Now, before I begin, I just want to state that this is all MIG work from a beginner welder. The flange is an ATP 304ss tapped T3 unit and the piping is 2.5" 304ss. I used a FirePower 120 (110v unit) with .030" 308ss wire. Not the prettiest I know, but what do you think? Will the butt weld have any problem? I didn't take any pictures of the inside, but the seam was full welded and then ground down to eleminate the seam and not disrupt gas flow.



After about 30 minutes of careful "smashing" in the vise and massaging with a 5 lb. small sledge, you can make a 2.5" 304SS tube to look something like this:


However, it still needs to be "swedged". This is taken after it was tacked on opposing side.


After swedging.


I then flip it over and tack the nicely reshapped side. This leaves one more side to do ... so, how exactly do you swedge a pipe? With some heat of course!



Here we go again on the opposite side ... before:


Heat that puppy up ...


She is ready to start massaging with a 3/8" extension and the 5 lb. sledge when she is glowing bright cherry red ... this picture was take 5 seconds after and she was already starting to cool to a nice dull orange:


After the "massage":


I then tacked the corners to keep them in place. At this point, I have 8 tacks ... 1 on each side and 1 on each corner. Time to start connecting the tacks:



Not the prettiest I know, but she should hold no problem ... I hope!









Now, regardless of the fact that the flange was thick as hell, she still warped pretty badly. So, I decided to heat up the flange for a few minutes and then bolt her to the turbo. I then reheated and let cool twice more to stress releave the built up pressure. I will see how well it worked tomorrow night.









My favorite picture of all:

 

Looks good man! You've given me some good ideas there.

Also, an ugly weld isn't necessarily a unsound weld from what I've seen.

Fred

 

those welds are ugly?

coulda fooled me.

*refer to many of the fluxcore projects if you don't know what i mean*

 

looks good man im about to tackle my stainless DP with my mig haha off to go get a tri mix of gas and some stainless wire but looks great man

 

nice job man, much nicer than my mig welding, lol. I hope to get more practice with my DP 5 bolt flange.

 

ebay turbo

 

Yep ... for $275, they could fail every 20K miles and it would still cost less to replace for the life span of a "real" turbo. Similar Garrett unit would run in the neighborhood of $1,200!

 

Ur migging right?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by FastCougar &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Yep ... for $275, they could fail every 20K miles and it would still cost less to replace for the life span of a "real" turbo. Similar Garrett unit would run in the neighborhood of $1,200!</TD></TR></TABLE>

i dont see how. its not ball bearing nor is it gt technology and its sub par as far as quality goes

 

Dude, you're fine. Most of the guys commentating have never welding anything in their lives. You probably should have posted some practice pics so that we could have given you a little bit of advice before you welded something like this.

Your turbo wont fall off by any means, you just might get small cracking in the future, which is also no big deal as you'll be able to fix it up.

 

This hole right here might be a problem:


Middle of the bottom part of the weld. Very visable in this picture:

 

Thanks for the input ... I also spotted that and plan on touching it up in the near future. I can only get to this project a few hours a week spread over a few days ... this is on my list. BTW, this was caused by me "running over" the spot weld. The hole is just to the right of the spot weld.

 

What's the manifold gonna be like....that's one long piece of pipe you got there leading in.

 

Transverse Mounted FWD V6 ... the "front" bank header will go around the oil pan and meet up with the rear header, merge collected together just under the transmission and then come up to this flange for a top mount system.

header primaries are 1.625" OD 16ga., tri merged with a 2" outlet. They are ball/socket connected to the up-pipe, which starts at 2" and merges again for a single up-pipe of 2.5". Down-pipe will 3" and wastegate will be a 38mm Tial with 1.5" tubing to/from with a 1.5" flex bellows on the down-pipe side. My goal is 350 whp ... chassis will have a lot of trouble with 250, much less 350

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, engine is a 3.0L V6. It's going in a 1998.5 SVT Contour. When this project is done, it's going to a true fabricator for duplication analysis and I will be producing yet another myself for my 1999 Cougar. The engine for the Cougar is built to sustain at a minimum 600+ hp, but the tranny will be the weak link. I have done all imagineable mods to the transmission short of a full gearset from Quafe. If you want to follow the progress of my project, here is a link.

http://www.contour.org/ubbthre...art=1

This is a VERY long read, but will give you some insight as to why I'm doing this.