LocostUSA.com

As some of you may know, I bought a locost from someone here in socal about a year and a half ago. I havent had much time to work on it so I didnt do much to it. Since it was running I just enjoyed driving it around even though I really got tired of people saying "cool car, what is it?"

So anyway, a few months ago the carb started to leak and I was tired of the 40hp this old ford cortina motor felt like it had. The carb wasnt jetted right and the motor was starting to get a couple oil leaks in it. Instead of trying to fix it, I just had enough and pulled it out last week.

One of the reasons I bought this car was because he used a toyota trans and I already had plans on putting in a 4ag. Luckily I have a spare thats been sitting for a while. So I pulled the cortina motor out and putting in the 4ag. I know its not a build from scratch but the car was originally built from scratch.

Now the funny part. Instead of using the normal 4ag, the motor I have was setup for turbo. So instead of the normal 130hp, it should put out 250 to 300hp or at least thats what it did before it was taken out. So far I've put the motor in and made some new motor mounts. Then I had an aluminm radiator that my friend put a hole into one of the tubes. So I took that and cut the bad section off of if and made new ends for the tanks and mounted that up. That part really sucked. I would show some pictures but I try to stay away from taking pictures untill my work is done. You really dont want to see the welds on that radiator. I took all day of cutting and welding to make it fit in the nose. Then again, since the rad was used, the aluminum was contaminated and didnt want to weld so I had to grind down the welds a few times untill I could build up enough good material that it wouldnt leak.

Yesterday I started on the intercooler. Decided to V mount it in the nose. I had a spare core so I started on the end tanks but found out soon enough that there wasnt much space in the nose cone. So after the first try I've had to throw the first attempt away and now going for a rounder approch by using some tubing to make the end tanks instead of flat plate and trying to find and angle that will fit in there.

I did think about mounting the intercooler inside of the body work and venting into and out of it threw the side but I want to try and hide as much as I can the fact that the car is turbo.

Some of the bigger things that still need to be done are the intake and exhaust manifolds. For the intake, I may use the individual throtle bodies found on the 20 valve 4ag motors. Then make an airbox so everything fits under the body. The exhaust should be the easy part of this build once I figure out where the turbo will sit.

I'll try and get some pics up.

If you need more space you may want to consider purchasing the "tall" nosecone from Coveland. I think it is 1.5" or so taller than the "normal" nose and it still fits the book frame. It is the one with the small airdam across the bottom. As a downside, this will require that you make another hood.

I'm not pretending to be a turbo expert but out of curiousity, could you run a water injection system instead of an intercooler?

I'm going to move this to the builders log and sticky it for you.

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He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

Ever think about hanging the intercooler off the side of the car. Position it a foot or so behind the front wheel and build a shroud to route air through it. Might take some work, but I bet it would work decently well.

Glad to hear that you started on your project! That should be a fun 7 when it is done.

Best of luck,

--
Brian

Ok, so I took a few pictures of it but dont laugh too much at my work. I'm really going for the locost aproach and trying not to spend anything on this rebuild. Just using scrap parts and materials that are left over so this thing isnt pretty.

I think it looks great. I wish I could weld aluminum like that.

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He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.

Alex

You will need to cut a vent on the top of your nose cone to asist the 90* change in direction of the air to draw it thru the intercooler. Immediately behind the nose there is a low pressure area which will help direct the air up and thru the intercooler. You might also consider adding ducting to both the rad and intercooler.
Nice project, keep us posted. Dave W

I'm trying to stay away from running a vent on top the nose cone or hood but if its too hot once its running then I may end up doing that. Probably some old school lovers or something.

The pictures didnt come out so good but I'll take more as things go along.

You may be able to get away with out running any venting on the nose of your car unless of course you plan on running it very hard and racing it. On the street the engine will spend a very small percentage of it's life under boost no matter how heavy of a foot you have so the likley hood of heat soaking the air to air is fairly remote. If you do end up having a problem with heat soak though there is a simple and locost solution for you and that's to use a water spray system (home depot garden dept) on the air to air itself, this can make a bit of a mess if used all the time but it's cheap and it works to temporarly improve the efficency of the charge cooler. Stay away from water injection it's really old school and there are alot of things that can go wrong with it that can lead to an engine failure. Not only that but to do it properly it can get costly and frankly the idea of pumping water into my engine makes me shudder. Also if you set up your car so that you depend on the water injection and either you run out of water or the system fails you're in big trouble real fast.
Although it's a bit more complicated/heavy what you could use and make affordably is a liquid to air aftercooler this would leave your current system for dead and it would solve all of your space issues as liquid to air charge coolers aren't really picky on how or where you mount them. If you have a small air to air kicking around (and I mean small these things can be extreemly efficent) it can be converted to liquid air in a few hours.
As for the ITB's from a 20v 4AGE I think that you'll find these to be almost as expensive as buying an entire JDM 20v, What you might want to look at would be the ITB's from a large displacement crotch rocket something in the litre class, these can be had on e-bay for between $100-$200 USD. Depending on what you have for engine management this can be a very affordable alternative for you, the only catch is that you need to make a manifold for them but I don't think that's going to be a problem for you by the looks of things.
The swap looks really good!
All the best,
Ted

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86 BMW 325 coupe powered by Ford. http://www.e30v8.com

Thanks Ted. Yeah, I agree with you on the water injection idea. They way I look at it, you need a computer to inject gas at the proper amounts. If you add water to that mix, you would need a computer twice as fast (or 2 computers) because it would have to regulate and measure 2 different liquids to achieve the right mixture. I would rather convert to E85 but that’s a whole nother subject.

For the ITB's, I have a friend who makes the manifolds to fit the 16v motor and another friend that dropped off a set if I wanted to use it. So it still wouldnt have spent that much. I just got bored and started to cut up the stock manifold and that worked out fine.

I don’t think I mentioned it before but this motor is setup on an autronic ecu. Its a 32bit so it works very well and I've been more then happy with its capabilities. Its currently setup for sequential injection and wasted spark. I bought that setup many years ago for about $950 and I think its currently priced at $1400. Been using it for a long time and happy that i've got my moneys worth out of it.

Yeah, you're right. Welding's terrible....would you come up here and do a bunch for me?? Man, I'd love to be able to weld aluminum, ESPECIALLY if I could end up with welds like those! Well done!

Most of the welds on the radiator aren't mine but came like that. I did finish up one of the end tanks for the intercooler. I'll take some pics of that cause it came out fairly well.

Yesterday I worked on the turbo manifold and its a really tight fit. It took several hours just to figure out the configuration would work. I'm not totaly happy with its design because it turned into a half log type thing but dont really have a choice with that size primaries. I could drop it down a size and make a much nicer mani but then I would have to spend money on some tubing. The stuff I used was free. Hopefully I wont forget the camera today so I can get some pics of the build up.

Ok so today I finished up the mani. Unfortunatly the camera died (ran out of batteries). I'll more pics of it later but this is what I got before it died.

More pics

I think your car's "fun" quotient just tripled at least. Are you gonna punch some louvers in that hood?

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He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.