# V band adaptors for t3 style turbos and downpipe pics



## javierb14 (Jul 9, 2002)

as the subject says...we now make adaptors for those who want to run 3" dp's and v-bands. all the info can be found at
http://www.honda-tech.com/zerothread?id=320312
let me know what u guys think


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

160? Shit I can do it myself a lot cheaper than that. probably 1/3 the price. But it is a good Idea.



javierb14 said:


> *as the subject says...we now make adaptors for those who want to run 3" dp's and v-bands. all the info can be found at
> http://www.honda-tech.com/zerothread?id=320312
> let me know what u guys think *


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

javierb14 said:


> *as the subject says...we now make adaptors for those who want to run 3" dp's and v-bands. all the info can be found at
> http://www.honda-tech.com/zerothread?id=320312
> let me know what u guys think *


I'd get it but the price seems kinda steep. I could get my own made for way less than that.

Mike


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## javierb14 (Jul 9, 2002)

if u can TIG up the same part of equal quality for less go ahead, but they arent the easiest piece to make.


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

javierb14 said:


> *if u can TIG up the same part of equal quality for less go ahead, but they arent the easiest piece to make. *


You can get the T3 and V=Band flanges at Turbonetics or ITS and get them TIGed up for like Mike says, about 1/3 of the cost.

On the other hand yours are stainless, but why is the price so high? You can get the flanges Lazer cut for pretty cheap, then get the stainless V-band flange from a HD Truck supplier.

If you made them like this, you could sell them for under $100 bucks and move them fast while still keeping a good margin. Still its a very nice piece.

Mike


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## javierb14 (Jul 9, 2002)

hmmm...i'll have to check out the HD truck suppliers. thats a good idea.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

javierb14 said:


> *if u can TIG up the same part of equal quality for less go ahead, but they arent the easiest piece to make. *


It's nice to have your own machine and the experience to back it. 












I don't like to knock someone elses work, but that is hardley what I would call quality. From the look of that picture, it is definitely not welded with heliarc (TIG). That is a MIG job, you can tell by the fat bead. From the looks of it, he ran a little on the hot side and a little fast. These thing's are not hard to make by any means, definitely not worth 160 IMHO. Again I say that was not done for quality in mind, more like mass production. 











The flange on the downpipe side seems to be welded with TIG, but it's really hard to tell in that picture, It looks more like he ran a bead on the inside of the flange instead of the outside.


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

Hey I'm new here, so go easy on me. You, on the other hand, seem like an old hand, so i will not be so easy on you.

Just fyi, i have worked on jaime farrer's car since the beginning, jason hunt's 9.8 second *Street* CRX and gary gardella's methanol civic. I have been building turbo 4 cyl cars for a while now and am by no means new to this.

As for your having "your own machine and the experience to back it. " id love to see some of your work. Im sick of self proclaimed internet fabricators who have CNC mills in their kitchens and a lathe or two in their living rooms. Half of them still live with their mom anyway. We, too, have our own machines, and the experience to back it. The fastest hondas in the country are running our setups. 

Now to the welding. We use a miller syncrowave TIG, yes tig not mig and its not heliarc anymore, no one uses helium, get into this century and say it with me A-R-G-O-N. We dont own a mig welder. We dont mig weld anything here and if you consider a 1/8" wide nicely colored and perfectly scalloped weld to be a hot, fat mig weld, you need to take some welding classes. 

now to the price. Go out, get prices on the 2 v bands (stainless), the v band clamp, the flange, and put the cutting grinding and welding time into it, *before* opening your mouth

I mean this, go find the parts, docutment what you pay for them, and go make the part. Record exactly how long it takes to make the part and then come back to us. Thanks


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

psshhgoesmysr20, can i see some pics of your engine bay? Here is a pic of mine.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

> As for your having "your own machine and the experience to back it. " id love to see some of your work. Im sick of self proclaimed internet fabricators who have CNC mills in their kitchens and a lathe or two in their living rooms. Half of them still live with their mom anyway. We, too, have our own machines, and the experience to back it. The fastest hondas in the country are running our setups.


Im not interested in the fastest hondas using your equipment, I am however interested in how much rework you have to do when your products break.





> Now to the welding. We use a miller syncrowave TIG, yes tig not mig and its not heliarc anymore, no one uses helium, get into this century and say it with me A-R-G-O-N.


Nobody uses helium anymore? Oh how wrong you are. . I come from a generation of fabricators from my father to his fater and so on, so I usually refer to TIG as heliarc., but if you want to get technical TIG is an acranym for Tungston Inert Gas, the correct technical term is GTAW.

As for Helium, helium allows for better wetting action, than argon does, Argon is very dry. Straight argon, in conjuction with voltage has the tendicy to creat dry socketing effect between the weld puddle and the parent metal. So by adding helium it helps reduce the dry socketing affect due to its heat input, and better wetting action. Running pure helium, running straight DC polarity works well with copper, and you can use pure helium running straight dc on aluminum in order to produce high quality xray welds. Hence running pure helium (heliarc welding), 

You can run helium with MIG trimix which is mostly helium. Not to mention helium is a great purge. The only draw back to using helium is the cost factor, and if they don't purge the bottles properly it is easily contaminated, so you must have pure helium. 

If you don't use it maybe you should. We also purge the pipes when we weld our manifolds so the inner bead looks close to the outside. You don't have that crusty rock drop through effect. 



> We dont own a mig welder. We dont mig weld anything here and if you consider a 1/8" wide nicely colored and perfectly scalloped weld to be a hot, fat mig weld, you need to take some welding classes.


First off it is running too hot, and no I don't need to go back to school. You call that nicely colored? dude get your glasses cause that looks like amature hour. There is no need for a beed that wide with that set up, you say that is 1/8th in. Looks more like 3/16 1/2 inch. You are adding too much filler rod to the mix my friend, if that was TIG as you so claim. Speaking of filler rod, what type of filler rod did you use concidering the fact you combined disimular metals. 

We will get into your choice of welding equipment at a later time. 



> now to the price. Go out, get prices on the 2 v bands (stainless), the v band clamp, the flange, and put the cutting grinding and welding time into it, *before* opening your mouth
> 
> I mean this, go find the parts, docutment what you pay for them, and go make the part. Record exactly how long it takes to make the part and then come back to us. Thanks


Here are the pictures you requested. 

http://community.webshots.com/album/40584205YTeolq

http://community.webshots.com/album/38587181MHQtfU

http://community.webshots.com/album/28725850qKGPjKyEaC


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

havent had a part break yet =). not one single failure.

i just measured that weld with a pair of calipers, its 142 thousandths wide, and its still nicely colored. The parts are welded inside and out, the digital camera may not have portrayed the part correctly in low resolution, but thats the truth.

im well aware of the uses of pure helium, but we are welding steel here, not copper, not aluminum. 309 rod is used.

We could have welded it on an OTC, but the syncrowave works just fine.

Now i asked for pics of your car, not your friends? 

if that gold sr20 is yours, nice downpipe:










http://community.webshots.com/r1/2/44/42/28724442yZQIWMTOFW_ph.jpg


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

oh one more thing, why would you use a 8.99$ collector?









http://community.webshots.com/r1/2/59/78/28725978TJjmRQFGdN_ph.jpg

http://www.turbo-performance.com/Products/Headers/all_headers.htm, its really 8.99.


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## javierb14 (Jul 9, 2002)

here is a closeup of a charge pipe weld on my car. all of my TIG welds are of this quality.








heres a link to an extreme closeup of the same bead, large high res pic
http://www.public.asu.edu/~ramirez0/B14/TIG_weld_closeup.jpg


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

BLANK


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

I know you asked for pictures of my car, I'm assuming it's to see the work. So I showed you our work. As far as the 8.99 collector, Just FYI that is the same style collector recommended by Mr Corky Bell himself. It seems to me by my post that you are getting a little offensive. It seems you want to play my daddy is better than yours. Okay after going to that site you sent me, that is not even the same collector on our manifold. That collector is mild steel. Our collectors are stainless 4 into one design. I'd like to see the collector you use FF.




FFgeoff said:


> *oh one more thing, why would you use a 8.99$ collector?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

That looks pretty good Javier.



javierb14 said:


> *here is a closeup of a charge pipe weld on my car. all of my TIG welds are of this quality.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

Here you go FF photos of my engine bay 



















Be advised this car is still underconstruction until I get back from Europe.


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

FFgeoff said:


> *As for your having "your own machine and the experience to back it. " id love to see some of your work. Im sick of self proclaimed internet fabricators who have CNC mills in their kitchens and a lathe or two in their living rooms. *


Not to say that you are not a good fabricator, but I can vouch that the quality of Mike's stuff is pretty damn good. He is not a self-proclaimed Internet expert.

Mike


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

fair enough, i think i may have jumped on your back. The collector you use is what is known as a clover leaf, it is simply a stamped piece of steel and does not flow like a true merge collector. 

Here are our collectors. I dont feel like having this turn into another internet pissing match, i just felt the need to stand up for our products. 

Our collectors are true merge collectors with well defined points. here is a pic.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

> Not to say that you are not a good fabricator, but I can vouch that the quality of Mike's stuff is pretty damn good. He is not a self-proclaimed Internet expert.


Thanks Mike. 



> fair enough, i think i may have jumped on your back. The collector you use is what is known as a clover leaf, it is simply a stamped piece of steel and does not flow like a true merge collector.


You are correct in that statement, it is a cloverleaf design. We thought about using the burns collectors, but those are too expensive, and are not recomended for our application. We designed ours to flow like a tornado effect, to aid turbo spool up. 

The inside definitely isn't as smooth as your collector (which is very nice btw I may have to get in contact with you on those) but it seems to work very well. The whole Idea of this design was going off of the recomendations of Corky Bell.


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## Yellow4g63 (Aug 29, 2002)

nice collector


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## Yellow4g63 (Aug 29, 2002)

FFgeoff said:


> *fair enough, i think i may have jumped on your back. The collector you use is what is known as a clover leaf, it is simply a stamped piece of steel and does not flow like a true merge collector.
> 
> Here are our collectors. I dont feel like having this turn into another internet pissing match, i just felt the need to stand up for our products.
> 
> ...


opps ment this one.


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

FFgeoff said:


> *fair enough, i think i may have jumped on your back. The collector you use is what is known as a clover leaf, it is simply a stamped piece of steel and does not flow like a true merge collector.
> 
> Here are our collectors. I dont feel like having this turn into another internet pissing match, i just felt the need to stand up for our products.
> 
> ...


Nice collector, I wanted to use a burns myself but its too long to fit wehere I want it to.

Mike


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

we can make any collector, in any length, angle or orientation you want. And its not the thin stuff like burns.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

FFgeoff said:


> *we can make any collector, in any length, angle or orientation you want. And its not the thin stuff like burns. *


Do you have any photos of a header welded up, where you can look up inside the collector of the manifold (like the one I showed you earlier) If so I would love to see it.


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

heres a pic. Believe me, it wasnt my idea to run a split housing on this manifold!! The customer insisted over and over again he wanted this, so i ablidged him... it made 680 at the wheels tho so what do i know.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

He probably got the Idea from Lisa Kubo. Do you make those collectors yourself or do you have a supplier? What do they go for a piece? Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are using stainless weld Ls correct? If so that is a good Idea, since they are incredibly thick and have very good heat properties. 



FFgeoff said:


> *heres a pic. Believe me, it wasnt my idea to run a split housing on this manifold!! The customer insisted over and over again he wanted this, so i ablidged him... it made 680 at the wheels tho so what do i know.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

We make the collectors oursleves, in house. literally. Everything is done here, the only thing we farm out is the head flanges. The collectors cost 289 each, and are cut anyway you specify. 

The material is all schedule 40 long radius 304 weldels.

Lisa Kubos manifold was not a 4 into 1 merge like ours. It was split with cyls 1 and 4 and cyls 2 and 3, going into the split housing.


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

FFgeoff said:


> *heres a pic. Believe me, it wasnt my idea to run a split housing on this manifold!! The customer insisted over and over again he wanted this, so i ablidged him... it made 680 at the wheels tho so what do i know.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


A split collector with 1-4 and 2-3 paired up makes a huge difference in a turbo motor. It can allow the motor to spool faster than going down a size in turbine housing. Or you can go up a size and keep nearly the same spool up and have less backpressure.

Mike


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

*got proof?*

i would like to see your proof on that statement. There is a reason no one really is using them anymore, and everyone runs a 4 into 1 collector these days. The last couple of years most people were trying all sorts of different collector styles but if you see the majority of race car manifolds theyre all open 4-1s. I do agree that for the most part the split housings will work better, but that is usually on engines with 6 or more cylinders...

its just the same old 4-2-1 vs 4-1 argument.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

*Re: got proof?*

Where are you located Geoff?


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

We are located in Tempe, AZ. Thats where the shop is. I started things in NJ, as thats where i live in the summer time. 

Now i go back to NJ in the summer to prototype new stuff and work on a few drag cars out there.


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

*Re: got proof?*



FFgeoff said:


> *i would like to see your proof on that statement. There is a reason no one really is using them anymore, and everyone runs a 4 into 1 collector these days. The last couple of years most people were trying all sorts of different collector styles but if you see the majority of race car manifolds theyre all open 4-1s. I do agree that for the most part the split housings will work better, but that is usually on engines with 6 or more cylinders...
> 
> its just the same old 4-2-1 vs 4-1 argument. *


Garrett and other OEM turbo manufactures did some testing and found that. Its actualy a common engineering fact about that sort of style manifold, just that import drag racers have not caught on to it yet. It is pretty common on WRC cars.

Its the most effective on 4 cylinder motors, or V-8's with 180 degree cranks. It is very common in the diesel world as well. Its called a pulse converter manifold. When taken firther and combined with a divided housing turbine housing, a pulse converter can bump turbine effiecncy over 20%. This is marked because a 3% bump in efficiency can overcome a 20% gain in roatating assebly inertia. A divided housing also improves VE because it makes reversion and croiss cylinder contamination on overlap almost imposible. It can allow a biger cam to be used.

The charts and stuff that I have from a major OEM turbo supplier is propriatary and I promised my sourse that I would not let it out in public. If you want to read some engineering text stuff on pulse conversion, I recomend the book, Turbocharging the High Speed Internal Combustion Engine by Watson and Genoda. They have a whole chapter on the subject and modeling equations.

It's a very good book on the subject.

Mike


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## FFgeoff (Nov 2, 2002)

Thanks for the tip. I have spent the better part of 3 hours looking for that book and cant find any trace of it anywhere. Got any clues?? thanks tho i love finding good books

As for the theory, i understand the idea of pulse converter manifolds, but maybe the manifolds we have dealt with were somehow not properly functioning or who knows but we have yet to really see any power gains using one on the ecko drag car. It made 943 whp with the open housing and a 4-1 merge collector, but with a similar equal length manifold and the split housing it made 917 and similar torque. This was on methanol, but it should seemingly work better witht he pulse converter... ive seen simliar results on a number of other cars, look at venom they are running a shorty style manifold 8.63 and 1040 hp, jotech same thing and 890 hp, no one is running a divided housing and most everyone has tried them out.

Any ideas?

Oh and as far as camshaft choice goes, heres a weird one. Jotech goes 172mph and 8.59 on stock GSR camshafts.
on the ecko car, they are running the BIGGEST cam they can (its not vtec) and the valves are dropping so far down in the hole that they are as big as possible so that when the motor is clayed its off the clay by about 10 thousandths. After you reply to this post ill be deleting this because its not really my place to let all this info out, but this is a slow board.


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## psshhgoesmysr20 (May 1, 2002)

Geoff, Just curious, what Size cup are you using on your torch as well as type of tungston you used when you made that manifold? Also what was your flow rate, and travel speed? Do you utilize a turn table? How far was your tungston sticking out beyond the cup?


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## morepower2 (Apr 19, 2002)

FFgeoff said:


> *Thanks for the tip. I have spent the better part of 3 hours looking for that book and cant find any trace of it anywhere. Got any clues?? thanks tho i love finding good books
> 
> As for the theory, i understand the idea of pulse converter manifolds, but maybe the manifolds we have dealt with were somehow not properly functioning or who knows but we have yet to really see any power gains using one on the ecko drag car. It made 943 whp with the open housing and a 4-1 merge collector, but with a similar equal length manifold and the split housing it made 917 and similar torque. This was on methanol, but it should seemingly work better witht he pulse converter... ive seen simliar results on a number of other cars, look at venom they are running a shorty style manifold 8.63 and 1040 hp, jotech same thing and 890 hp, no one is running a divided housing and most everyone has tried them out.
> 
> ...


I got the book from SAE publicatins a long time ago, it's proably out of print by now perhaps.

Maybe its other factors like the turbo choice? 

Turbo selection has a lot to do with how well a cam works, in my opinion if the engine runs into crossover then you can run close to the same cam that works well naturaly asperated with just spreading the lobe centers a bit more. I usualy spread the centers more towards the exhaust side so the extra blowdown helps spool the turbo quicker.

I always check pre turbine backpressure when trying to figure this stuff out. Lots of backpressure, especialy if more than the boost pressure likes short duration less overlap.

Mike


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## mevans (Jun 5, 2004)

*who won?*


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## NotAnotherHonda (Aug 7, 2003)

holy old thread!!!!!!


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