Sam's build thread

[sambb]

Ok so the fluttery high pitched sound I was chasing ended up being the turbo to dump pipe junction. Its only re torqued at the moment but made the sound go away. It only did it under load/boost and didn't seem to draw air at all as my fuel trims still looked ok. Because it had a flutter to it, for all money it sounded rotational and considering that I'd just done the hydraulic to manual cam belt tensioner conversion of course I thought it was something to do with the tensioner roller or idler. A lot of people had said that overtightened manual tensioners tell you that you've stuffed up with the tensioning by being very noisy and because I'd just done that job I obviously assumed it was that. Why the leak appeared right after I did the job I don't know but it definitely took me down the garden path to the tune of two re tensioning jobs on the roller and lots of induction pipe checking. I even got a torque wrench out on the plugs thinking I'd left one loose. I was lucky to do a cold start one day and in the brief minute before it all gets hot ran my hand over everything on the exhaust side and found the leak.
So feeling better now. What I have noticed with the manual tensioner is that you get cold vs hot variations in cam belt tension. These are obviously taken up by the OEM hydraulic tensioner or the ABF 2.0L 16V sprung automatic tensioner would do the same if you used it. If I hadn't found that leak/noise when I did, I was planning on removing the KR manual tensioner and fitting the ABF, but as itstands the tensioner is in the clear, its tensioned as per IE recommendations so now I'm just going to enjoy the sucker and get ready for the next event. I'm sorted for my front pair of tyres now so the next event will most likely be the Huntley hillclimb where i'll run 215/50/15 medium fronts and 195/55/15 soft rears. I've lost a bit of front track width to get the 215's to fit but overall it'll be a net gain I hope.

[simon k]

well that's good news - might have cracked the seal or wiggled the bolts with the engine up/down when you removed the engine mount...

The hot/cold tension change is an odd one, wouldn't expect a lot of change like that. It's not just the belt being more twisty when it's warm is it?

[sambb]

Yeah thats what I'm thinking. You need to have the dog bone out and then up and down to get the engine side bracket off so it may have popped the gasket then. Nut wasnt loose really, but getting another bit on it made the whistle go away so I'm happy.
No its tighter when hot. Its harder to twist when hot eg 70 degrees at the same effort level and much less deflection when pressed with your thumb than cold. You'd think a hot belt would get looser if anything. Since its all fixed position tensioning, the only way the belt can get tighter is thermal expansion of the head. I asked IE about it. They said you will see variations and variations across seasons (but they are talking big year round temp drops), but they didnt really confirm if head expansion is the culprit, but I can very definitely say that there is a difference.

[sambb]

holy f*&^k my hands hurt. Making up AN fittings is a bitch on hands already destroyed after a week of work. Regretting going for steel armoured hose now. Don't have a bench or a vice for that matter so basically leaning up against a wooden wall. If it leaks I will break things and swear lots.

[simon k]

holy f*&^k my hands hurt. Making up AN fittings is a bitch on hands already destroyed after a week of work. Regretting going for steel armoured hose now. Don't have a bench or a vice for that matter so basically leaning up against a wooden wall. If it leaks I will break things and swear lots.

hahaha... what are the hoses for?

[sambb]

wife away so abe to get the car into bits for a couple of days. I'm fitting the oil thermostat sandwich plate, deleting the heat exchanger and I've fitted the oil cooler inside the fender where the side mount IC used to be. I'd bought it from Louis19 but his lines were made up for mounting the cooler above his front mount. The SEAT fmic sits much higher though so the cooler had to go to the fender and so I'm making up longer steel armoured lines for that. With it mounted there I'll be able to blank off the cooler for normal driving and hillclimbs and then open it up to air flow when I get out on the track. I did a bit of logging of how the oil and water temps rise from cold in normal commuter driving. Its my hope that with the cooler blanked off that the oil will still get up to 90 around town as quickly as before. The oil thermostat is an 85 degree. I guess if its too slow to bring the oil up I think you can get higher temp thermstats for theses plates and that that might rectify it. If worse comes to worse I can refit the heat exchanger and stack them all (will have to go to a stubby filter though). But yep getting the hose/sheath through the gland of the AN fittings is nigh on impossible but you get there in the end. Going to do a couple of hours before F1 qualy tonight and hopefully be running around on Monday...…..without leaks!

[sambb]

Progress report on the oil cooler fit up. Sorry forgot to rotate the images so you'll have to rotate your heads. So I fitted it vertically angled forward at the bottom. There wasn't much reasoning to that other than so it would fit but it does so happen that angled coolers cool better apparently because if the air that is ducted too it is forced to bend through the fins than it slows the air down so that it can pick up more heat on its way through - well that's what the F! technical sites tell me anyway. I did deliberately try to get it inboard a bit though so that if I have a shunt the cooler is a little way in from the guards. I had some angled and slotted steel so I used combinations of those hung off the old SMIC pick up points to mount it.
The feed from the sandwich plate will go to the bottom of the cooler so that as the cooler fills it will not get air pockets. It also means that when I do a thorough oil change or change oil type and need to evacuate the oil that will stay in the cooler, I can take off the bottom hose fitting and get the oil out easy enough.
The heat exchanger came out after I sourced the 27mm socket to get its nut off the spigot. Its coolant hose come out with it and you'll need the pictured hose to put in the bypass. The hose was down a Supercheap. So I tore the sticker off it but it is shaped like this and goes straight in without cutting. To make way for the sandwich plate, the spigot then has to be removed from the oil filter housing. I couldn't see any other way to do it really so vice grips got it out easily once I came to terms with the fact that the spigot would be sacrificed in the process, so i'll need a spare one of them if its ever to go back how it was.
The most time consuming part of all of it is deciding on the routing path of the oil lines, making up the AN fittings and fitting them up at the right angles with the sandwich plate so that the lines (very abrasive with the steel armour on them) aren't rubbing on anything or too close temperature wise to anything sensitive.
I'll be priming the cooler soon and starting her up so if she leaks anywhere i'll be gutted because its been quite a bit of work on a very cold garage floor.

[sambb]

So all done. The pics are pretty self explanatory. The line that goes under the IC pipe is the oil outward bound from the engine and goes to the bottom of the cooler. The top line out of the cooler goes back to the sandwich plate, through the filter and into the engine. I had some 2.75in silicon pipe on hand which has now been wrapped around that part of the IC pipe so that no inadvertent rubbing can happen. I've also got some aeroflow hose bridges to hold the two pipes alongside one another in a way that they wont rub.
Before start up I used a pump pack to fill the oil cooler with oil from its top take off. What I didn't expect was that it would prime it so well that oil would start coming out the oil filter spigot. Bit of a mess to clean after that but atleast I new the engine woulnt be gulping air at start up. Filter primed too. I cranked the car for a bit with the coils disconnected and fuel pump fuse out to make double sure everything was oily and it warmed up aok with no oil leaks. Did a bit of running around this arvo - had to get more oil because the extra capacity of the lines and cooler meant that I needed a shade over 5 litres. As per usual with me I had a heart attack moment when I came out to the car (raining for the first time in weeks in Sydney today) and found an oil slick under it. Turned out to be just some dropped oil from another car. So far so good - i'll log the temp rises from cold start tomorrow morning and hopefully they'll be in step with the stock heat exchanger setup when the oil cooler is blanked off. Part of the reason I oriented the sandwich plate the way I did, was so that the sandwich plates oil thermostat is accessible so that it can be swapped out for a higher temp one if this doesn't work out. I could piggy back everything and run the exchanger again but the problem would be that the oil lines would be pushed too low and probably rub on things so they'd need to be redone - not something I'm keen on doing any time soon.

[sambb]

oh and ducting to come. Will need some way of trying to keep the air feed to the brakes discs that I've been running, while still getting air through that core. Intitially I was going to run the coolers air exit (hot) out the vented guard I'd used when I had a water sprayed side mount intercooler. But a fair bit of crap still was getting thrown into there from the tyres, plus I don't like the idea of a potential oil leak throwing oil directly onto the tyre the moment something lets go. So I'll get air in through the fog light facia and run the coolers hot exit air along the inside of the wheel well to re join behind the engine in the engine bay like the stock side mount does.

[HaydEn]

Good stuff Sam!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[sambb]

So I've done a bit of testing of temps now that the oil cooler is fitted. I have an OE spec Tridon 90 degree thermostat. The mocal sandwich plate uses an 82 degree oil thermostat I believe. Temps taken from instruments grp 003 in vcds = coolant temp sensor for water and sump sensor for oil.

Previously on a 10 degree morning wth the original gear all in the car, just doing a local small street commute, with water at 10 degrees and oil at 9 degrees, after the below times the temps were as follows:

10 mins - water 80 - oil 61
13 mins - water 88 - oil 71
15 mins - water 90 - oil 76
17 mins - water 95 - oil 84
18 mins - water 93 - oil 88
21 mins - water 95 - oil 91 thereafter the water oscillated around 94 degrees and the oil trended up to 99 degrees and stayed there.


Today with separated water and oil systems (no heat exchanger) and with the oil cooler installed I decided to test the worst case winter commuter scenario for the cooler. The fog lamp facia was taped off so that zero airflow could get to it. It was 10 degrees ambient too:
from cold start:

8 mins - water 93 - oil 50
10 mins - water 95 - oil 64
12 mins - water 94 - oil 71
14 mins - water 92 - oil 80
17 mins - water 91 - oil 85
19 mins - oil 88
20 mins - oil 90

Then going home from work this afternoon from cold in ambient 18 degree air (oil cooler still blanked off to any airflow):

0 mins - water 19 - oil 16
6 mins - water 80
7 mins - water 85
8 mins - water 88
9 mins - water 90.....
14 mins - water 95 ish - oil 80
16 mins - - oil 85
18 mins - - oil 90
22 mins- - oil 95

It seems that post oil cooler/sandwich plate that the water temps are coming up to 90 degrees 5 minutes faster. My guess is that this is because the heat exchanger has been removed. On warm up previously the water temps were loaded down by the slower to heat oil possibly putting a latency into how quickly the water could get up to temp. So the water heats to operating temp sooner now. However once up to urban temp I've noticed it will oscillate more. Previously with the heat exchanger, the oil and water temps would lock onto each other anywhere between 95 -100 degrees and then hold each other very frimly in that windown. Now without the oil in the heat exchanger to dampen the changes in water temp you can see it move around more eg at the end of a down hill coast the water temp will drop to 87 degrees and then get back up to 95 once you get back onto the throttle. Its like you can see the different temperature water bursts that the thermostat is providing. This is less so in traffic on the fans though where it still locks itself to one temperature though.

Thankfully on both 10 degree ambient days, it took basically 16 mins for the oil temps to get to 80 degrees. A little bit quicker on the 18 degree afternoon. Pre and post mod it took the same 20 odd minutes for the oil to reach 90 degrees. That was my biggest fear as under temp oil is bad news, so the fact that in normal driving that the oil temp was coming up just as fast with cooler + sandwich plate as standard is great. It must be remembered though that this is with a 6 row oil cooler, blanked off to any air flow and eventually heatsoaking too. Also, pre and post mod, the oil temperature eventually set itself on 100 degrees. At one time in bumper to bumper on the way home on the 18 degree afternoon after 45 minutes in Sydney turd traffic the oil temp got to 103 degrees which is a function of zero airflow and total heat soak. It cooled back to 99 once I got moving again.
So basically I think the numbers show that you can run an oil cooler and sandwich plate without the heat exchanger and get OEM type temps from water and oil (water coming up 50% quicker though). Once up to temp the water will have slightly bigger oscillations - seems to be 'on' the thermostat more than when its temp was held stable by the oil. And the oil once up to temp seems to want to exist in the 95-100 degree band that it had previously.
What I'll do next is the exact same test with all the blanking removed so that the oil cooler is seeing airflow throughout the warm up process and see if it retards the rate of temp increase of the oil. I expect the water will be unchanged from above though since it is completely independent of oil temps now. Longer term i'll build some nice ducting for the cooler and then i'll settle on the right amount of blanking for street driving, and open her up for max flow to the brake ducts and oil cooler ducts when I'm on the circuit.
That's the low down so far anyway.

[seangti]

Great share Sam. I'd been curious about those stats too.

I bought a new daily driver this week (VW Jetta), so will have the opportunity to take the car of the road to fiddle with these sorts of things.

[seangti]

Great share Sam. I'd been curious about those stats too.

I bought a new daily driver this week (VW Jetta), so will have the opportunity to take the car of the road to fiddle with these sorts of things.

[sambb]

Oh that will be so sweet to have a garaged track car again. To be honest I was surprised too that the temps came up the same as standard. I don't think that'd be the case if you had it mounted out the front though. You couldn't blank it off then and always getting airflow I don't know if oil temps would come up in the same way. Could be wrong though and I guess we'll see once I can test it again without its airflow being blanked off.
Honestly if I was to do it again, I'd just invite an Enzed guy around to make up hydraulic fittings (only one nut to tighten rather than 3 per fitting) swaged to the hose. Costly but virtually fail safe. I can tell already that these AN fittings are going to be something that i'll have to routinely check to make sure they are always in order.

[sambb]

Just went for another little commute drive this arvo in 18 degree ambient. suburban streets onto 60kph rd with traffic lights every couple of minutes. The entire fog light facia was removed to let some airflow in - no ducting concentrating air through the core but some mass airflow getting into the fender area.

0 mins - water 16- oil 15
8 mins - water 80 - oil 43
9 mins - water 85 - oil 47
11 mins - water 90 - oil 55...

18 mins - - oil 80
21 mins - - oil 85
23 mins - - oil 88
25 mins - - oil 90

so luckily I was able to go back to back on an 18 degree day with and without the facia. With the airflow running through it, it took roughly 4 minutes longer for the oil to reach its temp. That probably mirrors what a cooler out in the front air flow would see eg one that cant be blanked off and that gets mass airflow rather than concentrated air via a duct.