Quote:
Originally Posted by wagonman76
View of the blade assembly before painting. I actually built the plow a little while before the axle attachment broke, so this is just before I had a welder. Could have just welded it and saved some money in fittings. But the $400 I spent total on the plow has paid for itself in the times I would have had to hire the driveway done over the last 5 1/2 seasons. Plus I did not have to buy a truck.
View of the frame assembly, off the car, before painting.
|
That's wild! You have a great imagination to come up with that. I've thought about building a small plow for my garden tractor for a while, and never did black pipe cross my mind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wagonman76
Frank, I have opened a new thread to continue the discussion. I would like to know more about your setup too. I see oddities that do not look like the factory 3.1 turbo.
|
Yep, it's not a factory 3.1 turbo. The motor is a 93 naturally aspirated 3.1 which happened to come out of a Lumina.
The only factory turbo part I used when I put the turbo on was the rear exhaust manifold off of a turbo grand prix. The front manifold is a stock 3.1 casting. The crossover pipe was homemade from a stock 3.1 crossover and some schedule 40 pipe to beef up the assembly to hold the turbo flange. The intercooler is front mounted and is off of an Isuzu NPR diesel truck, the tank ends were cut off and replaced to allow for side inlet/outlet configuration. The charge pipes were made up from 2" mandrel bends from Summit, cut and welded to fit where they needed to go.
The 16.8 lb/hr stock injectors were tossed for a set of Accel 24 lb/hr injectors. Fuel pump was swapped to a 255 lph Holley (walbro). The stock intake air temp sensor was changed to a threaded model and placed in the charge pipe, post-intercooler.
The exhaust is 2.5" smooth bent from the turbo to the rear bumper. High flow cat and dynomax ultra flow muffler installed to keep the neighbors (and the nj dmv) happy.
This motor has seen two turbochargers since I did the conversion. The first was a Garett T3 60 trim, the same turbo found on some ford turbo t-birds and also on the earlier Datsun Z cars. It made good power, but wasn't, uh, "violent" enough.
I also knew I wanted to swap heads in the future, so I upgraded the turbo. New and current turbo is a Garett T3/T4 hybrid, T3 .63 AR turbine with a T4 T5/T6 (rather rare) compressor wheel. Should be good for about 400 hp of air, and it spools quite nicely. At 10 psi of turbo, the car will light up the tires at a 30 mph roll.
I've also played with two different engine management systems. The first was the factory GM 1227730 ECM running highly modified code from a 91 pontiac turbo grand prix. Ran very well, but some local guys are playing with Megasquirt (diy engine management) and wanted some help. So after Christmas I built a Megasquirt 2 kit and got it installed in the car. It's rough tuned and drivable, but currently on hold until the homemade trailer project is completed..
Right now, the 3.1 makes an estimated 250 hp at 10psi, which is quite the bump from the stock 140 rating. Swapping to the later generation heads should increase that figure by a large amount. I have a friend with the same car, but running the gen 3 60* V6 ("3400" stock, sans turbo and fueling), also with a homemade turbo system. He's over 400 hp and the car runs 11's in the quarter mile.
Here's a couple of proofs with pictures of the car from a calendar done by a website I'm active with.
If you're interested, build pictures from the day I bought it (it was pretty trashed) are here:
http://gallery.shadetree.org/main.php?g2_itemId=592
There's a lot of pictures there, as there isn't a bolt on that car I haven't removed. Quite a bit of work has been done, including a rear disc brake conversion using spindles from an 89 Dodge Daytona and custom rear axle.
It's not your usual "hot rod" but it's something different. Doesn't get much respect from the younger generation ("it's not a honda") but the old timers love it. All the work was done here at home in my little 1 car garage, except for the exterior paint - I farmed that out.
- Frank
__________________