Story goes like this.
Late 1980's, I was in my early 20s and decided to turbo my RS2000 Coupe. Spent far too many $1000's and the final incarnation after many upgrades was a fully prepped bottom end running Cosworth 8.5:1 CR forged pistons topped with a ported head, oversize stainless steel valves and custom Wade turbo camshaft. The engine was pretty much bullet-proof. Turbo was a standard Garret T03 mounted on a genuine cast Garret exhaust manifold, externally wastgated with in-cabin adjustability from 7 PSI to BANG, blowing straight into a Weber DMTL topped with a cast plenum exactly as shown here:
http://www.turbosport.co....viewfull=1#post2172262. All machining was done by Duggan Balancing, assembly was done by myself and the tuning, rejetting & distributor recurve were all done by Frank Lowndes on his dyno back in the day when he owned Northern Tuning Service. Never got any power figures off Frank (and they're all dyno dependant anyway) but the car was tuned perfectly. To give you some idea of performance, 0-100 km/h was timed at 3.9 sec and she spun easily to 7000 RPM in all gears running the original 3.54:1 diff. Maximum boost I could run was 18 PSI before surge hit in a big way. Finally, after many broken gearboxes, diffs and clutches, in a moment I can only describe as temporary insanity, I sold the car. Didn't take me long to realise it was one of the worst decisions of my life.
Many pining, boost-less years later, around 2005, I could bear it no longer and decided to do it all over again, only this time it would be on the cheap, so when a draw-through turbo setup became available I quickly snapped it up, ditched the draw-through manifold & SU carby, and built the crossover pipe and plenum which mounted onto the original Escort 32/36 Weber carby. All this was strapped to a rebuilt bog standard engine with absolutely nothing done to it apart from a rebore and new oversize cast pistons & rings. Crank was fine, so in went a new set of bearings, reused the original oil pump, new set of gaskets and slapped it together. The head I used was already ported with oversize valves, but they were not stainless steel. Cam was another Wade turbo grind. Compression Ratio was lowered using a 1mm copper decompression plate between the block and head-gasket. I had the distributor once again recurved by Frank, who was now working from home and didn't have a dyno, so the jetting was done by myself using a combination of seat-of-pants and reading of the plugs. The turbo was the same spec T03 with external waste-gate, again adjustable from 9 PSI (had a heavier spring in it) all the way to BANG, and again, turbo surge would hit with a vengeance at 18 PSI. 0-100 km/h was done in 4 seconds flat, again with a 3.54:1 diff, and she spun to 7000 RPM just as easily as the first engine, but only in 1st and 2nd, as I never tried in 3rd or 4th, but I'm sure it would have. Older. Wiser. Yada yada... The photo I listed in my previous post is the 2nd cheaper engine.
In the end, the performance of the 2 engines were near identical, and the driving experience was just as exhilarating, if not more so the 2nd time around as the car I built the cheap engine for was an ex club-car RS2000 and handled far better than my 1st one which had all the money thrown on the motor. I didn't blow any gearboxes of diffs thanks to gentler, older driving, but clutches were still a problem. The only other issue I had was as discussed in the above link. After opening the carby numerous times in order to get the jetting correct, it was proving difficult to get a reliable seal between the body and the top of the carby, and eventually the gasket got a habit of blowing out as the boost got wound up. Apart from that, it ran beautifully for around 16,000 km, at which point the cast pistons finally gave up. The constant high boost ended up compressing the pistons, clamping the top ring and restricting their ability to seal properly, and very quickly power died off and piston ring blow-by increased. Had I not installed the in-cabin adjuster, and left it at 9 PSI constantly, I have no doubt that the engine would have lasted just as long as if it had not been boosted, but once you've tasted higher boost, it's near impossible to stop reaching for more. In the end, it only got wound down in the wet, and even then, 9 PSI was too much.
The car was sold off long ago, but I still have the engine, turbo and running gear tucked away next to all my other goodies waiting for the day when I can start all over again, only this time, better.