Initial Turbo Installation (3.5)

3.5 hours

With the exhaust on, I took an initial pass at mounting all the turbo stuff.

The first thing I noticed was that although the instructions say the turbo should be oriented the right way from the factory, it was like 180 degrees off, so I had to re-clock it anyway.  I'm not sure how they could plan on not needing you to do this, because the bearing block needs to be oriented parallel to the floor with the plane on its gear, and I don't think they ever asked me if I'm building a tailwheel or tri-gear plane when I ordered the engine.

Anyway, it's not hard.  To clock the turbo, just consider the exhaust side to be fixed since it'll sit on the exhaust manifold.  There are four bolts you loosen, and then you can rotate the bearing block to be parallel to the floor and then retighten the bolts.  Then you have to squeeze a giant snap ring to rotate the intake side of the turbo relative to the bearing block.

Here's the picture in the manual of what it's supposed to look like, relative to what I got:

Someone posted this on the forum, and I found it to work great, and that is this pair of pliers from Napa:  https://www.napaonline.com/en/p/BK_7743431 .  I ground down the tips a little bit and it had no trouble squeezing the big snap ring enough for me to rotate the turbo.

Here's the bearing block now level with the floor.  It doesn't look exactly level, but it matches the angle my garage floor is at.

With the bearing block level, I adjusted the intake side of the turbo to appriximately the right angle.

I installed the intake manifold parts and did a few more slight adjustments to the turbo angle until everything fit nicely.

The turbo is pretty close to the firewall.

However even with such little clearance the heat shield still fits, which I took as a good sign.  I'm going to add some heat barrier material to the firewall too though for good measure.

The most obvious fitment issue I ran into was the exhaust.  As it sits now the lower exhaust pipe runs into the engine mount.  I think I will need to slightly un-bend the 90-degree elbow to move the lower pipe outboard an inch or so.