I don’t know how much you’ll have to spend but for me the answer was “everything”.
I had not updated here as much as on my Facebook but when we dyno’d with the turbo in place it turned out that the intercooler I built was terrible. It wasn’t a little bad, it made the engine make less power than it did NA. Needless to say that intercooler has been chopped up and turned into the beginnings of version 2.0
The dyno session went like this. We had a good tune NA, made 525hp. Finally got everything plumbed into the turbo and intercooler, remote water tank, electric pumps. It looked like the plumbing department at Home Depot mixed with a science experiment in the dyno room. We fired it up with the coupler to the throttle body redirected just in case there was any debris in any of the plumbing. I noticed then the wheel in the compressor was spinning slower than I thought it should. Hooked everything together and tried a short pull. The engine wouldnt rev, the BOV was open the whole time, it just fell on its face. We disabled the gates and the BOV so it would have no choice but to boost, still no boost. It had vacuum in the manifold at wide open throttle. After some head scratching and discussing options we then put a pressure gauge in the inlet of the intercooler and just removed the tube from the outlet. Did another pull and saw 5 psi in the inlet side of the intercooler with the outlet side wide open. I think we found our problem!
Next test we removed the plumbing between the turbo and the inlet of the intercooler and immediately it rev’d like normal. With the turbo discharge not plumbed into the engine it moved so much air in the dyno cell it threw stuff off the walls that had been hanging there for years. The final test was just to bypass the intercooler and see what happed. With minimal effort I was able to twist around some tubes and get everything connected. One more pull and it seemed like it came up on boost very fast, saw 6 lbs and stopped the test. We were out of time as we had scheduled a paying customer for the following day.
Since the dyno testing I have not finished the redo of the intercooler, had some family commitments and needed to recover financially from what seemed like endless spending building up to that point. Just like when everyone asks when do I hope to be done, August, I just don’t know what year. Truth be told I’d like to shake it down at El Mirage before going to Bonneville but I’ll run where I can when I can.
Steve and Rich from Canada built a really nice little Isuzu and bumped the C/BMMP record to 181 and I’m sure with this years experience under their belts they will have even more speed in 2019. I hope to be in impound with them next year.
Brick