Soon coming to a show near you! This '89 Acura Legend will soon be sporting a turbocharged V6 and a removable hard top (since someone decided to remove the roof with a saws-all when the car was younger). Don't worry, extra support was installed under the body to keep it rigid. A roll cage is going in, however, and that extra support will be cut out.
Currently, this Legend is being stripped under the hood, and new paint sprayed therein. The engine will look nothing like this once done (below, right). The car looked like the pic on the left when I got it, except for the wheels, which were factory, and the top was made of canvas. I trashed the canvas top, and plan the new hard top to be of a 2-piece design. Once part will remove like a targa piece, and the other part will be the rest of the roof. It also didn't have the racing seats in there, those were added by yours truly.
The wheels are 19" Motegi DV5. Perfect offset for this car. I'm using Intrax springs, with Tokico shocks. The ride is better than stock, and handles like a dream on this setup.
Headers out-of-the-box and installed. The headers were hard to get lined up, but they fit...barely! The O2 sensor wires have to be lengthened for the OBX headers. We will be modifying these headers for a turbo setup later on, which will consist of basically welding on a section of bended stainless pipe, and fitting the turbo flange to it.
The heat exchanger is a universal type from CX Racing. Not too much cutting had to be done to make it fit the already chopped up Erebuni front end. This is a air/water cooling system for the charge air. This exchanger will keep the water cool, while the water circulates to two other air chillers in the engine compartment.
Here is one of the intercoolers I am using. These come in several lengths from 6" to 12", and can be installed anywhere there is a straight section of charge air tubing. More efficient than air-to-air coolers, and you dont have to run those big pipes to the front of the car!
This is probably where I'm sticking this one. It will give the charge air a preliminary cool-down before it goes through another box-type cooler.
The box cooler will go here, giving the air a final chill before going staight to the throttle body.
And the box cooler itself, well, this is gonna be interesting.
Hope it fits in there....
I plan to use a Garrett GT3076R turbocharger with 56 trim compressor. To get more fuel in there with the boost, I've upgraded the injectors (over 3x) to 750cc low resistance injectors from Marren Fuel Injection.
THE ELECTRONICS: Unlike many people, I like to make sure my fuel management is taken care of before I slap on a turbo. For this, I'm using a stand-alone ECU from SDS. It allows complete mapping for ignition timing and fuel injection.
SDS programs their ignition software to work with MSD ignition systems, so it's also sporting an MSD-6A ignition box, which is wired to the factory coil.
The SDS system was mocked up to the engine for a test and street tuned the best I could with my butt-dyno. The power increase from being able to custom-tune was substantial. I could advance my timing and run on high octane, or tune it down for regular grade. It was great, to not have to swap chips!
I am now ready for the tear town and restoration of of the body. The engine finally failed on me at 350,000 miles, which is what I was waiting for before I started a new motor build. The ground-up portion of this build shall continue on the next page.
Partially sponsored by:
The best place in Middle Tennessee to buy your Honda/Acura automobile
