Justin's '85 UrQ'd 4000 20vt Project - Tuning Help?

Onwardtothestars · Post by **Onwardtothestars** » Sun Jan 28, 2007 10:32 pm

Come out to COLORADO and work on my 4k

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Mon Jan 29, 2007 7:56 am

AudiSport4000 wrote:Always excellent updates meng. I wish I knew or had somebody teach me how to weld, definately something useful to learn.
Nice work with the support too and intercooler. A very wise idea. I had to dick around with the Urq IC to get it to fit in my car, what a pain. Glad you went a different and better route.

Keep those pice comin! :-D :-D

thanks Mike! I actually didn't know how to weld completely. I went through a quick and dirty tig/stick welding here at work (went through a generic class that they generally use to teach the Navy guys how to weld). Also did a *minor* amount of mig welding in college... to the effect of running one bead and tack welding some chain to a prototype we designed for a senior design project...

So yeah, I'm kinda learning what works as I go. That crank lock tool has far uglier welds than this did... so practice makes perfect

Onwardtothestars wrote:Come out to COLORADO and work on my 4k

though very tempting... not sure that'll be able to happen

VWralley · Post by **VWralley** » Thu Feb 01, 2007 2:30 pm

Can you enlighten me on this coolant passage mod? just about to get into my swap and i have heard a little about people "upgrading the coolant passeges" but id love some more info on the need and or benefits for this modification :-)

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 6:13 am

Basically you drill into 3 existing bungs that are located in the head (as you can see in this pic)

This helps with flow through the head in the back 3 cyl, which don't get as good of a coolant flow compared to the other 2 cylinders. This will help keep the head cooler, thus less likely to cause detonation. If you're just going to run stock boost, it's not completely necessary (to me), but I'm planning on tracking the car... which will result in 30-40 min sessions at high rpms and full boost :-D So I'm tossing every precaution I can think of at it so I don't have issues down the road.

hope that answers your question.

VWralley · Post by **VWralley** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 10:31 am

that does, thank you very much

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 11:47 am

no problem, glad i could help ya 8)

VWralley · Post by **VWralley** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 12:08 pm

do you have it planned out on how to run the coolant lines to there? are those intended to be inlet or outlets? im on the fence whether i should do this or not, i could pop the head off, do the metal head gasket w/ arp's and supposidly she'll be ready for some big boost...

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Sun Feb 04, 2007 9:43 pm

VWralley wrote:do you have it planned out on how to run the coolant lines to there? are those intended to be inlet or outlets? im on the fence whether i should do this or not, i could pop the head off, do the metal head gasket w/ arp's and supposidly she'll be ready for some big boost...

Funny you should ask... 8) This lil update should answer your question.

So I spent just saturday afternoon on the car and minimal time last week working on things. I was busy, and moving at a slow pace (lack of motivation) so not as productive as I woulda liked... but what have you.

I spent some time figuring out the route of the final coolant line to the turbo. For the life of me, I could not see how in God's green earth this hose was suppose to route like they had it on the donor (I'm assuming it ran infront of the motor). There just wasn't enough slack in the line to pull this off! So with a little bit of looking around, I was able to come up with this:

this pic is before I made final adjustments so it's not hitting anywhere on the bracket except where you see the rubber hose padding. I think it'll be fine... it's tight, but no undue pressure from what I can tell.

from this point, it was time to address the transmission mounts on the car as well as do a little more trimming on the subframe so it didn't hit the monster downpipe

After a LOT of fighting with the stubborn heat shield covering the passenger's side tranny mount and passenger's side tranny mount bolt, I was able to get the subframe to drop out

As I looked at the bolts on the tranny mounts, I saw they still had the factory captivation paint on the bolt heads/threads... yup, looks like these mounts were original! And they def looked it:

totally shot... they were literally disintegrating as i poked at them...

this def proves why the drivetrain moved so much when doing high rpm shifts and flogging on the car prior to the motor pulling.

and this was the remainder of the trimming I did to the subframe:

I'm gonna clean it up some and toss a lil paint on it so it doesn't get tempted to rust or anything of course.

From this point, it was time to route my coolant lines and get those all ready for some fluid to be passing through them!

In order to feed the new coolant ports in the head, I had to make a sleeve with feeds in it on the top hose to the radiator... I picked up a 1.5" exhaust tube from the local pep boys and went to town. This was the original drill and tap of the piece:

what this resulted in? Me being pissed at myself for not thinking straight and drilling the holes too close to eachother :frustrated: :bashtard:

I was able to thread the nipples in, but they were so close there was no way in HELL I was fitting the house and hose clamp on there... so pissed off at myself, I head out to the local meinikie... to find they're closed :frustrated: :frustrated: :frustrated:. Lucky for me though, there were a couple guys coming in to put a car in that they were working on... and they hooked me up with a new piece of hose!!! I was stoked, and was able to go home and get cracking on the adaptor.

After a more careful measure and cut (gave myself 1" between each centerline on the nipple) I was able to come up with this routing of the hose:

So this is where the car sits for now. I also installed the UrQ throttle cable, new foam inserts to the pedal (whoever is responsible for the design of these things should be drug out to an alley and beaten w/ a rubber hose!!!!).

Next thing in line is to make up a new hard coolant line with the port so I can run the afterrun coolant pump for the turbo. Got all the parts I need, just need to take some time and do a lil bit of welding to get it together like I need.

Hopefully after this week things will be a little closer. I found that the exhaust is a wee bit tighter in the back than I thought it was going to be, so I need to attend to that. Also, need to order up a set of allroad mounts for the tranny. I ordered stock ones, and after lookin at them, I kicked myself for buying them. So hopefully i can get those in this week and get cracking on it... and i'm going to order the final bit of tubing I need for the exhaust. My silicone adaptors came in, but hte mailman was too lazy to walk to my door to deliver them saturday, so I have to pick them up at the post office tomorrow after work.

that's it from this point... more to come.

AudiSport4000 · Post by **AudiSport4000** » Sun Feb 04, 2007 9:47 pm

Very cool. My trans mounts looked the same after I replaced them a few years ago. I ended up snapping the large bolt too, oops!

Good progress pictures.

audifreakjim · Post by **audifreakjim** » Sun Feb 04, 2007 9:49 pm

Nice cooling mod. I always wish I did mine like that.

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:18 am

AudiSport4000 wrote:Very cool. My trans mounts looked the same after I replaced them a few years ago. I ended up snapping the large bolt too, oops!

Good progress pictures.

Thanks Mike... yeah, Impact wrench made quick work of getting those off

Though the pass side bolt was really wedged in there unfortunately, so I had a hard time getting it out. And of course, I couldn't access it from under teh car so I had to make up like a 3 ft extension to get in there and turn it :wtf:

Will make installing the allroad mounts real interesting I guess... not sure how i'm gonna get that bolt out now that its wedged in there, but I'll figure it out

audifreakjim wrote:Nice cooling mod. I always wish I did mine like that.

thanks, jim. I thought you had done this mod though, no? or am I thinking of your 20vt motor and not the 20vt... regardless, in the grand scheme of things, it really wasn't too difficult to do, so I'm glad I sacked up and drilled into the head

audifreakjim · Post by **audifreakjim** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 9:28 am

I did do the mod, but I plumbed it in differently.

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 10:29 am

oh that's right, you did the 3 into 1 big hose, right? I thought about that, but this was an easier (and much cheaper) solution. <$20 all said and done.

audibeans · Post by **audibeans** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 12:44 pm

Thinking about changing the sub-frame bushing in my 4kq this weekend. How difficult was it dropping the subframe? Do you have the tranny supported?

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Mon Feb 05, 2007 1:30 pm

audibeans wrote:Thinking about changing the sub-frame bushing in my 4kq this weekend. How difficult was it dropping the subframe? Do you have the tranny supported?

It's not terribly difficult. I put the front end up on jack stands then put a 3rd jackstand under the very back near the output shaft of the tranny. I then undid the subframe bolts and let it come down, then undid the BIG bolts holding the mounts to the tranny arms.

Big issue I had was getting to the small 8mm bolts holding on the heat shield for the pass side tranny mount. The 3" downpipe makes it kinda difficult to get in there :-P Also had to finagle it a lil bit to get the mount around the downpipe, but I got it. Hopefully it goes in w/out fighting me too badly.

I was able to source a pair of 034 tranny mounts for a steal (guy couldn't use them), so those will be replacing the OEM mounts

Now who wants to buy a set of OEM rubber mounts? I'll cut ya a deal on 'em :-D

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:15 pm

Alright... time for an update!!!

After having friends from out of town in for the weekend, I spent the majority of the weekend entertaining and not horsing around with the car... but once they left on sunday, I went at it!

Prior to this weekend, I spent some time running the vacuum lines. To keep with the red theme, I sources some various sized red silicone hosing and ran almost all the lines.

Vac lines running to the Ib ECU/Boost Gauge/Zientrix Wideband controller

And how the engine bay looks right now:

This didn't take too too long, but I have a few more things to feed... like a line to the BOV as well as the Elec Boost controller. Also, I need to hook up the wastegate. I'm not sure where to put the vac line that goes to the bottom of the wastegate... can anyone tell me if I can hook it up here:

The empty bottom port. I can't remember if I could use that as a vac port or not, and the bentley isn't really too helpful in this department. I'll probably end up making a new thread to ask this question though so it gets a lil mroe attention.

After I got the vac lines done, next on the list was to get the transmission mounts into the car and the subframe bolted up so the car could sit on its own 4 wheels again!

First off, I had to swap in the new AL subframe bushings I picked up from the bilzcat fire sale. I started by cutting the top off the original bushing and then beating the piss out of it w/ a large screwdriver to push it out

by the 3rd one I was REALLY good at getting these out w/ minimal cutting and only a few whacks with the hammer 8)

here is the subframe with everything installed and waiting for me to shimmy under the car and get it installed:

And, as usual... NOTHING can go easy. When I went to initially install the damn thing into the car I couldn't get the damn pass side tranny mount to line up with the arm on the tranny. It was off by ~1/4" :frustrated: :frustrated: So I pulled the subframe BACK down again and oblonged the holes where the mount bolted to the subframe. With a bit of fighting, I was able to get it all together... but not without a full scentence of nothing but :curses:

Also, while the subframe was out I had to adress another issue :wtf:

When I had first dropped the subframe back in August when pulling the original JT motor, I noticed that there was a non-OEM bolt in the back driver's side subframe bolt. It was a standard thread, and a bit shorter than it should have been. I didn't think too much of it at the time, but knew I needed to address it before putting everything back together.

At first, I wanted to just retap the hole and see if that did the trick. Unfortunately, the more I looked at the hole, the more and more it looked really fishy :wtf:

here's what the hole looked like from the underside:

Yeah, def did NOT look right, and no matter what I drilled or tapped, something kept moving in the hole. Only thing left to do was some surgery :curses:

So I pulled out the wire wheel on the drill and the dremel tool and cut myself an access hole in the driver's side fender well near the subframe bolt... and found this:

Mind you, there's no bolt in the hole... yup... PO must have sheered the bolt off, and instead of drilling it out... they decided to drill INTO IT

can you say... NOT SAFE!!! I was a bit pissed off at this point in time, but not much I could do about it... I had to make this right.

In order to fix this issue, I drilled a 1/2" hole through the existing metal block in the frame, then proceeded to cut a large slot in it. I then trimmed down a nut to fit in the slot...

and after many attemtps, and a $hit load of ugly welds you get this:

Not pretty at all, but what have you. I basically torqued down on the bolt to pull the nut into the slot and then torqued it to spec. Once it was secure, I tacked it in place, then released the bolt and removed it... then proceeded to cake on weld so it didn't try to pop out next time I pull the subframe (which I hope is never

)

From there, I had to then seal up the hole I made in the frame rail. This is what it looked like once everything was bent back into place:

Then started the welding... I'm still getting used to this welder, so these aren't the prettiest of welds... but they worked just fine:

the undercoating def did NOT like the heat of the welder... as you can see by the smoke coming off it in the pic. I had to stop many a time to slap out the fire that started from the heat

Went out easily, so no worries for sure.

After a treatment from the wire brush to clean up the slag and oxidation from welding (and some touch up welding to hit spots I missed originally) I threw on a coat of 3m underbody coating to protect the metal:

was a bit of an ordeal and a royal PITA, but I fixed it the right way this time and didn't half ass it. Kinda pissed I had to do this, but whatever... I won't have to worry about it again at least

Next in line was to make a new hard coolant line so I could incorporate the turbo afterrun pump into the car... which meant mating these two lines:

after some eyeballing and cutting...

and then some more eyeballing and welding... this is the final product:

At this point, I was :slap: myself for cutting the hose that went from this flange to the afterrun pump on the donor car... so I have to either make myself one or go find another one... I'll figure it out as I go though... but this is now ready to go back into the car. Was really easy for the most part, and I was glad to see that the pipe was steal so I could weld it myself

After getting all the small stuff done, I put the wheels back on and then lifted the car completely off the ground in prep for....... exhaust!!!

I'm going with a full 3" downpipe back exhaust on this puppy... and being that the originaly exhaust was 2.25" max, this def took a bit of shoehorning!

From the downpipe it will go as follows: 3" flex joint to 3" high flow metallic catalytic converter to straight pipe (room for a resonator if I feel its too loud basically) to mandrel bend OVER the axle to 3" xlerator muffler to dual tips in OEM position.

Here's a pic of the resonator area:

It took a LOT of finagling to get the bit over the axle to fall in line and not hit anything... this is def a tight fit, but I didn't want to give up any ground clearance by putting it under the rear diff... so this was my only option.

Here is the rear muffler mocked in place awaiting me to weld in some supports to the OEM exhaust mounts:

After a lot of tweaking, I got it all to fit in really nicely. I need to pick up one more 3" band clamp inorder to meet the piping that goes from the resonator area over the rear axle to the rear muffler. This is all sectional because that's the only way I can get it in/out from the area over the rear axle...

here are all the pieces I made:

They are now all welded up solid. I got pretty good making the welds look pretty how, and they seem pretty strong. I'm going to pick up that band clamp I need then reintall everything permanently into the car. Then I'll start screwing with the tips I need to make. I'm going to basically take pieces from the donor car's exhaust tip (dual 3") and make them into my own new tip.

Turned out really good IMHO... not bad for my first custom exhaust

Only casualty was me lighting the back of my hair on fire when welding on the one support bracket to the over the axle piece :tard: One of the hot ambers fell back and must have landed enough on my hair to spark it up! lol No harm done though, and I only can tell it did something cuz of that tell tale smell of burned hair :barf:

Once I get the exhaust all buttoned up I'm going to get to plumbing the intercooler! I got the pipe in on friday, so *hopefully* I can get it all plumbed up this coming weekend. Not sure I'll get any time during the week to work on it, so we'll see what happens.

So that's it for this little update. Hope ya enjoyed the show 8)

SEStone · Post by **SEStone** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:25 pm

Nice stuff Justin!

Sam

Post by **Marc** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:27 pm

lol, just wait till you've got sunburn tomorrow

Nice writeup, keep up the good working. Nothing like spending some time in the garage. I've been away from home for the last 2 weeks, time to get some quality wrench time in!

audifreakjim · Post by **audifreakjim** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 8:46 pm

Lookin good!

AudiSport4000 · Post by **AudiSport4000** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 9:13 pm

I feel like I say the same thing after every update, but its true. Nice work!
Love to see these kinds of pictures, its all going to pay off in the end. Looks like you are getting somewhat close to firing the motor for the first time.
:-D

JShadzi · Post by **JShadzi** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 10:57 pm

Really love to see the progress and how you're not afraid to get your hands dirty 8)

mholme · Post by **mholme** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 12:34 am

Jretal wrote:Next in line was to make a new hard coolant line so I could incorporate the turbo afterrun pump into the car... which meant mating these two lines:

You could have gotten that part from me for free sir..Looks like someone was looking for an excuse to do some more welding...

Toxcheap · Post by **Toxcheap** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 7:24 am

It's coming alone good :wink:

jretal · Post by **jretal** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 10:45 am

a4kquattro wrote:lol, just wait till you've got sunburn tomorrow

Nice writeup, keep up the good working. Nothing like spending some time in the garage. I've been away from home for the last 2 weeks, time to get some quality wrench time in!

Thankfully no welding sunburn that I can tell (long sleeve shirt and a mask covering pretty much all bare skin), though the eyes did get a lil spotty last night cuz the stupid wire feed on my welder was being retarded and kept sticking... so it'd get a flash and then another flash, and it made the auto dimming mask I have go a lil crazy :-P

JShadzi wrote:Really love to see the progress and how you're not afraid to get your hands dirty

If I'm not gonna do it, that means I gotta pay someone to do it... and that's not gonna happen :-P

mholme wrote:You could have gotten that part from me for free sir..Looks like someone was looking for an excuse to do some more welding...

well $hit! When I asked you about it, you just said it took a lil bit of cutting so I figured I could cut up the one and make it work... then I looked at it and slapped myself in the forehead :-P You don't by chance have the hose that goes from the hardline to the afterrun pump still do ya??? :-D

Thanks for the kind words though guys! My forearms are sore today (and not from :jerk: ) from all the cutting with the angle grinder and what not. Really wish I had a chop saw cuz that would have made life a LOT easier than horsing around with the sawzaw and angle grinder, but what have ya.

I hope to pick up the clamp today or tomorrow and get the exhaust installed on friday... then tackle the remainder of the intake track and give this puppy a test fire :-D I have a long weekend this coming weekend, so I want this thing running!

sam80quattro · Post by **sam80quattro** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:57 am

what size holes did you drill into the head for your cooling port mod?? thanks