30th May 2007. Fire in the Hole!!!!
The slow painstaking bit next, plumbing the turbo, Oil supply is from the oil pressure gauge takeoff and the oil drains back into the sump through a pipe in the unused mechanical fuel pump mounting in the block. This was a problem,
its tight and you have to use oil rated hose I eventually got an elbow from a SAAB and some brass fittings from the hardware store to work. water cooling is via braded hose and then the turbo was mounted. Next I fabricated an actuator
bracket as it had to be reversed due to the turbo outlets new position. Finally the downpipe was installed and the carb was mounted and plumbed in
and the hoses sorted for turbo inlet and outlet to the carb. Finally the exhaust was connected. Time to start this baby...
After final checks of the fuel and ignition I turned the key and in a few seconds it started!! All was looking good, oil pressure fine , O2 sensor at 14, megajolt responding correctly and no obvious exhaust leaks. I set the rpm to 2500 to bed the cam and watched it for 10 mins.
----I first saw the flames through the windcreen, the turbo was on fire, there was a pool of oil on the floor and that was on fire as well!! I grabbed the extinguisher and as I fumbled with the clip I blew on it to try to get the flames out..It worked! Not too much fire damage just a few singed cables but what happened?
I spent 20 mins waiting for it to cool down thinking damn!! one of the oil lines has popped.. As I lay underneath with the warm oil dripping on my face I could not see anything wrong with the lines. I decided that if the turbo was blown I would throw it out go back to a suck engine!! I spun the engine on the starter to see just
where this oil was coming from, no oil pressure, Double Damn..... then I saw it..
I had used the original plastic oil pressure gauge line. It was lying on the downpipe, melted!! Whew...I didn't know so much oil went down that line...
After sorting the oil pressure gauge line I was on the road, surprisingly not much else was wrong and after many many
short trips to fine tune the carb needle and ignition timing I was reasonably happy. AFR ended up at around 12-13 on
boost and I also had a nice safe 20 degrees of advance, I did a quick 0-60 or two only revving to 5000 and still managed a respectible 8.1 secs.
Thing is it feels a damn site faster that that!! The gear whine is wonderful and when that "cute" little car lights up it surprises everybody.. I even got some applause from a road crew!!
