KC 38R: Finally a BA drop-in turbo option for E99 7.3’s

euroford

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KC 38R: Finally a BA drop-in turbo option for E99 7.3’s

First off, a huge thank you to KC Turbo’s for getting me a charger way ahead of schedule. My truck has been down (but not out) for a couple of months, we’ve had a lot of correspondence and I’ve been not-so patiently waiting to get my grubby mitts on a solid turbo upgrade. I can’t say enough about the great customer service they have provided and the quick shipping when parts finally came in. I’m taking the truck on a long road trip for the holidays, I REALLY wanted the new charger in on time and they made it happen.

So let’s establish a little background and then I’ll follow up with a review.

My truck is an early 99 crew cab long bed, with the ZF6 manual trans. I purchased it in 2010 with 230k miles and she is now up close to 320k. The truck has NEVER been stock, uniquely it was delivered new to Banks Engineering and then driven home to Illinois by its first owner, where it served as a daily driver and boat tow pig for many years. I’ve always had project vehicles and right from the start, the truck was no different. It’s nothing crazy but I’ve been working on it constantly to replace old parts, fix the things I break and make sensible upgrade. We live near Boulder Colorado, and though I consider wrenching on our vehicles in my well-equipped shop one of my favorite hobbies, my primary interest is outdoor sports in the mountains. My wife, (now adult) son and I are avid mountain climbers, river runners, skiers, campers and mountain bikers. I typically do 40+ days a year of skiing and 40+ days a year of mountain biking, mostly downhill ridding at Winter Park resort. We also have a 1950 Willys CJ3a built as a rock crawler. We may not tow heavy, but we run our truck HARD. A typical weekend sees us loading the camper in the bed, hooking up the 14k car hauler and loading my wifes SUV to act as a self-contained river shuttle setup, then we’ll blast to Moab and back via i70, and on the way home I’ve maintained 85mph up and over Vail pass on several occasions. A Typical after work Wednesday will find me blasting over Berthoud pass and pack, punching full throttle through 2nd, 3rd and 4th on every switchback. I abuse it, I’m okay with that. If I break it, I fix it, and usually upgrade it in the process. It’s a toy, we have fun. It’s also a daily driver (though I work from home and don’t commute) and gets a couple of runs down Bandimere raceway every summer, though being a manual I don’t really pull down brag worthy timeslips.

I’m running Swamps 200/30 hybrids, tuning by Dave Armstrong (who also deserves a huge shout out for great product, tuning and support!) and all of the supporting mods you would expect to run those injectors the way I do.
Being an E99, addressing a turbo upgrade was not the easiest thing to do. I suppose years ago if I’d wanted to drop $4g’s on a turbski I would have down a T4. But at the time I’d noticed my uppipes leaking pretty bad, I’d just bought a new mountain bike and wasn’t in the mood to drop that coin on the truck, so I took a more DIY approach and decided to stick to a “stockish” turbo platform for the time being.

To fix my uppipes I took an unconventional direction and TIG welded both uppipes and the collector all into one structure, ported out the entire assembly for the smoothest airflow and had it ceramic coated, along with the manifolds which also received some minor porting and I also heat wrapped the entire assembly. At the same time I also ceramic coating my downpipe/exhaust and my charge air pipes, the exhaust was also heat wrapped and the charge pipes were also insulated, as is my airbox. I took it as a complete project to keep the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold. I decided that if I was going to run a stock turbo, I’d do whatever I could to make it as efficient as possible. To this end, I also added a Turbosmart turbo boost controller, a Turbosmart dual port wastegate actuator and a Turbosmart electronically controlled blow off valve. To address the turbo itself, I obviously did an EBPV ****** and also a 360 degree thrust bearing rebuild and a Dieselsite billet compressor wheel. The charger already had a Banks quickspool 1.0 housing.

This combo worked GREAT. I ran this for several years with excellent results, I could tow at high attitude at very high speeds, I pretty much got out of the habit of watching my EGT guage and I drug many a cummins, on the street and track.

And then one day a couple of months ago we were driving up South St. Vrain canyon, we heard a weird bang, lost all boost, and then boost came back on lazy with a weird flutter noise…. After limping back home I found a chunk missing from my Wicked Wheel 2 and more shaft play than I would expect. I rebuilt the turbo and reinstalled my factory compressor wheel, I got it back on the road but was surprised about how much performance was lost. That billet wheel really does make a big difference.

So, at this point I decided that it was just time for an all new turbo, and I began looking into my options. I weighed going several different directions, including doing a T4, but after doing the work I’ve done with the stock platform and feeling a little ho-hum about the Borg turbo’s my enthusiasm for that wasn’t really all that high. Fortunately, I spend a lot of time lurking on this forum and I found myself very intrigued with what KC Turbo’s was up to, so I sent them an email on the long-shot hopes that they had something E99 in the works.

Too my surprise, they did! I explained my situation and told them I’d be thrilled to throw my Benjamins down for one of those as soon as they became available and the rest is history.

Too back up just a little bit…. When everyone thinks a T4 is the crème de la crème of the 7.3 turbski universe, why would I find that ho-hum? I’ll grant you that an S366sxe is a proven combo, but honestly these are pretty basic chargers. Yeah, it’s a great turbine design, and a better compressor design, but its cast wheels and a journal bearing center section. I just wasn’t that psyched to spend that kind of money just to end up with a cast journal bearing turbo. I thought about an EFR charger, but they are very unproven in diesels, and I spoke with Precision about doing an S366 with billet wheels and a ball bearing center, they were more than happy to comply, but I wasn’t stoked about the price!

So if you’re in my position, and you’ve fully sorted out your stock turbo setup, now that KC is offering such a great turbo package I think your WAY better off going with the drop in option than you would be a T4.

This new charger checks all of the box’s, you get a billet 66mm compressor wheel, an SXE style 73mm turbine wheel, a 4” inlet with anti-surge holes, a ball bearing center section and as a major bonus you can keep your stock-style wastegate with a nice billet wastegate actuator. Personally, this is everything I wanted, and didn’t require the additional expense of the T4 platform. I went with the .84 a/r exhaust housing.

I got the new charger installed the weekend before last and have only had it out for a couple of drives, but it’s working GREAT!

I don’t have my EBC or BOV setup on it right now, so I’m driving it in kind of a standard configuration to feel it out for a bit. I actually didn’t even hook up the wastegate at all for now and left it at whatever tension KC sets it at. Over the next couple of months I’ll gradually play with it and get all of that sorted out and tuned in.

The other day I drove it from here in Louisville down to highlands ranch, not a crazy pull in the mountains but a nice mix of moderate hills on two lane highway, some interstate and city driving. I left it in my “hot street” tune for the entire drive. Spool up is great, significantly better than the “stockish” charger. Boost comes on smoothly off the line and then really takes off at about 1800, hitting about 20 in 1st, 25 in 2nd and up over 30 in 3rd. With the current wastegate setup and tune it seems to want to top out around 36-38psi which is perfect for street driving.

It certainly gained some top end power, quite a bit actually, but most impressive is the drivability. It has a much broader power band now, comes on great in between shifts and I find that I have to shift a lot less as speed varies in traffic. For the most part it was perfectly happy to be left in 6th from anywhere over 50mph, even steady cruising as low as 1400rpm I could roll into the throttle and build power to accelerate, previously I would always have to downshift as the stocker just can’t build a thing below 2k.
Backpressures look really good, maybe a touch higher vs. my 1.0 exhaust housing, but well within my comfort level. Pretty much 1:1 up to about 22psi, wrapped up to 38psi I was showing backpressure around 44ish, which looks pretty good to me. Sure I’ll be making more when I give it some hits in the race tune, but I’ll be getting the EBC and wastegate setup at that point. I’ll work on it with the KC wastegate and see how that goes. I can also install the dual port Turbosmart actuator in the future if I need some help keeping it closed at high boost levels.

EGT’s were super chill. Swamps tunes even in the “hot” street tune have always had good EGT control, but this charger is significantly cooler still. Getting on it up through 3rd it wouldn’t even get above 1000, making a hard pull through 4th up to about 100mph only got it to just under 1200, so I think I’ll be pretty much ignoring the EGT gauge.

Sounds great, a nice whistle that you can hear without being so much that it would get on your nerves after too long, the sound from the exhaust on shifts is almost a musical pipe organ sound, very cool. It’ll be interesting to see how it sounds with the BOV, that’ll happen next, but my solenoid suffered an untimely death and I’m waiting on a replacement.

For the holidays, I’ll be driving the truck cross country form here in Colorado out to visit friends for a day in Chicago and then up to my hometown of Midland, Michigan to hang out with the family. I expect this is going to be a great highway cruiser setup and it will be fun to see how happy it is to be at sea level.

So, I’ll conclude that this has been a fantastic upgrade. I had a VERY dialed stockish turbo setup, about as good as one could be, and so far I find that this charger beats it in every respect. Spool, drivability, response between shifts, ultimate power, sound, temps and backpressure. And, I’m still leaving a lot on the table at the moment. Getting my BOV on will make it way snappier on the shifts (seriously, manual trans guys, go buy a BOV), the wastegate and controller will help spool and keep egt’s down at high boost, and I haven’t clicked into race mode even once yet.

So, I hope ya’ll found that interesting and helpful. Over the years I have GREATLY appreciated it when others have put effort into a write-up here on the forums, so I hope you also find this helpful.

Also GREAT JOB KC Turbo!! Even though it won’t be your biggest seller I’m sure, I appreciate that you made the investment into bringing a solid upgrade to market for the Early 99 crowd, and thanks for all of the great correspondence to help make it happen.
 

euroford

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Good to hear that!!!

Yeah dude, its working out quite nicely! I did the same drive again yesterday and performance appears to be even better. I'm not sure if DA was lower, if the turbo is breaking in or if i'm getting all of my clamps fully bedded in.

When installing a turbo or messing with the charge piping, I try to drive it and then give all the clamps a re-tourqe for 3-4 cycles. I've found this to make a good difference, and then i'll be boost leak free for a good long time.

Max boost is about the same, but its coming on quicker and higher in each gear. Over 30 in 1st and reaching 38ish in 2nd and 3rd with ease. boy you gotta be bang on with your clutch and shifter mojo, it goes through 1st and 2nd insanely fast. Not much time to actually watch the gauges and I've broken the tires free a couple of times. not bad with sticky 35" duratracs on dry pavement.

To not be too rosie about the setup, my one minor critique is the intake plumbing. The E99 charger comes with the same intake boot as later model powerstrokes, thus its a little bit of a pain to get on and didn't align everything with the factory mounting points. Even still, i got it to all fitup just fine with my AFE intake and discussed this with KC. I believe they are working on some intake boot revisions, but I wouldn't let this put you off it all.

old turbo vs. new

2v2innr.jpg
 

euroford

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to add a couple more photos, because people like photos.

here's our subject vehicle.

river adventure mode: this way we can park and camp at the takeout, then drive the escape up to the put in and shuttle ourselves. we typically use the escape and the hard boats for long lazy rivers like the Upper Colorado. for whitewater stuff we'll run Alpacka Packrafts and usually use our 1950 CJ3a mini-rockcrawler as our shuttle rig.

2yyxrts.jpg


daily driver/work truck mode: I took this photo last summer when she rolled over 300k miles. I had gone up to Bandimere for a couple of runs, hoping she would roll 300k at the dragstrip, but no luck, she hit it on the way home.

1gqioy.jpg
 

euroford

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What is your clutch setup?

Its a South Bend "Super Street" dual disk clutch. This is the same clutch as the regular "Street" DD, except it does not have the sound dampening system composed of rubber bumpers on the midplate ears and rubber dampers in the clutch plates.

Its a no-cost option if you call South Bend up directly, and is recommended for abusive applications as the rubber stuff tends to fail way earlier than the clutch itself.

yeah, it makes some noise when you push the clutch in, but only then, and its nowhere near disruptive. especially given how noisy a 7.3 is in the first place.

6rhdl2.jpg
 

lincolnlocker

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Get rid of the afe and put a 2790 or better yet, the Donaldson version in its place. It will save that compressor wheel. And still breathe just fine.

live life full throttle
 

euroford

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Get rid of the afe and put a 2790 or better yet, the Donaldson version in its place. It will save that compressor wheel. And still breathe just fine.

I like the AFE setup as it provides good separation between the hot engine air and cold intake air. I added reflectagold to the engine side of the air box and underhood insulation to the cold side, this has been very effective. I log intake air temps through my Insight, while at idle (stoplight for example) intake temps rise a couple of degrees, but return to ambiant the instant i begin moving.

I monitored temps before and after these mods, and it made a massive difference. intake air temps were always 20-30 degrees above ambient before. having watched air temps for years as i've made various mods, intake air temps make a big difference on the butt dyno, and I have great setup in that respect.

but... i'd love to ditch the washable air filter for a good disposable. currently i'm running an AFE 24-91018, if somebody knew a Donaldson # that would be a drop in replacement i'd pull the trigger on that post-haste.
 

euroford

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Intake pictures if your curious. I know the gold insulation can be a little polarizing from an aesthetic standpoint, but it works great, its inexpensive, and i'm kind of a function over form sort of guy anyways.

blahk... looking at photos makes me want to clean up that engine though! having had the turbo in and out several times lately, i always get some soot everywhere until i get that dang v-band good and tight. like i said above, I find it takes a couple of heat cycles and retightens to get it cinched up nicely. Its also worked loose on me a couple of times, so now I always use a new metal locknut and then double nut it.

e0pjlu.jpg


5yduok.jpg
 

lincolnlocker

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Intake pictures if your curious. I know the gold insulation can be a little polarizing from an aesthetic standpoint, but it works great, its inexpensive, and i'm kind of a function over form sort of guy anyways.



blahk... looking at photos makes me want to clean up that engine though! having had the turbo in and out several times lately, i always get some soot everywhere until i get that dang v-band good and tight. like i said above, I find it takes a couple of heat cycles and retightens to get it cinched up nicely. Its also worked loose on me a couple of times, so now I always use a new metal locknut and then double nut it.



e0pjlu.jpg




5yduok.jpg
That filter is hideous... need a pretty white one in there.... lol

live life full throttle
 

MeTo

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That filter is hideous... need a pretty white one in there.... lol

live life full throttle

^^^ +1 I vehemently dislike oiled gauze.

Thanks for taking the time to share.

Here is my solution after Corey recommended me try an open intake test run. This was the fastest spooling and least smoke.
 

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powerlifter405

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^^^ +1 I vehemently dislike oiled gauze.

Thanks for taking the time to share.

Here is my solution after Corey recommended me try an open intake test run. This was the fastest spooling and least smoke.

Second that. I always saw an increase in silicon on my oil analysis when I ran reusables.

Nothing beats the cost of the good ol' Tymar/BHF set up. R-R has them in donaldson water resistant. And replacements can be had at nearly any class 8 dealer or even most auto parts stores can have them in stock the next day.
 

lincolnlocker

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^^^ +1 I vehemently dislike oiled gauze.

Thanks for taking the time to share.

Here is my solution after Corey recommended me try an open intake test run. This was the fastest spooling and least smoke.
Did you find panty hose to fit the bigger filter? Holy crap..

live life full throttle
 

euroford

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Well, that was a successful holiday road trip. I guess it’s safe to assume that new turbocharger is broken in now. In total, we did 843 from Louisville CO to Davenport IA, then another 440 on to Midland MI and returned from Midland to Davenport with a stop off in Chicago to have dinner and a beer with friends for 469 miles and then on back home for a grand total of 3,064 miles of driving.

To diverge into thread drift briefly, I’m surprised everybody gets so wrapped around the axle on air filters. Though no doubt Donaldson filters are fantastic, maybe the best, I’ve certainly never felt that my washable type filter is holding me back or causing any damage. Around these parts, everybody loves those, but otherwise I’m inclined to think you’re good to go assuming you keep up with maintenance or replacement as required. My 1200hp mustang ran K&N style filters, so did my 650hp sierra cosworth, as does our current BMW 540i, my CJ3a crawler and my wife’s aftermarket turbocharged Ford Escape (2.5l Duratec with a BW EFR 6258).

My Hideous filter was freshly washed before that photo, and looking/running basically brand new and ready for our road trip. Now that we’ve racked up 3k miles, I’m due for an oil/filter change, clean the air filter again and replace the Baldwin fuel filters (I replace them every other oil change, likely more often than necessary). But… I do think I’ll seriously look into switching to a Donaldson filter, more for convenience than anything else. Washing filters is a pain in the arse, and I’d frankly rather spend my time doing something else. But for the time being, to do that I’d need to figure out what filter will fit my large AFE intake tube. I do also REALLY like that dual filter setup that MeTo shared, it would be a fun little project to build something like that up with some aluminum tube, but I’m afraid that I may not have room in the airbox as it shares space with the battery.
The filter socks are a very good idea. AFE makes one for my filter ($30), I don’t use it all of the time, but do throw it on when we head out to the desert. After a long weekend in Moab the filter sock will be totally red crusted, then I can pull it off for the drive back home, where you need all the air you can get eastbound over Vail pass.

Anyways… back to new turbocharges and road trips. In addition to the new charger, we also picked up an Escort Max II Platinum radar detector on sale at Costco. This turned out to be a fantastic decision, as we made some excellent time through the desolate wastelands of eastern Colorado, Nebraska and Iowa. I’ll spare any further rambling to just say that the new Escort worked excellent, and was a great deal through Costco, and we give it a solid two thumbs up.

As for the turbocharger, it has revolutionized my truck. Though it’s easy to focus on making peak power, huge dyno numbers or hauling massive loads, this trip was none of those things. This was all lightly loaded, high speed interstate cruising. But this new charger just made it feel so smooth and effortless that it made the drive so much more pleasurable. Booking down I80 at 95mph it would make a steady 10ish PSI, and show about 14psi of backpressure. With the cruise control on it would smoothly snap as high as 24psi to maintain speed up hills, and again backpressure would stay within about 4psi of boost. If I had to slow down for traffic (or more often, a schmuck sitting in the left lane for no good reason), I’d then click back in the cruise control and it would surge as high as 35psi to bring us back to our cruise speed.

I left it in the “Hot Street” tune for the entire drive, and for the most part with wife/family/dogs in the truck, I keep my driving smooth and steady. My 8 month old male Shetland Sheepdog likes to chill on the center console, so I didn’t really want to send him rocketing into the back seat, though I can assure you that would be easy to do. Driving smoothly with the new charger is a vastly easier task than it was with the stockish setup.

By comparison, it always felt like you had to really work the stockish charger over to get it to respond. The stockish charge could make some power, but it just felt like I had to pretty aggressive with it. Shift hard, floor it, wind the rpm’s out, all the time. It was like I either had to be slowwwww or ON IT. The new KC38r on the other hand, is very responsive to part throttle driving and comes on very smoothly. Using about a ¼ throttle in traffic or heading up an onramp it’ll very smoothly build 10-12 psi in 1st, 2nd and 3rd without jerking my occupants around. Then if I’m merging I can tip into it in 4th, build over 30psi and have more than enough speed to overtake merging traffic and get on up to my cruise speed.

Interestingly enough, with mellow driving I noticed very little difference in behavior due to altitude. I’m at close to 6k here at home, and were at near sea level obviously for the rest of our trip. I have no doubt that I could have found a difference if I was making some pulls in kill mode, but at least for standard driving, its performing very very well at moderate altitude. It’s an interesting contrast that even for interstate driving, the stockish charger was noticeably happier at lower altitude. I had a decently direct comparison as I had just driven the stockish charger to TX and back for Thanksgiving.

I’m sure ya’ll would like to know about fuel millage. Sorry to say, I’ll admit that it’s just not my primary concern, and I don’t pay attention to it or log it that carefully. I just fill up when I need to and drive on up the road. If fuel millage was a major concern for us, than the Ford Escape would have been our weapon of choice, instead we choose the interior space and all weather awesomeness of the truck. Despite no accurate logging, I can certainly discern that fuel millage was “better” than before. I can typically expect to get about 450 miles out of a tank before the low fuel light comes on. On this drive, I never ran it out that far between fuel ups, but despite driving a fair bit faster than I have in the past, I think I would have been pretty comfortable squeezing 500 miles out. So, let’s take this with a pretty huge grain of salt, but I think I could jump on a fairly flat highway, set the cruise at 90-95, click off 500 miles and I’d guess that would be about 35-36 gallons of fuel or about 13.89-14.29 mpg. That’s pretty acceptable in my book. I just don’t have the patience to do it, but it would be interesting to drop down to the Eco/Tow tune and actually drive in a manner acceptable to state troopers, I bet you’d get some awesome fuel millage. If you’re into that kind of thing.

So yeah, that’s where we are right now. Initial impressions are very good, and it’s also a very satisfying turbo upgrade for road trip cruising. Sometime next week my new solenoid will come in to fix my BOV, I’m really interested to see how this effects transient response through shifts. Also, we typically consider the start of ski season to be after the Christmas holiday, so if we get some snow we’ll go try out some lightly loaded mountain driving. Likely up to Copper. Also, if I can get my rockcrawler (new tires, electric fans and ditched the lunch box lockers for spools) back together, and we get some snow we’ll head out for some snow wheeling and I’ll see how she pulls the trailer up Boulder canyon.
 

IdahoF350

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Great info.

I picked up one of the drop in KC Turbo S300 style turbine wheels for my truck. I have a 66/88 billet 6x6 compressor wheel in a machined stock cover and backing plate. It went from 95% as good as stock below 1800rpm and 110% from 2000rpm up to all around better than stock with 28-30psi up top. I’ve never checked back pressure with it but on my tow tune, I can’t hit 1300° no matter ho long I say in the pedal with 12k behind me. KC Turbos has got it figured out for anyone with a 7.3 theses days and they are clearly the top of the game for E99 trucks now.
 

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