Project Turbo
Turning Up The Horsepower
My Second Attempt At Project Turbo
Well here is my situation now. I have one engine completely dismantled in the basement of my house, but it has a fair amount of corrosion in the cylinder walls where the pistons had stopped moving, and the pistons themselves are pretty far gone. To get this engine going again, I will probably have to take it to an engine rebuilder and have the cylinders bored out a bit, to get back into some good metal, then buy some oversize pistons and rings, and put it all back together. All of this translates into some big bucks. This clearly is not the road to follow for an EXPERIMENTAL engine like my turbo. I don't want to spend wads of cash only to have everything blown up in my face, after all.
So the solution to my problem is to find another engine, and that I have done. My dad was generous enough to donate the engine from his 81 Niva to my cause. This Niva's body is pretty far gone, but the mechanicals are still in pretty good shape, so the deal is the following: I get the engine, and in return I part out and catalog all the other stuff for re-installation on a different body. Pretty good deal, no?
The other engine, the one in my basement, will eventually be bored out and get new pistons (proabably high compression ones) and be rebuilt, but it will stay naturally aspirated and will be installed in one of my dad's Nivas.
The Donor
Well this is it, this is the 1981 Niva, the one that my parents bought 20 years ago and started this whole love of Nivas. You can see by the pictures that although the sheetmetal on the actual body is not too bad, the floorpan and rocker panels are completely rusted. You can also see, however, that the mechanicals look like they are still in fairly decent shape. And check out my new facilities too, or I should say, my new fancy gravel floor, much better than mud.
This is a picture of how I had the engine set up to try and get it started. I could get the engine to turn over, which is very good, but neither the fuel delivery nor the ignition was working, so I wasn't able to get it to start. This doesn't really matter, because those things will be replaced. Couldn't you just see me driving down the road with the engine hooked up like this? The last two pictures are of the engine once I had removed a few things.
This last picture shows approximately how the turbo will be sitting relative to the rest of the engine and engine bay. It will be a bit more to the front, and up, and... well you know, this is just to give you an idea of how stuff will be positioned.
