After talking to Tim, he convinced me that getting some pre-bent exhaust tubing and welding it together would be a good way to get the intaking plumbing taken care of. So, I got a couple 2.5″ OD U-bends from Jegs for $17 each and took them over to Tim’s place. He helped me cut them up and weld them back together, with a slight change from the original plan. I’m going to keep the 2″ metal piping that runs out of the turbo. At then end of that there is a rubber adapter that used to go onto the PVC. The new intake tube will fit onto that coupler, go up, over the right-side engine mount, and then back down into a rubber 90 degree elbow on the intercooler. A smaller pipe will replace the PVC that used to go between the rubber elbows on the throttle body and the intercooler outlet.
I test fit the pipes the other night and it takes some forcing to get the wider OD pipe between the cam cover and the strut tower, but it will fit and it looks pretty good. The hood will even close, which is a bonus. I ground down the welds tonight and applied some JB Weld to the joints to improve their air-tightness. Tomorrow, I’m going to prime and paint the tubing.
In cooling system news, I put some Bars Leak in the radiator and ran it for about 15 minutes. The coolant stopped dribbling out of the radiator core and started more of a steamy hiss. Chris Greenhouse offered me a radiator and fans from his parts car, but he isn’t going to have time to procure it before the Rallycross on the 7th. In the meantime, however, he offered to let me borrow his rally spare for this event, so I’m going to pick that up tomorrow. I’m planning on trying to drive the car around the storage lot a little bit on Friday to see if the Bars Leak will fix things up, and if it doesn’t help, I’ll swap the radiator for the event and then take it back out when I return.