Tuning 1.2 16v Turbo talk!

[Trololipop]

Hello everyone, been trying to wrap my head around a relatively cheap but effective way of fitting a turbo to my 1.2 16v Fiat Punto 188.

Looking at the NA decat manifolds I noticed the mounting holes look very similar to the bolting pattern on the 595 abarth manifolds. Any idea if they do bolt straight up?

Fallen a bit too much for my little punto… looking into this to get it more pokey and a 6th gear to make it nicer on the motorway as that’s where it sits most of its life

 

[AndyRKett]

If you search the forum you’ll find many posts and attempts to turbo the 1.2 over the years, non of them end very well.

If you love your car then this is a pretty poor way to prolong its life, if anything it’s only going to shorten its life significantly.

 

[Trololipop]

If you search the forum you’ll find many posts and attempts to turbo the 1.2 over the years, non of them end very well.

If you love your car then this is a pretty poor way to prolong its life, if anything it’s only going to shorten its life significantly.

I’ve seen a couple of 8v swaps but I’ll dig through and try find some 16v swaps!

Worst case I’ll go back to my original plan of making an intake manifold to run cbr600 ITBs on a piggyback/stand alone and get decat pipes

 

[StevenRB45]

There is an epic build thread from a long time ago here...

Punto (Mk2/2b) - Munkul's thread

love your alloys!! they look really smart :)

www.fiatforum.com

Don't believe Matthew is still here...and unfortunately a lot of the full detail was on the now dead Puntomk2 forum.

Also although not covered in the thread this ended with a rod through the block leading to an oil fire and the car burning out.

 

[AndyRKett]

The turbo In the abarth 500 is squeezed into a very small space and very lacking in air flow around the engine. As a result the engine while powerful was compromised in terms of heat soak and other issues. The exhaust manifold it very short, it is probably not the best design. The Mk2 punto has a much bigger engine bay than the abarth 500 so If you are technically able to do things like fitting a set of of throttle bodies, and you're comfortable with aftermarket engine management etc, then why not just get a nice stainless down manifold and have a turbo mount welded on exactly where you want/need it. also much lighter than the clunky cast iron thing posted in the picture above.

What I would say it look at your brakes and suspension before making more power in this car, The Punto you have is not designed to take any significant increase in HP with drum brakes solid front discs, floppy anti roll bars and soft and bouncy springs and dampeners Even increasing the power to say 130 hp which the what the NA HGT puntos made, will probably see you the wrong side of a hedge pretty rapidly.

As pointed out above these sort of mods are usually tackled by people to see if they can do it but the car is not considered as something they love dearly and they are accepting of the risks of things like pistons exiting the engine, on that point your standard pistons will likely not handle very much boost at all before they melt or break.

 

[StevenRB45]

Had another look and found the other thread...

Punto (Mk2/2b) - Mk2 Sporting Turbo

Saw this a few days ago but been busy, gutted for you mate it's a huge amount of work to lose like that, but hey at least it went out properly as said, putting the fun in viking funeral much better than the usual slow downward decline of the heavily modded car into the realms of a b****boy feature.

www.fiatforum.com

There was also a supercharged one, the key snapped off the cam on that one and it went 180 degrees out of time..with predictable results.

So possible but have a spare engine and possibly car to hand...

 

[Greasytrucker]

Had another look and found the other thread...

Punto (Mk2/2b) - Mk2 Sporting Turbo

Saw this a few days ago but been busy, gutted for you mate it's a huge amount of work to lose like that, but hey at least it went out properly as said, putting the fun in viking funeral much better than the usual slow downward decline of the heavily modded car into the realms of a b****boy feature.

www.fiatforum.com

There was also a supercharged one, the key snapped off the cam on that one and it went 180 degrees out of time..with predictable results.

So possible but have a spare engine and possibly car to hand...

So a great recipe for a reliable daily driver is what you’re saying then!

 

[StevenRB45]

Well the old Fires are just not built for boost, the blue one windowed the block at 0.8bar...

Standard boost on the current 1.2 turbo is 0.8bar all day everyday and you can turn them up to 1.2bar and gain 30 odd bhp with no supporting mods.

But old Fiat engines aren't built like that...if you want boost it's probably better getting an Abarth engine or something similar and running a standalone ecu. Unless you keep the boost right down or are happy to blow it up.

 

[AndyRKett]

The other thing with these things is that you can easily burn through several grand doing these sort of modification where as you can buy a grande abarth or 595 abarth for the same sort of money now and not have to argue it all out with the underwriters when trying to get insurance