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Re: Sacré Bleu! Merkur XR4Ti Project
Long post ahead! Been a while since I updated this thread, ive been super busy with school and just working on the car as I get the chance to so this post will cover the last 3 or so weeks. Alot of my time has gone into research of how to reassemble this thing correctly. This cars been quite extensively modified as far as cooling and little things go. I do have the factory Ford service manual with diagrams but its quite hard to follow when my specific car is so different. So ive been on the Merkur forums a lot reading peoples common mods/deletes and such to try and piece together whats going on with my car. Theres lots of random holes in the head/block that ive finally found the answer to so I can finally put some time into actually assembling the car again! First off I bolted on some accessories like the alternator, power steering reservoir/pump, power steering lines, coolant bottle, overflow and little lines etc.
Next up I threw the fuel injectors into the fuel rail, and bolted it all down to my lower intake manifold. This car came with the stock intake/exhaust manifolds but theyve now been heavily ported to take advantage of the big cam, valves and turbo! Below shows the porting done compared to the stock unported manifolds from Google images. The first set shows the ported and "knife edged" lower intake, then the "gutted" upper intake, and the porting and gasket matching done to the exhaust manifold.
Besides the porting, the upper intake manifold has also been chopped, rotated 90° and re-welded. This was done because in stock form the Merkurs are not intercooled, so the turbo plumbs right to the upper intake shown below.
As you can imagine, this would make for a really messy set of intercooling pipes if youre running a big front mount like I plan to. After bolting up the upper intake however I ran into a problem. The intake manifold no longer clears the alternator. I used some sockets to gauge whether I had the room to make a spacer and space it up to clear but as you can see with the right amount of spacing the clearance to my hood gets dangerously tight, and the throttle linkages interfere completely.
So thats a problem I have to figure out soon, but it shouldnt be a huge deal. My car has the AC deleted, so if I can source a stock AC compressor bracket and with a little fab work I should be able to relocate the alternator lower down in the bay. With that wall, I decided to start working on modifying the Holset turbo to better optimize it for the 2.3L. Lots of people who run these turbos on gasoline engines have boost creep issues, this is because the internal wastegate cant bleed off enough exhaust flow to properly control boost at higher RPMs. To remedy this I had the divider in the center of the hotside machined down so the wastegate could bleed off exhaust flow from all 4 cylinders instead of just cylinders 1 and 2. Also, I bored out the actual wastegate hole from 7/8" to 1" diameter.
While it was all apart I decided to throw a fresh coat of gloss black on the cold side as well as it was half primered for some reason...
The next thing I needed took way too long. For many reasons. It turns out that my factory turbo oil return line was missing an important 45° fitting. Ford doesnt sell these anymore, and its not a generic Home Depot part. After a while of searching I finally managed to track a used one down with an oil return line attached but it was off a Thunderbird TurboCoupe, which has an IHI turbo from the factory instead of a Garrett. This means it does not bolt up to my Holset.
No big deal (I thought), just gotta take the fitting off and swap it over! Well I tried that, and it didnt budge. So of course I heated it up, cause that always works right? Still nothing. At this point the fitting on the TurboCoupe oil line was starting to strip really bad so I did what I had to do. I TIG welded my wrench to the bloody fitting.
Well, im pleased to say that it actually worked without tearing the brass fitting to shreds. (Why do I keep buying cars with obscure hard to find parts) With some careful grinding work my wrench actually survived the ordeal as well!
So, after the better part of 2 hours screwing around with that fitting I finally had a turbo return line on my engine. I also took this time to plug the hole for the turbo coolant feed line in the block, like previously mentioned the Holset is only oil cooled so I no longer needed that port.
So far so good! I hope to get alot more done this week. The more I work on it the more confidence I have in this thing actually making it to Driven! Hopefully I didnt just jinx myself.... fingers crossed!
Long post ahead! Been a while since I updated this thread, ive been super busy with school and just working on the car as I get the chance to so this post will cover the last 3 or so weeks. Alot of my time has gone into research of how to reassemble this thing correctly. This cars been quite extensively modified as far as cooling and little things go. I do have the factory Ford service manual with diagrams but its quite hard to follow when my specific car is so different. So ive been on the Merkur forums a lot reading peoples common mods/deletes and such to try and piece together whats going on with my car. Theres lots of random holes in the head/block that ive finally found the answer to so I can finally put some time into actually assembling the car again! First off I bolted on some accessories like the alternator, power steering reservoir/pump, power steering lines, coolant bottle, overflow and little lines etc.
Next up I threw the fuel injectors into the fuel rail, and bolted it all down to my lower intake manifold. This car came with the stock intake/exhaust manifolds but theyve now been heavily ported to take advantage of the big cam, valves and turbo! Below shows the porting done compared to the stock unported manifolds from Google images. The first set shows the ported and "knife edged" lower intake, then the "gutted" upper intake, and the porting and gasket matching done to the exhaust manifold.
Besides the porting, the upper intake manifold has also been chopped, rotated 90° and re-welded. This was done because in stock form the Merkurs are not intercooled, so the turbo plumbs right to the upper intake shown below.
As you can imagine, this would make for a really messy set of intercooling pipes if youre running a big front mount like I plan to. After bolting up the upper intake however I ran into a problem. The intake manifold no longer clears the alternator. I used some sockets to gauge whether I had the room to make a spacer and space it up to clear but as you can see with the right amount of spacing the clearance to my hood gets dangerously tight, and the throttle linkages interfere completely.
So thats a problem I have to figure out soon, but it shouldnt be a huge deal. My car has the AC deleted, so if I can source a stock AC compressor bracket and with a little fab work I should be able to relocate the alternator lower down in the bay. With that wall, I decided to start working on modifying the Holset turbo to better optimize it for the 2.3L. Lots of people who run these turbos on gasoline engines have boost creep issues, this is because the internal wastegate cant bleed off enough exhaust flow to properly control boost at higher RPMs. To remedy this I had the divider in the center of the hotside machined down so the wastegate could bleed off exhaust flow from all 4 cylinders instead of just cylinders 1 and 2. Also, I bored out the actual wastegate hole from 7/8" to 1" diameter.
While it was all apart I decided to throw a fresh coat of gloss black on the cold side as well as it was half primered for some reason...
The next thing I needed took way too long. For many reasons. It turns out that my factory turbo oil return line was missing an important 45° fitting. Ford doesnt sell these anymore, and its not a generic Home Depot part. After a while of searching I finally managed to track a used one down with an oil return line attached but it was off a Thunderbird TurboCoupe, which has an IHI turbo from the factory instead of a Garrett. This means it does not bolt up to my Holset.
No big deal (I thought), just gotta take the fitting off and swap it over! Well I tried that, and it didnt budge. So of course I heated it up, cause that always works right? Still nothing. At this point the fitting on the TurboCoupe oil line was starting to strip really bad so I did what I had to do. I TIG welded my wrench to the bloody fitting.
Well, im pleased to say that it actually worked without tearing the brass fitting to shreds. (Why do I keep buying cars with obscure hard to find parts) With some careful grinding work my wrench actually survived the ordeal as well!
So, after the better part of 2 hours screwing around with that fitting I finally had a turbo return line on my engine. I also took this time to plug the hole for the turbo coolant feed line in the block, like previously mentioned the Holset is only oil cooled so I no longer needed that port.
So far so good! I hope to get alot more done this week. The more I work on it the more confidence I have in this thing actually making it to Driven! Hopefully I didnt just jinx myself.... fingers crossed!
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