The Rotary Car Club’s Official NA-to-Turbo How-to Ultimate Thread

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Exhaust is one of those things that gets hashed out every other day on forums so I'm not going to detail it all that much. But here are a few things to consider:

When doing this project you need to figure out up front what's going to be more cost effective or worth your time. If you are doing an off the shelf turbo manifold you may be able to secure an off the shelf exhaust system. I would highly recommend spending the extra money and going that way if you can. Remember though if you are planning on keeping the 6PI you'll need to manufacture your own turbo manifold. This means no off the shelf exhaust system will work for you. Which means you'll have to spend extra time to hunt down materials and find persons or tools that will enable you to accomplish what you need done.

By this same token you can hybridize the two. If you do construct your own turbo manifold you can easily construct a down pipe that can connect to a custom mid pipe. This mid-pipe will then need to connect to an off the shelf cat-back system. This will probably provide you with the least amount of headaches... and may be a route I eventually choose to go with. As it stands however I found it significantly cheaper to manufacture the exhaust myself buying off the shelf universal components. Stores like Racing beat and summit-racing are indispensable when doing the exhaust that way.

If you choose to build your own you will need to figure out exhaust sizes for your HP/Trq Goals, and locate a dealer that can supply you with the proper materials. Mandrel bending will flow much better than crush tube bending and may prove to be the exactly what you need. I recommend the vendors on here as they are very helpful and more than likely have the parts or materials you will need.

Of consequence if you choose to manufacture your own Turbo Manifold you will need to plan it out before you weld all the pieces together. I was lucky and had access to CAD software and built a digital model of mine prior to even making the first welds. On top of that, I was able to test fit prior to each individual part of the manifold in that I saw that my original blue prints could not function how I wanted them too. The off the paper revision caused me to move the wastegate runner to the underside of the manifold rather than on the top. As it stands it functions rather well without much issue. Further details on constructing your own manifold will be presented later.

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TitaniumTT will absolutely bite my head off if I didn't include this section, and for good reason. The electronic suite you choose to run in your car is your line of defense from potential problems that may cause you tremendous grief and pain with regard to the engine. What you choose to monitor should be the key index's that measure the condition of the engine. Unfortunately we have nothing that directly measures the condition of the engine at any given operating scheme. What we can do however is monitor specific subsystems for their function and secure base line readings of all systems throughout the nominal operating conditions and then compare those readings throughout any situation that may arise.

What we have been discussing so far are all the subsystems we need to monitor. Oil, fuel, coolant, etc. They're all the portions of the engine that we need to ensure we can have data from if we need to. It will do us little good to know that we are low on coolant when we don't know what final temperature we were able to keep the engine at while we attempted saving the engine. It would do us little good to know we are low on oil without knowing that the pressure is good but the temperature is out of spec. These systems however do not need to be monitored all at once, nor do they need to be monitored in real time under most situations. For this cause, you as the builder, need to figure out which specific systems to have dedicated to real-time gauges, and which systems need only access to be datalogged.

The systems I chose were: AFR's (Exhaust), EGT (Exhaust), Boost/Vacuum (Induction), Oil Pressure (Oil), Coolant Temperature (Cooling). Those provide me with enough information to know if my engine is operating under satisfactory condition. Stock gauges themselves are helpful, but they lack a specific degree of accuracy you might want, if so consider altering your setup and real estate for more gauges.

Another portion that needs to be addressed within this section is the ECU/EMS. The stock NA ECU will not cut it--and sadly neither will the RTek 2.1 system for the NA-Turbo. An alternate way would be to secure a Turbo ECU and Harness and have it modified for the RTek 2.1. It then should have no trouble running what needs to be run. This however has not been tested by me and so I can not verify it.

The other option is to go piggy back. You however lose control to alter spark, but that may not be necessary depending on the boost level pressure you plan on running. You may also need to replace the MAP sensor with one more capable to handle positive pressure. The NA MAP sensor only is able to read up to 2.4PSI (I have rarely seen it read above 4PSI even though I have seen as high as 8PSI on my gauge--don't ask).

The final option is to go with an aftermarket EMS. I personally plan on going this route and have had many discussions with members on this and other forums to ensure my understanding of what each individual EMS brings to the table. Some top contenders in my book are MoTec, MegaSquirt, and Haltech. This is not to discount other EMS boxes such as MicroTech, Wolf3D, and others--but to show my specific inclination based on past conversations.

What the biggest thing you should consider is what you plan on running and how you plan on running it. If you need specific functions or are only able to run specific devices with the use of a specific ECU you may wish to hunt around to see what one can do the job.

This and of itself could be it's own write up, and maybe some one will one time in the future. But this is just to give you a basic understanding. So we'll go over a little more detail later on in the write up.

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Here's some helpful information about what Turbo you want to run. Bigger is not always better. This information is taken from the Turbonetics inc Website located here. I didn't write these things and as such all credit is given to Turbonetics Inc and deals simply with their line of turbos.

Once you have chosen your goals you now know what you need to do. So lets begin this process of turbo charging your NA.

I will be using pictures from my build a T60-1 mated to a 6PI or as some refer it to a GXL-T.