After much deliberation I finally decided to paint the manifold in wrinkle red. I now, kind of rice but in the end it was al about the money. I already had the can of wrinkle red and wasn't going to use it on anything else so... why not.
Anyway, I always feel kind of like an alchemist when painting with the wrinkle paint. As you can see in the pics, it first looks like a thick gloss paint. I just put all the paint on in one go without any primer. Smart thing would be to use an etching primer and start with one thick coat wrinkle and then a few thin layers... but the can doesn't say anything about primer and spraying in one go seems to work to. Ok, there are a few runners, but in the end you can hardly see them. After that I get the hot air gun and blow on the paint until it starts to 'shrink'. You can go all wild and make the wrinkles really big, which I did on the valve covers, but I didn't like that and I ended up sanding the wrinkles down on them. It's really fascinating to see the paint react on the heat. After the entire manifold was lightly wrinkled I put it inside to dry. It takes about 7 days for the paint to really harden up. After that I'll spray it with a little bit of heat resisting clear. Off course I've got no idea how it's going to hold up when the engine runs, we'll just have to wait and see. Next up is finishing the fuel rail and fitting it to the manifold.
And I got the water manifold welded. My old neighbor told me I shouldn't even try and weld it myself (he used to be a professional welder) and took me to a factory where they could do it for me. Well the people at FIB did a fantastic (and really inexpensive) job and I already test fitted it and it fits just perfect. Very happy right now. Picts of it fitted coming soon. That's it for now. I need to draw a comic now......
Here are the fuel rails for my top feeds.
Bolted on the manifold with some really wierd bosses I am not going to show....
...and bolted to the engine. Looking good. This is another one of those "we'll see if it works" projects so let's hope these really are 440cc injectors and the rails are not going to leek. But at least I made them so that I can switch real easy to other injectors....
While reading on how to make fuel rails I 'discovered' catch cans. When I pulled my engine apart I was really unhappy with al the dirty oil in the turbo and when I read that a catch can can catch that oil I thought I needed one. Or two actually. Of course you can buy them but I think they are kind of expensive for what they are, so I decided to build my own. A catch can is a very simple device, so I thought that making 2 of them would be quick and easy.... Well, I was wrong. It took me 6 freakin' days to build them. No, they didn't turn out to be complicated and it didn't take me hours and hours, it just didn't go smoothly. The 2 holes for the bracket for instants took (the machine) 4 hours to drill. Going to 7 different shops all across town to get the little fittings and then to find out I bought the wrong ones just after the shop closed, didn't help either. Well I can go on like that but I wont. I still need to finish the fuel rail, coolant tank and swirl tank. So I'll just lie to myself and say it all went super smoothly.... :D
Fitted the watermanifold. Fits great but after I cleaned some of the coolant lines I found out they kind of don't fit anymore. Doh. Well, if it wasn't that funny I could've gotten upset :D At least now I now why everybody else has the watermanifold kick out in a straight line.... No worries though, I might get the coolant lines to fit and probably I'm not even going to need them seeing as I need to redirect all the cooling and breather lines.
Also fitted the intake manifold for haha's and man, is there way to much red..... Luckily I'm out of red paint. Need to fit the fuelrails on the manifold first before I can install it. So much for the little update. Hope to be able to put some real hours in this project next week.
I finally got the valve covers on. I had painted them in a nice wrinkle red but I had destroyed the little half moons and I couldn't find new ones anywhere. So I had to make them myself. I wasn't looking forward to doing that and had put it off for a few months.... Well, in the end I did make them myself and it was about a 2 hours job (for parts that can't be more then a few euro's) Good thing, the buzz I got from putting the valve covers on was great. Next on the list, re-weld the water manifold (hope my welder is going to be up to the job) and make my new fuel rails.... And I am still not sure what color I want to make my intake manifold. The alu looks dirty, polishing is going to take far to long, black looks good but I can't find the paint I used on the altenator and I've got another can of wrinkle red but I find that a bit pretentious because it's not a sti engine.... decisions decisions.... :D
I was just updating my site and noticed that, while I am slowly building away on my engine, I wasn't taking pictures or updating any of it on the part of my site dedicated to my beetle. So I decided to change the updating to a blog. Here's an old picture of the 1302 half a year ago, I'll take some new pictures and place them here soon.
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