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Message: [QUOTE="euroford, post: 1524033, member: 17667"] KC 38R: Finally a BA drop-in turbo option for E99 7.3’s First off, a huge thank you to KC Turbo’s for getting me a charger way ahead of schedule. My truck has been down (but not out) for a couple of months, we’ve had a lot of correspondence and I’ve been not-so patiently waiting to get my grubby mitts on a solid turbo upgrade. I can’t say enough about the great customer service they have provided and the quick shipping when parts finally came in. I’m taking the truck on a long road trip for the holidays, I REALLY wanted the new charger in on time and they made it happen. So let’s establish a little background and then I’ll follow up with a review. My truck is an early 99 crew cab long bed, with the ZF6 manual trans. I purchased it in 2010 with 230k miles and she is now up close to 320k. The truck has NEVER been stock, uniquely it was delivered new to Banks Engineering and then driven home to Illinois by its first owner, where it served as a daily driver and boat tow pig for many years. I’ve always had project vehicles and right from the start, the truck was no different. It’s nothing crazy but I’ve been working on it constantly to replace old parts, fix the things I break and make sensible upgrade. We live near Boulder Colorado, and though I consider wrenching on our vehicles in my well-equipped shop one of my favorite hobbies, my primary interest is outdoor sports in the mountains. My wife, (now adult) son and I are avid mountain climbers, river runners, skiers, campers and mountain bikers. I typically do 40+ days a year of skiing and 40+ days a year of mountain biking, mostly downhill ridding at Winter Park resort. We also have a 1950 Willys CJ3a built as a rock crawler. We may not tow heavy, but we run our truck HARD. A typical weekend sees us loading the camper in the bed, hooking up the 14k car hauler and loading my wifes SUV to act as a self-contained river shuttle setup, then we’ll blast to Moab and back via i70, and on the way home I’ve maintained 85mph up and over Vail pass on several occasions. A Typical after work Wednesday will find me blasting over Berthoud pass and pack, punching full throttle through 2nd, 3rd and 4th on every switchback. I abuse it, I’m okay with that. If I break it, I fix it, and usually upgrade it in the process. It’s a toy, we have fun. It’s also a daily driver (though I work from home and don’t commute) and gets a couple of runs down Bandimere raceway every summer, though being a manual I don’t really pull down brag worthy timeslips. I’m running Swamps 200/30 hybrids, tuning by Dave Armstrong (who also deserves a huge shout out for great product, tuning and support!) and all of the supporting mods you would expect to run those injectors the way I do. Being an E99, addressing a turbo upgrade was not the easiest thing to do. I suppose years ago if I’d wanted to drop $4g’s on a turbski I would have down a T4. But at the time I’d noticed my uppipes leaking pretty bad, I’d just bought a new mountain bike and wasn’t in the mood to drop that coin on the truck, so I took a more DIY approach and decided to stick to a “stockish” turbo platform for the time being. To fix my uppipes I took an unconventional direction and TIG welded both uppipes and the collector all into one structure, ported out the entire assembly for the smoothest airflow and had it ceramic coated, along with the manifolds which also received some minor porting and I also heat wrapped the entire assembly. At the same time I also ceramic coating my downpipe/exhaust and my charge air pipes, the exhaust was also heat wrapped and the charge pipes were also insulated, as is my airbox. I took it as a complete project to keep the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold. I decided that if I was going to run a stock turbo, I’d do whatever I could to make it as efficient as possible. To this end, I also added a Turbosmart turbo boost controller, a Turbosmart dual port wastegate actuator and a Turbosmart electronically controlled blow off valve. To address the turbo itself, I obviously did an EBPV ****** and also a 360 degree thrust bearing rebuild and a Dieselsite billet compressor wheel. The charger already had a Banks quickspool 1.0 housing. This combo worked GREAT. I ran this for several years with excellent results, I could tow at high attitude at very high speeds, I pretty much got out of the habit of watching my EGT guage and I drug many a cummins, on the street and track. And then one day a couple of months ago we were driving up South St. Vrain canyon, we heard a weird bang, lost all boost, and then boost came back on lazy with a weird flutter noise…. After limping back home I found a chunk missing from my Wicked Wheel 2 and more shaft play than I would expect. I rebuilt the turbo and reinstalled my factory compressor wheel, I got it back on the road but was surprised about how much performance was lost. That billet wheel really does make a big difference. So, at this point I decided that it was just time for an all new turbo, and I began looking into my options. I weighed going several different directions, including doing a T4, but after doing the work I’ve done with the stock platform and feeling a little ho-hum about the Borg turbo’s my enthusiasm for that wasn’t really all that high. Fortunately, I spend a lot of time lurking on this forum and I found myself very intrigued with what KC Turbo’s was up to, so I sent them an email on the long-shot hopes that they had something E99 in the works. Too my surprise, they did! I explained my situation and told them I’d be thrilled to throw my Benjamins down for one of those as soon as they became available and the rest is history. Too back up just a little bit…. When everyone thinks a T4 is the crème de la crème of the 7.3 turbski universe, why would I find that ho-hum? I’ll grant you that an S366sxe is a proven combo, but honestly these are pretty basic chargers. Yeah, it’s a great turbine design, and a better compressor design, but its cast wheels and a journal bearing center section. I just wasn’t that psyched to spend that kind of money just to end up with a cast journal bearing turbo. I thought about an EFR charger, but they are very unproven in diesels, and I spoke with Precision about doing an S366 with billet wheels and a ball bearing center, they were more than happy to comply, but I wasn’t stoked about the price! So if you’re in my position, and you’ve fully sorted out your stock turbo setup, now that KC is offering such a great turbo package I think your WAY better off going with the drop in option than you would be a T4. This new charger checks all of the box’s, you get a billet 66mm compressor wheel, an SXE style 73mm turbine wheel, a 4” inlet with anti-surge holes, a ball bearing center section and as a major bonus you can keep your stock-style wastegate with a nice billet wastegate actuator. Personally, this is everything I wanted, and didn’t require the additional expense of the T4 platform. I went with the .84 a/r exhaust housing. I got the new charger installed the weekend before last and have only had it out for a couple of drives, but it’s working GREAT! I don’t have my EBC or BOV setup on it right now, so I’m driving it in kind of a standard configuration to feel it out for a bit. I actually didn’t even hook up the wastegate at all for now and left it at whatever tension KC sets it at. Over the next couple of months I’ll gradually play with it and get all of that sorted out and tuned in. The other day I drove it from here in Louisville down to highlands ranch, not a crazy pull in the mountains but a nice mix of moderate hills on two lane highway, some interstate and city driving. I left it in my “hot street” tune for the entire drive. Spool up is great, significantly better than the “stockish” charger. Boost comes on smoothly off the line and then really takes off at about 1800, hitting about 20 in 1st, 25 in 2nd and up over 30 in 3rd. With the current wastegate setup and tune it seems to want to top out around 36-38psi which is perfect for street driving. It certainly gained some top end power, quite a bit actually, but most impressive is the drivability. It has a much broader power band now, comes on great in between shifts and I find that I have to shift a lot less as speed varies in traffic. For the most part it was perfectly happy to be left in 6th from anywhere over 50mph, even steady cruising as low as 1400rpm I could roll into the throttle and build power to accelerate, previously I would always have to downshift as the stocker just can’t build a thing below 2k. Backpressures look really good, maybe a touch higher vs. my 1.0 exhaust housing, but well within my comfort level. Pretty much 1:1 up to about 22psi, wrapped up to 38psi I was showing backpressure around 44ish, which looks pretty good to me. Sure I’ll be making more when I give it some hits in the race tune, but I’ll be getting the EBC and wastegate setup at that point. I’ll work on it with the KC wastegate and see how that goes. I can also install the dual port Turbosmart actuator in the future if I need some help keeping it closed at high boost levels. EGT’s were super chill. Swamps tunes even in the “hot” street tune have always had good EGT control, but this charger is significantly cooler still. Getting on it up through 3rd it wouldn’t even get above 1000, making a hard pull through 4th up to about 100mph only got it to just under 1200, so I think I’ll be pretty much ignoring the EGT gauge. Sounds great, a nice whistle that you can hear without being so much that it would get on your nerves after too long, the sound from the exhaust on shifts is almost a musical pipe organ sound, very cool. It’ll be interesting to see how it sounds with the BOV, that’ll happen next, but my solenoid suffered an untimely death and I’m waiting on a replacement. For the holidays, I’ll be driving the truck cross country form here in Colorado out to visit friends for a day in Chicago and then up to my hometown of Midland, Michigan to hang out with the family. I expect this is going to be a great highway cruiser setup and it will be fun to see how happy it is to be at sea level. So, I’ll conclude that this has been a fantastic upgrade. I had a VERY dialed stockish turbo setup, about as good as one could be, and so far I find that this charger beats it in every respect. Spool, drivability, response between shifts, ultimate power, sound, temps and backpressure. And, I’m still leaving a lot on the table at the moment. Getting my BOV on will make it way snappier on the shifts (seriously, manual trans guys, go buy a BOV), the wastegate and controller will help spool and keep egt’s down at high boost, and I haven’t clicked into race mode even once yet. So, I hope ya’ll found that interesting and helpful. Over the years I have GREATLY appreciated it when others have put effort into a write-up here on the forums, so I hope you also find this helpful. Also GREAT JOB KC Turbo!! Even though it won’t be your biggest seller I’m sure, I appreciate that you made the investment into bringing a solid upgrade to market for the Early 99 crowd, and thanks for all of the great correspondence to help make it happen. [/QUOTE]