HOW TO: LOW BUCK, DIY JUNKYARD LS TURBO KIT

[Music] hey guys richard holder here you know we talk about turbo ls motors all the time but let's take a look at what goes into building your own turbo kit in this video we're going to take a look at my low dollar do-it-yourself turbo kit now we're going to take a look at it on an ls it's this is kind of my go-to single turbo combination whenever i want to run turbo or any kind of testing on the ls the reason that i use it because it relies on stock exhaust manifolds now before i had run these tubular headers and i'll show you a picture of them here and while they look fancy they're stainless and they're mandrel bends and they've got all the flow that you need the reality is they're just not a good choice i mean i use them a lot of the big bang stuff but the problem with them as opposed to a factory exhaust manifold is that while they might flow well they might flow even better than a stock exhaust manifold they're just problematic i mean when you try to bolt these things on they'll bolt on but they're in the way of everything you don't have good plug access they definitely will burn plug wires they weren't made for like with fitment in mind and accessibility and they certainly weren't made for like real turbocharging in mind that's the reason why i although i've used them in the past i've since made another y-pipe to adapt to stock exhaust manifolds that work much better and there's plenty of power and i know guys are all consumed with yeah but what about the flow rate i got to have all that exhaust flow and while it's true that a stock exhaust manifold was not designed to flow the exhaust levels that are associated with 800 900 1 000 horsepower the reality is it works very well because ultimately what limits the flow of that hot side is usually the turbo itself that's usually the big choke point and it's not the manifolds i mean you can have restrictive manifolds and we've seen that on some of these applications but they work very well for all of these power levels i'm going to show you uh what happened when we ran them on a couple of combinations so let's start out with and i but i also need to show you what it took to get there and what we use to make these kinds of things but the first thing we need to start out with if you're going to the wrecking yard and getting a motor here's what you need to get it makes it a lot less expensive and easier for you to ultimately create the single turbo system that you need to create to fit in your chassis so if you go get a 4 8 a 5 3 or 6 0 or whatever else you're going to get make sure that you obviously first of all get the factory exhaust manifolds it's very important that they have the manifolds on them you don't want to have to go buy those later on whether it's from the wrecking yard or ebay or online or somewhere maybe somebody will give something to you we throw away lots of sets of them so we have some extra ones laying around sometimes if we don't throw them away but if you get your motor get it complete if you're buying a complete motor get everything and here's the other critical part and it's a thing that a lot of guys forget about and this makes it a lot easier and less expensive to create your single turbo kit when you get your stock exhaust manifolds the wrecking yards here where we get our stuff they basically just cut the cats off they've got they've got big hydraulic pinchers that they use and they just scissor the rest of the exhaust system off with the cats and just remove that what they do leave there is a section of pipe that's maybe about this long but the important thing that they leave is the flange that attaches that pipe the exhaust the the all the rest of the exhaust pipe and the cats and everything it has the flange that connects that to the stock exhaust manifold so if you had to go buy that that's going to be another expense you're gonna have to pay for shipping and it's not a cheap deal so if you can get that already it's part of the complete motor that you got then it will come with it and basically that's the beginning of your turbo kit get both of them the right side and the left side are different so make sure you get them also if you have a section of stainless pipe that's going to be the right size diameter two and a quarter two and a half two inch it doesn't even matter what it is whatever it is just make the rest of your exhaust out of that again you're not worried about making a high flow you know pro mod race system you're getting all of the exhaust going to the turbo so get those pieces when you get your complete motor the next thing is getting building the rest of the the hot side building the y pipe basically and i'll show you a picture of mine we built this because it has it's easy to put on the dyno and that's what we were configuring it for and i get i get complaints about this hey you need to build that so it fits in a chassis no i don't you need to build it so it fits in the chassis and that's the thing you build the y-pipe to fit in whatever application you have and a lot of times it's not just chassis because if i built one that goes in a 69 camaro everyone would say except for the people that have 69 camaros well not everybody has 69 camaros why don't you build it for something that we all have everybody doesn't have the same thing so here's where you guys come in you have to build your y pipe to position the turbo in the available space to fit the turbo if that's a truck and you've got room over on one side position the turbo there run all of the exhaust to that turbo and then you have to buy a we normally use a t4 flange on my setup i actually ended in a three inch v band and then made v band to t3 t4 or t6 adapters just to make it easier for me on the dyno so i could run any kind of turbo that i wanted but most guys what they'll do is they'll end they'll bring those two pipes together one from each side and again it doesn't matter how long if one's a little bit longer than the other because of where you had to position the turbo doesn't make any difference get them both together weld on the v-band flange mount your turbo when you weld on that v-band flange or when you weld on the t4 turbo flange make sure it is oriented so your turbo is positioned where you want it so that here's the thing to think about make sure that the exhaust can go back down the downpipe can go wherever it needs to go also make sure that your cold side can go to your intercooler and then to your throttle body make sure that the turbo is positioned right that's the other thing that the v-band does for me when i put it on there once i put the turbo on there i can kind of clock the turbo and move it around so i have options not only can i move the hot side and the cold side i can also swing the turbo around which is nice and which is why i do it on a v-band the the next thing to think about is wastegate now wastegate is one area where i don't skimp i usually put a good wastegate on it because wastegate is critical for controlling the boost i have run stuff like from cx racing and other inexpensive ones and they have worked i just haven't found their spring rating for boost to be accurate sometimes they tell me this is an eight pound spring and sometimes it's 13 pounds sometimes it's eight pounds so be prepared for that if you use a low dollar wastegate and also make sure that you get the wastegate mounting flange because you're gonna have to have a section of tubing welded to the the wastegate flange and then you're gonna have to position the wastegate i like to position the wastegate in a bend because as exhaust is flowing if it flows directly to the wastegate that usually makes the wastegate most effective on my y pipe i use two of them so that we can have control in the engine dyno out on the street or on a chassis down or something usually one wastegate especially a 45 millimeter like we use is enough if you're going big you can go bigger on the wastegate you can go to a 60 or something bigger and make that works but that's one area where i don't skimp the other thing obviously you're gonna have to get is the turbo itself now there are a lot of options for turbos and choose the turbo based on your desired power output if you're going for six or seven hundred horsepower something like an s366 or that board or the ebay gt45 that works well and the ebay gt45 is 163 so they're very very cheap if you want to go bigger which i will show you in this video like an s475 size turbo you can also do that it will be a little bit more money but it makes a lot more power so the next thing after the turbo is you're going to have to have an oil feed from the motor from some oil fitting in the motor up to the turbo that's usually a braided line and a couple of a n and a in the pipe fittings then you're gonna have to have an oil drain and they sell drain fittings or you can weld a fitting into your oil pan some guys put them into the front cover that also works just as long as the oil is draining back and that the turbo is above the level of the oil so that it all drains back into the pan now the final thing is or the one of the other things is the down pipe you need to have a down pipe going from the exhaust on the turbo to go back down into your exhaust you can go down as a single make it as big as you can for maximum flow you can go down as a single three and a half or four or whatever and then wire it into a dual exhaust you can run it all as a single exhaust that's going to be more your available space and what kind of application you have now let's talk about the cold side so the cold side can be done a number of different ways and for both the hot side tubing and the y-pipe tubing and to some extent i've seen guys do this on the cold side as well if you want to go really cheap and i've done this before i go to my local muffler shop and i get the stuff that they cut off of the stock exhaust so i can go go through their scrap yard basically and grab different bends that i need and sometimes you get you know if it's factory stuff a lot of times that's stainless and they're just going to throw all that stuff away or they have a guy that comes by and gets all of their stock mufflers and the associated tubing now they'll usually just give you that and let you just go chop it up and take you take what you want but even if you had to pay 5 or 10 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever it is that's cheap comparing to going buying bins from you know online or from your local place i do the same thing for the cold side if you want to do aluminum you can use aluminum on that and that's a good way to go it's more expensive that way i've seen guys do hot side out of mild steel because it's cheap and it's free and the other place to get those bins and you can find good bins at the wrecking yard you can especially find if you're doing a single turbo you can find uh stock exhaust setups especially on an older vehicle like if you were because this works for any kind of motor if you're doing an early small black chevy you can find a y section on a truck where they run the two exhausts into a single exhaust well they're running that into a single exhaust and even if the merge goes in at like a 90 degree it still works and that still functions as a single turbo kit get that y section have it face forward run the one pipe up put your turbo flange on it and you have a turbo kit and that that actually works so that's another way to go and it's very inexpensive but if you're going to do aluminum tubing it's really inexpensive now to find aluminum tubing and like front mount intercooler kits get universal ones get as big of a and if you're doing an air to air get as big of an air to air as you can fit in your location and and i would get big tubing going to it also so you can free up you know the the flow rate of the cold side i wouldn't worry so much about response rate because the tubing is bigger coming from the turbo but i like to get as much flow as i can through the core and then the core obviously is always a balance between flow and cooling but if this is a an inexpensive kind of junkyard deal you know you're not you're not going big on the cost there so get all of that obviously the the air from the turbo through the inner core up to your throttle body and again you don't have to worry about going to a big throttle body just get all of your couplers coupler sets are usually fairly inexpensive i use just regular clamps you can go with t-bolt clamps if you're running lots of boost i think i'm going to do a video coming up here where i actually just tape the stuff together and see how much boost i can run just with gorilla tape to find out you know to show people hey look you can actually run four pounds or three pounds or 20 pounds or whatever the number is just using tape if everything is lined up right so that will be an interesting test but let's check out how well all of this stuff when you put it together let's find out how well it actually works we're running out a couple of combinations let's check it out to further illustrate that our do-it-yourself low butt turbo kit actually works we're going to step up and power and show you that you know what happens if you don't want to just make 700 horsepower or so with that really inexpensive ebay gt45 turbo what if you're looking at like a thousand horsepower turbo now if you're going to make that kind of power you're going to have to step up obviously in costs on the turbo itself all the other things basically stay the same but you're going to step up in the cost of the turbo in this case we ran a summit racing s475 there are other options out there that will get you to you know the thousand horsepower level like a 7875 gen 2 from vs racing and obviously there are other choices out there too but you're gonna have to step up above that gt45 size or a 366 borgwarner which is also a good one for that lower power level but this was a summit racing turbo and it's about 649 or so and as i said it's a borg s475 kind of copied we ran eight and a half pounds on it and it was making 718 horsepower if you want i'll go ahead and show you the our theoretical and a combination but um we stepped up in boost on this thing and and as before remember these exhaust manifolds were obviously designed for a 300 horsepower 5.3 liter not something that's gonna that needs to flow the exhaust of three times that much power in this particular case so we stepped up and boost you know we went up to 10 and a half pounds or 10.8 13. 15 and a half and then our final run of the day was uh just over 17 pounds and where we were over 900 horsepower this is 923 and we've seen this before i have this video up comparing the gt45 versus the summit racing turbo and obviously they're two different size turbos so and that's exactly why i did that comparison not not because i'm comparing a boost for boost and guys want to know which one makes more power at this boost level really the the amount of power that they make at the same boost if both of them can supply exactly the same curve they'll make really close to the same power that's not really uh of interest to me to show which one of those if one makes one or two more horsepower than the other one does in a level whether they're both supporting the same amount of power because turbo guys don't really want to know that especially not at that lower power level what they want to know is which one makes more power and if it does make more power does it cost me more money and in that comparison the gt45 costs less than the summit racing turbo or than any s475 turbo and you have to pay for what you get you have a thousand horsepower potential but you pay more money for that and that's what that video is but this shows the same thing it shows that this low dollar do-it-yourself turbo kit with the stock exhaust manifolds and some sort of homemade y-pipe that you make to fit in your particular chassis in your application it works well enough and we could have gone to even higher there was more power to be had here i especially wish i would have used an electronic wastegate controller so we could have had a nice smooth even boost curve and not a falling curve which we're having here because of the change in in back pressure on this setup and and the back pressure is more from the the size of the turbo than it is from the exhaust manifolds because back pressure in the system that's inherent in any turbo sizing unless you have a really really big hot side relative to the flow rate of the exhaust and the power output and displacement of the motor you're almost always going to have more back pressure than boost pressure and unfortunately that has an effect on the wastegate setting especially with a manual controller so the that was less of a problem on the summit turbo than it was on the smaller ebay turbo which the exhaust back pressure started getting higher a lot quicker on the ebay turbo even though the power output was lower but do-it-yourself turbo kip no problem stock exhaust manifolds i do like them very much because of not burning plug wires and having plug access and obviously they can support lots of power and i've never maxed one out but i know that the limit is way above this let's get to our conclusion as i indicated in the previous section of the video we've run this single turbo do-it-yourself kit on a ton of different ls combinations i'm sure at least 25 or 30 different combinations and it always works well in fact it's my go-to setup for any single turbo application i'd much rather choose this as we've talked about than the tubular headers because of the you know concern for plug wires and access to the spark plug so this is a much better setup and the other thing to think about is even though these stock exhaust manifolds were obviously never designed for this increased flow rate at these kinds of power levels they work very well the other thing i like about them obviously is their cast iron so they retain the heat which is also good for a turbo combination so here i want to show you we can show you like i said any of 25 or 30 different examples where we've used this successfully and it works really well this particular one was a 5.3 liter this one came from my buddy david freiburg on loan it had forged internals it had trick flow 205 heads we had a summit stage 3 turbo cam in this thing and it was a 600 575 lift split a 231 234 degree duration split and 115 plus 5 lsa it also had a fast intake manifold on it we had fast 89-pound injectors and i had my y-pipe with two turbosmart wastegates now you can do that any way that you want and we can i showed you kind of the positions of where you might want to take a look at positioning the wastegates whether you're on one or two i normally run two on the engine item just because it works out well we have good control over it now i say that but what was kind of limiting this particular test is the fact i used a manual wastegate controller and not an electronic controller but the other thing that was limiting this first test is the fact that i had that ebay gt45 turbo on there we ran this up fairly good this is only about eight pounds and it made 664 horsepower now the problem with this is i did not i didn't ever run this particular combination naturally aspirated i can kind of show you where it would be having run hundreds and hundreds of nals combinations but i did not run at n a with that specific turbo cam but this is kind of what it would look like and as you can see we're because we have a falling boost curve on the ebay turbo um the thing is not carrying out like it should be but i this is more about the turbo setup the the turbo system the do-it-yourself kit with the stock exhaust manifolds and it works very well here here's eight pounds and we went up to 11.8 pounds and then we went up to you know 14 pounds and again we're still seeing the thing with a falling curve but in this case we're making 776 horsepower and 786 foot pounds of torque and i think we probably could get near 800. um we've we've run near that on a smaller 4.8 liter that seems to work a little better on a smaller motor because of the the exhaust back pressure on that particular turbo but again this is more about the turbo setup and i wanted to show you an ebay turbo because if you're doing a low buck do-it-yourself kind of turbo kit that's the kind of turbo you're probably going to put on it at least you would in this kind of power range now if you want something that's going to make even more power obviously you'd step up in turbo size but the nice thing is with this kit and we've run fairly big turbos on it we've run s 480 turbos and and the precision 7675 that we ran those are capable of you know maybe 1200 or so so you can certainly flow enough uh exhaust on that system even with the stock exhaust manifolds i i honestly think we could go way above that if we had a really big turbo and we had a combination that could take advantage of it i don't think we'd get into a flow limitation of the exhaust or see excessive back pressure just because of those stock exhaust manifolds but it would be interesting to test to find out where that limit is because we ran the tubular headers on all the big bang motors because we were looking for you know in the case of the six liter i mean that was up around 1500 horsepower i don't know if there would be a big difference in power between those two manifolds and the stock exhaust manifolds and the do-it-yourself kit at the same at that elevated power level it would be an interesting test but i can tell you that if i was doing a dedicated system that was actually going to run in a car i wouldn't pick those tubular manifolds i would make something like that that had the flow rate of that but also had the spark plug access of the stock exhaust manifold so let's take a look at another example where we ran even more boost and more power with the do-it-yourself turbo kit okay guys i hope this helped you figure out what you need to do to make your own turbo system for your application remember although we did this on an ls it could apply to a coyote or a small block forward a big block chevy you know heck even a buick or cadillac it doesn't matter it all works the same way you can make your own y-pipe have it fit your combination but remember when you get your motor from the wrecking yard especially on the ls make sure that you get the flanges that go from the exhaust manifolds out to the exhaust because that's a good start toward making your own y-pipe then all you have to do get the turbo mounted where it needs to go run the exhaust up to it and then get all the boost from the turbo into your motor armature holder guys make thanks for watching make sure to like share subscribe ring the bell do all that stuff i got more and more testing coming up right after christmas

Channel: Richard Holdener

Views: 69,008

Rating: 4.959084 out of 5

Keywords: diy, turbo, kit, ls, boost, intercooler, stock manifolds, welding

Id: g_BreaprLHE

Length: 22min 13sec (1333 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020