Pistons

The standard pistons have to be changed they are cast and are not very strong. The standard pistons are the wrong compression ratio some people skim the tops of the pistons and use a de compression plate to achieve the right compression. In my opinion this does not seem to sound very reliable skimming metal off the top of an already weak piston your just asking for trouble buying a set of forged low comp pistons will only save money in the future and make your engine far more reliable.






There are a few pistons on the market you can use a vauxhall calibra turbo pistons(c20let) can be used but the little end of your con rod will need to be machined to take the gudgeon pin. Ringing around motor factors and car part suppliers i could not find these pistons for cheaper the £105 each plus the cost of the extra machine work would work out just a expensive as proper zetec turbo ones made by companies like cosworth or accralite e.t.c.









I got my piston from the USA including postage they cost me £236 they took 2 weeks to get here but for half the price i was willing to wait.
Look on Ebay international sellers it's just as easy to buy from some one in the states as it is from england and your save loads of cash.

The pitons are low compression and 85mm bore the compression ratio is 8.7:1 a little high but as they are forged i can drop the compression with a skim and not affect the strength(all machining should be done by a pro not you in your shed with a block of wood and some sand paper!!!!)

I Got them from Massive Speed Sytems on e bay.

Be warned I got stung by customs and had to pay V.A.T on them which cost me £40 but with total price still being under £300 they were cheap.

Inlet Manifold

I have choosen to use a rover turbo inlet manifold for a few reasons the main one being as i'm gonna use cosworth management it allows me to fit top feed injectors into it with out any mods you can also fit frst injectors in to this manifold. Also i got this off a rover breakers for £10.50 off Ebay could not belive it when i won the auction.
Cheap at half the price.










If you use a zetec inlet you have to use a fiesta rst/xr2i fuel rail as the normal zetec injectors are side feed (finding high flow side injectors can be tricky i read some where you can use nissan ones but finding a chip to suit is nearly almost impossible) the fuel rail will have to modified to fit the zetec inlet as the fixings are in different places.







The other advantage for using the rover inlet is that you don't need a charge carrier over the cam cover so no need to mod the cam cover to allow the charge carrier to bolt to it. with the charge carrier going over the cam cover your charge temperature will be slightly higher due to it being over the engine. And the engine producing heat.





And the final reason is the inlet port is the same size as a cosworth throttle body and the studs line up as well so the cosworth throttle body is a bolt on fit.....easy.






My throttle body in these pictures is stripped it has no idle speed control valve(iscv) throttle position sensor(tps) or throttle linkage will post picture when re built.

In order to fit the inlet manifold to a zetec head you need to buy an adaptor plate which will coast you about £100 from Ferriday Engineering (www.ferriday.co.uk).





pictures

Head Modifications

Once the engine is stripped and the head is off a few alterations have to be made to the head in order to turbo charge it.

The most inportant thing is to change the valve springs to uprated items from Kent Cams or Piper Cams as at at about 5000rpm you'll get what is called 'valve float' and the car will miss fire.

Some drilling and tapping may be needed to be done depending on the exhauste manifold you are gonna use but i'll cover that in the next post.

So that about it really for the head standard cams flow well so no need to change them but would recommend a pair of adjustable pullies again from Piper of Kent Cams. Preformance Zetec turbo cams are avalible from Place like Area six, Piper and Kent Cams

When stripping the head the cam caps will have to back on as they came off, they are numbered from the factory all you have to do is remember where number 1 was on the head. They are numbered 0-9

Engine

First off you need to decide what cc your gonna go for 1.8 or 2.0. I'm going for a 2.0 phase2 as a friend of mine had a low milage mondeo auto that was gonna be fragged as the gear box was fuc*ed. No real advanatages over the 1.8 only the obvious but the 1.8 can be bored to a 2.0.

The zetec as whole unit is good strong engine as standard and i belive it was developed from from the american 1.9 cvh tall block(4mm higher than the british 1.6)

There are 3 phases of the zetec engine the only major diffference between them is that the phase 1 and 2 have hydrolic lifters and phase 3 has solid. the oil filfters sit slightly different and the cam covers have different things on then like 16v zetec or dohc 16v.

Expect to pay about £200-£300 for an engine or poss more depending on what ancillaries it comes with. I've got a whole car as i think it will be handy to have when it comes to pipeing it up.