UH OH SPAGHETTI OH! my exhaust manifold thus far (pics)

[crazymofo]

gday folks

had a spare few hours to burn this arvo, so i dragged out my crappy old (20 years old and about to die) arc welder. found some old filler rods, and off i went, redesigning my turbo manifold.. progress pics below, i'll upload updates as i do em.

plan is to weld it up nice as i can with this crap arc welder, grind it all smooth then go round and tidy it up with the tig at work, then clean it up again, this way i get a 1 peice looking manifold once she's finished.

cheers.joe.

[Anonymous]

A turbo?!

[SweetLou]

You are my Idol.

I so want to turbo mine

[Knucklehead]

Holy sheeite, it's gonna be nice....

[ZukiFred]

Sweet!!!!
I will be vary interested in how it turns out, and the performance increase it brings.

[Waltari]

Joe, what thichness tubing are you using? Looks pretty thick and I take it you're not going to do it out of stainless

[Range]

that pipe is frikken HUGE!

even with a TURBO...it won't be able to wheelie!

[jason05]

maaaaan i wanna turbo mine. ive got a turbo just laying around. but my bike is my only transportation right now... so it has to wait

[crazymofo]

to get to the above was 5hrs work. granted if i was using my tig, i would have only taken 3.5hrs.

wasted about 6 bend section peices too, just cutting them either wrong with the grinder, or re-thinking where i want to go.

some tips:

*try and get all changes in direction either continous or as subtle as possible, your after gas speed here and keeping all runners as short as posible with as few bends as posible.

*use steam pipe sections found from blackwoods and onesteel or the like. come in short and long radius and only cost 4 bux or so each

*manifold design, whilst nasty does work, the smoother the joining of pipes into a collector the better, meaning the angle at which the pipes mean is very narrow, look at the front 2 pipes merging on my manifold, nice tight angle, minimal disturbence in the collector.

*a better and more clever way of building manifolds is to merge unfiring cylinders with firing ones BEFORE the main collector, once again, i refer to my own one, ports 2 and 3 never fire one after another, likewise for 1 and 4, so merging 1 and 4 as a pair creates no restriction in the next pipe that runs to a collector, as there is only ever one exhaust bang in the pipe at any given time, so what happens is, one fires, exhaust gas travels on its own to the main collector, 2 fires does the same, and is right behind exhaust gas from number 1, the others flow on from there, so in effect, you get a constant, high velocity gas pulse hitting the turbine, brings boost on earlier, yet still wont choke the engine up with too much back pressure.

i like to use 3mm thick wall steam pipe, cos it acts like a brilliant heat sink, keeping all the heat in the pipes which also helps gas speed. also theres a fair bit of thermal changes going on in the area, and a large heavy turbo swinging from the manifold as well, so the heavy guage tubing resist cracking better and hence why i stayed clear of stainless tube, which is prone to cracking with hot/cold cycles.

the welding rods im using are just a few i had laying round, they are stainless steel rods, bloody brilliant things they are to, nice and easy to get going, very consistant, my problem is, the bloody welder would cut out the very minute you'd get a nice weld happening! very frustrating.

cheers.joe.