It's definitely beefier than the first one, it looks great. Haven't test fitted it yet, but the quality is already 100x better. They shipped it Friday after I emailed asking for a status and I got it Saturday afternoon.

 

any weight savings vs the stock k-member?

that thing looks HEAVY!

 

It's definitely lighter than the stock one, I struggled to hold the stock one back up to bolt it back on the car. It's heavier than my first one, but the first one cracked so I'm ok with it being a little more weight from the extra supports it has.

 

So my box was dropped off last night even though we were home, no one ever knocked or anything so it sat outside all night. Luckily no one took it.


I'm not sure if my boost gauge is in there or not, it was ordered. I didn't get a chance to open it any farther before having to leave for work.

Edit: My cat Booger located the boost gauge for me, it was in a separate small box. He was sitting on it.

 

Tubular K member saves like 25 pounds

 

Took a few hours of fabrication, but I got the blank cluster panel to fit together correctly.

 

Great work so far. If I may make a suggestion, I used to build race engine and I have been following a lot of turbo builds recently. One thing I noticed is the first engine is at very high risk of failure while the tuner is debugging the tune. It does not seem to matter how great a motor you build you run out of fuel at decent boost and a reasonable timing due to some unforeseen issue you damage the motor. As cheap as you can find used motors it may be worth it to install a "test" engine to get the bugs worked out of the turbo tune. Then once you are happy everything is working right swap in you high dollar motor. It would suck to have a faulty injector or a sticking waste gate cause you to loose the whole upgraded motor.

If you follow Musicman build you will see he blew his first high dollar motor then switch to a decent used bone stock long block. Most of his good runs where on that block.

Also if everything goes OK after you switch to the new engine you have a backup long block just incase.

 

yup happens to the street outlaw guys all the time as most of there cars are turbo ,there was episode Dominator blew $8000.00 block as it was not tuned right an he had to get out there an race ,2700.00 for reman long block 3800 ebay,or just a desent used block ,they like live under the hood too,i am very interested in the #s all the way around, nice gauges too

 

I do have a spare motor to transfer parts to. We've been using it for mockup outside of the car while mine is still in the bay for the turbo plumbing. Already well aware and prepared.



Got my cluster put together. I love the set up. It's not wired yet, just spent 2 days fabbing the old one to get the blank panel to fit right. The small gauges will have pink lights and the 2 bigger ones will be white. The rest of the gauges will be in the a pillar.

 

Gorn, thats not a bad idea, but the spare motor we have is high mileage and i kinda beat #2 main rather hard since it was stuck. Tuning it would be different because of the lower c/r (9.4 stock vs 8.0), the cam, the soon to be ported heads, and ported intake. The other thing is it sucks pulling these engines from the top or bottom. Its also the reason why shes taking it to get tuned by a 3800 specialist group