Another great day.. thinking we could finish today was stupid ambitious, as we came no where near, but still very productive... a lot of time was spent making small adjustments here and there. For instance, we noticed the passenger side water feed to the turbo was up against the chassis... the stainless steel lines are like sharkskin and there was already some abrasion on the paint. We reclocked the fitting to be a little freer and also split some heater hose to wrap the line in. I also heat wrapped a portion that was near the manifold.
I also felt the fuel line extension-OEM fuel line connection was in a high heat area near the manifold and the connection is plastic, so I heat wrapped it as well and we repositioned the line so it reached the fuel rail inlet without strain.
Reinstalled the intake manifold.. that felt like a milestone! Found all the vacuum ports and harness plugs and those look good.
Modified the starter cable (just flatten out the angle on the terminal) and shrink wrapped the new boot into place, heat wrapped the portion of the run that ran near the manifold and reconnected it.
Installed the passenger side charge pipe..
Ran the wastegate lines.. There is a small heatshield around the pass wastegate and it looked like it could cut into the vacuum line so I bent it slightly..
Ran the PCV lines...
Ran the power steering lines...
Relocated the drivers side horn to clear the air filter (just had to move it up an inch or so).
Cut off a nub on the radiator support to clear the pass air filter.
New coupler for the Drivers side turbo outlet/intercooler inlet connection arrived and is WAY longer than the old one. No worries there about the pipe popping loose under pressure anymore.
Installed the MAFs and MAF tubes...
One note here, before we put in the MAFs, we taped the holes, left the tubes off the throttle bodies, and ran a shop vac from the air filter end of the pipe to make sure we sucked out any dust that might have fallen into the intake path... We figured the turbos would spin a little but they actually spun up quite a bit and we got to hear them whine a little - it was pretty exciting! Only did this for a few seconds on each side since there isn't any oil in the snails yet.
Also torqued down the intercoolers in their final position and went ahead and installed the air filters. We would have run the BOV's but the length of vacuum line Gamma provided is barely enough to run one of them, much less both and the auto parts store was closed.
That is one thing that has been a slight annoyance - the kit is extremely stingy on the hoses. The PCV and wastegate hose was barely long enough (none left over), they forgot to include power steering hose, and the BOV hose isn't nearly long enough. There isn't much provided for oil drain either, we'll have to see if we have enough when we install tomorrow... we know they left us short two hose clamps there as well. Another thing is, there is no spare hardware. You get just as many nuts and bolts as you need and no more.. god forbid you lose one! Gamma has spoken to us several times about working with them to refine the small details like this and to refine the instructions so hopefully all these notes I am streaming onto the forum will help me write up a pretty comprehensive report for them and the kit can be improved. The clamps were no big deal, as I hate the factory spring clamps so we just went to Ace and bought a big bag of screw clamps.
Overall, this was a really satisfying day as we accomplished a lot of things and were able to cross a lot of items off the list. Even filled the radiator before bed to let it settle and hopefully let some air out.
Still left to do (in orderish):
BOV lines
Turbo oil drains
Steering coupler
o2 housings
test pipes
Y-pipe
wheels
oil pan
fuel pump
Then we'll be ready for the initial startup! I'll probably leave the bumper/fender liners off until after we see no leaks. May even leave it off for the tune and flatbed the car to JTRAN. Haven't decided yet.
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