Downpipe

In the past few days I finished the welds on the downpipe so that everything matches up quite nicely. The welds aren't pretty but I think they will be strong enough. I erred on the side of strength versus appearance.

Tough to tell from the picture, but the downpipe is now orientated pretty much straight down from the driver side exhaust outlet. In my previous posts I explained how the stock ABA downpipe was having issues being too far towards the passenger side, so I'm optimistic this will solve the problem. I'm still a bit nervous the whole thing will have too much depth to fit in front of the firewall.

I also cut mostly new gaskets myself with the exception of the actual turbo onto the manifold. I decided to go gasket-less on this. Hopefully it doesn't prove to be a mistake, but a lot of my research showed that people that did use gaskets kept blowing them. I'd rather have a small leak not using a gasket than a big hole where a blown gasket used to be.

I plan to pull the oil pan off the 16v motor to tap the oil return into - the oil pans should be the same size and thus easily interchangeable. For the coolant lines, I'm thinking about using the heater core coolant lines. I could simply tap into the line going into or out of of the heater core. The only problem is the heater core lines are much bigger than the nipples currently on the turbo. The turbo nipples are currently reducing to the line, so I might be able to find alternative ones that expand to the proper size for the heater core.