[bacon]

Glorious thread this, with a nice ending. Top work :thumbs:

 

[Chris155]

Frontpipes on, oil cooler and PS pipes installed:

Lot of other bits on like clutch slave cylinder, gearbox linkage, driveshafts connected, power wiring connected…:

PS and oil coolers connected, together with intake:

Intake plenum on, wiring behind plenum and ECU connected, TB, intake piping anc catch can connected:

Quite ready to fire:

I started the engine yesterday. I had it running only for 8-10 second as I do not have cooling connected, but once it started it idled perfectly smoothly and quiet, no knocking. Finally.

Now I need to wait another paycheck to be able to afford Autolusso silicone hoses and stainless steel pipe under the radiator and once I get them it’s just a matter of few bolts to finish the car.

With my luck I am sure that once the GTA is really finished, it will start snowing again and I will be grounded in garage waiting for spring …

Looks like a lovely job, great pics too. Congratulations.

 

[Alfa 4 life]

What a beauty of an Alfa Romeo, gotcha! The Busso 3.2 V6 sounds incredible stock, so I can`t even imagine how good your sounds like.
A great build, with a lot of detailed and high quality photos. A great read on a Friday evening I want to own an Alfa with a Busso V6 very badly, believe me! I really hope you enjoy the car, and have some great driving trips in it.

 

[freelancer.55]

happy to read you again
it's really nice on oil cap.
it is available on Alfisti
http://shop.alfisti.net/Tuning-Styl...uning-Styling/Alfa-145-146/Motor-Luftfilter/Aluminium-Motoroeldeckel::6006.html

 

[freelancer.55]

happy to read you again
it's really nice on oil cap.
it is available on Alfisti
http://shop.alfisti.net/Tuning-Styl...uning-Styling/Alfa-145-146/Motor-Luftfilter/Aluminium-Motoroeldeckel::6006.html

 

[Pe4e]

Coil packs on:

Relocated oil filter on:

Fuel rails on:

Wiring loom:

Freshly chromed intake runners. I had them restored by a guy restoring old-timers and he did a perfect job. They are better than new from factory, really perfect chrome plating.

Engine finished to go back into the car:

Sliding the engine under the front beam, exactly the right clearance from my axle stands:

Lets put it on the crane…

...and do some heavy lifting:

It looks easier as it was, mainly because due to Christmas I did not ask anybody for helping hand and installed the engine alone. It was quite a fiddle to do it with only one pair of hands, but after 1h, it was in:

Colleague amazing work and execution !!! I bow to your perfectionism,detail and desire which makes a unique car! I wish you success and wait for videos of sound, the motor and naturally acceleration :thumbs:
I apologize for the bad english language
Greetings from Bulgaria
Peter

 

[enzo156GTA]

Freshly chromed intake runners. I had them restored by a guy restoring old-timers and he did a perfect job. They are better than new from factory, really perfect chrome plating.

Hi Gotcha, yes I agree intake runners from Tonas are perfect, very nice work.
This is mine engine with them...

Dave

 

[Milan20155]

Hi all, i'm just into having F430 TB in my 3.2 GT, and as this is my daily car can anybody tell the consumption figures after upgrade?
Or is it just better to mount smaller f360 TB as i own both of them.

Thanks Milan

 

[Mymatemarmite]

I've only just seen this thread and I need to read through it all as I've only seen this page so far.

STUNNING attention to detail....right down to cloths placed over the axle stand saddles etc......you should be very proud :thumbup:

 

[tramontana021]

masterpiece :thumbu p:

 

[Portugues]

amazing

 

[gotcha]

I am coming back to my old thread after a very long time, to make some end to it. Despite the time, money and effort invested in the 3,8 it was never perfect and even after the 2nd re-build it was knocking. Maybe some components are already past their life, I can think for example about one piston where the pin was much looser than the others or something similar things to that. The 3,8 is an amazing project and great fun to drive, but I didn’t want to drive a car with quite loud countdown to fail so I decided to give it up for now. Even though on the road it was pretty spectacular and despite the Q2 and suspension it was able to light up the tyres in every corner.

As I also sold my 159 so I was really missing an Alfa in my life that’s why I decided to use all the spare parts I had and build another 3,2 engine so that I can finally spend more time driving the GTA.

I am not giving up the 3,8 idea, and I am not regretting all the investment. I learned a lot with it and I will for sure build one again, probably a build from scratch, scraping the old components and starting fresh with new ones with no doubts about their condition. And then I will think about another car to put it in. The 147 will stay as 3,2 and I am thinking about 156 GTA to have a pair, or maybe about GTV6 or 75 with 3,8 as a project car.

I will not be posting a lot of pictures again. 3,2 build is in principle the same as 3,8 but as I can never stay completely OEM, I will post some pics of the additional modifications I did to the 3,2 (and I will hopefully later apply to the future 3,8 as well )
It is good training to rebuild the Busso again and again, as every time I modify something and one day I will combine all in one ultimate build (hopefully)

 

[gotcha]

This time the topic was lightening of internals and the main inspiration is coming from Alan and his „real GTA project“. Thank you Alan for inspiration and I hope you don’t mind I copied some mods

I started with the modification of the camshaft pulleys. They were made 2mm narrower (1mm from each side) and the 8 openings inside were merged into 4. I forgot to weight them before lightening but after the modification they are 685g each for one head and 695g each for the other one.

Then I lightened the flywheel. First my workshop made a CNC program to take out 3 blocks of metal out of the circumference between the bolts and then later I decided that I can drill out a lot more and I spend one afternoon drilling holes into it  They are not perfectly positioned as I had only hand drill available, but as I was going to balance it anyway it did not matter. The total saving on the flywheel is 900g, but the more important thing is that it is 900g from the outer circumference, where the lightening makes most impact.

Original flywheel, re-surfaced and 0,25mm shaved off

First step, after the CNC modification. As I already have the program available, doing copies is easy so I had second flywheel modified as well, for future 3,8 build 

Second step, after drilling of the lightening holes

 

[gotcha]

And then I got the idea of lightening the conrods.... Originally, I asked my workshop to design a custom made ones for me. This was not a problem, but they warned me that we are looking on quite a high bill and after examining the OEM conrod they told me it would be much easier and cheaper to modify the originals. Later they regretted this idea, as in the end it was cheaper for me, but definitely more difficult for them than designing and fabricating brand new set from scratch.

We started with 3D scan of one OEM conrod to have a model for the CAD with the idea that we will „shave it“ a bit in the software and then let the CNC mill to work its magic.

Here is a screenshot of the 3D scan we got for CAD design.

Than the programmer spent few days to design a lightened one out of it and program half a million lines for the CNC tool to fabricate it. And we really did finish with a beautiful conrod. But the issues appeared when we wanted to do the second one :angry: Alfa conrods are not the same at all and in reality each of them is unique. Alfa (more realistically its supplier) stamps them from steel and then focuses only on big and small end openings and weights them to get close to each other, but the rest of the conrod is as it came out from the stamping tool. As a result each conrod is unique. So when we run the CNC on the second conrod, in some areas where it was cutting off 0,5mm on the first one, it was cutting off 2mm on the second one. In some other areas the mill just worked in the air as where was some extra material on one, there was nothing on the second one... So we threw all away and stared from scratch to make a much simple program, to make some basic circles around the big and small end and smoothen the main body. Then I finished them off with a Dremel tool and weighted them to match.

Original conrods were 620-625g, the lightened ones I use now are 528g each. This means about 15% lightening or almost 600g down on the complete set.

Based on that I re-calculated my bobweights for crank balancing and I got to 772g per bobweight. During the balancing I was able to drill off quite a lot from the crank as well, but I could not measure the saving.

Here is a short video from the final run on the balancing machine, we were able to get to 0,21g and 0,28g unbalance on each end of the crank at 6500 rpm. On the video, crank assembly is not locked, you can see the black cage opened and it is rotating very smoothly with no vibration at all. Pity I did not take a video when we were starting, crank started to vibrate and wanted to jump out of the machine already at 1500 rpm 

 

[gotcha]

I decided not to install the carbon plenum with Ferrari 84mm TB on the 3,2, I think it is too big for the „small“ engine and I decided to stick with OEM plenum but I still wanted bigger than OEM TB. The usual choice of Ferrari 360 76mm TB is pretty rare and expensive, so I went for Porsche Boxster one. There are more versions depending on Porsche engine, I went for the 74mm size. I paid only 50GBP for it as the seller bought it by mistake and wanted to get rid of it, but there is plenty of Porsche TBs for fraction of the Ferrari TBs cost (they are in principle all the same units from Bosch)
I am not a fan of adaptors and probably everything up to 76mm can be adopted and fitted straight to the OEM plenum.

I just needed to make the holes in the TB oval to get closer to the center and shave off the bolt heads to make them slimmer to get closer to the center as well. Than the TB fits perfectly.

Obviously, there is a step inside that needs to be smoothen out:

But with a Dremel tool and correct attachment it is pretty easy:

And final result is a perfect and smooth fit:

The whole TB mod costs actually less than a „sport“ air filter. I will not comment if it adds power or not and how much, but it definitely changes throttle reaction and the feel of the car.

I did few smaller jobs, I refurbed some cambelt covers. Powder coated in black and as the original heatshield material/sticker is not available form Alfa anymore I cut a copy out of Thermotec

I refurbed the engine wiring loom, tidied it up and wrapped with textile tape for looms.

I also designed the next generation of my oil filter relocation kit. Instead of thick rubber hoses for hydraulics that were a bit overkill I changed to braided PTFE hoses with alu fittings. They provide me with the same internal diameter while being much slimmer on the outside and lighter. I also decided to relocate the filter even further and instead of behind hidden behind the plenum I decided to move it somewhere to the battery area for easy servicing

 

[gotcha]

The rest was the usual drill, I am getting pretty efficient in Busso removals and installations, able to take it out and put back in in less than an hour. The total job is like 2 full days for me but getting it out of the body and back in is pretty quick now. I hate disconnecting and connecting the driveshafts, for me it is the worst job on removing/installing the engine.

3,8 out, with the GTA bleeding a bit in behind during the transplant:

Let’s not make a mistake which one goes in:

Going in without a scratch (except my hands):

And this small bit took me six weeks to make as I had literally no time to work on the Alfa:

It is a bracket to hold my re-located oil filter that I put between the gearbox and airbox:

Now the filter changes will be quick and clean, just screwing filter off vertically.

Job done. In line with the current trend of downsizing, 3,8 shrunk to 3,2 :happy:

 

[gotcha]

I flashed the 3,8 software with the original GTA one. That’s the only 2 options I have, I still need to ask Alfatune to make for me a modified 3,2 version.

Holding the breath I started the car and actually no drama. It started and settled on smooth idle as if it was running just yesterday. Some knocking from the valve lifters as they were refurbed and empty ones, but after 2 heat up/down cycles they filled with oil and got quiet. P/S pump made quite ugly noises due to a lot of bubbles in the system but in general it was all smoother than expected.

I did 220km yesterday night and today, just driving around with no real destination I wanted to drive it in gently, but today I already hit the rev limiter in 2nd gear. Just could not resist. Car is pretty wild to drive as I also changed the track rod ends and tie rods and did not go for wheel alignment yet, so the car is a handful with front wheels pointing in slightly different directions But the engine is sweet. At 2-4k rpm I definitely know it is not a 3,8 anymore but 4,5k to limiter I don’t have too much time to notice, it revs so fast. Clutch is a bit more sensitive in 1st and reverse and needs more gas to take off, probably due to lightening some inertia is missing, but it is not bad at all and I stopped noticing fast. I can definitely feel the engine revs much faster and lighter, changing to neutral the revs drop to idle very quickly and a light tap on gas when downshifting matches the revs very nicely.
The consumption is actually higher than I was used with 3,8. This is not really a problem, just creates a weird feeling that 3,8 vas more powerful and economical in the same car. The engine probably has to run in yet and I need to get software for CFII manifolds as OEM GTA runs a bit rich to cool the pre-cats.

So it seems that the end of my 3,8 story is a well sorted 3,2 GTA.
I will probably keep the 147 as it is now, it has already seen enough work in its life, but I can’t resist the idea how a lightened 3,8 would feel. I usually take my time, but one day it will happen. I will not give up that idea.

 

[Giorget2]

:clap::clap::clap:

Video with engine sound?

 

[paxman]

I was wondering how this one ended and although we can't see a video :yum: of the 3.8 beast, it looks like you've build yourself very nice car..

Amazing build and respect for your ability to learn so much by yourself :clap:

 

[alan Q4+33]

Welcome back
I'm really happy when someone finds some use in my threads, thats why i write them i think this is more in a spirit of the badge GTA (i like 3.8 and torque but i feel its not for GTA) rev happy engine and lightening of all kind of stuff. I think that with good custom map this should give you a lot of joy from 5 to 7000+ (it's quite safe to rev it to 7500 now when it's all balanced and lightened.
Now some lighthening of the car (-50kg or more and still usable) and it would be a great match to modern hot hatches