I have quite a few hours into this project now, and its still not quite done. But its getting closer now. I finished all the welding, and smoothed out the rough spots inside. After all the hard work, I wanted to make it look a little nicer, so I sanded the tubes and polished them up a little bit. The stainless steel really polishes nicely with enough effort. I still need to find a place for the external wastegate and weld on a flange for that. It is looking like I will need to remove some Air Conditioning parts to make it all fit. Hopefully I can do some creative plumbing and maintain the AC, I really don’t like my daily drivers to be without cold air in the summer.

My header build is coming along nicely. Here are some more recent pictures.

For more pictures of the header building, follow this link to my header gallery.

I have been making good progress on the turbo install project this week. I’m pretty tired from spending late nights in the garage. I am keeping this short for now, with just a few more pictures of the header build as it comes together. These thumbnails should be clickable for bigger images. I tacked together the first 2 primary runners on the benchtop using my little mig machine. Its so handy for this type of stuff because you can hold parts together with one hand and just zap them together with the other hand holding the mig gun. I’ll go back and tig weld everything later.

I put the half done header on the motor to check for fit. This was also the first time the turbo is mounted without me holding it too. So far everything is going as planned. The turbo is big, but has about an inch or so of room on each side of the compressor. I might have to add some heat shielding to components in the area, but it doesn’t seem terribly cramped yet.

So, I did alot of head scratching tonight. I always seem to screech to stop when it comes time to actually start routing the tubes and making things fit. After seeing these pictures, with this tiny turbo, you will understand why I didn’t want to try and make the big Divided turbine housing fit in here. The space just seems to disappear really quickly. I got alot of spaghetti tubes to fit in there, and there isn’t much room.

This top view is a good place to get a feel for the routing. The turbo will probably be closer to the head by 1-2 inches, its leaning against the strut tower right now. But this seems like the natural home for it. The plan is to route the #1 port to the tube you can see on the right of the cluster. It is a very short, and direct path. #2 will go to the collector tube you can see at the left of the cluster, also very short. Ports 3 and 4 will have relatively longer runners and feed the 2 bottom tubes that you can’t see from here.

Moving the turbo farther forward frees up some space for the header runners, but then there are problems routing the compressor pipes, radiator hoses, and oil feed and drain. Besides, there is alot more hot tubing to melt stuff. I’d like to keep it compact, even if I have to make the runners very different lengths.

And here is the traditional Turbobricks scale shot. Though by now, I’m sure people know how big turbos are.

Here it is, my personal chronicles of how to build a turbo header the denverspeed way. I have a header design in mind now, and a new turbo on the way. So, I needed to get going with the execution of actually assembling my new header. I can’t say I’m a master fabricator yet, but I have a decent set of tools for doing this sort of thing and I get better every time I do a new project. This is my 3rd header, and I’ve done quite a few other fabrication projects over the years. I’m very slow, as I only get about an hour or so to work in the evenings after work. It usually takes longer than that to get the TIG machine plugged in and ready to go. Time on task is a slight problem, though I do enjoy doing all the work myself, so its often worth the wait. However, I sometimes like to actually drie my car , and it is hard to be patient when its summer and everyone else is out racing at the track. So I’m pushing a bit harder right now to get this done.

I got the band saw vice set up to make nice repeatable cuts to build my collector. Getting the collector put together is by far the hardest part. I make one cut like you see below, then I twist the tube 90 degrees and make a second cut to form the tube into a wedge shape. It doesn’t look bad, but it is quite difficult to make the cuts perfectly 90 degrees to each other so that when you put the four tubes together that they make a perfect circular collector. If you make each tube is a little too big, like 92 degrees, you can’t get the wedges to fit tightly together. I got pretty close this time after cutting up enough tubing for 3 collectors and a little time on the bench grinder to make some final adjustments.

Here are a couple of good collectors, and lots of “spare” parts in the back that didn’t quite fit together as nicely as they should. At about $25 per foot, its not cheap to make mistakes with stainless tubing. I am going to use the shorter collector for this project. The longer collector didn’t really fit in the place I wanted it. Its just too long. An engineer might think the short collector tubes merge at too sharp an angle. But the fit seems to be demanding the compact design.

Below I am welding the flange to the collector tubes. The rectangular flange didn’t really fit my collector very well. I hammered a bit to make the collector oval shape at the exit, and then just filled the gap with lots of welding rod. The flange is made of mild steel. The tubes are 304 stainless. I am using 409 stainless filler rod. In the picture you can see a trick I learned after lots of attempts doing this. The piece of welding wire in the picture is clamped between the flange and the turbo. Everyone will tell you to have the flange bolted to something solid to keep it from warping. But the way to really have a flat flange when you are done is to anticipate the warping, and bend the flange the opposite way before you begin welding. Its not scientific, but this stuff is way more art and feel than science.

After welding, I did a little cleanup of the sharp edges on the inside with a die grinder.

So far so good. I have probably 20 hours into the header already, spread out over a couple weeks time. I can’t imagine making a living building these things. Its like art. You would want a thousand dollars for something like this. Yet, cheap imported ones show up on ebay for $100 all the time.