Home Made Turbo Manifold progress - Honda Prelude Forum

DirtyLude · 12-21-2002, 01:49 PM

Well, here it is so far. I handed all the materials and the design idea off to my mechanic to weld up for me. It's still really rough and needs to be cleaned up. All the welds are very thick and I'm going to grind them down some as well as clean up the inside of the tubing as much as I can.

I'm not going to link all the pictures, you can just go to the gallery to look at them. I don't have a picture of it in the car, but the turbo is mounted backwards than usual. The compressor is on the driver side. We had more space this way since I don't have A/C anymore. There's some pictures of the original fit checking. The first picture shows were the regular placement of the turbo that manifolds like the SFP and Kiwi use. The last three are how the turbo is mounted with this manifold.

http://www.higginstribe.com/gallery/header/

Total parts cost has been around $180.00. I bought way too much piping though, since I had no idea what I would need. I'm going to weld up a second one on my own to see how well I do it, but I only have a gas welder and my skills are not that great.

smoothludey · 12-21-2002, 06:02 PM

wow, way to go dirty....that manifold looks very promising...what did it cost you in all? I don't think there's any need to really make it look nicer....it's all about function, but if you want i guess you could have it candy coated.

94LOOD · 12-21-2002, 10:27 PM

whew, lookin great so far

chomorro · 12-22-2002, 02:02 PM

That looks like its going to be a good one. Good luck on the welding, very hard craft to do the right way.

DirtyLude · 12-22-2002, 04:54 PM

I'm not really cleaning it up to make it look pretty, I just want to smooth it out a bit to get rid of the major stress risers. The merge collector is the only thing that really needs cleaning up.

I did some practice welding on the extra piping I had and it turned out really well. Much better than I expected. It welds really nicely. I should be able to make an extra one fairly easily.

I'm not going to mention how much I payed my mechanic to do the welding of it for me. He was interested in it in a project so he did it pretty cheapely.

The exhaust manifold flange I got from F-Max for $55.00. I don't remember what the turbine inlet, outlet, and wastegate cost me. I bought them a while ago, but you can look up the prices on roadraceengineering.com All the piping I got from http://www.mcmaster.com/ The piping is extremely thick and heavy.

Dr. James · 12-22-2002, 06:19 PM

Looks like a good start, but I have one question, what is with the larger diameter piping, alternating with the smaller piping? Other than that one thing the design looks good, and welds don't look too bad, I would certainly clean up the merge collector though. Good job,

DirtyLude · 12-22-2002, 08:37 PM

When I bought all the piping I originaly bought the smaller stuff by accident. I bought the larger stuff later. The guy who welded it up was unable to make the merge collector with the larger piping, so he used the smaller piping for up to a point and switched to a larger piping heading toward the exhaust flange. The transitions from large to small have been smoothed out as much as possible. I would have prefered he used the larger piping throughout, but as you can see he had a hard enough time on the merge with the smaller piping. When I recreate the manifold I'll be using the larger piping throughout. I'd also like to move the wastegate port as well. Somewhere where the gasses move into it rather than have to turn around to go back up the pipe.

I've seen smaller piping used on some manifold where the piping is reduced right after the exhaust flange to try and build velocity before the gasses hit the turbo. Unforutunately there wasn't such a design pupose here, he just didn't have the tools or the time to do it with the large piping all the way through.

I did find that the smaller piping is the perfect size for the 35mm wastegate flange, though.