I’ve been waiting for some time for Turbo Concepts to finish the development of their billet wastegate actuators and with the arrival of the FrankenTurbos I had the itch to try out some different wastegate actuators. After some searching I came across these and decided to give them a try.
The Mamba wastegate actuators are built for the B5 S4 and outwardly look to be a quality product. Hopefully they perform as well as they look.
Since I last gave a look at the FrankenTurbo F21 there has been an update made that legacy F21’s can take advantage of. As FT has developed a turbo for the BMW N54 engine the legacy F21 turbo’s can be retrofit with a similar product that leverages the work being done for the BMW engine.
I came across an old pair of F4H turbo’s that were ready to be rebuilt and I contacted FT to see what could be done with them.
The turbine housings were appropriate to reuse with the latest turbine wheel so I shipped those off to Swaintech to have their White Lightning ceramic coating applied.
After the coating was applied they were forwarded to FrankenTurbo for the update.
Now that the turbochargers are back with me they’ll be on the shelf while I make my way through a number of projects.
The changes that this version of the F21 has are:
The change to using this design with legacy (original F21 compressor wheel) rebuilds started around summer of 2017.
I’ve started the initial clean up of the project engine, the first step was to take off a number of 2.8L engine specific parts that I will not be using.
The engine does have 2.8 heads, and I plan to give them a try.
Working on this engine is like opening a time capsule:
I was reminded of just how long it has been sitting waiting to be completed.