Four years pass and I've finished a few other projects and my new painter tells me he wants to get the Ttop back on the road. Wanting my old car back and having just finished the 3900 Fiero I struck a deal with him to get me the car back and him the 3900 swapped coupe. Ever since having the 3800sc swap, and maybe from having it when I was young and impressionable, I have felt that it sounded horrible. They sound great at idle but through the rev range they just get rough sounding. Even with a set of equal length headers it just didn't sound the way I wanted. I longed for the Fiero sound, the 60 degree v6 that was found in them factory, but with more horsepower. I started in on preparing this:
A second generation 2.8l aluminum head V6 out of a beretta with the lower and upper intake from a large power third generation 3400. I cleaned up the intake and capped off some ports and set the motor up for a water cooled turbo. Brackets were adapted to run LSx based ignition coils and a custom dogbone bracket was made incorporating a alternator mount and belt tensioner:
Then it got some color, well black, but still:
The turbo kit started with a Miller Woods (or Designs 1) turbo kit for a stock Fiero from the early 90s that was designed to work with the 4 speed manual. A quick modification of the cross over and it was fitting well for the Isuzu 5 speed transmission I was using:
The dogbone was finished with a heim joint:
A small intercooler from an Audi S4 was located under the driver side decklid grill:
Air filter was tucked into the wheel well:
By this point I had gotten the car back with the chassis damage repaired. The motor was fitted and everything had a proper place:
The engine bay was cleaned up and painted:
And with a short downpipe that was nothing more than a pipe with a Y into dual 2" runners pointed at the ground we ended up with this awesome sound!
We drove the car around quite a bit without a body. At that time the painter was designing a custom wide body, hood vent, and integrated spoiler for this car. Its hard to beat the amount of looks you get in a car that has no body panels.