I don't post too often on this forum, but I thought you all might enjoy what I have been up to. A couple years back I got the opportunity to attend SEMA. That year the Borg Warner EFR turbos were all the buzz around the industry. I only had about a half day there so I knew I had to make a stop at the Full-Race/Borg Warner Booth to check them out in person. These are my friends from Red Lion Motorsports @ the Full-Race Booth. A closer look at the EFR off-set WG setup This a locals R34 V-SPEC2, legal & running a single EFR The famed S2E Time Attack Car running an EFR Maybe it was seeing them in person, but I believed the hype. The Compressor map seems far better than the Garrett GT28rs. I was starting to crave more power than my stock turbos could muster & the time seemed fitting. Luckily for me Full-Race is ?local? so I could make the occasional stop by their shop to check in on supply, since they are very rare. I also started to look at the few results that had been posted on the inter-web. Here are some very loose number on a dyno mocked up dyno graph that I came up with. This one simply cuts off the top to focus on the spool up of the lighter EFR wheels. Greg @ SZ had been interested in the turbos as well, he & I had sent a few email back and forth about them & since I could get my hands on some of the first ones produced. Greg was kind enough to ship out a set of MS manifolds that SZ had on their mock up motor for clocking turbos. This way I could ?test fit? & see if the MS manifolds could be modified or an adapter plate could be made to attach the two. Unfortunately they do not fit, not even close. The turbo appears to come close to fitting on one side , but defiantly not the other. The picture is deceiving because the turbos are clocked for on of Full-Races Honda kits & I could not adjust that in the shop. Additionally the flange location would make the turbo hit the block on both sides, even if the turbo did mount to the manifold. I was discouraged with the results of my trial test & didn?t know how to proceed. You can see just how much larger the EFR turbos are! This is not Apples to Apples, but here are the next size bigger. Down the street from Full-Race is another local shop, Future Fabrication. The owner & single employee are incredibly humble people that are some of the most talented fabricators I have ever seen. They do not wear their accomplishments on their shoulder, but here are a few thing that they created both while working @ Full-Race from the beginning & since starting their own shop: Designing manifolds that are still in current production today, Creating some 800 manifolds from scratch, of those less than 1% has ever returned with a defect, Designing & Creating the R-14 AWD S14/Skyline conversion (http://www.full-race.com/r14/), Building the cage for FX Motorsports Time Attack NSX, Building the cage & much more for both of Bob Bondurant?s Cameros that he currently races in SCCA [[LI|URL of whatever image]], Build the cage for the K-Sport Drift Car, Design & build the Compound Turbo setup on John?s personal S14 with RB26 Drift Car. The list goes on & on. Of the custom projects I have created, these guys have often been involved. I knew their quality was some of the best around from first hand experience. Anyone that?s been around me knows I like to tell stories & these two guy have heard them all from the times I?ve been over at the shop. One story was about how I wanted to fit the new BW-EFR turbos in my Z32. Once I knew there was no way to fit the turbos with out creating some crazy custom manifold, I knew it was no longer a story of what I wanted to do, but rather what I was going to do. The manifolds started off with me CAD drafting a custom flange. I?m not a fan of having the gasket scanned creating a file from that. I went from scratch, increased the width around where the tubes would be welded to the flange, enlarged the mounting the holes for the studs & made a happy medium from the stock exhaust port oval to the runner tube that?s round. The exhaust port is also larger than the heads/stock manifolds, but smaller than the MS manifolds. The manifolds took about 9 months to create. We used my complete Z with full AC, minus turbos, manifolds, etc. & a spare complete motor with an alt, AC compressor, TT PS pump, Front cross member & steering rack. It was a complete PITA! But it was also an incredible learning experience for me. I was at the shop 3-5 days a week for months, even if it was a half day. I have so much more respect for someone like Mike Smith who created a product from scratch. From the idea I originally drafted out. we went in a very different direction after getting all of the pieces in place. And here they are all welded up. Fully Back Purged. John also has multiple certificates & credits from different types of welding, including passing the X-Ray Penetration test. This IMHO is the best that has ever been created for the VG30DETT. Equal length with in about 3/16" on CLR as well. They finally came together nicely & the rest of the parts could be created: Inlet, Coned outlet, Down pipe, Drain lines, Feed lines, etc. Then of coarse the intercooler piping needed to be adjusted slightly. With the help of Nick (Stadzsport) it started for the first time in March of 2012 the day before the Modified Magazine event that was @ one of the local track Firebird raceway, the same location ZCON 2012 was held at. With the laptop hooked up & gauges mounted we took the car for a drive. Everything seemed good, no leaks, no smoke. The only thing was the amount of heat the engine bay sees without having a heat shield. After talking to the guys @ the shop who have much more experience with long tube manifolds we pressed on, continually checking everything. 100+ miles of driving to check things over @ no load & no boost we headed to one of the local DynoJet dynos on the other side of town. Using Nistune & my Ostrich2 we made some 16 pulls on 91 octane fuel only. We pulled out timing all around, corrected the AF & added fuel to the top end to be on the uber conservative & safe side, since power was not going to be a problem. On only 14.5 PSI of boost it made 482whp (with less timing than before). The conditions read 92*F, 28.75In-Hg, 4% Humidity & 1.04 SAE correction. Since the tune was rough & very safe I?m not going to post a dyno graph until I have had time to really ring out the system. I can tell you that the off throttle response is better than my stock turbos were with all the bells & whistles attached. The car pulls & recovers from shifting like its almost an automatic. The next day I ran in the HPDE series during the Modified Magazine Event. The car was the fastest on the back straight, beating out a Z06 Vette & a 450whp Subie. Before the end of the day there was a fellow Z32 racer that had an off track excursion, resulting in rolling his Z 3.5 times. Fortunately he practically ?walked away? from the wreck because he has had a well done weld in roll bar installed. That was enough to make me finally pull the trigger on a second Z32 that I could commit to the track & not have any compromises any more. The EFRs were removed in preparation for the new track Z project & haven?t been run since. More on that chapter later. I have many more pictures, however they are taking forever to upload & I have things to do. Sorry for the quality of the pictures, many of them were taken on my cell phone.
Awesome writeup! How much were these turbos if you don't mind me asking? Did you guys have to change the mounting location/height of the engine to make it fit without hitting the side of the bay? Many mods to support these turbos at all? Those things look amazing :O
Thank you. The turbos are around the same price as the new Garrett GTX turbos, but a little more. IIRC they were a little bit over $2Kea US Dollars. The engine sits in the stock location, no modification there. I had to modify soem other things to make sure I did not have to modify the frame rails. Its VERY tight. The supporting mods I had were the same ones as my old 500whp (american dynojet) stock turbo setup. All the "Breather" mods, that I made. Stock block & stock 40P heads. I will have a better engine supporting setup on my track car that the turbo system will go into.
Sry my bad, actually I'm following same route as you. I have already turbos and I'm looking around how to get manifolds - to buy from someone or to pay locally to make them. Bottom end and top end parts are waiting in bedroom time when I'm pulling engine out. It would be good to know if that shop can make any more of these manifolds.
There are a few people that are seriously interested in a set of the manifolds. I own & have the Positive & Negative Jigs. The show can make sets off of my Jigs. However they are not a low cost set of manifolds.
