ebay Turbo manifolds are popular in the rotary community, our friend John Gleason at Glease Manufacturing in Canada gives us an in depth look as to why these manifolds should be avoided.
CNC Billet parts = the customer gets to pay for the expensive toy the seller uses to make all his other toys! The reason 'good' manifolds cost so much is that nobody wants to make things the old fashioned way. Flat plate and tubing can be put together relatively inexpensively, hell the Chinese do it. How about you put together a reasonably priced manifold made without all that 'bling' of CNC Billet stuff that only serves to increase price?
John is clearly advertising his own product with those awesome billet merge collectors. I'd consider $900 a budget manifold. He also goes on to explain there are plenty of other great manifold manufactures, some of which have a lower price. For the longest Time, Glease's manis were only $700, he just bumped his price up about a week ago.
TIG welding is not an art. It is just another skill that requires a bit of practice and experience. I can tell you're European just by your statement, where you have to apprentice in everything for ridiculously long amounts of time before you're 'allowed' to call yourself a 'master' of the trade. That's all fine for you but that does NOT mean that it takes 5 years (!) for anyone to learn to properly TIG weld. That's just ridiculous. I have built manifolds, crossover pipes, up-pipes, down pipes and full exhaust systems. You have an 'old fashioned' plasma or water jet cut your flanges, you use off-the-shelf mandrel bent tubing and the v-band flanges provided with the wastegates anyway. Jig it, weld it, belt sand the flanges flat and you're done. Seriously, we are talking a couple hours at most, ~$50 in material and what $35K in equipment total? Yeah you aren't going to mall back the cost of the water/plasma jet on one run but the beauty of those machines is their ability to produce many many different types of components. Spending $250K on a billet CNC machine so you can save 5 minutes grinding a flange flat is stupid. If you'd at least admit you buy a machine like that as a toy to make bling bling then I could accept that. Claiming it's a time saver is complete BS. Someone still has to load the machine, program it, empty it and maintain it. A water/plasma jet is quicker, easier to maintain and DRASTICALLY cheaper, for the same task.
Honestly you have to pay to play and if you can't then get a cheaper car. I make parts on a CNC mill and the cost to make parts here in the USA or even Canada costs a lot more than in ChiNO where you are paying 2 dollars for a staff of 15 for an entire day. As for your pocket you need to think long term do you want to buy one manifold or 5 of them? Case in point I spent 1200 on a non bling manifold made by a guy that caters to the NHRA crowd out of T321 and it has NEVER had an issue, leak, etc. No boost creep or anything either in 7 years of running it. In the same period a buddy who like me takes his RX-7 to the road course track has bought 4 manifolds in the same time period spending well over 1200 in the long run.
I've got one of John's manifold on my Rx7, great quality manifold. Service and communication were excellent until he shipped it and I got it delivered the UK. Had a cheap ebay manifold and after a rebuild and a new BW turbo, it didn't clear the car body but John's manifold solved that problem for me as the turbo now sits much further forward.
im running a small block chevy 350 with the efi fuel injection system and i want to run a single turbo what kind of turbo should i buy for it to run right
Just want to say I have a 700hp setup running full turbonetics 70trim turbo manifold down pipe dump pipe and wastegate works great had an entire eBay setup before made less power but had a typical t3t4 and made 530hp it cost me about 1k the turbonectics set up cost 3500 the eBay stuff works if your on a budget it works enough said I think someone is jealous here that he is not selling as much as these knock offs lol
well... i have been running an ebay manifold on my 325i with s50b32 internals and an ebay turbo. The only thing I did to it was weld it again, just for safety. The car is doing 728hp... and it has been doing it for the last year. I also lifted the redline to 8600 rpm, soo...
Has someone got any links to the primary sizing and how it actually affects lag? I have seen rear mount turbo set ups ( as in, in the trunk on larger engines like LS tho) which have huge amounts of volume between manifold and turbo and have no noticeable lag. I'd love to see compared dyno graphs and such
gonna try de carburizing the engine on an fc convertible we picked up, I've read about the atf trick but is there a better way like using sea foam or another combustion chamber?
i went to school with some guy who only worried about having a pretty weld but he never had good penetration. this is another thing to keep an eye out for.
I got to meet John are DGRR this year and check out some of their products, I think the standard to which everything else compares has been made for me. Legitimate quality and John is a kind dude that really does know his stuff.
yeah you have some really good valid points. when i buy that stuff i always looked at the material used and welds. no necessarily the actual enginering, which is what people need to do.
A small mechanical engineering course on fluid flow and heat transfer, and some small time in and a buddy or small machine shop and you will be able to design and produce anything for a vehicle as appropriate.
mypalAbra should do a video on how to stop apex seals form blowing out. or why wankels eat oil or why do I need to cram 30 psi into my 1.3 liter buzz bomb to make 500 horse. yeah I know they make a sexy noise but so does a kawi 250 .....brem.......brem .....brrrrraaaaaaaaaappp-pop!....braaaaaaaaaappppppppp-pppppppp-Pop! oh boy!
That part about the holes for the wastegate tubes being too small amazes me, because it's not like it costs more money or is more difficult to drill the right size hole, just get a bigger bit.
Is there only one Chinese factory making manifolds? No? Why do people label EVERY manufacturer as the same quality? You sell manifolds? So you are not biased?
I think there is a few issues you did not go into like that the WG pipes are at 45 degree or more. It didnt look like it had been root filled with gas (backing gas) which then kills the turbine if something gets loose. The general design of the tubing stretches and I actually think you might be wrong about why it cracked, I think it has to do with the angles the WG pipes are attatched and how its welded together further down which when mounted stiff with gate/turbo then stretches and shrinks which cracks the flange weld (which might be suffering from whats described in the video). Also merging two same tube sizes into the same tube size is also a strange choice Lots of stuff and then theres few people willing to pay for a proper manifold...
As a general rule of thumb, theres an easy equation for almost any performance build. cheap-fast-reliable, if you add any of the two together they won't equal the other. fast and reliable, won't be cheap.. cheap and fast, won't be reliable.. cheap and reliable, won't be fast..
Look how simple the glease manifolds are, throw away all the billet bull shit and you would have a decent cheap to produce manifold. I could get copies of his manifold made in China with 20mm thick flanges and any thickness and grade pipe I wanted for $50 each order of 10.
3:42 I've seen turbo inlets that big and larger. They come off of big huge diesel bulldozers front end loaders etc. You know, a diesel with more than a thousand cubic inches to it usually having two turbos like that.
i have a single turbo manifold custom made by someone who knows what he is doing, just now while im watching the video. im so glad now i decided it to be this way. cost me only 700€, so not even really more expensive.
Someone should make a little flapper valve for non-divided manifolds for divided/twin-scroll turbos. Divert the flow to one volute at low RPM and open @2-3 k RPM or something. I'm sure it's been done but don't see much of it...
Super cool dude, he built me a manifold for my 10AE, ended up not fitting because the motor swap, took it back in and sent it to another rotary dude and showed me nothing but excellent customer service.
Good info as usual, however met a fabricator from NJ and will be offering a copy cat version of hi dollar manifolds Schedule 40 etc material Very a very reasonable price
had all these probs on my ebay manifold. warping. broke twice. think ass walls an turbo hanger solved it all. did waste alot of money and time having to do it all 3 times. dont cheap out on a manifold!
Totally true. Ebay manifolds are made from extremely thin walled 321 or 304 stainless steel. They are great throw way manifolds as they will not handle heat cycles from normal exhaust temperatures. If you want a quality manifold that will last go with a name brand company. Do not skip on quality here...
To be honest the only thing that is really going to work is a cast iron setup everything has been tested including inconnel tubing which also cracks, stainless cracks, and cheap exhaust tubing is defianatly going to crack.
so choose btween $$$ or small risks on weld cracks than can be fixed if it happens. ill go with ebay btw turbo works with pressure so wont lose anything with bigger tubes
To be fair most welded manifolds will break at some point. And no1 wants to make a really good Cast manifold, so were kinda stuck with either cheap junk you can fix, or expensive manifolds you will have to repair eventually.
Thin-walled tubing will crack. Been there, seen it, had the turbocharger literally fall off. The thin wall heats up quicker than the thicker turbo flange and the difference in expansion rates will cause it to crack. It's a *fact* .
- Bad QA from manufacturing - Poor primary sizing - Poor material choice - Poor welding - Poor flange design - Poor WG runner position/design Gotta love Chinese knockoffs and ebay with a nice photoshoot and a consumer who is uneducated/impatient and unwilling to do the proper research, lol Thanks for the Gleasman ppropaganda. Def going with one of his now, especially since he's on my side of the border! Lol Cheers all
Turbo Source invesment cast Manifold are some of the trickiest Manifolds i have ever seen , Heat treated CNCd , There coming out with a Long tube manifold now with duel waste gates . Never fail Life time warranty . Some thing to look at !
The weld cracks because of the heat cycles like every eBay stainless manifold, get a pro to weld that shit pipe to that flange and it will still crack. If you want a real budget manifold buy this eBay junk off some one who has already had all the problems and are selling it cheap as chips ($10) hand mill the flange with sand paper and a sheet of glass, weld some rods to the flange then too the piping as a brace, cut the manifold open and open up the wastegate feed holes to same diameter as the pipe. Where the turbo mounts to the flange make a brace too engine some where. Again hand mill the t4 flange to get it as flat as possible, spray your gaskets with like 5 coats of copper spray, when you mount turbo put oil on the threads and use spring washers, tighten the shit out of them. Or be full ghetto and bolt turbo on off the car then tack all the nuts to the flange so they don't work loose. Chances are you can't build your own manifold if your buying one of these your budget minded, but that doesn't mean you can't throw some hours into your cheap purchase and have a bit of fun. Doing small things will make this manifold better, it won't be perfect and will probs crack often due to such thin pipe but getting in there and having a go can be a good experience even with bad products. After you have spent 5 hours making your eBay manifold work and the best it can be you will be more confident in your self, you will then end up using the flange off this and throwing the rest away. Tbh those manifolds that Gleason make would be easy af. You don't need billet.
Tom Pickrell even us manufacturers have their manifolds crack. it's just a part of Tig welded manifolds. in order for them to not crack they would have to be ridiculously heavy.
HEKTIC458 They are and I have used them on countless builds without an issue. All you lot just sell the false narrative that you need all your expensive cnc bullshit to make power.
Everything you said here is true but the price of your manifolds is obscene $950 for a 13b manifold is crazy. I can only compare to similar options, here in New Zealand a company called sinco customs makes a 13b manifold for $600, with no fancy uneeded CNC parts. I guarantee it would be just as good if not better. Used in mad mikes car etc.
tdogusackit1 no, the sinco manifold you're talking about is a single gate open scroll manifold. A twin scroll twin gate manifold would be priced about the same as Gleaseman. Furthermore, grease manifolds are now being used by top rotary shops like Scoot.
First off? i would NEVER buy shit from ebay in the first place. even for car parts. Always turns out to be an catastrophic failure. As well as a bigger hassle to return the part if defective.
You're kinda wrong there. A lot of oddball parts can be found on ebay when you can't find them locally. That's what I had to do when I rebuilt my transmission, that way I didn't have to go crawling around in a junkyard. Yes, they were used parts (for the most part) but they still came from the state's, not China. So you can get good parts from eBay, you just gotta use your common sense.
instead of just studdering and crying about companies making money over them... show the performance differences which is what will get to people not you just sitting there talking
gyea ma life go trashed whiled exiled in az frm la.. but havin tha teg garaged half decadeim bac at it. thanku dog. i rather havsilvia for life. but to hold and cradle a rotary just like havin a daughter first. still an offspring. ma u stay u blessed. csafe cuh
people who buy ebay turbos arent looking to go crazy on the horsepower. Generally they are just adding 8 psi boost because it gives their honda civic some more personality and fun factor. An ebay turbo can easily work for those situations.
this video completely contradicts the eBay/name brand market with hondas. eBay manifold runners are usually smaller (about same size as ports) while name brand like Skunk2 or Blox manifolds have wayyy bigger inlets and ports.
*looks for link in description/annotation to this guys site* nope... He does some serious quality work though. Turblown is another dude that does pretty good stuff for the rotary community, albeit when hes not trying to oversell you shit.
you are saying that the primary tubes are too big, i've never heard of anyone complaining of too much exhaust flow to the turbo or from it. lots of high end turbo headers are made out of .062, just because you overbuild your shit doesn't mean other people are doing it wrong. also twin vs single scroll is worth about 10-20 hp on a 700+ hp car, probably almost no difference on a street car. You called the 1.75 tubes to the wastegate absolutely massive then you claimed the 1.5 holes to be little baby holes. you shouldn't try to promote your overpriced stuff by cutting down everyone else. The twin scroll design came about from turbo diesels, which have huge exhaust pulses and very low operating RPMs... this means lots of slow but forceful pulses of exhaust spooling up the turbo. Keeping them seperate has proven to be beneficial this way. On a smaller displacement, higher revving motor the benefits are much less because you're dealing with smaller faster exhaust pulses which create an almost linear pulse on the turbine wheel.
You know I get that alot of eBay parts are "China cheap" but Im getting pretty sic of hearing about it all over the place. Instead of talking, PROVE (like during a Dyno run or something) that the parts are crap, that's what I'd like to see👍
'PROVE' Like show a cracked manifold, why it cracks, the science behind runner diameter and flow dynamics alongside the poor craftsmanship, warped flanges a dramatically incorrect T4 flange? These manifolds have been shown to make 30-40whp less across the board on dynos, do a minute of research in RX7Club and you'll see that.
Honestly just buy a cast iron eBay manifold. It will hold up. Or buy a tubular and have someone touch up the welds. It's not a "disadvantage" it simply "works with no extra performance advantage" and I think everyone understands that.
I wouldn't blame ''Ebay'' for the poor quality manifolds a better video would be to show who is producing the lowest quality and function manifolds and the medium to best grade. You can find nice quality manifolds easily on Ebay i'm sure SpeedFactory has an account on Ebay and they are top quality fabricators.
