Chapter 5: The Crafty Clock

"The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret to outward success" - Henry Ward Beecher

All the work in the previous blog post obviously consumed a lot of time because of all the problems that I had encountered. Carrying out small tasks while waiting on parts for the cylinder head swap section of this project allowed me to maximize the long waiting time. The innovation and craftsmanship involved really wasn't too complicated thankfully. Check it foo'....

Dragged over various speed bumps like a forgotten freckled step child, the headers were in need of some serious cosmetic work. I had previously covered them with fiberglass composite thermal heat wrap to help fight radiant heat being absorbed by other things in the engine compartment. I stripped them of their heat wrap and rust using a combination of brush on rust stripper and a 4" angle grinder armed with a coarse grain sanding disk. Following this was the application of some flameproof Rust-oleum header paint designed to withstand temperatures of up to 2000 degrees.

*Headers: Tubular aftermarket performance exhaust manifolds. A required part when opting to improve the airflow through the engine, they are first part of the exhaust system to be subjected to abuse from the fire breathing out of the cylinder heads. Most cars use ugly, heavy, and restrictive exhaust manifolds made from cast iron, so bolting on tubular steel exhaust manifolds can uncork some serious perfomance when used with other parts.

Before

Comparing an original versus a stripped header

The final product. It really is amazing what chemical technology can do!

Another thing that I did was build and install heat shielding to prepare for the turbo system. The law of conservation of energy states that energy may neither be created nor destroyed. Therefore the sum of all the energies in a system is considered to be a constant. Energy can take on various forms such as kinetic, potential, light, or heat. Only up to about 26% of an engines energy output is actually used to drive the car forward. The rest is mostly lost to the discippation of heat through the exhaust, radiator, etc. The problem with this is that the more power an engine makes, the more heat it generates. Of all the performance upgrading possibilities that can be done to a car, turbocharger systems generate the most substantial amount of heat. Even at low boost levels it is normal for the exhaust system to glow cherry red under load conditions. The exhaust system design and routing will be covered in another post once I am done fabricating it, but the goal was to prevent melting the shoe soles of any brave passengers to my floorboards and to protect the engines mini starter from baking to a crisp. I used aviation snips to trim some sheet aluminum that I purchased at the local hardware store and combined it with some high temperature thermal insulation that I bought on Ebay. This will not be the last that you hear of my cyber oniomania. Fastening these to the car required the use of a drill and some self tapping sheet metal screws.

*Oniomania: the psychological term for shopaholism. The modern world we live in has created a very extensive market place online which drives prices down due to the enormous amount of competition. Cheap prices are addicting, especially on Ebay. Craigslist isn't any better.

This is the thermal insulation used, it kinda makes me eager to build a space suit for driving the car around.

3' x 3' aluminum sheet stock

The fabricated floorboard heat shield

The installed floorboard heat shield as viewed from the engine compartment

Under that shiny shield is a Summit Racing gear reduction mini starter which can produce 222 ft-lbs of torque....if kept from melting. Not a typo, that's more than the engine torque of most 4 cylinder cars!

From use over the years, the cast aluminum Edelbrock Performer RPM intake maniold had been stained with grime from a combination of gasoline dripping from the carburetor and oil misting from the valvecovers. Cast aluminum surfaces are very porous and will trap stains easily, so a trick that I learned was to use an old toothbrush with some laquor thinner to restore it to a shine. It doesnt look brand new, but it definitely looks much better.

*Intake Manifold: Its basic purpose is to allow the air and fuel to reach the ports on the cylinder heads through runners, and the design of them has a direct relationship with engine performance. Long runners build low-RPM torque and short runners provide maximum high-RPM horsepower. Cooler air is more dense and allows the engine to add more fuel which makes more power. Performance aluminum manifolds shed heat much more than the original cast iron, and this one in particular also features raised runners to allow smoother transitions for increased airflow. Another benefit of raising the bottom is to allow ambient air to get underneath it and cool it off. Automotive technology has allowed some newer cars, including high end exotics, to have nylon reinforced plastic manifolds featuring variable length runners. These provide an engine the ability to combine good street manners, performance, and fuel mileage. Although nice, the street manner part would be borrrrrrring!!!

The grimy manifold before cleaning

The gleaming product afterwards

Any car equipped with an automatic transmission needs a way to cool its oil. Most cars pump the transmission fluid out of the transmission and into the engines cooling system radiator where it is cooled by an integrated oil cooler until it returns. The problem with these transfer lines is that they were directly in the way of where I plan on running the turbocharger exhaust system. The lines that carry this fluid are not flexible, so rerouting them requires the lines to be massaged to fit. Bending by hand will not only make them look like Pamela Anderson, but the lines will be weakened. The tool works by grasping the metal piping and pulling it around a bend so that even force is distributed on the inner radius of the bend to keep it from kinking. This creates smooth contours for the fluid to flow without disturbing the metallurgy of the piping. Creating a clearing for the future exhaust system required me to move them closer to the engine block and bending them around the oil filter mount. This changed their length as well, so I had to trim them shorter with a tubing cutter and re-flare them using a tube flaring tool. More on flaring when the fuel system is covered.

*Pamela Anderson: worn out, dented, and kinked. Potato sacked in the movie Borat, she was also on some cheesy swimsuit tv show back in the early 90's and had a public fling with Tomme Lee from Mötley Crüe.

The old transmission lines: The shiny one has been cleaned with sandpaper

The new routing of the modified transmission cooler lines. The old routing had them taking up space through that clearing and on top of the frame of the car.

A long time ago I was coming back from the racetrack bumping some tunes when the radio literally went up in smoke. Removal of the head unit left an ugly gaping hole in the dashboard. Combining this with the peeling woodgrain dash trim and lack of a proper mounting surface for some needed toggle switches led to a dashboard makeover. Removal of all the dash trim was simple, but modifying it to mount the toggle switches required drilling of some holes. I simply stripped away all the wood trim from the plastic backing and then scrubbed all of the glue off. A respray with some rattle can chrome paint provided the finishing touches. In addition to this was the expansion of the gauge cluster so that i can mount a boost, fuel pressure, and wide band O2 gauge. These will be very important for tuning once the turbocharger gets installed.

Before

After the makover

Guilty as charged, I still have not added a stereo, but a better quality one may come in the near future. Who needs a stereo when you have an aggressively violent thunderstorm for an exhaust system anyways?!