Video: We stuffed up Turbo Taxi’s brand-new engine!

If you watched last week’s episode of Carnage, you would’ve seen Scotty down at Dandy Engines to watch the boys put together a brand-new, forged-bottom-end Barra for Turbo Taxi.

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It was truly awesome to see professional engine builders in their element doing what they do best, and at the end of the day we got to walk out with a Barra short block that’d been freshly machined, passed all the tests and was sporting a new set of I-beam rods and JE pistons.

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In this episode, the plan was to turn the short block into a complete engine and throw it into the Taxi, but right at that point was when Scotty realised we’d made quite a large error.

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There’s a big difference in both the sump and dipstick configuration between B-series and FG Barra blocks, and guess which one we’d had built for our FG Falcon? Yep, an early B-series one.

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That means there’s no provision for a dipstick at the back, which is where it needs to be to use an FG sump. Bugger. Of course, holes can be drilled and so forth, but it would turn into a big muck-around very quickly.

There’s a silver lining to everything though, and lo and behold, our Barra-swapped MX-5 runs a front sump with a front dipstick. Not only that, but the Mazda’s SBE gassy Barra, which Scotty only recently rebuilt, has the provision for the rear-mounted dipstick.

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The forged engine won’t suit the Taxi easily, but it will suit the Mazda. So, the new plan is to put the new Dandy Engines Barra in the MX-5, and then re-use the healthy Barra currently in the Mazda for the Taxi. Simple, right?

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But before any of that could happen, Scotty still had to turn the fresh short block into a complete Barra. To match the upgraded rods and pistons, Scotty added billet gears to the oil pump and beefy timing-chain gear as a good insurance policy.

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You’ve already seen Scotty do the whole Barra-in-and-out-of-the-MX-5 trick not long ago, so he pulled the engine from the Mazda off-camera this time around, the plan being to steal any last bits off it before sending both the mill and the Taxi down to Maxx Performance so they can marry the two.

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So make sure you tune in next week, as Scotty now has an MX-5 to put together and hopefully a Taxi to get tuned and then race. There’ll be no shortage of content, that’s for sure!