The Rotary Car Club’s Official NA-to-Turbo How-to Ultimate Thread

[vex]

Now that you've "gutted" your engine bay you have room to work. (I'm assuming you've already rebuilt your engine, and ported it for whatever you want and have re-installed it).

I adjusted the location of the oil cooler and made new oil cooler lines so allow more direct cooling of the oil and free up space towards the front of the engine bay (this is not necessary, but may be something to think about)

Oil cooler lines

New Oil Cooler Location



By this time I imagine you've also selected and bought your turbo:

The use of adapters I have fitted my 60-1 turbo with a v-band connection. I highly recommend V-bands as they are extremely easy if you ever need to do anything with the turbo.

Next you'll need to mount the upper intake with the actuators (if you're going to keep them), and find the ideal spot to mount the turbo. Here is a mock-up of what I intended to do:

[vex]

While I had it mocked up I took some generic measurements to enable a base design for the turbo manifold. I tack welded the input flange for the turbine to a set distance from the exhaust flange which allowed me to fully render and figure out the manifold prior to actually fabbing any part of the manifold together. This is the result:



As you can see it's a very compact unit.


This also led to issues when constructing it. (always make sure to check and double check when you're fabricating something). During fab I came to the sudden realization that the waste gate path would interfere with the lower intake manifold. This is what the process took:



A test fitting:


This is when it became apparent that the waste gate could not be mounted where the digital manifold dictated:

[vex]

So by now you have a majority of the manifold constructed (and I emphasize a majority), you should realize that you need to know how the turbo needs to sit and what room you have left. So throw on some of the intake and check your clearances, like so:


Notice that it's a tight and snug fit, and depending on where you mount your turbo you may have more or less (more with a smaller turbo, less... and probably having to cut into the sheet metal to mount the nice big turbo you have).
You'll also need to figure out how to work out the cooling to the turbo. You can do it one of two ways:


There are kits that can easily do this for you. So shop are around or figure out how you want to do it. But to make it easier do it the way as the first picture shows. The second one will not work.... So don't do it.