January 14-15, 2006 - Turbo Install (2)
Before we could see how sturdy the setup was we had to do a little
more metal-work. We noticed that there wasn't much room
between the bumper support and the radiator for the rubber hoses
that connected the turbo and intercooler. The corner of the
support was
digging into the rubber and it looked like, over time, it could tear
a hole in the rubber. It was definitely worse on the passenger
side but we decided to modify both sides anyway. We just
hacked off the inside corner of the support with the cutoff wheel
and that seemed to do the
trick. The pictures below are of the driver side (top) and passenger side
(bottom).
Once we got the intercooler in place with the hose clamps
tightened we saw that the entire setup was actually very stable.
However, we noticed that the turbo placement was a little higher
than expected. The horn had to be moved out of the way and the
turbo housing just barely fits between the quarter panel and the
sheet metal around the headlight, and this was after we played with
the tubing to find the best position for the turbo. You can
see what I mean in the pictures below.
I still haven't figured out where I'm going to put the horn, I
suppose I'll just have to fabricate a small bracket or modify the
stock bracket to move it back a little. I asked HP about the
turbo placement and they said to move the horn and remove the
bracket that's resting on the turbo in the picture above (it
connects the quarter panel to the sheet metal by the headlight
opening). With that bracket off the quarter panel seems a
little flimsy so I'm not going to remove it, but I will modify it
slightly to make it fit.
The passenger side turbo had a little more clearance but the
bracket needed to be modified as well. Since this one looked
pretty easy it fix we just went ahead and took a little chunk out of
it, painted it, and put it back on.
