JLarson's build thread

[JLarson]

I'll try to provide a fairly detailed summary of the weekend.

Madwi arrived as planned on Thursday afternoon, and we were joined by Craig the Blessed (not from the forum, but helped me install LTH previously).

Thursday involved installation of the new fuel pump, installation of new injectors, and finishing heat shields for headers. Craig handled the fuel pump and tapped the upper plenum, Madwi handled the injectors, I tackled headers and finished connection of the oil cooler. Spirits were pretty high, jokes flew, and we all look forward to the arrival of Craig's car assembled entirely with JB weld instead of fasteners for weight reduction.

Note - and this may be important - we had to splice the injectors into the existing harness. The supposedly plug n' play connectors did not, in fact, plug n' play. More on this later.
Note 2 - The instructions with the BP kit are also outdated regarding the hardware used to secure the fuel pump in place in the fuel basket, and the hose used to connect the ports. This took several messages with Sasha to resolve because it was not an obvious solution.

[JLarson]

Friday saw the next serious complications. Currently Sasha is using Treadstone to provide the intercooler and charge piping for the kit. My intercooler arrived with the brackets welded backwards. The greatest significance of this was that what should have been a 5 minute job - bolting on an intercooler - turned into a multi hour ordeal. I ended up having to take the intercooler brackets to a machine shop where my brother kindly made use of a bridgeport to machine down my brackets. Between that and some creative uses of washers, the intercooler was installed.

Madwi tackled wiring for the new AFR and boost gauges, as well as assembling the gauge pillar.

Coolant lines were installed in the car, turbo was roughly clocked.

Rusty arrived around 8, and after a brief dinner (thanks Megan!) we mated the turbo manifold to the OEM headers. This took a bit of work. The manifold was about 1/2 inch too narrow to fit the header hole pattern. The flex pipes on the manifold do allow for some maneuvering, and we were able to seat it with a bit of effort, mostly on Rusty's part. That wrapped up the evening.