Small-Block Turbo Kit for $699! But Does it Work?

[Music] unless you've been living under a rock you've heard of eBay turbo kits and that was all the buds for a while and now Amazon is kind of the thing where everybody gets their stuff and you can buy this kit and it's 900 bucks and it comes with you know everything you see arete eclis need to put it together whether it works or not will test you pretty much got the biggest kit it's got everything in it yes today we're gonna find out what works what's worth getting is it worth getting the base kit that has just the bear turbo manifolds you know the bones of it or do you want to spend the extra money is the other stuff the boost controller the blowout the wastegate is that actually worth buying so this is a stainless steel for the manifold it does have a crossover on it because it's a single turbo setup so this was one of the few things in the kit that does need to be welded but so the headers are gonna be the most important part of the kid that's what ducts everything correctly and the fact they're stainless puts it off to a good start obviously you can't have a turbo kit without a turbo this is a GT 45 sized wheel china turbo this is the specter had another amazon deal this is not included with the kit this was some Kurtis had to buy the motor that we're gonna be working today is an old 350 out of a truck that I had it's nothing special stock iron heads mostly the entire motor stock it's got a small cam in it and some new valve springs so the old ones were toast and we're gonna build this just like anybody at home would and we ordered the kit came in a giant box no instructions the other way [Music] so if this were a regular vehicle and that crossmember anything just gonna get there - we're about 10 minutes into putting the turbo setup on the motor and we found problem number one which is there's no physical way you could ever possibly get a spark plug wire on to that point it's touching the header just resting so we're gonna hit it with a hammer we got some of the turbo system put on I did a baseline dyno just to see what the thing made made about 300 horsepower and got oil everywhere so cheap little splurge $29.99 okay unofficial amazon rep be careful what you say about Amazon because they know where you sleep [Music] if valve covers hopefully no more leaky the kind of shiny and they've got the manifolds on first drop turbo on pretty quick and we just got a lot of piping to do to get everything to kind of play with each other so I found this neat piece of guilty napkin she was looking fairly well over the carb so that's what we're gonna use to seal the Hat so that is one of the difficulties of the kit is that half the fasteners are metric half of them are standard so you end up having to use twice as many wrenches cuz we lose the same job [Music] all right so we got a turbo you got an intercooler you got Pat now we have connected ups so the whole kit is based on like three inch intake tube comes with a whole bunch of three inch silicone couplers everything kind of slots together and gets clamped down this is what the blow-off valve mounts to so this is an immediate fail this part of all valve flange is way too small from our kit so obviously if you're handy with a welder you can make yourself a nice beautiful stanchion if not what you can do is basically reduce this down to two back to three back to two back to 3 which means buying extra couplers and putting a restriction in your intake which doesn't make any sense I've got to worry about where we get the exhaust out we've got to plumb up all this stuff so none of this really comes with any good instructions it's a universal kit that's kind of like you figure it out so this is the one piece of paper that they include in the kit which as you can see doesn't give you a whole lot of insight on much at all third fail so far way too small for outlet of turbo will either have to get a coupler neck down to it to make it fit or just get a different filter if I leave the top of this open to atmosphere then it's just going to run on the spring because we're not influencing the diaphragm with boost correct it's upside down okay so that that stays over bottom of it has to go to boost so we'll send boost pressure in the manifold to a tee one side is going to go to the wastegate and one side should go to the bow off this vent and everything's pretty much here now kind of comes the time see if it works the turbo is facing forward that seems to be the only way the system will mount up the other way definitely wasn't an option so we have to do some sort of a weird exhaust routing to send exhaust behind the motor so that it doesn't get drafted back in and give us a false dyno reading this would be a really weird installation in a car because the pipe points forward and you'd have to do some sort of a 180 to get it out of the way we've got all of Steve's expertise on the dyno cell computer just to make sure things are the right temperature and that nothing is going to blow up so [Music] like that's too much Buddhist so you did you cut it off in 13 and it was still building yes stay in a hundred rpm I went from 12 pounds to 13 and a half yeah just looking at this going this is some scenes this is horrible someone that gets this it doesn't know anything about how cars work and they figure a way to bolt it on and make it make loose and run and a robotics hundred pound beat it toward 13 I can impress them quick and impress their friends so we didn't have very high expectations for this motor its stock Ironheads very small camshaft and the Amazon turbo kit it's an interesting combination we made a ton of torque we made 650 pound-feet of torque and everything to its credit worked sometimes too well it worked so well it made so much boost that it wasn't controllable and that's a big problem on a turbo kit and this thing made diesel torque that and it's it's just it's set on kill though the wastegate is inadequate for the amount of boost the turbo can produce so I just made ridiculous numbers if the casual guy put this on a car it could really blow stuff up so the issue was that the turbo is a very large turbo it's a super functional setup it just can't get the exhaust out quick enough so today we took off the driver side header and we're gonna add an extra wastegate on to it and see if we can't actually meter the boost properly so we're gonna weld this on we're going to see the fixes so now we have Winkie number 2 Joe from West Tech did us a solid and TIG welded an extra escape mount on here so everything's bolted up we'll do some vacuum two big plumbing and see if we can make some boost and actually control the turbo so we just made a couple dyno pulls everything seems to be working good we put in a digital boost controller on the engine and we were able to get the boost curve in line with reality ten pounds that it held pretty consistently through the pole the old adage goes you get what you pay for there's no doubt about it I mean really with a little different exhaust system this thing would have been so much smoother I mean something that really would have fit we've got the exhaust facing forward because that's the only way it fit if we turned it around so it was back over by the brake booster it wouldn't fit and then the crossover to hit the crossmember I don't think a guy can expect to pick this thing up on Friday afternoon and be at the track on Sunday morning it was some work and most of it was just manipulating and making things fit once we got it running it was actually kind of fun I did one spot it was kind of cool watching this little small-block that looks like it was in someone's pickup for a wall made 611 pound-feet of torque made 540 horsepower you know I it's a cash crank cast piston motor there was a few nervous moments there when it spiked up to about 18 pounds of 3500 won who expects from me we worked hard but we showed that you can do things on the cheap but you've got to be a little creative and you've got to be willing to work you got to have a few talents you got to be able to weld a little bit or at least have a buddy that does you got to be scrappy you got to be savvy you got to have somebody like this that you can ask the right questions too but we answered them and at the end of the day it's cheap it works but you got to be ready to work for it the best thing at the end of the day was the oil still in it and I don't have any mopping to do

Channel: HOT ROD Network

Views: 4,383,626

Keywords: Hot Rod, Amazon, Turbo, Kit

Id: oFLqaSNp45Q

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2016