Overview Of Our First Ever Turbocharged Slant Six Build

you know i generally don't get very excited about too many things i've kind of jaded i've done a lot i've covered a lot of ground you know been there done it got the t-shirt but the slant six the turbocharged slant that we're doing with stubby i'm excited by this i'm i'm having fun with this i'm looking forward to digging into it as i said before it'll be my first turbocharged build now i'm not a stranger to turbo charger and a lot of people have this they say you know ever since we started this channel like when are you gonna turn to turbo we turbo this turbo that terrible the other thing and my answer has always been when somebody brings me a turbo car it's the same thing with imports i would love to do something an import but i'm not gonna go buy one somebody brings me one let's let's do this thing right let's work on this i like working on things that are new to me and building a turbocharged car is new to me now previously we did a supercharged slant section i'll talk about that in a minute um but while i've never built a turbo car i'm not a stranger to turbo chargers the reason that people they're the main reason that i haven't built one for myself why i won't build one for myself is because i'm basically an n a guy i like nitrous oxide nitrous oxide doesn't force feed the engine it only enhances its combustion capabilities it's it's a it's a it's a pouring or you think of it as pouring right it's spraying but it's a pouring like nitro methane where it's you're not changing the engine itself you're just changing the fuel that it's burning on that's running on turbocharged supercharged it's just not my thing and also i don't like all the plumbing when i open my hood right i own this car and when i open the hood i want everything to be clean and wide open and accessible and all the plumbing and everything that goes at a turbo charged car it's just not for me it's just not for me i appreciate it i look at i look at well planned out well well-executed turbo setups and i'm like god that's beautiful i say i i truly appreciate the craftsmanship and the effort that goes into some of these things but it's just not for me does that make any sense but like i said it's my first it's my first turbo it's gonna be my first turbo build but it's not i i'm not a stranger to turbo chargers so i know i i generally don't like to talk about my previous life in in all of this stuff i i keep this channel grounded in what this channel is but when i was a kid back in the 80s i was the technical editor for csk publishing so csk was vet high performance pontiac muscle car uh high performance mopar which i started uh and cars illustrated and we did a couple of other small books in between monster trucks buyers guides and whatnot but that's my job was the technical editor for all those magazines but it was also a contributor right i was a freelance writer so i contributed stories to all of those magazines cars illustrated was my puppy and one of we did a lot of drag tests on that so in cars illustrated i was the first person to put a 5-liter mustang in the 13s my own car i was the first person to put a tpi uh chevy in the 13s i was the first person to put a buick turbo cart in the 13s so this was in 1986 we did a drag test on a uh on a regal t type of turbocharged regal t-type which is the grand national in a different trim level and i street raised the car for a week and then we we took it tinglestown made our time runs with it i ended up going 13.85 at 100 or 99 miles an hour i don't remember a mile an hour doesn't make any difference but you can find the story if you're interested in reading this you can find the story it was it's been reproduced a couple places online it's called from buick with balls so that was that was uh my drag test on that car and if you do find it i want you to read a sidebar that i there's a sidebar that i wrote to this whole thing having to do with now remember this is written in 1886 and it has to do with all of the new technology that's coming in and at the time i was all about this new technology i was i was all in i'm sold this stuff is great and i wrote a whole sidebar on how this is the future and and hot rodders you know 20 30 years from now 40th which is right now this is what they're going to be working with and and it's going to be as familiar to them as jets and so on and so forth are to us i said all of this stuff i was all about it until it started to run off the rails the new technology back then in the 80s was still basically analog was very understandable it was very workable these were very simple systems but as time went on and things become became more layered and integrated and more difficult to work with i reached a point where i was like nope nope going back to points and carbs and that's what i did and that's where we are today but as i said i'm not a stranger to the turbocharged thing at one point i was very into it i just haven't built one so now fast forward to the last shop that had missed out more parts so one of the projects that we built in that shop was a supercharged slant six is valiant so what happened was the customer had worked out a deal with torque storm the centrifugal supercharger worked out to do a torque storm on a prototype slant six kit that they had wanted to offer but hadn't built one yet hadn't actually assembled the whole thing so he worked out a deal with them and they sent him all the bits and pieces and the turbo the the supercharger and all the things that they had with it right a carb hat and blah blah blah blah and it was our job to fit it all together and also report back to the torque storm people this is good this needs to be you know shorter longer it'll fit here you have to make this modification that modification and so based on our feedback is how they actually formulated the kit that they that's available today and i got to tell you i was super impressed with everything that had they had sent so if if you've have if you have any questions about the quality or the workmanship or twerk storm stuff i could tell you firsthand it's really good it's really good and that car turned out really nice and this put into stubby's mind stupidity worked for me so just put into stubby's bonnet he wanted to do a blown slant of some sort of his own the that supercharged slant 6 had the most distinctive sound it was just the most amazing like whale howl kind of thing when you got on it it was it was it was it was magical so stubby wanted something like that and he didn't want to go with the supercharger we want to go to turbocharger so right before we had to leave that shop they sold the land out from underneath us so we had to go uh right before we sold that shop he had started gathering parts to build a super turbocharged slant and that's why he that's where he got this kit he it was only like 500 something dollars he got the turbocharger uh a wastegate and just all the plumbing and intercooler the whole 10 yards and it cost him about 550 bucks fantastic deal he bought pistons for it i had nothing to do with this he this was he was doing this on his own of his own initiative so when we had to get out of the shop it was like just gather all this stuff up and get it out of here you got to picture this now this place was loaded with mopar stuff it was blocks heads engines transmissions it was everything all over the place so it was a free-for-all just grab what you can and get out of here so he grabbed up all of his his turbo charger stuff and he also grabbed a bunch of of miscellaneous sick stuff that was there a couple of blocks heads um so on and so forth all right make a long story short brings us to today and he wants to put this car together and we found a little turbocharger stuff so i started inventorying and before we send all of this off i figured let's let's now do an overview of the build of what we're going to do with this thing uh what we're going to have to procure for it and and the rhyming of reasons of um so on and so forth so stewbe grabbed this head off of a pile now this head belongs to another customer of mine who had ported this head but never actually completed it now at some point they got put together and they don't know who put it together but it got put together and the other day stubby takes this thing apart and i'm like wow this is ported already and then i realized what this head was and this head is not really usable unless we go with bigger valves on it so as you can see when he did his porting and and listen don't it was the kid's first attempt he had never done something like this before when he did his porting you could see that he cut into the intake seats badly there's a couple of them like this this this one's like this okay um so now there are the only way we can fix this head we'd have to finish the porting that he started okay you see he didn't really take this area down right we have the finished reporting that he started and we would have to put bigger valves in here we'd have to we'd have to increase the size of the valves which in and of itself is not a bad thing it's not it's not a problem but we still have to procure the valves and all of that and this is gonna have to go to a machine shop and the seats are gonna have to be cut and and the new valves done so that's what's up with this head we're going to have to find valves for this and go from there but that's i guess and okay one of the advantages of this particular head is that this is a later peanut plug head so this is a 1975 and newer head and you can use you see it uses the 5 8 or the peanut style gm like the small block chevy or most gm cars use that 5 8 spark plug well this is the first year for these heads that use that plug and it has the benefit of this is that it has a little extra water passage around the spark plug which in a turbocharged motor is going to be a big asset now because we don't need compression on this thing per se it's unnatural aspiration we're just going to surface this head and that's it we're not going we're not going to make a major cut to try to build compression or anything like that uh but that's what's going on with this so this is gonna go off to the machine shop we're gonna have to hunt down these valves and i don't know when or how long it's gonna take to get this thing done but that's step number one now on the short block so after doing a lot of studying a lot of studying a lot of trial and error i determined that for a normally aspirated slant right just sucking its own atmosphere running on gasoline regular pump gas or regular gasoline the best way to go one of these engines is the 1981 through 1987 cast crank motor and the reason for that is because the crankshaft itself chrysler reduced the the the metal in the crankshaft by a tremendous amount there's over a 20 pound difference between the early that the 18 then 1860 to 1980 slant 6 crank and the 81 to 87 there's a 20 pound difference and it's not 20 pounds of of of of strength weight it's 20 pounds of flywheel weight when i say flywheel weight these engines were built with extra extra beefy counterweights and the reason for this is to act as a flywheel effect remember these cars were originally built you go back to 1959 1960 when these were introduced in the valiant these were non-synchronized three-speed transmissions so basically you did most of your driving your stop-and-go driving in second and third gear you only went down to first when you came to a complete stop so the extra rotational weight of the crank along with the flywheel right made these things easier to drive there was like less lugging when you when you were accelerating away so you know let's say you slow down like five miles an hour but not come to a complete stop where you would put it back into first gear well if you slow down to let's say five miles an hour everything's idling it it would take the gas and move the car smoother with all of this heavy heavy weight on the counterweights so when they revised this engine in 1881 one of the things that they did was they eliminated huge amounts of this flywheel weight they also you went with a narrower set of bearings an hour set of of mains and a narrower set of rods the mains on these engines on this particular engine this is an 1872 the main bearings on this are exactly the same ones you'd find on a 440 or a 426 hemi even actually the timing chain set too is also a big block chrysler uh but 81 they reduced the burying width so there's less parasitic losses there so when you get into when you get into building a normally aspirated slant these later parts that were engineered for better efficiency as opposed to low-speed manual transmission non-synchronized manual transmission drivability it's a much better choice now with this thing with this project since since we're going to be stepping on it it's actually going to be boosted the extra beef the the this the forged steel crank because those later ones are cast and i don't want to cast crank but given the configuration of these engines with four main bearings and all i really feel that sticking with the the forged steel heavy crank is the way to go for this one so that's what we're going to do with this the block is he's got pistons for this thing already uh the block is going to go 60 over they're stock compression height pistons so our compression is going to end up at around around the 8 to 1 range perfect for boost and he's like he says he got the piston 60 over so this block is just going to get sent out cleaned up decked and and board for the 60 over pistons and that's what's gonna done with that as far as the crank goes i'm gonna have to well we still have to tear it apart but if if it goes the way you think it will the crank's not even going to need a cut it's just going to it's going to need a polish and we'll put it together standard standard it remains to be seen i still have to check it make sure it's straightened but that's that now one of the other things that's important to know about you building any slant using well just any slant but particularly one using the heavy steel forged crank is that the the the oil pan let me let me get in here okay so this is a problem and it's it's just the design of the engine so these motors were designed to fit in a valiant they were designed to fit the a-body platform from 1860. the crank it's got it's got a four and a quarter inch throw crank right very very long throw crank and a huge counterweight well the pan this is the front of the pan and this is where the k frame is now there's hardly any room at the very front of the of the of the oil pan when this is in place the the number one connecting rod and the counterweight come within about a quarter of an inch of the floor of this pan so basically any oil that comes down off the assembly as the engine is running anywhere is caught here it stays here and it gets whipped up in windage because like i said these things come like right to the bottom of the pan so one of the things and you can see here this is these are the witness marks in the oil you can see how close see how close everything comes right that's just the cl the cleaning of the oil as the motor is running so what we're going to do with this up here is we're going to heat this pan right in this section right here and we're going to drop this down and try to get at least a half inch three quarters of an inch more clearance between the pin and and the crank rod assembly at the back of the pan now this is something we found from firsthand experience this section right here is extremely shallow i'm going to put my finger in dirty oil just to show you how okay from from from the bottom of the sump all right my from the bottom of the sump which is the tip of my finger to where my thumb is that's the total distance of the floor of the oil pan to this flat section that makes up the back of the oil pan so essentially you've only got um oh gosh oh okay up here there's plenty it's very deep like i said it gets right here at the shallowest part of the pan that's all you got so it takes nothing for the oil to go to get thrown back there's just a tiny bit of oil in here right now what i found was when you put four quarts when you put one gallon in this sump it's actually level with this right here when you go to the five when you go to the five quart fill with the filter all right so the filter is going to take half a quart four and a half quarts in the pan this oil level comes to right back here all right so literally when this thing is at rest the oil is already in the windage area and this is slightly deeper than this but still not deep enough to to prevent the the crank from from scraping the windage and and throwing it up into the mix so this is something we're going to have to work on i'm probably going to recommend with stooby that we cut the bottom of this pan and weld another sump into it a deeper sump which is how i fixed my own engines we had to fabricate an oil pickup for that also but this is why this this situation right here is why on slam six race cars you almost always see a dry sump system it's exactly because of this so that's something we're going to have to deal with um he bought a cam he bought a cam and there's a cam in there but it's rusty so we're not going to really use it it's never been run and he doesn't remember what cam it was and it might have just been something i had laying around i don't know i guess this is it was such a cluster when we were moving out of that shop uh so but anyway that's it we're going to pull this thing apart now this this weekend is going to come apart monday we're going to run it up to shacklets that's my machine shop of choice they do such fantastic work and they they charge me they i get no i don't get a youtuber discount right like i don't write like in fact i think they overcharge me i think they're like you know bend this guy over but i don't care it doesn't make a difference because their work is that good and i and i trust them that much so this stuff's all gonna go up to shocklets um early next week and we'll get moving on it so it may be a couple of few weeks before we do anything else on this particular build but i wanted to give you guys an update bring you up to speed show you what we're doing with it and uh and that's it so i uh i should get the cleaning stuff up everything is such we still haven't recovered from from the uh the slag hammer build filth it's like just just chaos everywhere i'm going to spend a day or two going through this shop and trying to return things to like a slightly more you know workable condition so that's it guys i'll see you tomorrow

Channel: Uncle Tony's Garage

Views: 49,592

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Id: q66R13GRRbI

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 11 2022