Is Your Car Safe to Turbo?

so you want to

turbo

charge

your

classic car, you want to make more power, you want to make some cool noises and of course you want a bunch of guys to think you're super cool, trust me, I get it, but

turbo

charging a car can feel like that. . overwhelming there is so much to do there are so many parts how do you know which turbo is right for you? How do you know if all

your

parts are going to work together? What is adjustment? And first of all, the most important thing is that my engine is even

safe

to turbo charge. that's what we're going to look at today, we're going to do a compression test and a leak test so we can determine the health of this engine and whether it's going to blow up or not.

I'm Zach and this. It's a money pit, we're finally starting to do turbo stuff for the next six weeks, baby are you ready? Thanks to Ridge Wallet for sponsoring this episode. I'm going to have to see some identification, sir, driver's license, passport, okay, yes, I have it. you're screwed look james i gotta go it's me i gotta go host a b a b sorry pal rose rules let's jump back to never ever land mary poppins because we won't have it here ok that was easy, that was easy, Ridge wallet for sponsoring no, no, in a second you're going to drop your wallet, it'll ruin your life, they won't let you on set and then they'll let uncle jerry host, bumper to bumper , put up with what no one wants.

I know that man you have to use one of these it's a ridge wall and it's made with durable materials like titanium and carbon fiber so you only need one wallet for the rest of your life and they mean it, It comes with a lifetime warranty, uh ids. please, okay, yes, I have uh wow, that's durable, uh, here you go, okay, that's great, thanks for saving me a future job, sure, jerry, no problem, but we can save even more people by telling them that go to ridge.com donut and if you use code. donut you will save 10 but you have to hurry because time is of the essence ah looks like I have to go james is about to spend all his money well first let's start with the basics of a turbo, what it is and how it works Basically a turbo It has two sides, the hot side and the cold side, the exhaust from your engine goes through the hot side that comes here and spins this little turbine here very fast, now that it's on a shaft that's shared with this one. compressor wheel over here, so when the exhaust comes through the hot side, it spins the fan on the cold side, which draws a lot of air through this hole here, compresses it in this housing, and blows it out. by this outlet here, essentially cramming a bunch of air into your engine now the point of getting more air into your engine is that you can then burn more fuel and generate more power, but the flip side of that coin is that by generating all that extra power and stuffing all that extra air into the engine, you're going to significantly increase cylinder pressure and the kind of beating your engine takes all the time, so you need to determine whether or not your engine can handle the extra abuse that it takes. a turbo is going to deliver.

Here we can see some of our possible weak links in the engine. Possible weak links will be like the connecting rods, bearings, crankshaft, pistons or piston rings, and just by looking at them like that, you're not really going to be able to fully understand whether or not they are strong or ready for a turbo, that's where the internet comes in, you'll have to go on the forums, do some googling and if the engine you're thinking of has any weak links, trust me there will be people talking about it, so while all the pieces of our current engine are in good shape, we should have a great turbo car very soon, but we will have to do those tests and see whether or not. that thing is actually healthy, so we're going to run two tests on the miata's engine here, first we'll do a compression test and then we'll do what's called a leak test, which is a compression test is a pretty pretty way.

Quick and easy way to determine how well each of your engine's cylinders is performing compression. Your engine relies on the piston and the entire combustion chamber to compress the air-fuel mixture to burn it efficiently and generate good power with one compression. test, you can quickly evaluate the condition of each of your cylinders in terms of compression. Now you can't necessarily identify what the problem is if you see one, but ideally you won't see any problems and then you know everything is great. So to perform our compression test, I have the engine warm, we just turn it off so it's nice and warm.

Next, I'm going to put the battery on a charger because we need to start the engine several times and If you don't have the battery on a charger, you can turn it off, which makes the test ineffective, so now that we have the battery charged, it's time to go back up under the hood we're going to take off. Let's take out the spark plugs and we're going to disconnect our fuel system and our ignition system all together, so now we're ready to do our compression test, so I have my compression test kit here straight from the freight forwarder, I think.

It's about 40 bucks so it's not too bad, it's nice to have something on hand to prepare this for the miata. We have our gauge, we connect it to the hose that it comes with and then it has a series of adapters depending on the Measure your spark plugs, I think this is the right one for us, so we're going to put this on the end of our unit here, nice and tight by hand, and then we'll go ahead and thread it into hole number one, get that puppy. good and tight there now the only thing left to do is do the test so I'm going to get in the car remember that we have the battery charger on and I'm also going to this is very important I'm going to hold the Accelerate completely, open the accelerator fully to a compression test, so that there is no reason why the cylinder you are testing cannot receive air; you should be able to get everything you need.

Open the throttle wide open while doing the Try 10 seconds per hole and then we'll see what the number on the meter says. Can I make a prediction? I'm sure I think cylinder 4 will be the lowest. Yes, me too, that's my concern. Miata stuff. Cylinder one. What did we get? 125 or 130, yes, right between the two, we'll call it 130. So you might be wondering if the good is so bad. Well, it's a little difficult to say. In general, you'll want to see over 100 psi on any gasoline engine, the higher the better, but at the same time the specific number on the gauge isn't the end all be all.

Really what I'm going to look for here is to make sure that all four cylinders are roughly in. about 10 percent from each other in terms of pressure, if one moves further away from the other three, I know there's probably a problem with that cylinder, so let's go ahead and see what the rest of these cylinders do and then we can compare them to each other . and then get a general idea of ​​what this thing is like, turn it on for 10 seconds, type in the number for cylinder three, the next one, so cylinder four, here we go, one, twenty, whoa, 130.

Well, that's good news , this pup must be healthy, I have overheated it several times, and in the miata cylinder 4 tends to get very hot, so I was actually worried about cylinder 4, but so far everything seems to be doing compression, so we know it must be pretty healthy there, it's time. Doing a leak test is a little more accurate but a little more complicated and you need an air compressor. Luckily I have one again. If you can, you'll want to do this with the engine warm if the engine is running. In this test we are not going to depend on the engine to do the compression, we are going to give compression to the engine with our air compressor, so the first thing we need to do is bring the engine and cylinder one specifically to top dead center to do that, There are some marks on the pulley that I can use to visually check the center of the top end, but I'm also going to drop something on cylinder one so I can visually see when it's at maximum top dead center and that should be enough.

Okay, we have cylinder one at top dead center, all the valves should be closed, which means it should be able to maintain compression at this point, so we're going to attach our tester to the spark plug hole and introduce our own compressed air to see if we have any problems, this is our adapter, the threads on the spark plugs are very similar to those on the compression tester, okay, this is port transport. I forget how much it costs, probably around $50. We'll go through it using your instructions real quick so the first thing I want you to do is back this air regulator all the way clockwise, all the way counterclockwise, so that's what we have, then plug in your compressed air. at no more than 100 psi so we're at 100 psi, okay, now You can see our gauge is up there, you see that little zero where it says "put that yellow band on." The goal now is to turn it clockwise until you reach zero.

We want to zero this meter and it's important that when you do this you do it beautifully. accurately and try not to go over zero, you want to sneak up on it, perfect, so now all we have to do is plug this into the spark plug hole and then we'll get a slightly cumbersome reading. Okay, now on our meter here we have. We have a few different brackets, we have high, moderate and low cylinder leaks, obviously we want to land in the low range and look at that, we do it at about 20 percent. Now each cylinder will have some leak, some air.

Pass the ring so you never have a completely sealed cylinder. Okay, you just want to go and land on that low support, but the problem I have with this is that when you follow the instructions, this actually tests the cylinder. at about five to seven psi, which, if you have a major problem, is probably enough pressure to fix it, but it's such a low pressure compared to what each cylinder sees when it's running that I don't think it's enough pressure to notice really. smaller problems, so when I use this type of tool I throw the instructions out the window and I'll do the exact same thing but with a lot more pressure, let me show you that with the instructions we zero this out, which brings our meter. here up to only about seven psi and I don't think that's enough pressure to really test an engine, so what I'm going to do eventually is ignore this gauge completely and I'm going to increase the pressure. here, so we're letting in, say, 40 psi, I think that's enough air to start fixing some leaks, but since we're not going to be able to trust the gauge, we have to trust our ears and our brains, so we'll explain it in a second, okay, now we have about 35 psi in cylinder one right now, so now what you want to do is listen for leaks and depending on where you may or may not have a leak, that can tell you what is happening in your engine, so if you hear air coming out of the dipstick that means the air pressure is passing the rings and pressurizing the crankcase, that's where the dipstick gets pretty quiet, but if you hear it coming out intake air, that means your intake valve on the cylinder you are testing for some reason is leaking if you hear air coming out of the exhaust or exhaust port if you had the manifold removed, that means that for some reason or another your valve bubbles are coming out of the coolant overflow tank or radiator which means the head gasket is leaking and really all we're doing here while testing all four cylinders is listening for anything that comes out. stand out, they already know a little about you.

A little leakage past the rings coming off the dipstick is normal, but if cylinder three makes a lot of noise coming off the dipstick well, then cylinder three might have a problem with the rings, let's move on. and do it to everyone. of our cylinders we make sure we don't have any problem based on our compression test. I don't think we're going to have any, but just as a good practice we're going to check it out, so we've completed a compression. test and a leak test on the old miata and we have determined that the pistons appear to have no holes, our cylinder walls appear to be in good shape, our piston rings appear to be still there and the valves are in operational condition, so That's great, so now that we've done these tests, I feel pretty confident that this little engine will be able to handle the push that we're going to give it because again, doing these tests was really just a precursor to being able to do this, you know, we We've been preparing to turbo this for a while and now it really is time, now that we've tested the engine, we're ready to go full throttle with the turbo stuff we're going to do. turbo stuff on this car for the next five weeks that's right five weeks of turbo stuff so get ready thank you so much for watching this video come back next week and the next few weeks afterto get into the turbo stuff with me, don't do it. forget to follow me on Instagram zackjob and follow donut donutmedia.

I'll see you for an exciting next week.