Fix It Again Tomorrow - Street Sleeper

Fix It Again Tomorrow - Street Sleeper

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Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Sunday 2nd June 2013
quotequote all
This is a thread about engines, in particular the Lampredi Twin cam, it's what I know best. It's not intended to be an advert, just some pics and chat about what I get up to at work and for pleasure.

Fiat Coupe 16vt: Project Sausage

Where I work we fix integrales, I think what we do best and certainly enjoy the most is build engines. The problem is an integrale is hardly Street sleeper material, they are expensive, difficult to work on and modify due to space constraints and 4wd.

In comparison Fiat Coupe 16vts are cheap, have the same engine, loads of room in the engine bay (due to the long nose) for goodies and are more comfortable on long journeys.
We needed one for trainees to practice with, test out some ideas on and well, just a bit of fun.
One was sourced locally via the Devil that is Ebay, a bit overpriced at £400 with a seized engine, but as it was close by a saving on time and fuel.

Now check out the patina on that:



Perfect! Well I'm not going to be bothered where I leave it am I? wink


The engine was completely seized solid, we found the supply pipe to the oil cooler had been joined back together with a piece of copper pipe



and part of the undertray broken in that area too, so I suspect that something hitting both of them was possibly what caused the demise of the engine, particularly when we 'unlocked' the crank and found the remains of the big end shell bearings:



The rest of the engine was ok so it was stripped down and cleaned before work commenced.

The head was ported using a few new tricks I wanted to try out, everything is developed and tested on our flowbench.



A rebore followed, along with:
-Forged pistons and rods
-Standard CR
-Re-ground crank
-Lightened Steel flywheel
-Uprated clutch
-Full btm end balance +
Balancer shafts removed.
-25mm cambelt kit - replaces the crappy 19mm belt
-Gasflowed head, high lift cams
-GT3076R turbo
-Ceramic coated tubular manifold
-3" exhaust with race cat
-Manual boost controller.

That should help propel it on a bit quicker. smile



Edited by Evoluzione on Thursday 2nd April 23:43

Honestherbert

579 posts

146 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
GT3076 on one of these will be a laughsmile surely gonna be a bit laggy though?? I'm presuming you will be going for thew smaller rear housing?

QuantumTokoloshi

4,161 posts

216 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
Oh that looks like it is going to be a load of fun, road snotter with HUGE power. what do you expect the HP to be ?

Honestherbert

579 posts

146 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
I'd guess around 500 at the fly. But reckon it would need nearly 2 bar to get there!!

Podie

46,630 posts

274 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
Bookmarked! smile

e46acs

548 posts

190 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
Bookmarked coffee

QuantumTokoloshi

4,161 posts

216 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
Honestherbert said:
I'd guess around 500 at the fly. But reckon it would need nearly 2 bar to get there!!
Goodbye front tyres mostly, but once into 3rd gear, goodbye 911.

tomsnelling

278 posts

208 months

Monday 3rd June 2013
quotequote all
Good work, get it out on track!

Add some coil overs (D2s), rear Whiteline ARB, new brakes, decent wheels and tyres and setup and youre good to go!!


Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Wednesday 5th June 2013
quotequote all
Thanks for the encouragement, my OH says I don't need any, I disagree. biggrin

More of the usual problems were found stripping the head:



16v lobe wear is very common especially on later models, no-one really knows why, I'm guessing just poor manufacturing processes.

Well a good excuse to put some new high lift cams in then. wink



All rotating parts were balanced, if you look closely you can just see a shiny patch on the crank counterweight where a small amount of material was linished off:



Note also the light Cromo steel flywheel. All the plugs were removed from the crank and it was cleaned out, you'd be surprised at what comes out of an old crankshaft:



What happens is bits of engine which (usually naturally) wear away get trapped in there, as it is spinning it acts like a centrifuge and they get pushed into a dead end oilway, compacted and usually sit there (quite happily) for the life of the engine. If the crank has been cleaned or machined it can come loose or other bits of material from any machining processes get in there too, so always good practice to have a good clean out.

Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Wednesday 5th June 2013
quotequote all
So the engine was pretty much on its way, I wondered about cooling it; More power = more heat. The standard Coupe rad isn't bad really, pretty big, lots of cooling area, problem was this one wasn't in great shape, most of the fins were missing as were any others we had.
Hmmm, what to do? Well if I was going to buy a new one I might aswell spunk a bit more money and get a really good one and then well, what about the oil cooler? We're going to need one of those too....
The answer came in the form of a combined water and oil cooling rad from the front of some Ford/GM American pick-up 4x4 monstrosity thing, as they already had the size, core and end-tanks 'on-the-shelf' it wasn't much bother for them to just weld on the fittings where I wanted them to suit the Coupes plumbing. It looks something like this:





The width was just fine, a bit too tall though which I knew when I ordered, so it was out with the angry-grinder and welder for a bit of on-the-spot fabrication. biggrin

As I mentioned earlier, the Coupe has loads of room at the front for goodies, I scored a biggish intercooler on Ebay


for not bad money. 450 long x 300 x 75 thick. Many people go too long - especially on Coupes and end up having to use more pipes and bends to connect things up again - every bend is a flow loss. If we weren't on a tight budget I would have had a downflow cooler made, much more efficient.

We did a bit of hacking and plumbing to get it to fit. As this is a sleeper I sprayed it black and used black hoses, you have to look very carefully to even get an idea it's there:



I think you can just about see the two hanging brackets and maybe a bit of pipe through a vent hole.

Edited by Evoluzione on Tuesday 11th June 15:05

Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Wednesday 5th June 2013
quotequote all
Honestherbert and others said:
GT3076 on one of these will be a laughsmile surely gonna be a bit laggy though?? I'm presuming you will be going for thew smaller rear housing?
Oh that looks like it is going to be a load of fun, road snotter with HUGE power. what do you expect the HP to be ?
I'd guess around 500 at the fly. But reckon it would need nearly 2 bar to get there!!
Well you can't have everything on a budget, whilst it's a very strong, but largely misunderstood engine it's old school with no adjustable cam timing like VANOS or VTEC or other modern adjustable engine speed related goodies etc to help us out.
It would be good to see 500, but it will take much less than 2 bar to get there because we made everything so free-flowing, the MAP sensor only reads to 1.5 so we'll stop off there first to see how it goes. smokin




Edited 'Adjustable cam timing' for clarity - shouldn't post up when it's late and tired!



Edited by Evoluzione on Saturday 10th August 12:08

tomsnelling

278 posts

208 months

Wednesday 5th June 2013
quotequote all
Evoluzione said:
Well you can't have everything on a budget, whilst it's a very strong, but largely misunderstood engine it's old school with no adjustable cam timing etc to help us out.
It would be good to see 500 and you're right, it will take about 2 bar to get there, the MAP sensor only reads to 1.5 so we'll stop off there first to see how it goes. smokin
I know a 16VT specialist mapper who has adjustable cam pulleys and other goodies that may help you, let me know if you want his details.

Honestherbert

579 posts

146 months

Thursday 6th June 2013
quotequote all
Good luck to yousmile budget builds are normally the most rewarding in my experience!! and possibly the most fun as you drive them harder as they cost less to fix if it goes tits up!! ha ha

Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Thursday 6th June 2013
quotequote all
After all that hacking about it was time for a break:



Before putting the engine together.


A few pics of the engine build:

Checking piston/valve clearance:



Bearing clearance:




Original cast pistons are known for breaking at higher (50%) power outputs:



So forged ones were fitted.

Timing up the cams:




It was pretty soon looking like this:








Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Monday 10th June 2013
quotequote all
Piccy of the GT3076R, I went in with the grinder and smoothed out any imperfections, especially around the external wastegate as i was worried it wouldn't bleed off enough gas to control itself.



I initially re-used an old tubular ex manifold, you might see it in some pics (it's covered in white ceramic), but it didn't last long. It had already had a very hard life and was brittle, it soon blew in various places.

One of the problems with the integrale/Coupe manifold is that the turbo is mounted too near cylinder No.4, this means you can't get good airflow out of the exhaust port because the turbo flange is there. Below you can see the bad angle on one of the pipes:



People have tried all kinds of designs over the years, it seemed simple to me what we had to do: Move the turbo over to the right. We have a modelling kit, it's a bit like Lego for exhaust manifolds!



The new manifold came back looking like this:



It looks ok, well a big improvement on the original, but I wasn't happy with it. It didn't have any of the graceful free flowing bends I asked for. I couldn't put it on a customers car so a deal was struck and we got a cheap(ish) manifold for the Coupe.
I had 4 sensors fitted to measure exhaust gas temp (this is our development test car also remember) and got it ceramic coated to keep the heat inside it.


Evoluzione

Original Poster:

10,345 posts

242 months

Monday 10th June 2013
quotequote all
Next up was the intake, I hacked off the original runners, improved the angle and got my mate to Tig them up, I got a plenum from a Sunny GTIR on Ebay and grafted that on too with a spacer to increase the plenum volume, finished off with a bigger throttle body it looked something like this:


[/quote]

Hoonigan

2,138 posts

234 months

Tuesday 11th June 2013
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Awesome work, loving it thumbup

yellowstreak

613 posts

151 months

Tuesday 11th June 2013
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This is awesome. You have a very cool job.

My friend used to have a coupe the same colour as this stoked to (he said) 290bhp. We called it the red dragon and it was great in a straight line. I can't imagine how front wheel drive will cope with 500bhp!

vrooom

3,763 posts

266 months

Tuesday 11th June 2013
quotequote all
Mmm i alway liked the coupe. it would be much better if it was a RWD car. it has the look.

Greg_D

6,542 posts

245 months

Tuesday 11th June 2013
quotequote all
Loving your work, keep us updated with every little detail