Busting Greddy manifold studs. Yeaaaah.
 

One of my buddies pointed out that I finally busted the one of the turbo studs off the Greddy manifold. It has the relief cuts.

Yay.

Anyone ever get these out with ez-outs or am I gonna have to drill and tap the thing?

Gah, if only the ArTech manifold wasn't $500.

Edit: I dunno why I bother posting things and THEN searching. I think I'll find a machine shop to remove the studs and then go to the bolts.

Here's a question. Did the Greddy kit originally come with bolts? I think the previous owner of mine has it setup with studs and nuts. I am seeing threads where people talk about studs, but others talk about bolts on this thing.

Maybe I'm looking at the thing wrong though. I'll take it apart tonight and see.

Are you referring to the turbo-to-manifold connection? I think the original kit came with studs there and bolts for the downpipe.

Can't remember what I have. All I know is that was the one location I didn't have issues when pulling off the turbo/mani/downpipe.

Yeah, sorry, turbo to manifold. Mine has studs and nuts on that section.

Found this link from Savington in one of the other threads I searched.

Trackspeed Engineering

$155. I autocross a fair amount with this. Wondering if I should bite the bullet and go with those.

Harv, Trackspeed kit is 10mm studs and IIRC the Greddy uses 8mm. It's going to be a bunch of work to install those, if there is even enough clearance on the Greddy (I have no clue.) At the risk of costing Andrew a sale, you may want to look at what Hornetball did with his Greddy and OEM Nissan 8mm inconel hardware.

Edit: Ok, to be fair, I reread the thread and Hornet is using the 10mm kit for the turbo to manifold and the OEM Nissan stuff for turbo to downpipe. Seems like a lot of work for a Greddy, but if that's what it takes then so be it.

For the manifold to turbo, I put in Andrew Savington's stud kit. Basically, took my manifold and turbine housing to a machine shop to get the broken bolt remnants drilled out. They drilled, tapped and installed the 10mm studs for me and also drilled the turbine housing for 10mm. I'd have to look it up, but it wasn't that expensive. Drilling the turbine housing was a give-away.

For turbo to downpipe, I used the Nissan Inconel bolts that I drilled and safety-wired.

In general, you should use studs for connections that are likely to seize (such as the super high-heat manifold to turbo joint). Think about it . . . what you have to do is break the connection between a threaded hole and a threaded shaft. With a bolt, that connection is buried in your manifold and subjected to heat from Hell. With a stud, that connection is in the nut and sits outside where you can see it. Still hot, but not nearly as bad. I didn't follow this rule with my original build and paid the price.

BTW, if you use Andrew's studs and then change your setup later, you can recover and reuse that hardware and only be out the cost for replacement Resbond.

I think it really depends on whether I can find someone to do the work for me as I will likely mess it up royally if I try to DIY as I do not have the tools to do it well.

I went the same route as Hornetball (except I used 8mm incomes studs from ARP/FM for the down pipe.)

There's plenty of room in the X dimension and drilling only gets tedious in the Y (depth) to avoid through drilling. I took my manifold to a machine shop and in an hour they surface milled it and drilled/tapped - 25 bucks.

Having been in Sheldon CT, I'm confident you can find a machine shop to do this. Also, unless you plan on tracking the car you can probably run 10.9 10mm studs and be fine. I went Inconel because I like spending money.

It's more the autocross issue and if I have a co-driver the repeated runs that I'd worry about. I've already busted off one stud on the thing, though it took me a few years to do it.

I hit the Googles and there seem to be a few shops around my town.

I'm taking the car apart now. Gotta get some long extensions to get at the three bolts on the bottom of the manifold. Once I have the whole thing off I can get a good look at how everything is holding up. If it's just the stud then I'll probably look into getting it drilled and possibly going to Savington's stud kit.

Just run the OEM nissan 8mm Inconel studs, they're $5.95 a piece. I'm not seeing a downside besides them being harder to remove if you break one off.

Nissan Inconel studs? Where can I get them online?

Are we talking about these?

http://www.importpartspro.com/ni30oemtutod2.html

I'm searching through the forum and that's what I'm finding, but obviously that's a bolt, not a stud.

I got mine here, Performance Aftermarket and OEM Parts for the 300ZX 350Z G35 G37 240SX Skyline GT-R Nissan Peformance lineup

Thanks for the info.

I could also just go with the FM stud kit.

Flyin' Miata : Turbochargers : Parts and upgrades : Stage 8 hardware with Inconel studs

Gets me the locking hardware and what not as well. Assuming I need that. And it's still 8mm as opposed to the trackspeed kit which would require me to drill out the manifold and turbo.

Drill and tap the manifold and don't look back;)

I did so and put in exhaust manifold bolts I had laying around with Nord locks. Hasn't budged.

So, you're suggesting the Trackspeed version of things? IE, drill it out for bigger (10mm) studs/bolts?

Yes

This is at least giving me an excuse to buy new tools since the last time I took the car apart I used my buddies tools.

:party:

Unfortunately, he is deployed at the moment.

One of my other friends saw a post I made on Facebook about this and has a drill press and offered to help out. So, I'll probably drill and tap for 10mm.

I suppose I could always go cheap and get the Full Race setup if I'm drilling for M10.

http://www.full-race.com/store/turbo...dware-kit.html

I feel like Savington's kit might be overkill, but then again, maybe not, because I've heard a lot of guys say that the things back out or bust.

Overkill? Maybe, but exhaust leaks and busted turbo hardware SUCKS.

Make sure you get a bottoming tap if you plan on doing it yourself since you want to maximize thread depth (the driver side rear stud doesn't have much clearance).

-Zach

A machine shop is WAAAAY cheaper than DIY for this job.

And, like I said, Andrew's studs can be recovered and re-used on future projects.

Do it once.

How is a machine shop cheaper when my friend has all the tools needed including the M10 tap? I'm confused.

Manifolds must vary a lot; all of mine ended up through holes.

Sorry if I'm being dense. What do you mean they "ended up through holes."

Drilled completely through the manifold into the runners/plenum. It's generally considered "a bad thing" to do this as you are then directly exposing the fasteners to the exhaust gasses.

A blind hole has a bottom, a through hole has no bottom.

That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. I'll take a look at what is there now. I don't think I actually removed the turbo from the manifold when I got the thing because it was hooked in pretty good to the existing studs which the PO had put in to replace the Greddy hardware.

A through hole tapped all the way IMHO is better than a stud bottoming. The inconel stud will be less susceptible to exhaust gasses than just about everything else they hit and if you need to remove the stud, it will not bind so easily as in a blind hole.

There is also the chance of over-stressing the stud against the bottom of the thread which may lead to cracking of the manifold.

TSE's kit was the first inconel stud kit on the market aimed directly for miatas. Savington spent a ton of time making sure they fixed the problem, which he was one of the first people to discover. I will not recommend any other Inconel hardware because no other vendor has shown them running below SM laptimes and causing studs to stretch, then running their Inconel studs at the same laptimes and have them not stretch. That alone makes the cost of the TSE studs worth it in my mind.

I might go to a different turbo setup just to avoid undoing and redoing this stupid bottom bolt on the turbo to downpipe connection ever again.

:vash:

Well, you can't use a ratchet on it, but other than that . . . never thought it was much of an issue. What was the problem with it?

I'm a big wussbag and want a ratchet is the problem. :ugh:

It's annoying to get the damned wrench on the bolt I have on there. The tony downpipe is just in the way.

I think I had to use a shorter bolt for the bottom location of turbo to downpipe. I even chopped the end off a 13mm wrench so I could do that bolt and a couple of the manifold bolts specifically. It's tedious, but definitely do-able. A ratcheting wrench may help you.

I can barely get the 13mm wrench on there now. Most of the ratcheting ones I've seen wouldn't fit. It will come off, just not easily. I think I've got it mostly done now. I just have to detach the manifold and see how far I've gotten. Waiting for extensions to come in the mail so I can hit the bottom bolts on the manifold from under the fender.

Got everything off. Between the downpipe refusing to let go of the manifold and the manifold just sticking itself on to the block it was a huge pain in the ass getting the thing off. And that was after I finally managed to get those three somewhat hard to reach bolts off finally. It's really annoying when everything is unbolted and the thing still won't come off.

Drilling and tapping tomorrow. I didn't even try removing the turbo from the manifold yet.

I ordered the Trackspeed kit today.

I just read underdog's thread and now I want to go to a taco manifold and a chinese turbo for $300.

Okay, so as I figured removing the studs from the manifold didn't work out too well. Of the three remaining studs only one came out without breaking leaving a total of three studs embedded in the manifold. Looking at it off the car the manifold looks a bit well... bent. It's just not quite straight anymore. My friend didn't feel comfortable drilling out the all the studs as he had one walk a bit as he was drilling it out. So, he is sending it over to someone with better equipment. We'll see how it comes out and whether I can drill for 10mm or not. I'm kind of regretting ordering the kit before I really knew if this manifold was going to work out.

1. Machine shop would have been the inexpensive and easy way to go.

2. Those studs should be used on any setup you put on the car from here out. Why do you regret it and what does it have to do with your old Greddy manifold working out?

You can lead a horse to water . . . .

1. I still don't see where expense comes into this? Also my friend is sending it to a machine shop at this point, but it was worth a try at his place and I got pizza and beer out of it. Do you just want to think I've suddenly shelled out money for this? Because so far it's $0 and very little trouble. In fact I had to offer some money for the guy he is sending it to as he was gonna have it done for nothing.

2. Eh I dunno. I was thinking last night that I could only use it for this setup. I think I had too much beer and wasn't thinking straight.

The studs and bolt I'm using for the turbo to downpipe connection are still intact at this point and came off fine. I could replace them while they are out, but should I bother?

That connection sees much less heat. If you want to save money, just reassemble with some anti-seize. Nissan Inconel hardware (I've got pix in my build thread) is pretty cheap though.

Now that I've asked, the downpipe connection will just completely fail on my first autox run after the car is put back together.