Area 52 - April 25-27. NEW PROJECT ARRIVING; OMG!!!!1!!

Right then, as promised, an update, and it's a proper one too

Before anything else, I need to say a massive thank you to Bruce for the use of Area 52, and it's facility's this weekend, as well as for helping out with the conversion, it really was a huge help, so thank you! The same goes for the other guys who stopped by over the weekend to help out, all of you, thank you! Oh, and another thanks to Bruce for taking the pictures as my hands were much to filthy to go near my camera most of the weekend!


I arrived at Area 52 just before 9am on Saturday morning, with a boot full of what I hoped was everything needed for the swap. After a quick catch up with Bruce I headed off to pick some bits to make the downpipe from across town while Bruce made some space in the unit. From here on in it'll be easier to let the pictures do the talking.

One car that works just fine as it is, about to be pulled apart:



Up it goes:



And the old engine comes out, no pictures of the process, as that's the easy/not so interesting bit.



The obligatory sat in the empty engine bay shot:



A big hole:



The petrol lump out:





The 2 engines being compared to see what'll fit and what's going to need attention:



Now the 4t diesel gearbox I'd got for the swap had 90mm output flanges, and the driveshafts in my Scirocco being a late model are 100mm, so we had to swap the output flanges over from the old box to the new one. This is a bit of a pain, as they're held in with super fiddly spring clips, and are often a tight interference fit of the diff's splines. Several improvised tools ended up being made for pushing and squashing the flanges to take the pressure off the spring clips:



Ben having a go at the fiddly buggers:



Everyone crowded around:



One of the improvised tools, holding the flanges in while we release the spring clips:



Another improvised tool, pushing the flange off:



Now the box was sorted, it was time to move onto the engine. There's 4 mounts, 3 of them swap strait over to the diesel no problem, but the cam belt end mount bolts into holes that have now been re-used to mount the diesel pump. Bolting it over the pump isn't a huge issue, as the mounts are actually slotted in the shell, so the extra 4mm of spacing would be fine, but the diesel pump mount isn't quite flat. Luckily we were able to cut a few sections out of the petrol mount to allow it to sit nicely on top of the diesel pump mount.

The original mount off the petrol:



And the 4 bolts it needs to bolt behind, you can see the rib down the middle of the diesel pump mount that's in the way:



Marked to trim:



A bit of this:



A little of this:



And it fits:



Now removing the powersteering pump meant removing the belt that ran the water pump, however the alternator belt runs around a pulley that idles around the waterpump pulley on a bearing, so we welded up the pulley, allowing the single belt to drive the waterpump and the alternator:



Now the engine was theoretically ready to go back in, but before hand the bulkhead needed a bit of attention where the clutch cable had pulled through its mount, tearing the metal. Ben kindly did the honours of welding this up while me and Bruce nervously looked out for fires in the interior.

The damage:



Sparky-melty-stick-time:



Then it was time to drop the diesel in the hole, it fitted ;D , which brings us to the end of Saturday, and about 2am:





Sunday:

I dragged my self out of my sleeping bag at about 9 after a good nights sleep on the sofa, and got on with looking at making this fit:



Find some bolts, and some brackets to put behind them:



Then Bruce got busy with the welder and stuck them on each end of some L-section, to mount the bottom of the cooler, like so:



Some pipe chopping and jubille clip fiddling later and the induction run was all plumbed in:



A couple of random shots:





Now it was onto the fabrication, we found that the standard rad fan didn't fit in the hole anymore, because of the positioning of the electric waterpump that feeds the turbo, plus my old one was very, very warn out, so Bruce kindly got stuck in making a mount to fit an MX-5 one that cleared with loads of space, no shots of the during, but this was the result:





While he was doing that, I got on with making the downpipe. Amazingly usefully there was already a steel plate on the turbos outlet that was blanking the area the waste-gate exits into, so I used this as a flange and used a pile of carefully picked bits of tube to make the rest, it starts out as 2.5" diameter, and steps down about 3mm at a time down to 2" then slots over the 1 7/8" centre section:











From here on in it was just plumbing back up the cooling, wiring in the electric water pump, stop solenoid and a couple of other little bits, sorting an air-filter, plumbing up the fuel lines and putting some diesel in the tank:





Amazingly, besides missing a single wire onto the starter motor, the first turn of the key it fired into life, ran nicely and worked perfectly!

I still need to connect the speedo cable (Yay for phones with GPS!), re-do some of the wiring that we crimped because we didn't have time to solder it properly, wire in the glow plugs, plum in a boost guage and then it'll be time to get tuning and see what I can get out of it in terms of power and mpg.

So yeah, I'm knackered and I owe Bruce about 3 billion favours, but I've got a working, diesel Scirocco. ;D