Fabricating a custom turbo manifold

As you can read about in our previous posts our original idea was to use the stock turbo from the SRT4 engine to get everything in the Jeep and running.  Work the bugs out of it and build the motor along with our own turbo manifold the next winter.  Nick has been wanting to build a turbo manifold for a few years and it looked like his want was fast becoming a reality..  We had a problem we couldn’t fix by buying something.  No one makes a SRT4 turbo manifold that will fit in a TJ without reworking the firewall. Or at least we couldn’t find it.  All the options we found place the turbo on what is the back side of the motor for us, probably so they would still be compatible with the stock SRT4 boost piping.  We also wanted it to look factory so if you don’t know sh*# about Jeeps you wouldn’t know it wasn’t stock but that was not in the cards.

The internet is a beautiful thing.  The ideas people have for doing things can be amazing. When we first started searching we found some people making their own turbo manifolds and they looked pretty good with the exception of the merge collectors that were just a box they made with no real transitions.  There was no way we were going that route so we kept looking for how to build a proper merge collector.   We made our own jig to cut the pipe largely based off of this post on Honda Tech.  Our first couple cuts didn’t come out as well as we wanted them to so we kept cutting till we had 4 that matched up. By the time we had the four perfect pieces that we were using for our final collector we had enough extra pieces to build 2 additional collectors that ended up being great for us to practice welding on.  We used weld ells for the elbows.  As you might know the pipe is round and the ports on the SRT4 are rectangular.  I found a piece of solid stock one day wandering around the scrap yard that was just about the exact same size as our exhaust ports and I knew it could be used as a tool to reshape our runners to match up perfectly with our flange.  I welded a carriage bolt to the end so I had something to smack with a BFH.  Heated the runner with a torch until it was red hot, inserted the form and after a couple smacks it was now a rectangle.  The pictures will give a better view of it than my rambling on.  I can answer any questions if someone has any and spare the eyes if you have already read this far.