I mean besides the obvious that you want that particular car part something fierce. The junction where the discharge ducts from the turbochargers merge together and connect to the throttle body on the truck intake manifold is one of the most important fabrication projects of the Sprint-T, and if I don’t get it right it will both impair the performance and look really ugly and both are deadly sins for building a hot rod. And last night I had a particularly detailed dream of how to build it, down to where to cut the feed tubes and where to make the first tack welds to get the best looking transition from two pipes to a single inlet.
There are usually 3 iterations in building a hot rod, “making it work” is the schematic stage where the parts are assembled into a functional order. After that is the “making it work right” refines the rough edges off the first stage and reduces any inefficiencies in the design, followed by the “making it look good” stage. A seasoned fabricator or experienced designer can usually combine the last two stages into a single build. A freaking genius fabricator or designer can sometimes get through all three stages in his/her head and produce a perfect part/assembly right off the bat, but that’s usually the result of a lot of thinking and mulling over of possibilities that usually not possible before the first stage unless the project has no deadlines to meet.
Well this build is one of those kinds of builds, it can’t even start until there is an actual budget to buy parts with. And right now there basically is no budget, there’s “I have money now, I will buy what I can afford from my build list” parts being bought. Since I never know when I will have money I can’t take advantage of sales unless having money coincides with a sale, like it did for the suspension parts I bought the beginning of this month.
That’s why I have been resorting to Dream Aided Design for this particular assembly. First because of the relative sizes of the parts, the two 2.5″ (63.5 mm) outlets from the turbochargers that have to merge and feed clean-flowing (non-turbulent) air to the single 84 mm (3.3″) throttle body on the intake manifold, and second because this assembly will be front and center on the engine out there in front of Gawd and everybody to see. I’m even thinking of putting the blowoff valve on the underside of this assembly to hide it somewhat, unless the valve I happen to get is especially blingy and worth showing off a bit in which case it goes on top. Which means the final version of the connection between the turbos and the intake may only get built after the blowoff valve is bought. Or it might get rebuilt later if a nicer-looking valve is bought or otherwise obtained after the car is “finished”.
Portions of this build get changed because I see a new part or a part that is old but I never saw before, like the swing arm that is normally used in dirt race track cars to both locate the rear axle fore and aft and mount the coilover spring/shock assemblies that I’m using to do what it’s designed to do in the dirt racers because it means I don’t have to make two separate brackets to attach the springs and the radius rod to the rear axle. Well it changed again when I saw THIS! over at the Speedway Motors web site. Intended for use in building radius rods and track bars, I’m going to weld this particular one into the chassis and use it as a place to bolt things on to the frame, this one in particular is going to be for mounting the front end of the previously mentioned swing arm. I weld the bung to the point in space where it’s supposed to go and then triangulate additional frame members to make sure it stays at that point in space. And I just realized the previous sentence made it look like I was welding a part to the fabric of the universe and then cutting it loose after I welded some parts from it to the frame, instead of what I was thinking and welding it to the frame and then moving the rest of the universe to get the bung where I needed it to go. I will use other sizes to get other bits onto the frame, in particular the 4 ends of the 4-bar that restrain the front axle in 2 dimensions/freedoms of movement.
Last thing, while using the bathroom the phrase “Pain is weakness leaving the body” drifted past my consciousness, which by the way is a total bag of bullshit. Pain is the body telling you that “something is broken, please stop what you’re doing before irreversible damage sets in”, or in my case “You have damaged ligaments and tendons, make an appointment with an orthopedist ASAP” and “You should apologize to the driver of the car truck about his insurance rates going up”. That part was true for 3 of the five times I was hit, one didn’t do a whole lot of damage to either of us and the other just triggered a panic attack for me and caused his driver’s side mirror to fall off and break, with some confusion as to the order of events because I might have broken it before it fell off when he started crowding me into oncoming traffic while I was setting up for a left turn into the bank parking lot.
Witch on a Bicycle 