I forgot to mention, in the pic from the car show, the car is sitting on B&G S2 springs, so that brought the height down a little over an inch from the factory sport springs. Now lets move on after the show. Well right after it anyway. On the way home from the Carlisle event, I followed a friend onto the turn Pike. I should have had no problem keeping up with his EFI converted MK2 Jetta, so I pushed on the throttle a little harder and longer than I had before, and BANG! I had no clue what had happened, but it shure scared me pretty good. We pulled over on the side of the road, and popped the hood, to find that one of my couplers had blown off the pipe. I was only hitting 12psi then so needless to say, I wasnt expecting that. I made up a crimp tool, and went to town crimping the ends of all the pipes so this doesn't happen again
I then finally purchased the items needed to attach an air filter to the turbo, as I was running with 4 layers of window screen over the inlet of the turbo so I could get to and from the show with nothing jumping in there
Soon after that, I decided that I wanted to be able to tune my suspension, and came across a person selling a premade DIY coil over setup, the only problem was they came with 6" springs in the 700lbs and 800lbs variety.
They were too short, and WAY too stiff. I sold those off, and picked up some 7" 350's for the front and some 8" 375's for the rear. Those should be much nicer to drive on with the Koni inserts. Sorry, only ever got around to putting the rears together so far. I have a pretty good range of adjustment there!
Shorty there after, I found a pretty rare set of wheels, and they were local and cheap too! These wheels were mainly found on the Euro 80 competition, and also on the last 2 years of the Cabriolet, here in the states.
Made for the Votex OEM/Aftermarket line! Pretty clean too
Hopefully these will be fitted with a set of tires in time for the show this year.
So, as luck would have it, after months of back and forth emails with my tuning guy(thank god for him, I just cant seem to get the hang of tweaking the VE tables), things were looking and running great!
Driving video1 Driving video2
And just for the fun of it, here is what the beast sounds like with no load, I had a lot of people wanting to know how it sounded on other forums, so I made this quick vid. I have a Urq down pipe, catless mid pipe, and a complete Stebro exhaust. Basicaly, its a catless 2.5" exhaust with a resonator, and a muffler. NO DRONE! Pure exhaust sound
Wasnt long after that, I had another major setback. While taking a good friend out for a ride, I lost 2nd, 4th, and 5th gear and it sounded like I was dragging the transmission under the car! what a horrible sound. So after checking to make sure everything was still hooked up externally, we decided I needed to find another trans. So as luck would have it, a guy who was already buying parts from me, just happened to have one sitting in his shed, well chicken coupe. This is how I got it.
After a good pressure washing at work
Then we had to put it in. Lucky for me, a good friend let me use his shop to do this project. I cant tell you how nice it was to have a lift, and real tools at your finger tips to use.
After that, I was actually able to drive the car for a while! It was quite nice. Still working out bugs in the tune, but it was coming along nicely. Then one day, I noticed that my IAT was constantly at 70F, and it was 90F outside! Well this cant be good. So I pulled out the sensor, and sure enough, the thermister came undone from the conestor. I had this problem years ago with a 2G eclipse 420a. So I decided it needed to be moved from the quite hot intake manifold, to the boost pipe right before the throttle body.
Then, it was time for MORE TUNING! I really wish I could do this better myself, but for some reason I cant get my head around it very well. Flash forward a month or so, and I get a phone call. Its my friend who had the EFI'd jetta. He had recently sold it, and now his company was taking away the company cars on the weekends. Needless to say, he wanted mine for a while. I told hit it was fine, just needed to install the new starter. Another tow job later, he had the car. He ended up replacing the battery, and the starter
Then cleaned up my ecu and gauges
It wasn't long after he had it that he figured out why my coolant would just kind of dissapear under heavy loads. A leak down test showed I was losing coolant into all 5 cylinders! I wasn't very happy to not even get 5k miles out of a head gasket.
So off with its head again. This time we installed an MLS gasket.
Then I get a call saying Im losing a lot of oil quickly. It was running down the CV shaft of all places. Turns out one of my oil cooler lines had rubbed on the body, and rubbed through. We didn't even try to get the 28 year old fittings apart, I just got another whole cooler assembly and installed tha, with some protection for the lines.
Then he decided it was time to fix the cluster. The clock had bled out, and the tach had decided to stop working. Replaced the clock with one from a B4, and re-soldered a couple joints on the board. Oh, and then he replaced the odom. gear so that will work again.
Almost to the present. About 3 weeks ago, he told me that he has had to put in a quart of oil to every 1k miles. it doesnt burn it, or I would have plumbs of smoke from the tail pipes. The only thing I can figure, is that the front seal on the turbo is bad, and it filling up my intercooler with 5w40. Not good. So I decided it was time to build my hybrid turbo. This turbo consists of a Porsche K26/6 turbine and exhaust housing, Audi K26 center section, and a turbonetics to4e compressor wheel and housing. The rotating assembly is currently out being ballanced, and the new exhaust housing will hopefully show up soon. Im looking forward to seeing how this turbo compares to the K24 I am currently running, which we believe to be modified. We are not exactly sure how it was modified, but it spools faster than a known factory K24 on a 20vt, and the guy sold it to another friend of mine as an "upgrade" to the turbo on his 200 20vt. Should be interesting. Hopefully I will have my car back here soon though. Now that we are pretty much done with his B4q 1.8t swap, I should be able to get it back! I will post more when I can. Thanks for reading.