The Shart - Adventures in turbocharging with a 1964 Dodge Dart

759NRNG wrote: What is the official name for this event? Will there be any photobucket sites for this?

Back to the 50's. I'm not sure of any specific online coverage though.

Here's a bonus picture somebody I know snapped heading into the 'cruise in' this weekend. I like it and I think I'll put the roof rack back on tonight. I think it looks cool! Thanks for the shot Larry!

Also, I look like a creep. It's awesome.

Did you have to do any cutting/drilling/etc to mount the roof rack? Awesome build, keep it up!

need a surf board or two on there

In reply to Homework:

Those Yakima mounts pinch the drip rails and no mods are necessary, they are Yakima Raingutter Towers. I use the same ones on my Nova:

In reply to Nessumsar:

Thanks!

In reply to Nessumsar:

Correct, and sweet Nova!

Weekend update to follow shortly.

OK so weekend update. Thursday night in anticipation of the show I changed the oil, added a radiator overflow (factory just dumped to the earth... oh the 60's), and put some mad-tite JDM inspired speed-holes in my valance. Now, before you fly off the handle there was a practical intention with these. They're infront of the radiator and I am hoping to gain some airflow & cooling to help with the increased heat of the turbo. Anyhow, onto some pictures.

Radiator overflow fab starts here-

Then this

Then a bit of cutting, placing, marking, welding, and spray painting later and you have this little fella.

a chunk of old exhaust tubing contoured to the shape of the bottle with a bolt welded on.

here it is in final position.

The bracket is bolted to the core support and the bottle is hose clamped to it. Simple and somewhat effective.

Fancy, we tended to use plastic bottles that you had to change every month or so because of heat deformity!

Some more stuff- Here's the speed (cooling) holes plotted out and started I'd like to add that I actually used a tape measure and a punch to help actually keep these all square, and they came out looking at least mostly square, so that's pretty good.

All holes cut, but that valance is still way more WHITE than the car. Let's do something about that. Poorly masked and sprayed. Also poorly. The color is 'Wimbledon white' which is a Ford color, and it still doesn't match (obviously) but it's considerably closer than the stark white before. I had to bring my Fiance to the parts store to help me pick out a color because I am NOT good at it.

Finished product! There was something very satisfying about cutting into the factory sheetmetal. A certain level of berkeley it that I don't normally have. It's freeing.

In reply to dropstep:

I wanted to be a little classier than plastic, but like, not classy enough to purchase a real overflow. Truth be told I also googled the melting point of glass because I wanted to be sure it wasn't going to just burn up right there by the exhaust. So far so good.

My old renault has a giant glass bottle for an overflow. Looks like there should be 4 dozen pickled eggs in it!

Someone here could probably lend you a dimple stamp-thingy to round over the edges of your speed holes.

In reply to RossD:

Ooof, I don't think ANYONE needs to lend me a dimple-die. I'm quite certain I would swiss-cheese the whole car. I love the way those look.

Here's some bonus shots from the weekend. The first two are a success story that you probably don't want to read, but I'm going to share it anyway. So a couple weeks ago you may remember I had some issues with grounds and got the car towed home on flatbed while I got beers. Well I went to meet with the same group of people (who aren't car people and kinda laughed/scoffed at the car being broken last time) at a different brewery. This time we had zero issues and cruised through downtown, got some beers and shot some hoops, and wished my friends who are moving out to Oregon safe travels. Small success but I'll take it. I took these pictures for the victory and because I dig the look of a classic (if you can call this a classic) car out in the wild being used for something other than car shows. Enough soap box style rambling, here's the pictures. Modest Brewing- good stuff if you're into hipster craft beers.

And here's a bonus shot of my dad's 1940 Ford rollin down the highway. Ignore the windshield glare.

4th of July (ish) Update!

Last Friday I was all set on taking the car over to my Mom's place and just putting it away until after the wedding. Focus on the truck (which we will be taking our honeymoon road trip in) and not tinker with the unnecessary Shart.

That was until this happened.

Hey, those carburetor gnomes must have paid me a visit! Just kidding, the fuel and spinny spin side of this equation have been relocated to the "work bench".

I figure the longer runner design will cool the intake char... No. I got a wild hair and decided there was no time like the present to try and rebuild & re-seal my eBay turbo.

So, apart comes the turbo.

Hmm. That side shouldn't have oil in it... I'm hopeful that if my carbon seal fits I should be able to keep oil in the thing, the turbo was definitely using some oil.

Both covers off, time to take off the compressor wheel. Luckily someone at the factory in China already marked it for me, so I can keep it balanced (relatively speaking) when I reassemble it.

And boom goes the dynamite! Workbench full of exploded turbo.

Frankly aside from the seals not being intended for draw through the turbo was still in very good shape. For $144 I'm pretty impressed with the quality of this piece. All the castings were pretty clean, the bearings still looked new (as they should it's got probably less than 1,000 miles on it), and neither of the wheels were chipped or anything. Fairly miraculous to me. Like I said I have the carbon seal and a full rebuild kit on order and am very hopeful that, assuming real parts will play nice with my eBay garret knock off, I will have a drastic improvement in oil consumption. I also think I will be able to get the car to run better and possibly get more power out of it as I'm no longer running some kind of hybrid-forced-oil injection into the combustion chambers.

Wish me luck!

I'm waiting for you to weld some injector bungs into the intake manifold and port inject it.

In reply to bentwrench:

You and me both... There are a few things stopping me- first of all the intake is cast and I don't think it will weld that well. This could be overcome by just drilling and tapping the intake and screwing in injector bungs, which I think is a real thing. Also I have zero knowledge of fuel injection, although that seems like as good a reason as any to do it. Lastly there is some concern of the charging system. They didn't like to put high amperage alternators on these old gals so that would need to be addressed when running an electric pump, some kind of ecu, etc. Trust me though the idea is in my head.

You can always braze in the injector bungs.

I'm sure you've seen this already?

Start there, especially on a PickNPull discount day and then replace the GM ECU with MegaSquirt when you're ready to start tuning and upping the boost a little. MegaSquirt understands GM sensors out of the box and was originally built from a project to reverse engineer and improve the GM/Bosch EFI solutions from the eighties.

The only catch is how well the stock GM EFI will handle a turbocharger, that will require a little research.

I say keep it carbed but add a small intercooler behind the grille. A little IC goes a long way.

crankwalk wrote: I say keep it carbed but add a small intercooler behind the grille. A little IC goes a long way.

Can't intercooler a suckthrough carb setup.

Would need to convert to blowthrough, which you might as well go EFI at that point since keeping the box you need to put the carb in sealed isn't fun.

In reply to Stefan:

I have taken a gander at that, I think if anything I would like to try a fuel-only (to start) port style injection because it seems like the most effective. I had thought about putting a TBI unit from a Chevy truck in place of my carb, but that seems just as worthless for the most part. The carb offers a lot of off the shelf tune-ability. More so than an outdated fuel injection setup in my eyes. Having a wideband on the carburetor is fascinating wonderful stuff. I think if I can get the turbo happy being ran draw-through I will be able to make the carb very efficient.

And if I'm being honest I kinda like the 'carbureted turbo car' because there are plenty of younger people who think it can't work.

Once the turbo is happy and oil consumption is at an acceptable level, I want to do some upgrades to the brakes and wheels. Right now it has:

A.) single master cylinder- would prefer a dual.

B.) Four wheel drum brakes, surprisingly acceptable for normal driving, but worthless for anything spirited.

C.) 13" wheels, which I really do dig BUT they offer little for grip or tire options. I want to go to normal 4.5" bolt pattern and front disks, then get some 14" or 15" wheels with some 195 or 205 width tires.

Option C may be an over the winter project as it's going to be fairly costly. $600 for a brake kit, possibly a driveshaft to play nice with my other rear end, and a full set of wheels and tires. I've been hemming and hawing over this for a long time. I MAY be able to get the brakes from a junkyard, and I may not have to shorten the driveshaft, but I'm not sure. My transmission also has a weird front u-joint (ball and trunnion vs. standard U joint) that makes me nervous to berkeley with changing the driveshaft. May have to have a custom slip-joint style shaft made which won't be cheap.

Gunchsta wrote: In reply to bentwrench: You and me both... There are a few things stopping me- first of all the intake is cast and I don't think it will weld that well. This could be overcome by just drilling and tapping the intake and screwing in injector bungs, which I think is a real thing. Also I have zero knowledge of fuel injection, although that seems like as good a reason as any to do it. Lastly there is some concern of the charging system. They didn't like to put high amperage alternators on these old gals so that would need to be addressed when running an electric pump, some kind of ecu, etc. Trust me though the idea is in my head.

Injector bungs will braze in just fine or you could find a aftermarket aluminum intake and put bungs in that.

No EFI knowledge because you have not done it yet, If you can make a carb work you can do EFI, Megasquirt is only as hard as you make it.

You can hang a giant alternator on that thing like one off a Van. A 60amp alternator will run that car fine (electronic regulator) with everything on and a booming stereo!

In reply to bentwrench:

Aftermarket aluminum intakes are a click away... but they're also $300 which is a killer for me. But I do really want to play with megasquirt on something. Especially if I started with fuel only; I'm fairly confident I could make that work.

And I also realize that getting a good alternator on it isn't the end of the world, and I'm pretty sure there is an "easy button" for that as well from powermaster, but again more $$$ than I care to monkey with. GM 1-wire could probably even be made to work with some custom bracketry.

This may all kinda be dictated by the pending turbo rebuild- if the carbon seal doesn't fit my turbo for some reason (it should, but again eBay vs. real Garret) I'll probably be forced to NOT run the car draw through anymore. When and if that happens, I think the next logical step may well be some kind of EFI.

Gunchsta wrote: Here's a bonus picture somebody I know snapped heading into the 'cruise in' this weekend. I like it and I think I'll put the roof rack back on tonight. I think it looks cool! Thanks for the shot Larry! Also, I look like a creep. It's awesome.

If I run across the Shart @ the Downtown Hastings car show I'll be sure to say "Hi!"

Hope the re-seal works, but it would surprise me that the manufacturer would choose to save a fifth of a cent with a crappy seal rather than cheaping out on the expensive parts of the turbo (e.g. balancing labour).

If all they need is to be refreshed with 'real' seals and then put back together that's very exciting indeed. With recent Pick N Pull price increases in my area, new Chinachargers are getting pretty close to the same price as a junkyard pull.