StanceWorks: Over-Engineering: Intercooler Mount, Oil Sump, PDM, And MORE! Honda-Swapped Ferrari

StanceWorks Video Transcript

So So the honda swap ferrari is on the ground it rolls around and it runs now we need to shift our attention to everything necessary to get this car driving under its own power for the first time unfortunately there’s still a lot of odds and ends we have to work out

Before it’s ready for prime time and some of the parts and pieces that we need are not something we can just order up off the shelf we’ve got to make them ourselves we’ve got a handful of fabrication projects i’ve been putting off because they’re some of the most

Intricate ones we’ve done so far and today we’re going to tackle them this should be a good one let’s dive into it let’s turn the clock back to the last time we were working in the engine bay in that episode we built a brace that spanned across the engine bay for

Chassis support but also offered us the opportunity to design a mount that can support the water to air intercooler there were a few design constraints involved because the water to air intercooler is quite heavy after all it is full of water of course we could have mounted it from

The bottom using a support but due to the fact that there’s so much wiring and hoses underneath this thing it made more sense to hang it from the top so we booted up fusion 360 and repurposed the exact same mount we used to secure our ecu to our rear firewall

This will allow us to share some design language between parts and keep some cohesiveness among things that we create in the engine bay we drew up the intercooler itself and added a tube that represents our spanning cross brace and got to work designing the rest using a combination of aluminum to

Attach to the intercooler and steel to attach to the brace we designed a mount that at the time i thought was a good solution but after you guys made some comments we realized that unless i absolutely nailed the welding procedure this thing was gonna warp and never go

Together the right way it also had no bushings and allowed no movement or give and thus the aluminum might fatigue over time so we scrapped this idea and i redesigned it i focused on getting rid of some of the angles that would make fabrication and assembly a challenge and instead focused

On incorporating a bushing and a sleeve the purpose here is to isolate the intercooler from vibration and give it some degrees of movement hopefully allowing it to last a lot longer than it would otherwise so i sent all these files out to send cut send to have them cut and they

Showed up in our most recent order everything was pre-bent to our specs and ready for assembly and all i had to do was head over to the lathe and machine some small metal inserts to go in the middle the housing that will ultimately hold our bushing the tolerances of the send cut send

Parts are fantastic everything fits together exactly as i hoped that it would a nice snug fit without needing a press for assembly all of the joints were designed as corner joints so it’s just a matter of filling them in with 16th filler rod and the outcome is

Pretty decent i’m always a critic of my own welds but seeing as these will be up front and center in the engine bay i’m not disappointed now let’s head over to the lathe and start machining our bushings my bushing material of choice is some high density polyurethane i used this

Same material to make some bushings for a buddy’s control arms on his izuzu viacross about a month ago and i found it to be at least somewhat easily machined and so it should do the trick for this job too as an amateur on the lathe it did take

Me some time to get the tolerances of these bushings right but ultimately it worked out i machined the inside to a 10 millimeter inner diameter so that we can insert a steel sleeve through the middle the purpose of the steel sleeve is so that the bolt that passes through won’t

Wear away at the poly bushing which would happen over time inevitably but with these finished up we have all the parts and pieces we need to actually start building this mount and first on the list is to install these bushings into their housings they pressed in nice

And snug and will allow us to locate the rest of the parts for this assembly Everything looks pretty good so we need to tack it together disassemble it and weld it up the pressure is on for this one because these will definitely be my most visible aluminum welds on the project so far so i gave things a little bit of extra

Time and gave this part that once over extra cleaning to try to get these welds to turn out at least halfway decent Now if you’re enjoying this episode and you want to see more if you like the information that i share or all the how-to that goes into this project be sure to subscribe or if you are subscribed leave a like as it all helps with that crazy algorithm we’re all striving to satisfy Now it’s a really good sign during reassembly that our bushings still fit between the aluminum uprights of this mount perfectly and all of the bolt holes still line up with zero slot we finally get to see what this thing’s gonna look like in the car and seeing it

All mocked up i’m excited this thing looks sweet i’m always gonna think there’s room for improvement on these welds but it’s turning out not half bad now we just need to get it mocked up in the car get everything lined up and start tacking everything into place

The next good sign during this mock-up phase is the fact that the base of the aluminum mount sits perfectly on top of the intercooler we got all of our measurements right in cad so this thing fits exactly as it was supposed to i’m not saying that’s hard to do i’m

Just surprised i didn’t mess it up before tacking the steel brackets into place i had my buddy john apply some torque and get everything lined up perfect because we can’t really go back after this part’s done And now we’re off to final welding welding the bracket to the top of the intercooler was admittedly quite nerve-racking if i mess this up it could be a huge pain to repair this thing needs to hold air and water so there’s no room for error but it went well as

Everything seems to have been doing lately and now it’s all back in the car and officially for the first time mounted We’ll have to make a couple of changes i’ve got to find some clearance for one connector on the engine but ultimately i think we landed on an awesome design that should work and fingers crossed it should work well now i’m seeing room for improvement in the details already but i’m really happy

With how this mount turned out it does a couple of important things the first is that it gives the intercooler just a little bit of room for movement which is important because the engine is going to move the intercooler piping is going to move and we need some compliance so that

Nothing is under stress and we don’t wind up with aluminum fatiguing and cracking that would be a bad thing but the mount’s also really strong so it should support the weight of the intercooler which is good because the inner core is really heavy it’s completely full of water but on top of

Both of those i think that it also looks really cool i think it’s a better solution than a mount hidden underneath the intercooler so that it’s just kind of floating there i mean that would be cool too but this is an intricate piece and it looks handmade and i like it it’s

A cool focal point in the engine bay and i wouldn’t be able to make this thing without knowing how to use cad and having access to laser cutters i’m pushing you guys to learn fusion 360 all the time i even have a tutorial on the

Channel if you want to check it out and if you learned the basics send cut send has given me a discount code to give you guys it’s 15 off literally anything i don’t get a kick back from it it’s just a good old-fashioned discount for you

Guys so you can try their services and make awesome looking parts just like this on your own and you can get metal cut you can get composites cut pretty much any material you can think of and they now offer powder coat finishing so it’s awesome start to finish so give it

A try use that discount code it’s in the description it’s at the bottom of the screen let me know what you think now on to the next fab project we’re still focusing on the back end of the car but this time we’re going to be working underneath it let’s talk about

The oil drain from the turbo we have a hose running from it directly into our scavenge pump to help return the oil to our dry sump oil tank but some of you guys pointed out that we can’t do it this way if we have the pump connected directly to the turbo we’ll

Literally suck the oil out of the turbo and run it dry so what we need to do instead is mount a tank between the two we’ll run the oil into the tank and then run the tank to the scavenge pump now there’s probably a tank we could buy

Online that would work for this job but we’ve got some spatial constraints and i figured why not try making our own i’ve got a lot of spare sheet metal aluminum and i’d like to get better at working with it and more importantly better at welding it so we’re gonna make

A really simple tank three inches by five inches by five inches with a single inlet and a single outlet once we confirm with our cardboard template that it’ll fit in the small space that we have available to us we can unfold it transfer that to aluminum and cut it out

Thankfully everything looks like it should fit with room to spare so we’ll transfer all of those dimensions to some plate and cut it up in the stomp sheer This six-sided box is designed with two three-sided pieces and those pieces are identical so we’re gonna fold them at the same time on the bender to make sure that they line up without issue and for the second time in one episode i’ll admit i surprised myself with how well these pieces fit together

After giving them a solid bump into place all of the gaps work perfect no massaging or modification needed in fact i didn’t even need clamps to hold this thing in shape as i welded it together that doesn’t mean it won’t warp but it doesn’t seem to have

For the welding i followed some of your guys advice and dropped my cup size for the aluminum and honestly that worked out really well i paired that with three thirty seconds lanthanated tungsten and 16th filler rod and i felt like i had a lot of control over how this went

Now i know practice goes a long way and i’ve been doing a lot of it lately but i’m really happy and surprised with how well the welding went on this box i don’t want to give credit where credit isn’t due but i did buy a new tool and i

Want to show you guys so here’s some tool talk some of you guys may have noticed the new welding helmet in the other welding shots and it’s been a minute since we’ve talked about tools i bought a new tool welding helmet is a tool if you don’t

Want to talk about welding helmets we’re going to nerd out on them for a second so skip ahead but i have to say this is one of the coolest things i have purchased in a long time this welding helmet is an optrel crystal 2.0 and what’s special about it is

It is full color if you’ve ever used a welding helmet before whether it’s an auto dimmer or not you’ll know that everything is basically green sometimes blue but pretty much green there’s no color definition at all this thing is 95 give or take full color you can tell the

Color of everything you can even see the color of your welds while you’re welding once it has dimmed and you’ve struck an arc it’s incredible let me be clear i am not paid by these guys i did not get this for free i paid for this helmet it

Is expensive it was 450 bucks let me be clear i’m not saying everybody needs to go out and buy one right now but if you weld as often as i do and you don’t have one of these if you buy one you will be happy with it it’s

Incredible i don’t want to say that a helmet made my welding better but my welding is better after getting a new helmet i can say that in good faith this thing’s pretty fantastic a buddy of mine suggested it to me he said that he loved

His so much he bought a second one so that he has one for tig and one for mig as it gets splattered he said if you buy it you’re gonna love it do it trust me and i did i’m saying the same thing i think this

Thing is pretty incredible if you need a welding helmet and you want to spend some extra money this one is definitely worth buying there you have it so now we need to add that inlet and outlet to our metal tank and i’m using vibrant performance weld on an fittings

And i like these a lot because they have a really nice filleted edge on the back side that allows for really solid flow characteristics over a lot of the other ones that i’ve used in the past they’ve also got a nice machine register on the back side which makes locating

Them in a hole nice and simple we just had to punch some one-inch holes into our metal box and weld the whole thing together the last piece of the puzzle is welding on a mount so that we can attach it to that chassis rail underneath the turbo

I want to add a second wing to this so it’s in double shear but unfortunately i forgot to get an extra one cut so we’re working with what we’ve got but overall i’m really happy with how this box turned out scotch-briting the surface has it looking pretty good and

It has me eager to build even more with aluminum as hoped but expected this thing fit perfectly into place and our bolt holes lined up and with it in we are ready to rock all we have left is to order some fittings so we can custom make two new hoses

With the tank in place let’s turn our attention to another important aspect of getting this car driving before we got the car running we installed a rywire pdm along with our nexus r5 ecu today we’re going to upgrade that pdm to a nexus pd16 from haltech

If you aren’t familiar with what a pdm is the short version is that it stands for power distribution module and with this we’re able to provide power to all of our electronic accessories like our water pumps it eliminates the need for things like relays and fuses because it has an

Internal circuit breaker and it allows us to control everything with the ecu itself to install this pdm i simply bolted it to the firewall where we had the previous one mounted i’m gonna have to fill some holes but worry about that later from a wiring standpoint this is about

As simple as it gets i swapped the end of our power supply cable for an amphenol radlock connector and ryan from rywire came over and re-pinned the connector which happens to be the same there might not be a ton of wiggle room here but there’s enough and that’s what counts

With this all of the car’s wiring is wrapped up and all we need to do is boot up the nexus software and program the pdm to interface correctly with the ecu itself i’m excited to show you guys that in a future episode now some of you guys have seen the

Previous episodes and you’re probably wondering why i have removed rywire’s pdm is there something wrong with it or why i don’t want it so on and so forth well the simple answer is there’s nothing wrong with that pdm but when we wired this car this pdm didn’t exist it

Wasn’t even something we had access to but since it has just come out we’ve got one of the very first ones here it offered ryan an opportunity to work with this one and because they’re both hal tech units they’ll interface a little bit better and we can kind of test and

Troubleshoot some of that it’ll make all of the integration of these systems a little bit easier so again nothing wrong with his unit ryan makes great stuff but because this one’s available we said hey let’s take the opportunity and use it now while i’m in the car i do want to

Talk about roll cages for a second i’ve got some questions for you guys and i could use some opinions so leave a comment the decision i have to make i mentioned this in the last episode is do i put a full roll cage in this car you can see

The amount of headroom i have it is not much i have enough room for a helmet and that is about it there is not much room from my head to the a-pillar or to the roof line if i were to have kind of a roof bar in here or overhead bars in a

Roll cage i couldn’t drive this car without a helmet and be safe if i were to hit my head on a bar i’m going to wind up brain dead or worse we don’t want that so the question is if we go full cage it kind of eliminates this car as being a

Street car one it won’t be safe and two if you watch me get in and out of this car it is very difficult to do there’s not much room between the seat and the kind of window line or door line itself adding door bars in the way will make

Ingress and egress a big challenge it’s not going to be easy to do not comfortable it’s going to limit how often i want to even get into the car now on the other hand is a cage fully necessary well i do think a cage would be helpful in overall chassis rigidity

And making the car perform well but i don’t think that a cage is necessary for the type of racing that i do i don’t race wheel to wheel or door to door i’m not running up pike’s peak we’re talking about flat southern california tracks with lots of runoff some rocks

Anything could happen but overall i don’t really think i need a full cage but it’s still not a bad idea it’s better than not having one i’m just at this crossroads between deciding how much street ability this car really has and whether or not i want

To retain any of it do i throw it all out the window i mean ultimately i don’t really want a car i can’t go out and enjoy on the roads but if there’s a full cage in here responsibly i can’t do that anymore so i don’t know let me know what you guys

Think i still haven’t decided and last but not least one final race car tier part for the car wasp performance sent over a new starter for this thing that can replace our autozone special that’s currently under the hood wasp’s specialty is high torque high power lightweight starters true

Race car great equipment instead of auto parts store specials that might leave us stranded at the track we’ll get this thing installed as soon as we get the car on the lift to install our arrow on that note though this episode is a wrap what are we going to be doing for

The next one well i bought a bunch of parts and pieces and tools to start tackling the brake lines for this car it’s one of the other big fabrication projects or at least diy jobs that we’ve got to do from the ground up and hopefully i’ll make enough progress by

The end of the week to pump out an episode for you guys i want to make sure it’s worthwhile that it’s not kind of half finished but i’m excited to dive into it should be fun should be something you guys can learn how to do too we’re gonna hardline the whole car

And make it work anyways i’ll catch you guys at the end of the week thank you as always for the support i’ll catch you then This