Disco 1 Turbo boost + gauge help

Evening all,

I am in need of some help with re-plumbing my turbo and fitting a boost gauge to my '97 Disco 1 300TDI Auto.

Basically, I want to move the waste-gate line from the turbo outlet to the inlet manifold for that little extra poke, and use the turbo outlet to feed a boost gauge. I will be cleaning out the intercooler piping (might replace in the future) and getting somebody with a great deal of experience in diesel fuel pumps to tweak the fuelling.

I have read up a lot and as I understand; there is a loss of 0.2-0.3 bar from the turbo outlet to the manifold due to the the intercooler pipework, which means that the mainfold will only actually see ~0.7 bar of the 1.04 bar that the turbo *should* be producing. By moving the pipework you can get closer to 1.0 bar at the inlet and therefore a little more get up and go, at the expense of making the turbo work a little harder.

As has been mentioned in multiple places, there is a fitting in the rear of the inlet manifold., I have found this fitting, but unlike anybody else I appear to have a sensor there already... A little investigation has shown this to be an air temperature sensor. I have tried to follow the wiring, but it disappears behind somewhere with wiring from another sensor in the top of the head (I believe this is something to do with the EGR).

I had a look through some fittings that I had around me to try and tee out of the manifold so I could run the boost pipe to the waste gate and keep the temperature sensor in place. I wasn't able to find anything, and a trawl through Google / Ebay didn't throw anything up either.

Ideally I would use this to take a reading as otherwise I need to take the inlet manifold off so that I can tap a new fitting. On that note, nowhere have I read about people actually removing the inlet to drill and tap... surely you cannot do it in place as there is inevitably an amount of swarf that would then get sucked into the cylinders.

Has anybody else come across this? How did you get around it?

Thanks in advance

A 97 300 Tdi came out the factory with EDC - has it still got it?

The easiest way to attach a boost gauge will be to remove the plenum, and tap the other boss on the rear of it..

IMHO, do not increase the boost without a proper gauge - and do not take it over the factory spec, unless you want expensive engine repairs to be necessary.

Not sure that it's that straight forward re-plumbing the pipes. You cannot tweak the fuel pump either; it's electronic in the automatic.
All in all it's an old engine that's not designed for either speed nor outright power. You could also do a lot of damage to older engine components; is it really worth it?

Think the best advice i can pass on to the OP is. Don't play with what you don't understand.

Buy a manual then you can TWEEK it a bit! with out going OVER the top & KILLING it