ETS Drift Ute – Busy on a Sunday Morning

Yesterday i showed you that tube creation which was built to emulate a dummy engine block, it took a few hours to do but it was essential to keep progressing, getting into it early this morning i warmed up with a decent TIG session and a coffee of course.

I was lucky that the throwout bearing ID was 33.1mm and that was the exact size of some tube i had lying around, you can never have too much scrap metal laying around!

Most of the other steel was from metalland, i love my local metalland and i bet they love me even more, theres a product they sell called ERW Bright, it comes in oval, square and round, it welds really nicely and is dirt cheap.

Its always a gamble to see how much the welding process has “pulled” the steel, the best way to decrease “pulling” is to have as smaller gap as you possibly can between joins, a little extra time in the building process saves a lot of pain when fitting. Also tack as many positions as possible and then start your weld on the opposite side of the tack.

The frame slid in perfectly and bolted up to the engine mounts nicely.

The dummy head can then be lifted on to the top plate.

I used the factory head bolts and cut up some sleeves to eliminate taking 1 hour to tighten them up, head bolts are 11mm and therefore impossible to get nuts for, here is where a massive bolt collection comes in handy, M12 Nyloc bolts will tighten up nicely on the 11mm thread, not ideal but it works.

With the head now bolted down and in place i can fit the turbo and measure up a heap of things.

The first thing i wanted to work out was the waste gate position, i had no room in below the manifold and wanted to make the waste gate easily accessible.

Half an hour later and heap of grinding, hole-sawing, filing and TIGing it was a problem solved.

The waste gate pipe will exit out into the wheel well, ill leave that for another day though as there a stack of other jobs to do.

Next step design an intercooler and get that ticked off!

10 Comments
  1. Sikest ride dude.10/10 man

    Reply
  2. Those Brae manifolds are so nice. Is the turbo a TD06? What are the specs of it? Flange size? Hot side size? And you usually pair with an 11.50 lift cam correct? Is the rest of head stock? From watching videos of you drifting it seems like you get great power and good response.

    Reply
  3. I know you have probably already discarded this idea being that you are placing the waste gate dump in the wheel well, but it would definitely be cool, in my opinion, to run the exhaust and waste gate dump as a “stack” up into the air right behind the cab hahaha. I’m not a big fan of “stacks” on diesels, as most of they are way bigger than necessary, but I think, it would look pretty damn cool ha HA. Laughing just because of how sweet it would look, very unpractical, but the “cool” factor is there 100%. KEEP UP THE EXCELLENT WORK, I cannot wait until the exhaust fabrication starts!

    Reply
  4. nice work mate i check your blog every monday for updates…. what TIG welder are you using, are you happy with it so far…?

    Reply
    • should be interesting how good your welds hold up when she gets driving, Got a lot of welds to check when you service her.

      Reply
  5. Nice work Nigel, going to need some serious heat shielding around that manifold, heat transfer around that frame will be of epic proportion.

    Reply
  6. Thanks for the tips. I learned the hard way when my chassis dolly shrunk when finish welding. I’m learning a lot about the work process watching you and why certain things are done in a certain order. Keep up the awesome work!

    Reply
  7. Jeeezz Nige, do u just sit back some nights, and just stare at what you have created from nothing…. lolllll unbelievable 😀 must come over one day to see the lux again

    Reply
    • I do steve a lot 🙂 Your more than welcome anytime steve, you can talk me through some Haltch X Racepak ideas 😉

      Reply
  8. yeah i would really love to Nige! I have so many things going through my mind right now relating to suspension geometry, arm lengths roll center (list goes on and on) and seeing this again will help me understand how it all works and how to “better it” must come up… i have another question for you. Since you have made up this little frame, dummying up the crankshaft position, have you worked out where the center of gravity will be for this car? What you have created with the frame will give a very accurate guide as to where the “CG” will be and then building the rest of the suspension around that. Im not sure how deep you have gone with your suspension geometry but god i would love to really check out how it all looks. When you dumped the idea of running a factory rear cradle… god was i happy for you hahaha yes, racepak is a breeze thanks a lot Nige 😀

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>