The Project Pad

Wait, so you did all of that with a bum transmission in there?

LOL

Hank

nice!!

Yeah, I don't have the bits together for the 01E yet. Thinking an 01A is going back in if I seriously want to do the track event 7/7/13. Even then...looks like I'll be beating on the GTI with its wonderful ice cold A/C.

I also started playing around with my BBK parts. I got a set of front and rear 996 turbo brakes for basically free last Spring, so I just need to figure out brackets and rotors for them. The brackets are kind of trivial, but I need to pick a rotor to get started on those. The 996 Turbo front brakes are 330x34mm stock. I'm not aware of any OEM VAG application anywhere near that in terms of thickness for that diameter. The closest are the various 323/325x30mm S4/A6/A8 options, which come in various offsets. From what I've been lead to believe, that's probably still a bit thin for these calipers if the pads wear down. On the upside, I know on the Porsche's it's basically impossible to fit 17" wheels on the stock brakes (there are only one or two out there that clear these calipers for whatever reason, I guess they're chunky), so losing 5-7mm of diameter may help there. Running 17s on the track and/or in winter would be nice, but I don't know if the car is going to be driven in winter and I have access to loads of 18" takeoff tires.

Otherwise, I'm also trying to evaluate if these calipers will work with a rotor in the 345-360mm range, of which there are numerous OEM options. D2 S8 front rotors, B6/7 S4, Mk5 R32, R8 Rear, etc. etc. Some are 30mm, some are 32mm. This would provide a meaningful increase in braking torque at the sacrifice of only being able to run 18" rims and having to deal with obsurdly heavy rotors as some of these front OEM ones are.

I'm also debating selling the whole setup and moving to a more standard Boxster S/996 C2 caliper arrangement, which seems to still work awesome and is quite a bit cheaper all around. If someone wants a set of four 996 Turbo brakes (fronts and rears), let me know. Pads are almost toast and the fronts need some dust seals but look and work great otherwise.

Sam

Spent all day swapping transmissions and tidying up a few other items. I really want to try bringing this thing to the DCTC event on Sunday. I have a number of things left to do tomorrow and we'll see how I'm sitting. In the meanwhile, here's some cool noises. Only running 18psi, wastegate pressure only. It spools a little later than I was hoping; we'll see what tuning and some electronic control can do for speeding that up and making some healthy power.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyl2ykrvLgo[/youtube]

Sam

Sam,

Good work buddy.

On your sway bar stuff I can tell you from my work that a big rear bar is the best thing you can do to almost any old audi, especially the B chassis. I had an Rs2 28mm front and then swapped a late build 89 90 front 26mm bar into the rear with front control arms swapped side to side. Running these on a 90 with intrax springs (which are soft) the car would slide off even. If you'd like to try this setup let me know!

On your brakes I have seen TI shims that you can get for behind the pads, in theory you could use these to take up the gap from the rotor width. If you need help finding them or building the 4-pot rear setup let me know, I've played with all this and should still have most of the CAD stuff from my models.

Sounds healthy. I'd get boost control on it before you get too let down on the spool.

Hank wrote:Sounds healthy. I'd get boost control on it before you get too let down on the spool.

x2. Adding boost control to my last turbo totally changed how it spooled.

Got the oil cooler installed, found an air filter (Spectre #8162 is a 4", shallow depth cone filter FYI), changed the oil, and tidied up a bunch of other little things. Should be ready to rip tomorrow, at least as much as it ever will be for the foreseeable future. I think temps are going to be an issue; it's about 90deg here with a lot of humidity and everything is getting stupid hot. I've been trying to clean up any lean spots in my tune at partial throttle to help reduce the heat load, but I don't think it's going to keep up at this level.

Sam

Looks great, Sam!

Sunday was awesome. Lots and lots of thoughts to share, but for now...

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIfS3Aj4xns[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjR50xIfZZo[/youtube]

Sam

Looks like you are using it proper. Sounds fantastic

Alright, time to hammer this out...

So, last Sunday I did a PDX event with the local SCCA club. It was an efficient, albeit loosely organized event at a local semi-truck/cop training facility. It was something like $140, located about 30min from home, and promised lots of track time with a decently flowing course. Top speed was about 90mph with many corners in the 40-60mph range, together with a few pretty quick ones.

I spent Friday and Saturday of my extended 4th of July weekend banging out a laundry list of items needed to get the Coupe up and running. I started with a broken transmission, in-op and partially disassembled wastegate, no workable air filter after getting a hold of about four of them, and some work left to do to secure the bumper. The original stock 01A from my Coupe made itself available if I wanted it, so I decided to seize that opportunity and try to get the car running versus just taking the GTI.

A Facebook note from Hank (who I bought the turbo, header, downpipe, and wastegate from used) told me that the wastegate diaphragm was folded, but not torn. I hadn't bothered to look at it, but when I did I put it back together and verified it worked great! After stopping at the local O'Reilly's, I got a Spectre air filter that finally fit and they even had it in stock. So I picked up the transmission and by about 10pm on Friday I had it installed and drove the car home that night, the first real mileage I put on it with the 30R.

Saturday morning I ran some errands on it and get a simple tune going--basically made sure it was rich, running the 18psi wastegate pressure OK, and using text message tuning ignition values from Mr. Shadzi. The new turbo was coming alive a bit later in the power band than I was anticipating, hitting 18psi a little past 4000rpm. A fruitful exchange with Hank revealed I could safely raise the rev limiter to the high 7000 range on the stock valvetrain, and after verifying the engine ran OK up there and my tune was safe I beat on the car a bit. That resulted in some quickly escalating oil temperatures, which meant my project for the day was to reinstall my oil cooler. I made some brackets and got that in place, and I was off to the races the next day.



Pavel and I caravanned down, and after the song and dance of meetings and 'tech inspection' there (basically made sure it had four tires and the battery was secured), we went out first and second in the first session of the day. I took to learning the track, which was not super challenging in layout but had some major bumps in parts that the car did not like. Some were in the middle of corners and would cause the car to porpoise--front tires coming off the ground, all kinds of nasty stuff. Another very sharp bump was at the turn-in point of a 70mph sweeping corner at the end of the back straight. Nowhere near enough travel available meant the front suspension made an awful sound bottoming out over it. Pavel quickly disappeared behind me and pulled off with what was a holed rear brake hose. He ended up driving two hours round trip to replace it with a different hose and rebleed his brakes. He ran the rest of the afternoon, having to find a new alternator belt at one point after his flew off.





Temperatures started out in the low 80s but climbed into the low 90s, with a fair amount of humidity and a lot of sun beating down. I ran in every session and finally rolled out just before 5, totally fried. I had no real mechanical issues with the car other than a fundamental lack of cooling that meant I could only do 4-5 laps before temps hit nuclear and I had to slow down. The car and I got along great, and I was one of if not the fastest car in the 'advanced' run group, being most evenly matched by a modded newer WRX running coilovers and big meaty tires.


NEMESIS!!!

My friend Brian May also stopped by with his GoPro and rode shotgun for a couple of sessions. He took some really cool video. He also got video from the outside of the track that sounds awesome. The exhaust note of the car is COMPLETELY different with the tube header, much higher pitched.

Video of the passenger front wheel doing its thing:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIfS3Aj4xns[/youtube]

Flyby:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjR50xIfZZo[/youtube]


Takeaways from doing this
The event provided a very cheap, accessible, valuable way to shakedown this car and sort out some of its behaviors. I got a ton of seat time and have some very good observations to use to improve it.

Cooling System: Cooling issues were by far the biggest problem I had at the event. After 4-5 hard laps, oil temps would hit 140C and water temps would get near triggering the overheat light. Easy driving following that would finally get things cooled back down. I'm running Lubrimoly 10w60 oil in this before, which I'm now a bit more thankful for than I was prior. Even at 140C oil temp, I had full oil pressure with a minimum of pressure drop in corners. At the same temperatures on 10w40, it sounds like Pavel was having issues consistent with thin sloshy oil. However, I had a big oil cooler on mine and he had none on his, and we both seemed to be seeing almost the same temps. From that I draw that I need to duct my oil cooler much better, and figure out how to keep the water temps down as well.

As far as water temps go, my first step will be to fully duct the radiator. Right now, the driver's side and bottom are not shrouded. Now that I have the bumper and it's installed, I finally have something to build a duct to. After that, I'm going to look at upgrading to the 500w fan, and peruse better radiator options. I'm running a garbage 1 year old Nissens radiator. Comparing it to Pavel's brand new Behr, it's very poor quality and the density of the fins in the core is nowhere close. So just getting a Behr OEM radiator is one option. I'd like to stay away from the 034/Ron Davis radiators due to poor reliability they seem to have. Which leaves custom radiators? Time to learn to weld Aluminum maybe.

Right now, this is the biggest thing keeping me to commiting this car to further high speed events. If it can't cope on a small course with a fairly low duty cycle, how will it handle 10sec+ of full throttle at Brainerd International or Road America? That said, this event was lower speed, meaning that while I was at full throttle, there was less air mass moving through the radiator. Full throttle in first gear is said to be the limit scenario for a cooling system. I was full throttle in second gear very often.

The only other thought I have is the quality of Graf water pumps in these 5cyls. I run them because they're reliable. But a buddy brought up that I should check to see how well the impeller matches the contour of the block, as he's fought issues with other aftermarket pumps having poor clearances and causing cavitation at high RPMs. He lives in Phoenix, so that's a problem. Pavel changed his water pump just before this event, going from an unknown one that he completed two full days at BIR with no temperature issues with, to a Graf where he had the same problems I did.

Suspension: Whoever was spouting on the internet that you shouldn't run sway bars on a B3 is full of shit. I spent a bunch of time doing some calculations that said they would solve a multitude of issues I had predicted. I didn't manage to get them on the car due to some missing parts and a lack of time. Pretty much every prediction I made verified here.

The balance of the car is OK right now running 400lb springs all the way around. Very neutral, and with the rear torsen it will power out of a corner with no understeer whatsoever, bordering on power oversteer. You can't do anything stupid going into the corner, as it will push due to the motor placement or oversteer due to the high spring rates in back and front weight bias if you really ham it in. That's fine, and I wouldn't want to change that--a front RS2 bar and rear 26mm bar would be ideal, making sure you use the right type of bar to get the motion ratio right (hint, the control arm mounted bars are softer at the wheel).



The biggest issue that sway bars solve is a lack of suspension travel due to body roll. Cars are narrower than they are long (er, wheel bases are at least), so they need extra stiffness in roll to keep motions in check. It's super cool to watch this video of suspension as I drive the car and see it compressing exactly as much as I predicted, likely leaving only about .5" of travel before hitting a very firm, short bumpstop that doesn't give. Adding 26mm bars front and rear would HALVE the amount of suspension compression due to body roll in a 1g corner. It ends up being .5-.75" more travel available to deal with soaking up bumps, which would've made a significant impact on how I could drive the car on this bumpy circuit. Not only would I have better control over the bumps, I maybe wouldn't have had to change my line through certain corners to avoid hitting these monsters, which would've let me take them going much faster.

In an ideal world, I would want to go stiffer on overall spring rates as well. I've been setting up Porsche racecars lately, and depending on tires those cars are happily running 700lb front spring rates on the street (on the light front end of a 911) all the way up to 1500lb spring rates on a GT3 cup running Yoko slicks. With good dampers, the 700lb rates ride really nicely, and the 900-1100lb range work very well on the track for something running R6s--very quick response, good over small bumps, and no undesirable body motions. What's interesting is that works out to 6-7hz ride frequencies, which are over double what are suggested in the various chassis textbooks floating around out there for the most aggressive, aero-laden racecars. How times change...

Brakes: Didn't get Porsche brakes on the front. G60s provided good stopping power and never faded, but had some HAIRY moments while hard on the pedal with the rear S8 brakes locking up. Shit has to get done to make this safe, let alone quick.



I have a huge list of other smaller things that I would aim to get done before the next major event with the car. I MIGHT try to do a PCA event at the end of the month before Heather and I embark on a 4700mi west coast road trip in the GTI, but more than likely the next target will be sometime in September or October.

Sam

What are you doing for radiator fan? The biggest trick to slow speed cooling is a big fan pushing a lot of air. I find that high speed events do a great job of getting enough flow across the radiator to keep the car cool. Auto X type events are brutal on side mounted radiator cars. If you can keep coolant temperatures reasonable, that will do a pretty good job of dropping oil temperatures as well.

Like you said, ducting would do wonders for the oil cooler.

Looks fantastic. I think I would do some black thermo transfer on the front mount. Sticks out for some reason, though that could be the black on red bumper effect.

Good stuff Sam!!! I like it! The car is looking freakin sweet! My plan for cooling is using both a pusher and a puller, hopefully that will move enough volume to keep temps down. Also, I found (like Hank said) at higher speeds temps stayed nice'n safe even with just running the stock 4k radiator/fan.

Had an afternoon this past Sunday to do some work to the car post-track event. I realigned it, since the steering wheel became off sometime while beating around DCTC. The rear was tweaked slightly, but the front had the same camber as being but with .50deg of toe out. Weird...anyways, realigned it to 0deg and went on my way.

We made awesome progress with Pavel's car then I threw him the keys so I could sit shotgun and tune. A couple hours later, we had a phenomenally stable fuel map going, and started to up the boost. Stopped at about 25psi. The car flat rips. Still not doing much below 4000rpm, but it has no problem making tons of power all the way to the limiter beyond that. 0-90 happens very quickly. I need to hit the dyno and get an EGT gauge hooked up to my thermocouple to see how far I can take this on pump gas, but it's very very healthy now as-is. The work I did on fuelling turned out great as well; at very low loads it is smoother and more consistently responsive than it's ever been before.

Before we ended, I took the wheel to see how it drove. I ended up smacking the limiter somehow and blowing the exhaust off at the rear muffler clamp. The sound was epic so I had Pavel take a couple videos. This header makes things sound AMAZING, even with the exhaust attached. I've been watching youtube videos for years of cars from Europe sounding crazy like this, so it's awesome to have my own making these sounds .

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SvuJowiRDY[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-n2Jw6MGbA[/youtube]

I haven't blown up the transmission...yet. I have a bunch of parts handy to put sway bars on the car, so that along with figuring out some better exhaust hangers will be next. Then I'm road tripping to the west coast and back for two weeks in the GTI, so probably not too much going on with this until September or so.

Sam

sounds great... open exhaust ftw

Where are you coming to on the west coast?

Greg W.

Newport Beach for 2-3 days. We should be there August 10-12, I'd love to get together with you and Jim and company while I'm out there.

Sam

Put sway bars on last weekend. 26mm early-style bars that go to the control arms. I got new OCAP sway bar link kits, as I was too cheap/lazy to track down the nice poly ones. The fronts installed easily, I put the bushings through the holes in the forged control arms and it worked out perfectly.

The rear sucked. I started by making sleeves to weld to the control arms that the sway bar bushings would squish inside of. I got some 1" OD steel pipe, and a 7/8" hole saw to enlarge the centers of some fender washers with. The fender washers got welded on either end of a short (maybe 3/4" long) section of pipe. The pipe was made of shitty metal and the washers were very thin and did not want to weld nicely.

After putting about 600 amps into a 3oz piece of steel, twice, I had my parts. Welding them to the control arm was also fun. First off, I bought these arms from Petar Antonic, who had them nicely powdercoated. So I had to try to grind that off with pretty poor access. Second, I was too stubborn to remove them so I did it on the car. Which made getting the welder in there...challenging. After some ghetto stuff I'm not willing to discuss, I had them "attached" to the control arm to the point where a giant pry bar couldn't budge them.

From there, I bent up a couple pieces of 1/4" thick 1 1/4" flat bar and welded them on between the bottom of the subframe and the tie rod mount. I was able to position them such that I will be able to access the nut for the inner tie rod bolt, something that gets overlooked sometimes when making custom mounts. I got the brackets welded on, which did not go well since the subframe steel was apparently very dirty. I grinded, flapper wheel, and wire wheeled it beforehand but it was still splattery and messy. I got some penetration though and shouldn't have any issues.

Lastly, I attached the swaybar to the mounts using some 25mm ID Energy Suspension sway bar mounts. They don't bind too badly once greased, even with the 26mm bar installed. I'll keep an eye on them.

The end result (trigger warning: rust):


With the 26mm bars installed identically front and rear, the balance should be shifted a bit more towards neutrality/oversteer as well. Given this car's behavior thus far under braking and turn in, I'm not sure if that's what I need, so I do have a 22mm bar of the same style I might try playing with. I just need to order brackets for it.

I haven't had a ton of chances to push the car really hard, but so far it seems to have accomplished my main goal, which was to add roll stiffness to quicken responsiveness and maintain suspension travel in the corners. The car does not wallow or get as upset hitting bumps while heavily loaded as it did before. It just deals with them and causes no drama. It also changes direction faster--there was considerable body roll before as visible in the pictures, which feels as though it is cut down by quite a bit now. I did get one opportunity to rip it out the bottom of a 270* cloverleaf. It did really, really cool things, and I was kind of shocked by how composed it was for the speed I built up by the time I was driving straight.

I'm going to drive it more once I get back and see if there's anything else I need to do to the suspension. I had a talk with Jim last weekend, and he mentioned he uses camber bolts. Plates aren't going to happen this year, but I don't want to buy some of the 2Bennett mounts in the meanwhile. Camber bolts and some small spacers to get the tire away from the strut might be a good short-term solution if I want to track the car this Fall.

Otherwise, I'm still looking at cooling, brake, and seating projects before the September/October events.

Sam

Little update, big fun.

Took the GTI and girlfriend for a two-week long road trip to the west coast and back. Met Darin and got a ride in his car. Got the grand tour at 034 to briefly catch up with and introduce myself to old and new faces. Supervised Jim supervising his kitchen remodel. The Coupe sat around for basically three weeks, then fired right up when I got back...it doesn't even kill the battery when it sits anymore .

After two weeks and 5300 miles in the GTI, I drove the CQ heavily last week, since it turns out it's really fun to drive. Naturally driving turned into trying to make it go faster, which got me into some 'soft' sensations on boost. I redid my ECU map line, which got my MAP readings back into line over 20psi...gauge and ECU now read the same within 1psi or so. That meant some slight retuning, but no bueno on fixing the soft feeling. I debated changing plug wires, but then decided to try decreasing my map based dwell multiplier from over 2 to around 1.5-1.6 at 250-300kpa. The car suddenly got snappy and the softness went away. The laptop doesn't even reset randomly.

I also fixed some of the softness and misfire feeling by adding timing. I know there are reasons why too little timing is bad, but without a working EGT probe all I have to go on is the recommendations of others for safe timing values, spark plugs, and how the engine sounds audibly. At 26psi I was running ~12deg of timing at peak torque 5000rpm, which seemed about right for 93 octane, but I know people warn about backpressure at high boost when running the GTX3076 due to the small turbine. I decided I wanted to go faster without the risk of melting everything down, so I went and got six gallons of 102 octane after burning off the last tank.

I started by adding 4-5deg of timing with boost. Holy shit, instant massive increase in power. I played around a bit more, checked some plugs, and played a bit more with timing, fuel, and then boost. Right now I'm running about 315kpa manifold pressure at I believe ~15deg minimum timing, and the car seems to be running swimmingly. Plugs look fantastic and the car runs extremely strong and smooth. I took a buddy for a ride in 93 degree, super humid weather and he got the giggle fits. I really want to find a good stretch of road to try a 60-130 run on and see where I stand. With this turbo on this boost level it seems like 500whp or slightly more is about right, and by the acceleration in 4th gear I wouldn't rule that ballpark out.

I'm paying $7.75/gal for this stuff and the station is about 5min away. They carry it year-round. The power is awesome, so I've tried to rationalize it against E85 or meth injection. All three options have their advantages and disadvantages; for now I'll probably stick with the race gas for my fix, but also try to revisit the 93 octane and make sure I'm using that to the best of its abilities. Otherwise, for the $500-1000 it costs to put in a solid meth injection or E85 capable setup, you can buy a lot of race gas...

Sam

Get it on the dyno Sam. I'd love to know what kind of power it is making compared to other vehicles you work with.

Yeah, I'm with Hank. Since we have the same setup I'm curious to know where you are at. The whole backpressure at high boost must have got me and caused the detonation in #5.

Sounds like a fun trip! OH and Dyno x3

ooh ooh I want to know too! 30r x3. Darin what a/r is your turbine housing, and ditto to you sam?

I'm running a .82. Modded internal WG housing with the WG plugged and a V-band welded on the discharge by Hank. Depending on gear, I'm seeing full boost at 4000-4200.

Darin - it's probably the crap gas everyone west of the Mississippi aside from us here in the Twin Cities gets that caused your meltdown. I drove 5300 miles and the only premium I saw that wasn't various varieties of summer blend garbage 91 was at the BP just down the street from here.

Sam