Astraturbo.co.uk is a site dedicated to my Car, Its a car I bought with the sole intention of modyfying, It's not just a Astra GSi with a turbo lump shoved in, but its a car that I have stripped down to a bare shell and fully rebuilt, It was a process that took many months to achieve and I was helped along by many of my Mates,

It started Life as a 1993  Astra 1.4 si,  

I guess it's a little bit like playing GT3 on the playstation, you buy a car with the money you can afford, then as you earn more money, you upgrade the car with better suspension, wheels/tyres, engine mods etc etc.

That's Basically what I have done with the Astra,  it is now producing 4 times the amount of power that it started with, and has the ability to out accelerate and achieve greater top speeds than the majority of cars on the road today.

I hope you enjoy the Site, It's the first time I have ever done an internet site so if you see something you think I can improve upon then please let me know, or if you would like me to post pictures of your car on this site just e-mail me them and I will put them up for you.

Cosworth Head	Turbo and Manifold	New Pipes and Fittings

The Conversion

In my Garage was a very quick Vauxhall turbo engine, The C20 LET that had just been reconditioned, I had just finished building it back up along with the 6 speed Box (F28) that I used to have in my Astramax Van, this also had been reconditioned the previous week as the 1st and 2nd syncro's decided to collapse after trying a full speed acceleration attempt in 1st gear whilst in the Astramax van.

Due to a little sideways incident, the van is no longer with me and so I was now on the lookout for another vehicle to throw the engine into.

Quite a few ideas passed through my head for the Donor vehicle, A stripped out Mk2 Astra for sheer performance, maybe another Astramax Van or the normal low roof Astra Van, I then decided that I had to have the Mk3 Astra convertable, I went to look at quite a few, unfortunately, they were beyond my price range and so I settled for the Astra Mk3 car, 

The Astra GSi is in my view one of the best looking Astra's Vauxhall ever made, I also always liked performance Vauxhalls in white, I used to own a white Cavalier GSi 4x4 and I think that they look sweet with the Black trim panels used on the white car, especially from the rear with the black number plate surround and tinted lights.

I looked at a few GSi's and they were quite tatty yet expensive, so I decided to buy a Standard Astra. If I had bought a GSi, I would still have bought new wheels for it, new suspension for it, new body panels if the old ones were damaged and then still pay to have it re sprayed.  It would have cost an absolute fortune, deciding to buy a cheap Astra then building it up myself with new parts was a much better option.

I headed for my Local Auctioneers and the ideal car was there on the first visit, a K reg 1.4 Si, with electric windows, central locking and a sunroof all as standard, and it was white,  it was the perfect choice. It had a small dent in the bonnet and bumper at the front, But this didn't matter because I was fitting GSi Items anyway and the damaged ones were to be thrown in the bin. it also had silly alloys and Max Power stickers all over it, obviously a boy racer's chariot.. and would probably not get many bidders going for it.    I was right.

I had decided to set the limit I would spend at £1,000, I managed to get the Astra for £850, so I was very happy.

Within a few days of owning the car, the jack was out, the front end was up and the 1.4 was ripped out, in its place went the C20LET engine. At this time I didn't have a garage so the transplant had to be done outside, luckily it was warm and sunny. The front struts, driveshafts and suspension set up all had to be scrapped and replaced with Astra GSi items to cope with the Extra Power, they are stronger than the 1.4 items, and they have different dimensions so the existing parts on the 1.4  would not have fitted onto the new 2.0 engine and gearbox. 

While Rebuilding the car I decided to make a few changes to vauxhalls design, these included the addition of a electric sunroof, an intelligent delay switch on the windscreen wipers and also the fitting of Power Steering in the Engine Bay.

The Original wiring loom within the car was to stay the same at this point ( It will later be upgraded to the complete GSi Loom ) The only wiring that needed to be changed at this point was the Engine Loom, Vauxhall has a useful way of Wiring a car, They do separate Looms for Individual Items so changing them or adding them later is quite easy to do,

When you buy an engine that is different to the one in the car, you also need to buy the Engine Wiring Loom for the new engine, then it is just a case of altering a few wires here and adding a few there to get the Engine Loom to work with the Car Loom. Though this task is quite easy I also wanted the alarm taking from my old car and re-fitting onto the Astra, I decided that this was going to be fiddly, and when a job is too fiddly the mobile comes out and Kelvin is rung, he's a wiz when it comes to wiring.

The car was running sweet within a few days, The feeling was Great, It had been 3 months since I was last driving the turbo lump and I had missed every day of it. I decided to leave it looking fairly standard on the outside for quite a few months, I always had a passion for street sleepers, and with its Cav GSi 15" wheels and standard Si body trim, this was the ultimate snoring monster. There are three pictures below of how the car was looking when I first took it onto the roads, You will notice I have removed the rubber strips from down the side of the car, I think it looked a lot better with those taken off. I did have to fit the GSi Rear Bumper onto the car so that the Exhaust pipe could be made to exit at the correct position. 

The exhaust was fitted by Alpha in Leeds, its a Powerflow full Stainless Steel system with single rear box, the beauty is, you can tell the guys what type of noise you are after and they will then make the exhaust to your requirements, mine therefore, is very Loud. 

Pictures of the Car how it was when I first took it onto the Road. It stayed like this for 5 Months, This is the Street Sleeper Guise, already boasting 230BHP.

After a few months though, I decided enough was enough, the time had come for the GSi bodykit to be fitted. I sent the car up to my mate Adrian, he runs a small garage repairing cars for their MOT Called MOTor weld, he's one of the very few people who I would trust my car with, and his work is excellent. he fitted two rear arches, and removed the side aerial ready for the transformation. Then it went to Stuart's spray shop, I had never met Stuart before, but he came highly recommended from Adrian, Stu blended the arches in fitted the body kit and generally transformed a normal Astra into the hard looking beast it is today. I was amazed by his work, the thing with spray shops is that you are never sure of the standard of work you are going to get, pay cheap get poor, pay a lot and fingers crossed get a good job,

Now Stuart's price was cheap, I told him I wanted a  good job as he was looking around the car,  he then gave me his quote, so I told him again (a lot louder this time) I wanted it good, and he nodded and once again  repeated his price. I couldn't refuse. But, as anyone who has had a respray will know, the next few days without my car were agony, wondering what I was going to get back, how many runs it was going to have, how bad the body kit fitted, 

When the phone call came for me to pick it up, i couldn't get there fast enough, Stuart had done an amazing job, My car was superb and looked so sweet with the full body kit fitted..I was straight out in it and stayed out all night, a big grin all over my face.

My car was now fitted with 305mm racing disc Brakes, new 17" wheels, new headlights, new tail-lights, new bottom splitter, new badges just about all the rebuild parts were bought new so the car looked like it had just left the factory, the parts were either purchased from my local Vauxhall main dealership or Autovaux, a company which specialises in Vauxhall products. The car stayed in this guise for the rest of 2001, in 2002 it got a little more developed.....

The Arrival of Toy number 2

By the beginning of 2002, I didn't really have any major plans for the Astra other than cutting away the middle section of the front bumper to let more cold air into the engine bay and the intercooler, As far as I was concerned the car was finished, 

Though, to be honest, I wasn't really struck on the new wheels that I had bought, they were my third choice, the first been Azev A's and the second were OZ Vela's,

None of these wheels had the correct offset so I picked the Millemiglia revenge 4's as an alternative, for those who don't know their wheels that well, the first two wheels featured five thick spokes as their main attraction, I felt this would look good on the Astra, the wheels I ended up with are multi spokes, I thought they would be o.k, but the main problem was that they looked too small even though they were 17". 

Wheels aside, I was a happy chap.

Then I learnt that a Genuine Astra GSi Turbo was coming up for sale, this had all the fancy trimmings fitted, which included 18" wheels, Pace Charge cooler, Courtenay simmer switch, Twin headlight conversion, Steinmetz front splitter, Dastek unichip, Massive Wilwood Brakes and callipers, and stainless steel engine detailing, the retail price of these pieces alone comes to a staggering £4,690.

The car was up for sale at £5,500 and was a Courtenay Conversion, I bought the car (after a bit of haggling) with one intention, to strip all the good bits off and transfer them onto my car then put my bits onto this car, run around in it for a few months and then sell it on.

I did most of the swapping and changing in the first few days, I decided to sell the Twin Headlights because I didn't think they quite suited the car, they were nice, but I prefered the standard look  I used the new car for a few months until it ran out of tax, then in April 2002 while at Donny Show, I put a for sale sign in my original car that was featured at Donny Show that advertised the 2nd Astra I had just bought and stripped back to standard, I sold the 2nd Astra Turbo that same night.

I feel my car has a much more aggressive stance with the different wheels on, though I am still unsure about their colour, I may sell the wheels for a set that I like better or have them re-painted in silver.

The company that did all my engine powder coating was LSN Coatings based In Castleford, they also spray alloys, and Dave the boss tells me that they can do a flip from white to stainless depending on the sunshine, after looking at a wheel he had on display I was quite impressed, so maybe I'll do that instead, only time will tell.

During March 2002, I decided to finish the interior off by adding the Black Dash as opposed to the grey one that was still in, I was looking forward to this, because I had already fitted the rest of the GSi interior and so the dash was all that was remaining, This also meant having the trip computer put in, and because I wanted the computer to work, the 2-3 hour dash change suddenly  turned into a four day task!!!!.                For the trip computer to operate, all the relevant sensors had to be connected, and to do the job right would mean that the whole car had to be stripped down to a bare shell, the existing 1.4 wiring loom then stripped out and the 2.0 GSi Loom which has all the sensors for the computer on put back in. This means every wire in the whole car, from the front side light bulb to the rear number plate light bulb,  from the interior light above the head to the fuel pump sender under the car. the handbrake light, the horn, the door looms, everything..  Then as if the job wasn't hard enough already, all my extras had to be de-soldered off the 1.4 loom and re-soldered onto the GSi loom, these included Courtenay Simmer/Kill switch, electric sunroof, complete stereo system, and once again the Clifford Alarm.  

Helping me with this mammoth task was my old mate Kelvin, he fetched along his mate Bulmer on day one telling him it was just a couple of hours work, what a liar !!. Bulmer survived until the end of Day 2 then it was just me and Kelvin for the last two days.

Here's a few pictures for you to view, 

Now I had the car looking good and performing great with all the new goodies under the bonnet. It stopped a lot better too thanks to the massive Wilwood Racing discs.

I upgraded the wheels in September with a set of genuine Kahn RSS Alloys in 18", I liked the look of the wheel better but the dark colour of the previous set had begun to grow on me, they did give the car a Hard as nails kind of impression, a look that the softer kahn's just didn't quite manage to pull off.

Soon after the wheels came the next BIG Step, Nitrous Oxide Injection, made famous by the movie "the fast and the furious", The kit I got was a genuine Wizards of Nos kit, preferred by many international drag champions for its quality and reliability. It took some time to fit properly but it was all straight forward enough.

Leather interior is always at the back of my mind for a future upgrade, I had leather in the Astramax van and it really felt good just having it, it finishes the whole car off, so maybe if I can scrape enough pennies together I'll get it done. 

Part 3.

Nitrous is really expensive to use so it's not the best option if you are on a tight budget, the price of the basic kit and install is around £1,000, add another £500 if you want the digital controller,  Once all the kit is fitted you soon realise that you have some major running costs to be thinking about, the biggest bottle you can get is the 11lb bottle and this will go from full to empty in around 6 minutes and at a cost of £40 to be refilled it soon empties your bank account, saying that though the 6 minutes you get on gas is great fun.

My next step was a little interior styling, While browsing around Halford's Ripspeed I noticed a rather nice Momo Millennium steering wheel that I though looked really nice, it turned out to really suit the Astra's interior with its Black leather and shiny aluminium finish.

The front Mouth that I had cut into the front bumper was home to my Pace Charge-Cooler, This handy little device is basically a set of two radiators that are filled with water which is been constantly pumped around in a loop, the first radiator is in the mouth at the front of the car catching all the cool fresh air which cools the water down, the second radiator is in a sealed box that has a set of entry and exit pipes for the inlet charge pipes to connect to, as the red hot inlet air leaves the turbo it is cooled down as much as possible by the Intercooler, the air then passes through the Charge-cooler which cools it down even further before it finally reaches the inlet manifold and the combustion chambers.

This set up had worked fine up to now, but I had a massive intercooler sitting in my garage that would fill the whole of the front mouth up and to fit this I needed to find a new place to house the Charge-coolers main Radiator.

After a weekend of work at the front of the car the Charge-coolers Main radiator had been repositioned behind the top grille and the new intercooler was mounted into the mouth of the bumper, It was a nightmare trying to get all the pipes repositioned and connected securely but eventually it was all fitted and working fine. I really like the look of the intercooler, it gives the impression that the car really means business, before I had been a little unhappy with the look of the front of the car which is why I never really took any full frontal pictures.

New G-max shockers were fitted to the front and rear in the same weekend and these made the car handle much better than it did with the standard Astra shockers that were still fitted

.

For the next modification I returned to the engine, I had heard many praises about the newer spec Z20 LET engines injectors, they give a better spray pattern and higher flow than the standard C20 LET injectors that I still had in. A quick call to AutoVaux and an hour in the garage soon gave me a little more power to the wheels.

Everything seemed to be going great, The car was looking perfect and the power was great but after fitting the Nitrous, Injectors and front mounted intercooler I decided it was time to have the Das-tek Unichip remapped to hopefully squeeze out a few more horses, I estimated the current power to be around the 280BHP figure, I'm confident of this and have always been quite modest when it comes to BHP guesses, many people seem to think of a number, times it by two then add another 50 on for good luck, these people then end up looking silly when they are beaten by a semi-quick car. faulty spark plugs, wrong petrol, and too much weight are then the excuses they try and use to wriggle out of the humiliation.

I booked the Astra into Rik Woods, a company in Manchester that had originally fitted the Unichip onto the 2nd Astra turbo I had, I was hoping with the new mods fitted that he would be able to up the power by about 10 BHP maybe even 15 BHP which would have me knocking on the door of 300BHP, 

After an hour at Riks I could sense that this had all been a big mistake, the guy was a total idiot, fliggin rude too, he had taken a few of my mods off the car  telling me they were rubbish and that I should leave it to him to make my car fast, he didn't like me watching him so he asked me to go for a wonder around for a few hours, He fed me the lines that he knew his stuff and I needn't worry so off I went to the pub.

He finished the car at 5pm, I'd been their since 9am and was really tired but very excited about going out in the car for the test run, I jumped in the car and shot off into the distance.

Well the distance being about 100 yards because that's all it needed to wipe the smile from my face. I couldn't believe what was happening, the turbo was boosting at 10psi and the car felt like it didn't have the power to pull the skin off a custard. I turned around and when I got back I told him it was boosting at just 10psi, he said yes, that's the maximum it will go to Its producing 210 BHP he said as though I should be impressed with him and his wonderful work, I was like pulling my hair out, It was running at 14 psi when it arrived this morning I told him, he blamed this and that, everything bar himself as it happens, I told him to write the original map back onto the chip which was just a two minute job, and guess what he told me then, he didn't make a copy of the original map, what an Idiot I was stuck with 210BHP and a guy wanting £300 for a days work.

I told him he wasn't getting a penny and he threw a tantrum, he even tried to wipe the chip completely, after a few minutes of heated talking I was on my way back home with a  power lacking car but glad that the silly pratt didn't get a single penny from me.

I was now on the lookout for a new chip, I could have gone to another Unichip Dealer for my chip setting back up but after complaining to the head office about Rik Woods and getting no real apology I decided to sell the chip on and start afresh.

German based company V-max had just released a new set of chips called "Evo", Evo1 through to Evo5, 5 being the biggest and reputed to give 310BHP at a cost of £400. I was the first in England to get the Evo5 Chip, purchased from Gavin at Wallace Performance in Scotland, But my bad luck continued, The Evo5 wasn't happy in my Astra, It worked well in the Calibra and Cavalier turbo's but for some reason it just didn't want to work at all in my Astra, Code 55 was showing constantly on the engine Diagnostics and the performance was never there, after 6 months of chip testing between Gavin at Wallace Performance, V-Max in Germany and me on my Astra I have finally given up hope of owning the Evo5 chip, I am currently running the Evo2 Chips which are working fine but even with my engine mods I'll only be getting around 265 BHP, no where near the power I was getting from the Original Unichip.

To increase the power of the engine I have decided to up the power of the nitrous until I can find a suitable chip that will work fine on my engine.

Leather Interior was next on the list, I'd always wanted Leather since having it in the Astramax Turbo van, I felt so good and I finally had my GSi Seats re-trimmed in September 2003, I decided to go for two tone again, Black bolsters and Cream centres.

The seats looked really nice but when I fitted them into the Astra they just didn't look quite right, The cream was the lightest shade they had but the white colour of the car made it look out of place, I didn't want Black and white because the white would get mucky really quick but after seeing the cream I just had to change my mind, I sold the New Leather Interior in December 03 and am hoping to have the New White / Black interior in by February 04.

More to follow, 

Regards Bren.