FG XR6T Build Details Unopened EFR 9180

[absmith]

EFR 9180 installation;

This was a bit of a mission. The worst part was the power steering high pressure hose and reservoir relocation. 

To keep it as stealthy as possible I decided to low mount the turbo on the stock exhaust manifold, this part of the fitment was very straight forward from there on it was fiddly.

 

High Pressure P/S hose was a pain, it is as if Ford specifically didn't want anyone to put an EFR on there, especially with the location of the P/S switch. I ended up bending up a piece of fencing wire to reflect the final shape I needed the first 10'' of the line to be and took it, along with the hose, to Pirtek. They cut and shut the hose in the correct orientation. This worked out OK and for around $30 I got out of it OK.

 

P/S reservoir relocation, pretty straight forward, but I did impose a caveat on myself, like with most other modifications I wanted to be able to return to stock at a later date if needed. So with this in mind I made a bracket to mount the new remote reservoir back near the brake booster, this picked up an existing (stock) hole to anchor the bracket. The reservoir is nicely hidden and looks stock in black. To connect to the P/S pump I machined up a brass hose tail that slipped in to the power steering pump and sealed using the same "O" ring that the standard reservoir uses, to retain it I drilled a small hole through the P/S pump that allowed me to put a split pin through the pump and pick up the edge of the hose tail. Wish I took a picture of this because it is hard to explain. Either way, it worked out fine and left me with the ability to remove everything and return it to stock later.

 

I used a banjo fittings that went to a 1/2'' hose tail to connect to one of the factory water lines with flexible hose. The second water line just bolted straight on to the EFR with a slight amount of bending required. 

 

The oil feed line bolted straight up (I already had the flexible braided Earls feed line from past issues...). I finished off the oil drain line with a couple of hose tails and a flexible hose from Pirtek, it was too close for comfort to run a flex hose that close to the turbine housing so I heat wrapped it and secured with stainless cable ties (same stuff you wrap extractors with).

 

Usual stuff for drivers side air box modification, Plazmaman battery relocation kit to get rid of the battery. I didn't want to pay for an airbox so I fabricated once from stainless myself, nothing special it just needed to cover the K&N pod filter. Got a mate to bead blast it to a matte finish which I don't mind. I was going to paint it black but the sand blast look grew on me.

 

The EFR's are a vee band exhaust connection (around 3" I think), so out with my old dump pipe that suited the GT3582 and a bit of cut and shut on that with mandrel bends from the local exhaust shop. It is bloody tight trying to squeeze a 4'' pipe between the turbine outlet and the firewall/steering shaft. It worked out OK after a few trial fits, just tack welded it in place then removed it from the car for final welding. I add an extra bracket to support the dump pipe that bolts to the engine block while I was at it. I was not keen on hanging the whole front section of the exhaust off of the turbine housing alone (which is how the old exhaust was done by others).

 

Hot side turbo piping was pretty straight forward, given that I already had a Nizpro intercooler installed it all lined up pretty well, just a couple of silicone elbows and it was away.

 

Then it was tuning time, to be honest I didn't need to do a whole lot, I have a wide band permanently installed in my dump pipe so I logged AFR's on some WOT runs, looked OK at around 11:1, listened for any pinging and then started throwing some more boost at it. Again, it is few years back when I did this so I think I pulled a couple of degrees of timing at full load. 

 

Apologies for the pictures, they are all I could find on my old hard drive, normally I would be able to take some more but I am not at home ATM.

 

EFR 9180 vs my old GT3576

 

Trial fitting of the EFR

Halfway through the fitment process, the remote P/S reservoir is not installed in this image, it ends up hiding to the left of the brake master cylinder.

[sixman]

Great thread and nice write up. Well done on the car - looks great and stealthy.

 

I also use a BW turbo - the EFR9176 (slightly smaller turbine wheel which is supposed to spool quicker). I see you also use the BW 0.83 IWG exhaust housing as well - I got comments that it is too small for the Barra, but still makes enough power for a street driven manual. Havnt found it to be a limitation yet.

[absmith]

Yeah, I used the borg warner match bot program to look pretty closely at what the turbo was capable of. It certainly looked good for 800hp. Whatever the case is it has to be a lot better than the GT3582.

Some time ago I toyed with the idea of installing a tapping point in the exhaust manifold to measure back pressure directly, kind of lost interest after a while.

Correct me if I am wrong but I think the EFR 9176 is a hybrid? Do they run the smaller exhaust wheel to allow a higher shaft speed limit on these turbos? I think the EFR 9180 is only good for 116,000 rpm while yours might be OK to 150,000? What power did you make with yours and on what fuel?

I had thought about this shaft speed issue a bit and began to wonder if I was overspeeding mine, like the tapping point idea I lost interest in this after it held together for 30,000 kms.

 

Speaking of holding together, or not, here are some depressing pictures of the oil pump failure I had, just another installment in the history of the FG. It survived fine but it managed to fail at a very inconvenient time, I was working on renovating a house while I was on annual leave for 4 weeks so while I was flat out trying to finish the renovation on a very tight deadline so I could rent the house out I had the additional side project of complete engine removal. That will teach me for limiter bashing the thing.

 

 

 

[k31th]

ouch; that oil pump failure didn't look nice... nothing like that comes at a "convenient" time, though, upon reflection.

[absmith]

Next installment, caster camber kits;

 

As mentioned above I installed Kmac caster camber kits, I like the design with no shimming required and a much larger range of adjustment however I didn't like the execution. The welding was not something I would trust at speed while throwing the car into corners or under heavy braking. Just imagine the torque applied to the upper control arms when braking a 1800kg car from 100+ km/h. I installed them for about 2 weeks with the thought that they (the manufacturer) must know what they are doing and it would be OK. While driving around my conscience got the better of me, the idea of them snapping off at speed gnawed at me, so I pulled it all apart again, ground all the welds off and re-welded every connection point with twice as much weld length while achieving decent penetration as compared to the original welds which as far as I could see, seemed to be just sitting on the surface.

These have been in the car for probably 7 years and 100,000km now, no issues, never slip out of adjustment, excellent. 

An additional tidbit for anyone interested, I did all of my wheel alignment work at home with string lines for toe and a digital level for camber. I never worried about what the caster angles were as an actual number. Yes, caster is important, definitely so this is how I approach it;

 

1. dial in as much caster as I can on the LH front wheel, this means take it to the limit of adjustment (shim or adjust the upper control arm so the top ball joint is as far toward the rear of the car as possible)
2. Dial in slightly less on the RH front wheel, if I had the actual numbers it would be something line 1 degree less caster on the RH front (upper ball joint slightly further toward the front of the car) On the FG's I think the caster angles end up being somewhere around 5 to 6 degrees, happy to be corrected here but this wont be too far off. I did experiment with offset drillings in the upper control arm mounts to dial in even more caster but found the car seemed to not like it too much so reverted back to closer to standard values.

Note- Caster is the best wheel alignment angle to use to get the car to drive straight (resist the camber of the road), you can do it with camber but this will cause unwanted wear on the inner edges of the tyres (excessive negative camber, in particular on the LH front)

 

     3. Set camber on both front wheels to just over -1 degree on each side (actual ended up being around -1.2- 1.3 degrees), there can sometimes be a bit of fiddling around as each change to camber affects caster and vice versa. You just need to work with it until you land in a spot you are happy with.

    4. Set string lines down each side of the car and set toe on the front and rear, I put a slight amount of toe in on the front, say around 1mm on each side.

 

Similar deal on the rear of the car but the factory set up doesn't allow much freedom in alignment sadly. There is one adjustment that changes both camber and toe at the same time so a compromise has to be struck between the two. I generally ended up with around 0.7 degrees negative camber and toe close to 0. It is never perfect due to the constraint I mentioned before. There are aftermarket kits available to sort this out but I never felt the need to bother. No such thing as caster on the rear.

 

Final step is to road test the car, promptly find out it pulls left or something just as irritating and go back and do all of the above again, repeat numerous times and after something like 6 months of dicking around arrive at a point where I am happy with it.

 

Images of caster camber kits below with before and after welds, you guys should be able to see which are which...

 

[Gabbo_32]

Good info on the K-Mac FUCA camber adjusting kit.

I have been eyeing them off for a while now but had the same thoughts as you about their strength but more in the adjustment and locking setup of it.

I will give them a go now and do the same and have them rewelded by my fabricator before I fit them.

Cheers for the info @absmith 

[absmith]

Next installment, Harrop Brakes, very brief this time;

 

As mentioned in my initial write up, I went on a pretty big mission to fix persistent brake shudder. This has been an issue in all Falcons from BA onward.

 

EF and EL falcons didn't have the issue as long as we ran factory rotors. Interestingly aftermarket rotors on EF/EL developed brake shudder over about 5,000-7,000 km. Machine the rotors and they would be OK for another 5,000 - 7,000 km and begin shuddering again.

 

My experience with EF/EL falcons was that the factory rotors were quite soft and wore very quickly, I remember the pads wearing into the rotors and raising lips on the outer edges of the rotors say 2mm high. Stock pads were lasting around 20,000km and rotors maybe 40,000km, this said there was never a shudder issue. Aftermarket rotors were a lot harder and lasted much longer but suffered from shudder. 

 

The EF/EL experience contributed to my suspicion that the rotor type (harder) played a key role in the issues seen in BA onward. The BA's were getting front pad life of up to 70,000km and rotor life well in excess of this. The rotors on BA's were not wearing out due to wear they were going undersize due to being machined numerous times to correct shudder.

 

I sat on the fence for a while after trying two sets of DBA rotors and disc machining of the stock rotors along with different pad types, none of this fixed the issue for more than 7,000km. Finally I sprung for Harrop brakes, funny story about this, the car was a novated lease through work at the time (hence all the stealthy easily reversible modifications) so I managed to get the lease company to pay for the Harrop upgrade by calling it a repair, sure it was my own money but it was pre-tax at least.

 

History aside, here is a shot of the LH front brake assembly, note the Kmac caster camber kits are installed in the background, also two allen head bolts through the chassis rail just above the caliper are holding the process west surge tank and 044 set up, still running the Bilstein shocks and Kings spring set up at this time. For the super observant out there you may notice the top left Kmac adjuster is at maximum adjustment outward (pushing the top ball joint rearward for maximum caster) while the RH adjuster is set to whatever it needed to be to get to -1.2 degrees camber. 

 

[adams355]

I have found more neg camber (1.2 is not enough you might as well not have it) on front with more toe in to be best so far, plus as much castor you can get in there, more on left yes. Rear definitely toe in but not to much, camber as is sitting. Next test is taking off the rear swaybar.

[kink]

Finally another car with 245/45/18s.

How did you find the fitment?

[absmith]

I run Nitto NT 05's on the factory wheels, I think they work pretty well. I would like a bit more width on both the front and rear but stock is still adequate.

 

Being a country car having a bit more sidewall and compliance in the tyres is a good thing. I have hit some nasty potholes and one gutter with no issues. As long as the wheels clear your brake package then no need to go larger diameter.