Raising the suspension & fitting the new turbo - Part Two

A trip to Demon Tweeks

We made good time travelling down to Demon Tweeks in Wrexham and things looked promising upon arrival with acres of racing goodies on view. Full racing suites, steering wheels, engine pipes, crash helmets and more gauges than a power station. Surely this would have a few poxy oil attachments and a few other adaptors.

After a few minutes queuing it was our turn at the counter, we presented the sales assistant with our puzzle. 'Have you got an adaptor that will fit between this adaptor and this oil pipe' (drops a load of oil on the floor). The guy behind the desk started to flick through numerous books full of adaptors and pipe fittings. 'I'll be back in a minute'.

After a few minutes he was back looking puzzled and called over the manager, we explained our problem again, whilst dropping more oil on the sales floor and got a glazed look and a sharp intake of breath. 'What's that off mate?' This was not looking good. We felt like saying it Frankenstein's monster but told him what we knew, 'it's for a Renault 5 but has some internals from a Nissan SR20'.

After a lot of scratching of heads and numerous looks of 'are you mental?' it appeared that we were not going to get what we wanted.  A large queue of people buying steering wheels and race shoes was forming behind us, it was time we stopped wasting everyone's time with our impossible shopping list, wiped the oil off the floor and counter and got back to ponder our next steps.

On the way back we had the bright idea of, 'if we can't buy a part we'll make one' and dropped into Screwfix in Warrington to buy a tap & die set. Time was now getting on after our lame attempts at Demon Tweeks and getting lost in Warrington. Finally we got home around 6.30pm and thought we'd try a bit of DIY.

A spot of DIY

We started with the oil in pipe and adaptor, using our new tap and die set we re-threaded our adaptor to once again find it did not fit. We then attempted to saw off the end of our oil pipe, this failed miserably and another part was ruined. Nevermind, let's try and get the actuator off the bracket, without a vice to hold the actuator we sawed through the actuator and ruined it and did not managed to separate it from the bracket. Another part ruined. Time to give up on the turbo and try and tap out the torsion bar from the back end, this resulted in breaking our new tap & die set (cheap Chinese steel) and snapping off a bolt in our torsion bar. All together a pretty crap end to the day. It was time for a beer & BBQ, when was that track day again?

It's a bonnet off job fitting a new turbo.

Day Two - Raising the suspension

There was not much more we could do on the turbo, so we thought it was best to make a start on the rear end and try and sort out the stupidly lowered suspension, we'd worked out that at some point in its life the car had been lowered by 95mm, this is quite a lot and can prevent you from being insured. In theory it can be quite a simple job, remove torsion bar end caps, slip out the torsion bar, rotate the splines as much as you require, put back in and the car is magically higher. However, this is The Baron and he is not simple.

As the car has a body kit, this meant we could not access the torsion bar, we either had to remove the body kit (very messy), drill holes in the body kit (still messy) or take off the whole rear back axle (messy and awkward). We opted for the third option as it should be easier doing the job off the car. To remove the back axle requires undoing the four main bolts which feed into under the rear seats, undoing the brake lines and hand brake cables and undoing the rear shocks. After two or three hours the axle was off, all that was left was to tap the torsion ends and wind out the torsion bars. This is where we hit our next obstacle, the car had no end caps, so many years of road crude had badly corroded our torsion ends, and on one end it looked like someone had actually welded the end together. Our torsion bar was pretty screwed up and no end of belting it with a hammer and tapping with our cheap Chinese steel tap & die set was going to fix it.

Picture of our knackered torsion bar, WD40 and hammering were not going to fix it :o(

So, we'd failed on fitting the turbo and the back end of the car was missing, the shops were shut and there was nothing left we could do, apart from cancel any plans we had of a track day. Our plan was to still use the day off we'd all booked and rather go on a track day we'd continue fixing up the car. We'd drive down to CGB Motorsport in Telford, buy a new rear axle, take our turbo and any other none fitting parts and try and find a match, drive back and fix it up.

It was a shame we'd not achieved what we'd set out to do but we always knew this would not be simple, it's a 22 year old temperamental car after all.

Raising the suspension & fitting the new turbo - Part One

It had been a long time coming, finally the three of us were all together for a full weekend of sorting out the car. The whole weekend had been allocated to two things. First thing was to sort out the rear suspension, second was to replace the old smoky turbo. When we purchased the car we new that both these things needed doing within the first couple of months and now it was the time to tackle them both. We had even found a track day at Cadwell Park on the following Tuesday that we could attend if all the work had been completed. A fun few days were in store.

Sourcing & fitting the turbo

After undertaking quite a lot of research on turbos we were just about to settle for a T25 turbo as they were quite easy to lay our hands on and would provide a nice upgrade to our standard T2. However, just as we were about to source a T25, a reconditioned T28 hybrid had just been listed on eBay (with a correctly setup engine this could be good for 220bhp+) As we had a small capacity engine we needed a .49 housing rather than the .69 that is normally on the T28, by some freak chance on eBay was the exact T28 hybrid we needed. We negotiated to pay £250 which was a bit of a gamble, as we really did not know the history of it, but as it came from a reputable source we decided to take the plunge. It's easier to gamble when there's three of you :o) Now all we had to do was match up all the oil in/out and water in/out pipes.

In the week leading up to our main mechanical weekend, myself and one of the other owners had been trying to lay our hands on all the relevant turbo parts. We'd discovered that everything we needed to fit our new turbo was a different size, oil in need to be smaller, oil out was a T piece and water in was a different sized banjo bolt. After much frantic ordering on eBay we managed to source all adaptors and fittings (inc ordering for a second time when one of the parts we'd bought did not fit). The last part we needed arrived on the Saturday morning, it looked like everything was coming together.

As I'd been spraying WD40 on all the bolts for the past week the old turbo came off quite easily, a few awkward bolts, but nothing major and within an hour and a half we'd got the old T2 out. There was quite a bit of oil in the intercooler (see picture below) and a large crack in the housing so it was clear that our old turbo was pretty knackered.

Hole left in our engine with the turbo removed.

Once the old turbo had been extracted and put alongside the new T28 it was clear how much bigger it was.

All that was required now was to fit all the new adaptors and connectors we'd spent days researching and hook up the new turbo.

Oil out - we knew this was quite a bit different as we'd gone from a normal oil out fitting to a T-piece but luckily we had a spare oil out lying around from a Renault 21T so with a small amount of bodging and a new gasket it was possible to get this to fit.

Oil in - the connector arrived in the post and sort of fitted into the top of the turbo and in my naivety I thought we could make it fit or find a suitable adaptor from somewhere like Demon Tweeks, we just needed to take off the oil pipe and take this, with new adaptor to a specialist motorsport shop. A task for later.

Water in/out - Our new banjo bolt purchased off eBay fitted and the Turbo came with the water out pipe attached so another two parts crossed off.

Exhaust elbow - Our current T2 turbo only used four of the five bolts so we fully expected that our new turbo would be the same or even better, use all of the five bolts. To our horror it only matched up with three of the bolts, things were not looking good. We either had to risk using only three bolts, try & find a way round it with an adaptor or buy a new elbow. Once again, naively something I thought would be easily sorted by adding to our afternoon shopping list.

Actuator & actuator bracket - We had two options for our actuator, use the standard one or fit a bigger one from the Renault 21T. We matched up the one from our T2 (with a T2 the actuator is riveted to the bracket) we once again had a nasty surprise the bracket fitted the opposite way round, the only way we could get this to fit would be to separate the two parts, which is easier said that done. Using the T3 actuator seemed a good possibility it was big enough and we could hopefully use the bracket off the T2. With a bit of bodging it should work.

So out of all the new parts required, we scored two out of seven, things weren't looking good, but with a trip to Demon Tweeks planned we thought all would be fine. So we downed tools and decided it was time to pay a visit to Demon Tweeks.