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By Mark Higgins (aka DirtyLude) Why Turbo - Waiting for JR to put out the Supercharger for our cars was taking too long and the more I researched it, the more I wanted to go Turbo rather than Supercharge. Why F-Max -F-Max is not as popular with the other Honda/Acura lines as with the Preludes. Drag and Rev-Hard Prelude kits don't have the thought or the quality put into them that the Integra and Civic kits do. Disclaimer -This is not a set of instructions or a guide to installing a turbo kit on your car. This is simply a story of my own installation. The things I did are not guaranteed in any way to be the correct way to install the parts and components of a turbo kit. In fact some of the things I did were just plain wrong. Parts List -
I used liquid wrench to soak my header and exhaust bolts a few times during the week before the install. The bolts came off like a dream and I had no problems with them. I put the front of the car on stands and got to work removing stuff. In order to get the header and turbo in I had to remove the stock header all the way to the catalytic converter. It comes out in two pieces. I also had to remove various brackets that held the exhaust in place. Like this one:
The turbo bolts come fairly loose. You loosen them all a little and you're able to spin both side of the turbo to point it in the direction you want.
The exhaust ports were really dirty and filled with carbon. I cleaned them out as best as I could before putting the manifold on. The first thing I did was bolt the manifold to the turbo.
Here is where I ran into the first real problem. The turbo itself butts up against a motor mount bracket. This makes for an imperfect seal between the turbo and the manifold. I had to tilt the compressor housing back pretty far so that the bolts wouldn't get in the way, but even then the housing still touched the mount. I don't know if this is a problem specific to the Ball Bearing turbo or it's common. - I've tried using utlra-copper gasket seal and it worked for about 5 minutes before the gasket burned right off. I'm currently working on bending the motor mount a little, or making a copper or steel spacer to move the turbo out a little bit.
Before doing the final install of the turbo and manifold I tightened down all the bolts on the turbo housing and used a hose clamp to attach the oil return hose.
The instructions say that for Prelude application you might have to 'twist' the downpipe in order to get it up in position to bolt up to the turbo. This was exactly what I had to do. I used a jack to hold up one side of the car at the jack point because I had to put the downpipe in with the end pointing to the front of the car and then twist it around to face the back in order to get it up in the engine area. If I didn't use the jack point, then the jack stand got in the way. Actually getting the bolts all lined up and slipping them on would have been alot easier with two people, but I was doing this about midnight and no-one else was around. I then removed the bung that sealed the O2 sensor hole in the stock location and screwed in the stock O2 sensor.
The TIAL wastegate has to be one of the sweetest components I've ever seen. There's a small black metal dump tube with a flange on it that bolts up the wastegate and fits into the bypass hole in the downpipe. I put the fitting into the downpipe hole first with some liquid gasket around it. I installed the banjo bolt fitting on the side the TIAL wastegate and fitted it over the bolts of the wastegate flange on the manifold. Once it's there the second opening in the wastegate mates with the flange of the metal piece I inserted earlier. I just bolted it all together with the gaskets supplied with the TIAL. Before you can mount the intercooler I had to relocate the power steering cooler. The IC piping goes right threw the hole that the power steering cooler lines go through. The instructions seem to indicate that you can bend these hard lines enough to go threw the hole just above it. I removed the power steering reservoir (well, H23a_4ws did.)
The hard line that goes to the power steering fluid reservoir is short and I just ripped it out and replaced it with 3/8" fuel line. The other hard line is long and goes all the way to the back to the steering rack. I cut this line where it goes under the power steering reservoir and clamped a 3/8" fuel line to it.
I then ran the two new soft lines to the power steering cooler and mounted it with zip ties out of the way of the intercooler.
I pretty much held the intercooler up like it said in the manual and the brackets all lined up. Here's another problem. The intercooler bumps into an A/C canister which makes it so the passenger side lower bracket doesn't line up. I left the bracket unhooked. the two other brackets and the IC piping itself is adequate to hold it in place for now. I used a rubber mount that came with my MSD 6AL in order to mount the top bracket.
Installing the Intercooler Piping - Here's the next problem. The passenger side pipe that goes down from the top and goes to the hole where the old power steering cooling lines went to has some things in it's way. There's a couple A/C lines that are right where this pipe is supposed to go. There's nothing you can do but force the pipe up between these lines. The A/C lines did not break, but they definitely have a lot of stress on them.
The pipe that goes from the compressor side of the turbo to the piping leading down the driver side of the engine was a pain to figure out. Since the compressor housing is canted back so far it made it difficult to fit, but I managed to force it. Before putting in the pipe that goes to the intercooler I installed the injectors and the BOV onto it. Getting the coupler over the throttle body was a real pain and took alot of pushing and shoving.
I didn't want to cut my stock fuel line and F-Max forgot to include a T barb to do it, anyway. I already had a B&M underhood fuel gauge which comes with a replacement fuel filter banjo bolt. The new bolt has a 1/8" NPT female fitting on the top which is perfect for tapping into the fuel line with. I bought brass fuel fittings from my local carparts store and ran a line and T'ed my fuel pressure sender off of it and the two new injectors. Well, H23a_4ws did this as well. Geez, did I do anything on this project?
I did a real hack job here. The H22a4 oil pan on the SH started looking like a real pain to pull the oil pan off of, so I drilled the hole into the oil pan while it was still on the engine. This is bad, and you should take the pan off before drilling and tapping the pan so that alluminum shavings don't get into the crank case. I'm not proud of this and don't follow my example. I drilled and tapped the pan and screwed in the oil return line fitting in the oil pan. I used a drill with a 1/2" chuck and the largest bit that it could hold. This was just big enough to fit the tap into and increase the size of the hole.
The oil return fitting that goes into the oil pan is two parts. I made sure both parts were tightened together. I used teflon pipe paste on all threaded fittings. F-Max uses on oil port on the passenger side of the block by the VTEC solenoid. First, I removed the plug that's in there with a hex wrench. The adapter they supply is a 1/8" NPT adapter and doesn't fit in the hole. They also supply a 1/8" NPT tap that I needed to tap this hole out with. After I threaded the hole, I inserted the adapter side of the oil send line into the block. Then screw the other side onto the fitting on the top of the turbo. Now all the real mechanical work is done. I now had to wire up the the MSD BTM, which I bought seperately, and the ERL MF2. Installing the BTM was made easy because I already had the MSD 6AL installed (see my seperate install article for this mod). The instructions that came with the BTM came with a simple diagram on which wires go to and from the MSD 6A. The ERL MF2 looks like a maze of wires, but it's not too hard either. The wire chart from F-Max is easier to follow than the instructions from ERL. The one thing to remember is that the coil negative wire is the Ignition Trigger / RPM wire in the MSD install.
My MF2 control box is sitting in the engine bay right now. I'm going to get some printer cable to extend it into the cabin. If you open it up, there's an LED that will tell you when the injectors are working. A good thing to be able to track. In order to put the fans back in I had to remove the battery and battery base so that I could slide the passenger side fan into place from the side. I trimmed some plastic from the fan shroud because it was bumping into the compressor housing. The air filter goes under the battery and I ended taking this all apart again to put air filter down there. This isn't the best of places for an air filter. It's protected from the front, but not from the back. It's also pretty low and has a chance to be submerged pretty easily. If a small amount of water does get in, it's going to be rendered into steam by the turbo anyways so I wouldn't worry too much about that. I might relocate the battery later in order to make a better home for the filter.
Putting the bumper on is a pain in the neck with only one person. It wasn't fitting properly until I realized my JDM fogs would have to go. The intercooler piping runs right below the signal lenses. I also had to trim the bumper underneath the passenger side signal lens to make way for the piping.
I made sure all the fluids were at the top. Here is where I screwed up once again. I filled the power steering to the top. Took it for it's test drive and all the fluid in the reservoir was sucked up to fill the rest of the system, running the PS pump partialy dry for a while. The PS pump worked at half efficiency for a couple of days, but came back for me. It seems to be working fine, now. I started up the car and drove it out of the neighborhood to a long farm road. I hit the gas and watched all my gauges carefully to make sure boost wasn't spiking, I wasn't running lean, knocking, or overheating. Everything seemed to go fine. I wasn't hitting full boost, and the muffler suddenly got very noisy. I took it back and checked the downpipe. There's two holes for O2 sensors near the flex pipe. I used the one in the stock location, the other one was plugged with a screw in plug which I assumed was tight. The plug fell out on the road somewhere giving me a big hole in my downpipe. I filled the hole in with a muffler patch kit. 09/12/2000 - The exhaust leak between the turbo and the manifold is a real pain in the neck. I'm ordering a copper T3 turbine gasket, and I'm taking the turbo off soon to try and bend the motor mount bracket a bit. I'm also getting about 3-4psi max on my .4bar(5.8psi) wastegate spring. I'm hoping fixing the exhaust leak and putting in the 6mm silicon vacuum hose will fix this problem. When I take the turbo off next, I'm going to drill and tap a hole for my EGT gauge. The tap that comes with the F-Max kit is a 1/8" NPT tap which is exactly what I need for my autometer EGT sensor. I've set my VTEC x-over point pretty high because when VTEC kicks in it kills my power. My cam gears are still optimized for an NA motor. I'm hoping that retuning them is going to give me better top end power. A future project is to get rid of these two injectors and either replace them with 4 injectors in the intake runners to get even fuel flow, or go full EFI. I saw this four injector adapter at a car show to run 4 secondary injectors in the intake runners. I might mock something up and get a piece of aluminum machined to do the same thing.
I've been fighting with this exhaust leak for a time now. I used some copper wire as a gasket for the turbine flange. The second problem I'm getting is running lean when the car starts to boost. I'm not certain the secondary injectors are working. I'm going to have to get some printer cable to extend the controller into the cabin so that I can watch the LED's. I got rid of all the wire connectors I was using and soldered almost all of my wire connections, but that didn't fix the injector problem. I've found that I should have mounted the tap for the oil return line higher on the pan. It helps the frothy oil return to the pan and supposedly allows the oil to return easier and not back up in the system. I'm not certain what to do about this one. I don't really want to plug the hole and re-tap. I've ordered a whole set of fuel fittings and a gauge pod. I had all my gauges in the glove compartment because I wanted the car to look as stock as possible. I'm finding that I would rather have access to the boost and EGT gauge at all times. I had a bit of problems with the fuel lines to the fuel injectors. I'm now going to replace all that line with braided line and Earls fittings. The car is currently at Brullen exhaust getting a 2.5" cat back exhaust into the car. I bought a billet check valve from EFI SYSTEMS Inc. to replace the half assed check valve that comes with the kit. I have it on me now and I'll slap it on when I get the car back at the end of the week. I mounted the pillar gauge pod with the boost and EGT gauge. It looks nice. The fit of the Autometer pod was a little off, but not too bad. I ran some 9 pin extension cable into the cabin so I could open up the MF2 and check the status lights. None of them come on. This thing isn't working at all, so I need to check my wiring. Otherwise it's got to go back. No boost for me, for now. I'm currently on a list to get a custom baffled oil pan made up with increased capacity and an oil return line pre-tapped. Larry at Endyn would be doing it and I hope it goes through. I've only had about a quarter day a week to work on this thing, so progress is going very slow. I should have more time now, so I'll be able to clean things up fairly quickly. Pictures will come, but like I said, I haven't had any time. New 2.5" exhaust is on and looks nice. There's still a small leak at the wastegate which I'll be working on next weekend. I'll make up a custom copper gasket. The Check Valve from EFI Systems is on too. ERL MF2 is not working at all. Something is wrong with it. No status lights light up at all. The thing looks like it's toast. I've written an e-mail to F-Max, but I think I'll end up sending it back to them to be fixed/replaced. The wastegate problem was because I'm a complete idiot. I found the stainless steel insert that fits into the wastegate on the manifold flange. I have no idea why I missed this on the original install. This would explain why I only hit 4psi before. The ERL MF2 has been sent back to F-Max. The whole system should be working perfectly when the ERL MF2 gets back. I installed the missing link check valve and it's definitely pretty. Here are pictures of the F-Max supplied check valve and the Missing Link that I replaced it with. Sorry, the first one is pretty blurry, and they're taken from different sides of the TB.
I got the new MF2 from F-Max with no problems, I plugged it in and it worked fine. All the lights lit up properly and the injectors worked fine. The car was still bucking, bogging, and running lean/detonating as soon as I started to boost. I actually took the injectors out, reved the car to 2000 rpm and blew into the MAP sensor to activate the extra injectors, I've heard that the spray pattern is really bad with these lucas / disc style injectors, but actually the spray pattern was pretty good. I didn't think they were working at first because I couldn't see any fuel spraying out, but when I put my hand in front of the injector I could feel the spray. The problem ended up being my V-AFC. I had it set to +10% fuel enrichment when I didn't have the MF2 connected to try and run rich. It seems that the V-AFC will actually report to the ECU positive pressure when you try to increase fuel and won't stop at 0psi. This caused my ECU to freak and cancel fuel. Once I reset the V-AFC back to 0 correction it all worked properly. I did some tuning of the MF2 to make it run a little nicer; I lowered the threshold and richened it up a little for some safety right now. I'll be booking some dyno time as soon as the boost controller gets here in order to dial in the fuel a bit better and the cam gears. It all works perfectly right now, but I'm only getting 3.5psi max. I'm not worried about that since I'll be ordering a boost controller this weekend to up the boost when I need it. My next installment on this article will likely be my last with some more detailed pictures of the working install. Oil pan is currently on hold waiting to see the new Moroso pan that will be available soon for the H22a. It apparently has a 1/2"NPT bung on it pretapped for oil return. It's been a while. Since the last update I've installed a T3 gasket between the manifold and the turbo. I think this thing should be mandatory with the kit. I've managed to get rid of all the leaks at the manifold now. I've installed the AVC-R and I'm now running .5kg/cm^2 (about 7.35psi). I'm still getting some kind of tip in detonation. I'm not certain whether it's real or the J&S is getting fooled by other noise. I've ordered 4 310cc 16ohm lucas injectors from RC Engineering and 4 HKS injector cinches from carparts.com. I'm going to try and weld these things into my intake runners. It's pretty tight in there, and I may end up being forced to make an adapter like the one pictured above. It would be easier if I could get the Euro-R manifold, but it looks like I'm going to have to start toning down my spending. If everything goes well, I'll take pictures of the whole process and have an install article labeling all the parts you'll need to do this conversion yourself. The Moroso oil pan has issues on the 5th gen
with the bracket under the engine. It also runs into the ATTS unit on
SH models, so that looks like it's not an option anymore. Supposedly they're
trying to fix the fit on the base model, but that doesn't help us SH guys.
The 4 injectors came. I think these are 12.5ohm resistance
injectors, though, not the 16ohm injectors I asked for. I'm currently
checking to make sure they will still work and not burn out the ERL MF2.
The first picture is of 2 of the injectors, one
has the HKS brass hat on it that will screw into the cinches. I got 4
alluminum and 4 steel cinches just in case. They are very short though.
The machine shop is probably going to have to make up it's own so that
I can angle them, or put them where I want. As it is, it looks like I'm
still going to have trouble finding space to mount them. There's not much
room underneath the intake manifold because of the ATTS unit. I might
even find another way to mount them rather than the HKS cinches. I've
decided to leave final mounting the injectors until I have the engine
out for the rebuild. Which won't be until the end of April, at least.
I'm waiting for Endyn H22a pistons and I'm hoping they'll be out in a
couple weeks. If not, it will delay the rebuild until they come out, or
I just decide to get JE or SRP pistons.
Well, all that stuff I talked about earlier went out
the window. I bought a new car for my wife, so the Prelude is no longer
the family car anymore. I ordered a Haltech E6K today and 4 550cc injectors
from RC-Engineering. I also ordered Crower rods. I'll be calling SRP/JE
soon for pistons, and I'll be ordering turbo flanges for the new downpipe
and header this week. I was originaly thinking of going with Hondata, but
the Hondata would have been more expensive. It also didn't have the extra
features of the Haltech ECU. I realize the E6K will be more difficult
to install and get the initial tuning done, but it offers more flexibility
and expandibility. I wrote up this little price list about a week ago
when I was researching the two: I put the sale of the AVC-R in there, since the Haltech
offers boost control, and the Hondata doesn't. The only thing that will
be pricey that I didn't factor in is the cost of dyno tuning the Haltech,
which will be greater than the Hondata. These were the advertised prices
at the time. I actually got the Haltech for $1089.00 and I'm sure the
Hondata could be gotten for less, as well. I've been told that the Haltech can be used with all
stock sensors, even though the stock sensors give slightly different readings
than what the unit expects. The Haltech can be adjusted for the odd sensor
reading. You can get more information on the Hondata at www.hondata.com
and the Haltech E6K at www.haltech.com.
If this works out, as easily as I'm told, it's something I should have
went with in the first place. If you total up all of the piggybacks I
have connected to the car it would total up to the price of the E6K. Apex'i
AVC-R, ERL MF2, Apex'i V-AFC, MSD BTM. My turbo timer is part of the Defi
boost gauge, but I could also use the Haltech as a turbo timer if I wanted
to get rid of that. I'll most likely write a seperate install article on
the E6K once I get everything working. I have the Haltech and the 550cc injectors from RC now.
I managed to get the car idling with the Haltech, so I'm close to getting
it running. That's as far as I went, since the rebuild is going to be
happening soon. I'll have the pistons and rods in my hands within the
next two weeks. I took the turbo totaly out of my car. It took nearly
7 hours to take the car nearly back to stock. I have to get my emissions
test soon and I thought this would be a good opportunity to drop off the
F-Max header and downpipe at a local shop. I'm going to get new ones made
up. I've found that the biggest problem I've had with this
kit is the turbo hitting the motor mount. I should have taken the time
to notch the motor mount better, or do something. I put in the steel gasket
between the turbo and the header to try and fix the leak between the turbo
and header, but I found this when I took everything out yesterday: The bottom of the gasket was just blown away. There
was nothing left of it anywhere. With the new header I'll take my time
to make sure everything is fitting properly. Thanks to PureLude to pointing out that some of us
have .48 A/R turbo housings. With the turbo on the car I found that mid
range power and spool up was great, but high end power really died around
5500 rpm. A .48 A/R turbine housing with standard trim is just too small
for our engines. Now it's going to cost me $150.00 USD to pick up a new
turbine housing with a .63 A/R. Unfortunately there's not much I can do
about the standard trim turbine wheel right now. I'll have to live with it
until I can afford a new turbo. Make sure you specify what turbo specs you want on
the turbo that comes with your kit! The car is currently getting the pistons and rods in.
I completed the Haltech E6K article which is here.
Well, I had a kid and that slowed everything down. I looked at the turbine
and the A/R is actually .63 It's stamped on the inside of the housing. I guess
I'll just have to figure everything out on the dyno. |
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