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Here’s my progress on the 16V Syncro manifold as promised. (Apologies for words and text having been shamelessly just copied as posted elsewhere.)
I’m going to fit my 16V G60 into the G60 Syncro, and I was keen on having one just like the VWMS Limited cast manifold so that I could run the standard G60 Syncro downpipe. So earlier this year I invested in an R-tech 200A AC/DC TIG welder, with the manifold being the main excuse for buying it.
Initially I made a jig to hold the downpipe flange in the right place on the back of the 16V engine. To do this I built a jig that mounts between the rear engine mount lugs and flange on the 8V Syncro manifold on the back of the G60 block. Then moved that across to a 16V engine.
My friend Alan Lawrence designed the flanges for me. These were then water jet cut out of 12mm 316L stainless by Waterjet Precision UK Ltd (www.cncwaterjet.co.uk).
All Schedule 10 pipe fittings and a length of straight (all 316L stainless) were obtained from http://www.allstainlessltd.co.uk/.
As an alternative to the drama of having to argon purge inside the tubing, I decided to try out a product from the US called Solar Flux instead. It’s usually pretty expensive but I got it very well priced from PCES. It works very well. The reason you gas purge inside stainless steel tubing is because the reverse side of the weld ‘sugars’ very severely when exposed to the air inside. Therefore, you need to have argon on both sides of the weld — argon via the TIG welder as you normally would, and argon fed via the inside of the tubing. However, Solar Flux is a powder you mix with methanol into a paste and apply that to the reverse side instead. Million times easier than purging. It does leave a funny and extremely tough glassy residue though, which you would probably want to grind away if the manifold is being used for a turbo to avoid the risk of it forming debris.
I arranged this setup to enable me to mark a perfectly true radius cut on the pipe fittings.
That’s how far I’ve got so far. I need to pick up an argon gas refill in the week and hopefully by next weekend it’ll be complete. The hardest part is already done; completing the runners to the head flange will be quite trivial now.
Thanks gents!
Chris, apologies for missing your question before about the cost of the flanges. I don’t have the figure to hand at the moment, but I think they were in the order of £100 for both, by Waterjet Precision UK Ltd. Their pricing was very cheap actually compared to other quotes. I’d need to dig out the exact cost though.
Few more pictures from Sunday night when I very nearly completed it. Just have a couple of areas to fill in still. (Excuse the shonky phone images.)
I still haven’t actually tested and run this manifold yet. I’m still working on the G60 Syncro’s shell.
I had the manifold skimmed recently though, to complete it.
The manifold had a little bit of distortion in the flanges which was to be expected. The distortion was minimised because I had the head flange bolted to a scrap 16V head and the downpipe flange mounted to a massive slab of steel during TIG welding. The distortion has been machined away by the machine shop I use (Robert Walker Engineering near Chipping Norton).
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