Well, its been a while since Ive been on here. Ive been in school and playing college golf so Ive been way too busy to spend alot of time online other than doing homework but golf season is over and Ive been putting together a new setup over the past month or so.
For those of you that dont remember I had a greddy setup on my car for a couple months at 9-10psi making roughly 240whp and after about 3 or 4 months I broke the ringlands and melted the side of piston #3. To make a long story short I ended up selling most of the greddy setup to afford to rebuild the motor with tuner toys rods and 9:1cr srp pistons and evertually got it up and running again. I have always wanted a topmount setup but the manifolds are quite expensive and difficult to make. I found a thread on homemadeturbo.com where someone used an aftermarket header and turned it into a topmount manifold and it looked like a pretty cool, cheap, reliable setup and I thought why not? After saving up some cash I started piecing things together and last weekend started making everything. its difficult to explain without pictures but turning an old header into a topmount manifold was a challenging tast but was a lot of fun and well worth it in the end. The turbo is a t3/t04b v-trim from dfdon with a 2.5-3" downpipe and a tial 35mm wastegate. It pulls like crazy, way harder than with the greddy setup. I get spool at around 2.5k and full boost by 4k or so. I dont have a lot of pics right now since I dont have a camera at school but I got this pic off my buddies phone tonight. Me and my buddy back home put a lot of time and hard work into this setup so I hope you enjoy it.

 

Thats really cool. I like home made stuff, you can be really prud of something you pieced together or fabbed up compared to buying a kit.

 

yay for my turbo

 

WTF DON? shes not boosted anymore?

 

Justin, I believe it's Don's old turbo..

 

I havent been able to get a hold of a camera at all so I dont have any pics but I'll try to get some more soon. Im running an open 2.5-3" downpipe right now which is pretty loud and kind of annoying. Ive got a torn drivers side motor mount so I cant launch without the motor hitting the hood. Just a few kinks I need to get straightened out when Im finially out of school in 2 weeks. I will eventually be getting bigger injectors and a bigger intercooler and upping the boost to around 15psi or so. I would like to have 300whp on hand if I ever need it.

 

Nice setup. What kind of RPM does she redline at? Stock head?

 

Yeah the head is stock. Redline is right at 8k with the rev limiter at around 8300 I think.

 

wish i would have thought about top mount like that... whats the pros / cons of topmount vs normal?

 

Topmount

Pros
-Flow extremely well
-Easy oil return
-Can run a 4" downpipe.
-Wastegate placement is easy.

Cons
-Slow spool due to lots of heat loss
-Hard to make/very expensive
-Prone to cracking due to the weight of the turbo