Since the day that I got the Manifold (March 9th, over a week later than it was supposed to be), I’ve been working pretty solid on the car every spare waking moment. As it turns out, after taking 4 months to work on the project, Corky ignored all of my measurements and schematics that I sent to him, measured a random supercharger he had on the shelf, and designed the supercharger mount and collector based on that. So, essentially every measurement on the manifold was wrong, not to mention that the collector output ended up being directly into the alternator bracket, as well as contacting the live post of the alternator. So, after opening the package and a few minutes later realizing these lovely things, I’ve been constantly fixing the stream of problems resulting from this.
I first fabricated a new alternator bracket out of crap I had lying around to get the bracket out of the way, and tried several different slightly shorter accessory belts to try to move the alternator ever so slightly further over so that it would clear the collector output. I then had to modify the alternator live stud to point further down so that it would clear the collector as well. After all that, the manifold would actually bolt onto the engine. At this point, it was time to put the stock manifold onto the car and get the car back to Doug’s so that he could make the final exhaust and we could work on the rest of this fab.
Corky was also supposed to create a radiator and intercooler from cores, which, for the last 2 months straight he said he was going to ship out at the end of each week I emailed. When I finally pressed him “now or never” last week, he said he had no idea when he was going to be able to do it. So, that night I spent a bunch of time measuring the radiator opening and browsing the net for substitutes and ordered a 3-row (2.5″ thick) 92-00 Civic radiator and RX-7 sidemount intercooler from CXRacing, which seemed to get me the best combination of what I needed at the measurements I needed to make them fit in. I ordered them up, and they arrived just in the nick of time. Doug had made the exhaust all afternoon Wednesday (March 14), and the parts arrived midday Thursday, aiming to make a Dyno session friday, and then autocross all weekend. So, the race was on. I came over at noon Thursday to Doug’s and we started working.
The next step was getting the supercharger to mount to the manifold. I had to grind away a bunch of material from around the supercharger mount so that there’d be enough room to get a wrench around some bolts, grind away a ton of material from the collector inlet and intermediate plate, so that some air could actually get from the supercharger all the way into the collector, and replace the studs with bolts, since studs wouldn’t clear the SC at all. After several hours on the floor of Chase Race with wrenches, a sharpie, and a die grinder, I finally was able to attach the supercharger to the manifold. Not exactly a light pile of metal, all assembled.
There’s a very careful order of operations to install everything. Off the car, the supercharger and intermediate plate must be attached to the manifold. From there, the manifold must be attached to the car, and only after that can the fuel rail squeeze around the supercharger and nestle its way into its home. Bill Freiheit did a great job making me a quick supercharger to throttle body (I went with a 75mm Mustang 5.0 BBK throttle body, the BBK-1503) adapter, which nicely dealt with that portion of the setup. I’ll deal with the intake later on, but I’m hoping we can make something that curls down by the passenger side wheel well to pull fresh air out from under the car.
While I finished getting the manifold together, Doug had been working on making custom mounts for the intercooler and radiator and finishing up some other stuff (exhaust tweaks, etc.) As it turns out, they work fantastically and fit great in there. I was originally planning on getting custom ones made down the line, but it’s possible I’ll be happy sticking with these for quite a while now — 100$ intercooler and 70$ radiator, can’t beat that. We finished those at about the same time, so I turned my attention to the intake piping. Doug was new to welding aluminum, so this was a new game for him, and I’d never designed intake piping before, so I had a fun challenge of trying to fabricate legos that played nice with each other. In the end, the assortment of stuff I got from SiliconIntakes worked great for really cheap, and we ended up with some functional piping. Neither of us are particularly proud of our work, but it did get the job done.
The last major thing was the SC belt. I’d managed to find the shortest belt that would go onto the setup (required forcing it over the crank pulley while turning it with a wrench), and then found a 6-rib Gates auto-tensioning pulley (usually used in mid 90s GM cars) and come up with a harebrained scheme that I figured just might work. I did some hackneyed “measuring” with a sharpie, staring at the engine bay, and formed a plan. We cut out a chunk of aluminum, drilled a bunch of complicated holes in it, welded on a bracket, attached it to the manifold, and, much to both of our surprises, it just worked.
Finally, there was a ton of other cleanup/finishing work — doing some rewiring, fabricating a throttle cable bracket, running vacuum lines, etc. Around 4 AM, we finally got the car fired up. Remarkably, it basically fired right up without any fuss. I spent some time futzing with the fuel map so that it’d be drivable, we identified 2 coolant leaks (one was easy, one was a total pain) and after celebrating with a quick beer I managed to finally get the car home a little after 5 AM. It drove perfectly, and it was really hard to keep my right foot from squeezing out some more whine, even though I’d zeroed out the on-boost timing map and made the on boost fuel map super rich, just in case. Even pushing just a couple pounds of boost on the drive home (really really light squeeze), I could tell it was going to be fast.
