'd get that bellows in there somewhere. Turbo pipes have a definite fondness for cracking and need all the help they can get. If you look at the factory systems you'll see a bellows in critical places - they're there for a reason.

Dan

I won't disagree, but I'll add that I see applications without them the survive just fine too. it depends on the whole setup straight shots between rigid connection points is what causes failure, which are two things this setup doesn't have.

Today's progress... oh geez, where do I start? well, I added reinforcements to the cradle(engine subframe) a while ago near the engine mounts, unfortunately for me, I didn't test fit the mounts with the reinforcements until today, just to find that there were a few clearance issues to be taken care of. after about an hour or so, I got the needed clearance, and put the engine back on the cradle. then, this happened:



Engine is in the car, at this point, only for test fitting and mock up, there's no clutch or flywheel in there, ATM.

I test fitted the turbo, at which point I found everywhere I thought I had clearance, I didn't, and everywhere I thought I didn't, I did... DOH!





My original plan, was to trim back the sheet metal at the compressor inlet, then route tubing from it it into the area forward of the wheel, but I forgot, there's a fuel filler neck there... so that meant back to the drawing board, which wasn't entirely unexpected, there's a reason I didn't finish weld a single joint on the exhaust.

I cut the tacks, and I was back to square one, a pile of weld el's, and a turbo, so I took some time to remount the turbo where it has more clearance, here's what I ended up with:



I originally didn't want to do this, because when I put the new crossmembers in the cradle a couple of years ago, I ended up having to redo my exhaust because it wouldn't fit around the crossmember, and ended up needing wonky routing that I really didn't like, I remembered that headache, and didn't point the turbo that way because of it. when I put the engine in, I realized that didn't matter, because I removed the water tank (for the A2W setup) that was in the trunk, and now I have WAY more than enough clearance to route the exhaust any number of ways back there. I looked at the placement, and decided to move it 2" further back.



I think the placement is final now, it clears the strut tower just fine, and leaves plenty of room for the shift cables.

I test fit my air filter, fits fine like this, but I would like to make shroud that isolates it from the engine bay more, or plumb it into the quarter panel. as it sits, it has about 1.5-2" of clearance to the firewall.






the last thing to do for the night, was to fit the decklid and check clearance. the biggest area of concern for me at this point, was the motor on the top of the throttle body, it's way up there. I set the decklid on and didn't feel anything that felt like impact, so I tightened up the bolts, and hinged it up, threw some playdoh on the intake, and set the lid down. Turns out I had plenty, about an inch or so before contact.

[Captain]

You will have had that engine in and out so many times....... You can now get it done within a NASCAR tire change pit stop !!! LOL

[ejs262]

You will have had that engine in and out so many times....... You can now get it done within a NASCAR tire change pit stop !!! LOL

took me longer to find a dolly to put the engine on, then to actually get the engine in the car... lol. hopefully it only comes out one more time for the foreseeable future. that being said, I've already started planning build number 2, with a 3.9L instead, the 3.9 has variable cam timing, and a honk'n 3.9" bore! the 3.9" bore potentially makes piston shopping much easier.

[ejs262]

Pipe came in around 330 or so, so I got a later start than I would have liked.

I tacked together a new front up pipe, not pictured, after this was taken I cut it apart a couple of time to make small adjustments to the lengths of the straight sections, and the angles between the joints.



next was the rear up pipe, again, the design was adjusted several times before and after this picture was taken, but the general idea is the same.



by far the hardest part of putting the hotside together, has been the merge of the two up pipes, of the 7 or so hours I worked today, at least 2 were spent on just he merge, measure, mark, eyeball, repeat over and over, then cut, trim, grind a little, and a little more, and a little more... but now, it's set. the two pipes meet at ever so slightly different elevations, so the front pipe half of the merge sticks up a little higher than the rear, but that's an easy fix. before I tacked the halves together, its hard to see but I ground a hole in the middle of them for the wastgate port.



I've decided this design will need a bellows, otherwise I'll definitely have a crack problem, I have two options for installing one in either of the two up pipes.

here in the rear pipe:



or here in the front pipe:



I would prefer to put it in the rear pipe, because it would be easier, but from an engineering standpoint, the front pipe makes more sense based on the prevailing direction of thermal expansion, so it'll probably go there.

I'm hoping to get this wrapped up tomorrow, I think since I have the materials on hand, that shouldn't be a problem.