Building A Turbo Manifold...Step By Step

[TigWiz]

Over the next few weeks I'm going to go over all the steps that I follow while building one of my turbo manifolds. I'm always being asked just how I build them, and I've never seen an in-depth write-up on how to make one, so now you're getting one. I will be making this manifold during my break time at work, so progress will be slow, but you will have a complete guide to building a manifold.

Day 1: Prepping the Materials
On the first day I gathered all the materials that I will be using in this manifold and prepared to clean them all. This is a very important step if you want to have a professional quality manifold.

Here is a 90 degree 304SS elbow as I receive them from my supplier. It has ink on the surface along with oils and grease residue from shipping. This will need to be cleaned with acetone to have a good base for the next step.


Here we see the elbow after having been wiped down with acetone. The surface if free of any contaminates, but is not the most appealing, so a mechanical cleaning step will need to be used. This will bring out the luster and beauty of the stainless steel, but will also allow for very nice coloring to be seen after the parts have been welded together.


This is the elbow in its final cleaning phase, and is ready to accept a clean weld. There are many different ways to obtain a finish similar to this on the elbows, but mine remains a trade secret.


Here we have the stainless steel pipe that we will use to make both the collector and parts of the runners in our manifold. This too is covered in ink and oil so it must be clean.


After cleaning not much of a difference is seen, but DO NOT skip this step. You will kick yourself later if you do.


And here is the part after going through a mechanical cleaning step. This is the one process that really makes the parts shine.


Next we will move onto the flanges in the build. No matter how clean you think the flanges may be, do yourself the favor and clean them again. When I first started making manifolds this was one of the biggest mistakes I made. Assuming that the flanges were clean because they were already shiny.

Here is the head flange followed by the turbo inlet flange.

I just happened to take a picture of a B series flange that I had on me, but I will be building a manifold for a SR20DET.


If you are not gong to use the parts you just cleaned right away make sure you store them in a clean location. Here are a lot of the parts being put away for tomorrow.


Now I just so happened to have a little more time today than expected so I started to cut my collector. There are a million ways to do this, and a million different jigs to use, so I'll leave it up to you to figure this out of your own, but I will give you a tip. When cutting your pipe I’ve found that after the first cut you have to rotate the pipe just beyond 90 degrees. For some reason if you rotate the part exactly 90 degrees the collector doesn't meet up cleanly.
Here is just one of the four parts to my collector.




And that’s all for today. Tomorrow I will try to finish my collector and will so you how I prep it for welding the techniques used to do so.

A teaser of two manifolds that I'm working on. At this stage I’m just adding wastegates to the manifolds. The far manifold has an interesting location, it should work out nicely. I hope you all like the write- up so far. Feel free to ask me questions along the way.

[OfourTHREEfive]

Thats awesome you are taking the time to write-it-up.

Thanks.

[LongGrain]

this is sick, i'll definitely be following this thread.

what kind of tools are you using for your cutting?

[TigWiz]

I use a few different tools to cut all of my pipe. A bandsaw, a chop saw, and a plasma cutter are used at different points, but other tools can be used to get the same results.

[MELLO*SOS]

cool thread so far +1 for you... Please update when you can I'm sure a lot of us will be subscribing..

[DALAZ_68]

whats grade of metal is typically used for making exaust manifolds

[wrapmeup2005]

Thank you for sharing your break time with us
Looks too be very informative
+1

[gprb25]

Very nice writeup so far!

Thanks for taking your time to help us.

SUBSCRIBED

[atutt]

It's nice to see a fellow welder willing to share some info. Most of us are to stingey on sharing how we build things... Especially weld prep techniques and welding techniques...

+1 for you and I'm deffinately subscribing!