January 14-15, 2006 - Turbo Install (1)
When we walked into the garage on Saturday, January 14 we already
had our minds made up that we would be installing the turbos and
intercooler by Sunday night. Before doing anything else I
needed to wrap my mind around what needed to be done to the turbo
before it was installed. I already connected the exhaust
housing
and left the bolts loose enough so that the exhaust section would
swivel. I took a look at the center section oil drain and
noticed it was a little bit different than what was shown in the
instructions. Stuff like this was pretty much par for the
course concerning the instructions. They changed the kit in a
few different ways after the instructions were written and they
didn't bother updating them. I grabbed the new drain fittings
and started to install them. The first thing I noticed was the
bolts were too long. Maybe I wasn't even using the right
bolts, HP never gave a bolt listing or bothered to say which bolts
went where. There were several bolts that had the same thread
pattern but different lengths. I pretty much just guessed
where they went and so far everything had worked out. After
some fist pounding and swearing I just decided to hack part of the
bolt off. Here's a picture of the bolt not fitting:
And here's a picture of the bolt after I cut it - compared to an
uncut bolt:
I had to cut two bolts, one for each turbo drain fitting and they
went in without a problem. I don't know what bolt HP meant for
me to use, I sent them an email about it, but they didn't seem too
interested. After I got the drains mounted we put the turbos
in place temporarily while we got the header to turbo tubes
connected.
It was important to leave everything just loose enough so the
tubes would rotate around their connections. This gave us
enough slack in the setup to move the turbos around so that we could
put them in the right spot. After we positioned them in what
we thought was a good place we put wood blocks underneath them so we
could work on the intercooler. We wanted to leave the turbos
loose because we knew we'd have to wiggle them a bit to connect the
turbo to intercooler pipes. The intercooler just has a little
tab that sits on the sheet metal of the radiator support, it doesn't
bolt in place. When we saw the pictures of setup we really
wondered how secure everything was going to be because the only
weight bearing connections are at the header and the intercooler.
As we mocked up the turbo placement we still had doubts.
