Following an endless desire to know more and go faster!
The turbo finally made its way to its permanent home. I removed the manifold to check for obstructions. All clear!
There is a ton of potential in good manifold. One day I might put it on a mill and clean up the ports to their potential.
Some of the pipes needed arrived. The GM packaging is by far some of the best!
All ready to go now. Just need a few more nuts for the turbo to manifold
My personal opinion is that Fidanza shouldn’t be allowed to sell parts with sick half assed support . To get a party they recommended I would have to go to Europe or China but online the part is harder to find than a uniform.
I bought a piece of bronze on what and stayed to machine my own. The dimensions were simple. 16mmID 28mmOD and 26mm in length. It took about an hour to make.
Overall it will get the job done and be fine. That said I am no where near the phase of recommending a fidanza product. Especially after the need for custom bolts!
http://www.exportedafrican.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/img_8470.mov
Turbocharger Arrived this week and I quickly mounted it in a mock up fashion. Finding the size nuts and bolts for it is proving it be a royal pain in the ass.
It is a used unit from a junk yard off a stock motor which should be good enough for mock ups and to get things rolling. The air exit pipe actually fits in a good spot. Hopefully it will stay within the body lines.
The turbo came with 1 oil pipe but the other is missing and will need to be bought. 
The turbo mounts further out then I would like but hopefully it will work.
Water lines need to be made/purchased. Unfortunately without using the stock radiator and coolant tank it may be another custom effort
This weekend I started cleaning the engine (Brake clean is the $hit!) with the intention of mounting the flywheel and trans in the near future. There are some cheap engine stands on amazon for $40 but I don’t feel they would bolt up easily. I will probably start to build and frame up something that will offset the engine and make transmission attachment plausible.
For the transmission I added a bar at the back with 2 casters. That makes it easy to pick up the one side of the engine and slide it around.
Car is in the background. I do feel the intake manifold will need to be replaced with something custom to prevent the large side bulge.
I could use some help. If someone knows the connector that I could replace the clutch line with I would appreciate it. The factory line was cut and this was the connector that is left (It goes into the clutch slave cylinder). Ideally I want this piece to a -4an fitting to connect to my Wilwood master cylinder.
A short video showing the various components. It is a self adjusting pressure plate which was an interesting discovery for the first time!
I recently bought clutch cover bolts online and ironically 6 packages came from a GM online dealer. To my disappointment each only had 1 m6 bolt within it.
This is the GM throttle pedal. It isn’t ideal because of the angle that it mounts but some fabrication can make it work. Because the ecu is drive by wire a new pedal was needed. Here are a few pictures showing the pedal
To get the motor off of the pallet I wanted to build a “skate” to hold the engine and trans. My goal is to add wheels to the engine and the trans and have an assembly that can move around and probably running.
This is the passenger side of the engine that a mount needs to connect towards
This is the drivers side of the engine. 
This is what I suspect the mounting plates will look like. 
I tried to mount the paper version on a piece of steel and trace it out. My goal was then to cut it out with the plasma cutter. Unfortunately 25 amps was not enough and the breaker would trip at that point. A 4.5″ angle grinder did a good job and soon after I bought a bunch of flap disks with the intent of getting them to being really smooth and pretty. Next up I need to measure and cut spacers as the plates will not bolt flush to the engine block.
More to come..
The hardest to find parts is anything related to the manual transmission. It’s really like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I bought a fidanza flywheel after refusing to pay $800+ for a factory flywheel. My entire life I have wanted a lightened flywheel so it was an attractive option.
The problems..
Firstly the flywheel bolts are custom. Thankfully Tim at Zzperformance hooked me up. I will admit that looking for M11 bolts was a pain in the ass!
Secondly the pilot bearing is a big question mark. It doesn’t look like the factory would fit and there isn’t much information about what to do. More to come on that front after I talk to Fidanza.
Lastly I have called a few dealers trying to find a factory clutch and pressure plate. Many of them don’t see it in the parts catalog which is frustrating. I will most likely just buy it from Zzperformance.
If you decide to go LTG I would recommend just buying the clutch masters at from zz and be done. Spending hours trying to find information for simple things is not worth the savings!
After a large amount of research I was frustrated by the poor development of the LTG motor by General Motors. The initial launch was so strong but the follow through of the crate engine was very poor.
My hope is that I can add some content for anyone with an Ecotec build that isn’t willing to pay $8k for a crate motor, $4k for a manual trans, $2k for an ECU and a good few other packages to get things going.
I managed to talk to Andy at Swap Specialties and he gave me a good amount of faith in the process and their development.The order at the end of the day was for an almost fully loaded harness. – http://swapspecialties.com/product/gm-echo-tec-standalone-harness/
One aspect that Andy mentioned was their ECU and harness doesn’t require the fancy PWM fuel pump controller and a dead head pump. This is ideal because I have a fuel cell and would not want to modify the filler mechanism.
Lead time is 4 weeks but there is plenty to do and buy before I need the harness!
After thinking and looking around I decided it was time to pull the Miata engine out and go with something new.
Enters the Gm LTG ecotec engine! Modern power for the classic car!
