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A forum for help with the Alfasud And Alfa 33
 

33 Tuning

Just a collection of stories about tuning the 33, hopefully covering what works and what doesnt.
Starting with Hoygaard, having attempted to turbo a 33.

Any Turboconversion of the Alfaboxer is destined to go wrong, and wreak havoc on the poor sods engine.

Well, I myself tried, and failed. And to you guys out there whome I promised to share my experiences with, I'm Sorry, its never easy to acknowledge one's own lack of capability.

So, here it is, cut down to the basics.

Here we go. Being satisfied with the power output at high revs on my 33 16v, I was quite unhappy with it's lack of low-down torque. Having done a few Turbo conversion on SAAB's I decide to have a go on my own car.

I'm a cheap bastard, so I decided to buy the stuff needed second-hand. II decided on an IHI turbo from a Fiat Uno 1.4 Turbo IE, it’s very small, and used on an engine with a slightly larger displacement it would provide torque at nery low revs. I also bought an Intercooler from a SAAB 900 16V Turbo, quite small, but with a very dense core, and it was capable of handling at least 180 BHP.

I also bought some rubber tubes in different diameters, mild steel tubes and bends, and welded the lot together to make a new exhaust manifold and plumbing to and from the intercooler.

Having lowered the car, there were no ground clearance, so the turbocharger had to be mounted higher than the oilsump. This was for two reasons, There's no space on a 16V to fit the turbocharger in front of the engine, and second; the oildrain pipe from the Turbo has to be situated over the oillevel in the oilsump, lower fitting will cause oilleak into the intake system when the engine is running in a vacuum state.

So the Turbo was fitted next to the oilfilter, above the right driveshaft, Of course this resulted in longer exhaust pipes from the left bank, but it wasn’t noticeable at all whilst driving..

On the intake side the pipes were routed from the original airfilterhousing through the AFM, down to the turbo, and a pipe going beneath the gearbox into the left hand inner front wing, where I fixed the intercooler, and from the intercooler into the standard intake plenum.

Now, From this point on, things started to go wrong. The main reason is my lack of finaces at the time. What I should have done, was to get the car onto a descent rolling road and have it chipped, I didn’t. Instead I tampered with different sensors in order to fool the Motronic unit. With no succes, I might add. Racing a Peugeot Rallye one day I totally melted 2 pistons. Having replaced the pistons and overhauled the engine I discarded the whole turbo lot and brought the car back to standard.

Now. There were some benefits, the car had a crunching torque from 1700 rpm's, a Fair gues is a torque around 240 Nm at 2200 RPM's, but pinging began at 4500 rpm, and the engine started holding back.

But hey, that's my story, if you think you can succeed, be my guest