The engine...

This is how the engine has been tweaked...

This is my engine.

This is the Sparco air intake filter, I painted it black (originally it was blue) to match the engine. The upper part of the air intake box was taken off to hold the conical air filter. Actually the filter is located behind the driver's side lower grill as a cool air intake.

The exhaust is a Magnaflow, I haven't removed the catalyzator that is very restrictive (mostly while using nitrous or turbo), I will do when I install the turbo, I also have to modify the rear O2 sensor in order to get rid os the "Service Engine" light.

I left the stock intake pipe the comes form the front grille to feed with fresh air the air filter, is not Ram-air but I think it helps.

I have swapped the camshaft for an AUTOTECH 270° one, it has a higher lift than stock but the same lobe and all, so you don't get rough idling.

I got an MSD DIS-2 ignition but had to sell it because it didn't fit on the car >:(

I got Magnecor spark plug wires for spark delivery. I had to route cylinders 1 & 2 between the intake manifold because they didn't fit like the stock wires.

I used Bosch super 4 spark plugs, instead of the Bosch super 3 it came with from the factory.

Now I use Autolite Racing cooper spark plugs.

This are the ECS tuning underdrive pulleys, it's a set of three (crank, alternator and power steering). They are 73% lighter than the stock ones, so the engine revs up a little bit faster, but with the cam and this things the engine shakes a little on idle.

I sold these and installed the stock ones again.

I got a custom made turbo for my 2.0L, we are at the last part of the tuning process, but I can already smoke 1.8T's and VR6's with the turbo alone.

Since the intention of this project is to smoke an Audi S3 I have to add nitrous too. A 50 HP wet type single fogger system will do the trick. The nitrous purge will discharge into the intercooler to cool it down and show off a little bit, hehehe. I already have the control panel, it is a stock radio cover with ignited nitrous purge and carbon fiber covered switches.

Santa arrived the other day...

a closer look to the parts (nitrous kit, NOS fogger to get rid of the carb plate, turbo heat wrap, intercooler, nitrous purge kit, nitrous filter)

This is how the turbo wrap goes once it's installed, helps to keep the engine compartment cooler and reduce turbo lag.

The nitrous purge kit will blow nitrous trough the intercooler, so it looks cool and also cools down the intercooler a little bit.

check out the 30" intercooler, it is not so tall but this design makes it much more eficcient for better air flow and reduced pressure drop accross it. It is custom designed so I don't have to cut the bumper.

This are the IAPEL (Argentinian) pistons, they are forged aluminum special for turbo and nitrous applications. Superb quality.

A friend of mine has alredy this combo (2.0L VW engine custom turboed and with a shot of nitrous) on a 2003 Seat Cordoba (a similar car, same engine) and he is making low 14's on the quarter. I expect mid 14's at least since my car is about 100 lb heavier than his.

Stage Zero

This is the dyno run with the autotech camshaft, magnecor wires, ECS pulleys, magnaflow exhaust and sparco air filter. Compared to the stock 2.0L showed a 9HP gain at the crankshaft.

This is the dyno run from a Golf GTI 2.0L with K&N air filter. Everything else stock, you can see the difference compared with mine, mainly on because the troque keeps up longer on mine and the HP goes up when the stock one goes down at high RPM.

Here is the car at the dyno...

let's see how it changes witht he turbo and the nitrous!, comming soon (january - february 2005)

18 Jan 2005, installation update

The pistons were not a dirct fit, rods with 20mm holes were needed, also the skirt of the pistons hitted some oil plugs on the bottom of the cylinder, they had to be cutted and balanced to match the shape of the stock 2.0L piston.

We have fitted the forged pistons and rised the head to lower compression... the tensor of the timing belt had to be custom made to allow more stretching of the timing belt.

The intercooler has been placed...

The stock bumper was modified to fit the intercooler...

The fabrication is ongoing, here is the turbo, wastegate and manifold mounted. Looks like stock, doesn't it?.

This is my nitrous panel, check out the decals I had made specially for it. The switches are from ignited, they are lighted and match the interior perfectly.

This is an oil cooler for the turbo, it's a new addition but I think it will help to keep it cooler, that thing gets red hot!. I'll mount it on the place where the stock 1.8T has the intercooler, I already modified the plastic tire cover and placed the Audi TT grill in there to have better air flow.

I got rid of the cooler above ans installed this larger unit, the cooling difference was 15 degrees. I just ordered a 7" fan to go with this cooler.

Thinner front mud guard was modified to allow air flow for the turbo oil cooler.

I also added the grille to the driver's side mud guard to allow air to flow trough the cold air intake, this makes the blow off valve sound lowder and also gets some cooling for the front brake rotor.

The stock plastic intake manifold was replaced by an aluminum one, to whitstand heat and pressure. It was polished so it looks nice.

the exhust heat deflector was also cut to fit the turbo, additional lines, wastegate and so on.

Here is a shot of the turbo wrap installed.

A pre fit from the routing of the air lines.

We needed extra fuel, so the intake manifold was modified to fit 4 additional injectors.

This is how the engine looked when it first worled out, I'm still on the adjustment phase, but this babe pumps constant 19 psi of boost, no pinging or anything, it just pulls really hard!.

This is side view, at this time some things were loose still. The nitrous setup is half installed in this pic.

This is how it looks now.

I like the intercooler like this, looks bad and mean, doesn't it?.

 

The new power level needed a clutch upgrade so we replaced the OEM unit:

   

Too much boost?, hahaha, well, not quite, I hit the nitrous button while I was around 1500-2000 RPM, it kicked in the turbo but then there was a backfire, check out the hole on my polished intake manifold, hahaha. Nothing else got damaged, I replaced the manifold and the car runs like new, only this time I just painted it black, didn't polished it.

the engine was running lean on 19+ psi, so I decided to go for larger injectors. This is the set of Bosch injectors I got (30lb/hr) instead of the 14lb/hr I had as extra injectores (remember I have 8 injectors!), together with the stock ones I have 44lb/hr of gas per piston...

This is the lower intake manifold with the old additional injectors.

This is an image of the new injectors in place. Also we found out that there were small leaks, probably at high boost only because the engine ran smooth, and we corrected them.

this christmas I got this meter for my nitrous bottle, looks nice!.

Santa also borught me an MSD DIS-4 ignition, MSD DIS racing coils and coil adpaters to improve the cars ignition an allow a better combustion, I'm feeding a lot of fuel to this baby!, hahaha.

MSD told me the DIS-4 cannot be installed in my car, the reason is that the stock coil receives TTL signals from the ECU and the voltage level will not trigger the DIS-4, I made this circuit to solve that.

I got this dual stage boost controller from turbosmart, that way I can have 2 boost setting with the flip of a button, that is high boost and extra high boost!, I plan to run 17psi and 23psi or something like that. Now the third button on my nitrous control panel will have a function.

Here it is installed. It's soo cool to change the boost setting in a snap!. Even better have two preset settings, hahaha. The controller does not cause spikes or the boost to bounce like other controllers. Also reduced lag noticeably.

This is a knock alert thing I bought from MSD. I had to have an adaptor fabricated sin the bolt pattern supplied is english and the Jetta has metric threads on the engine block.

Here it is installed, besides the fuel injection controller for the additional injection. It has sensitivity and volume adjustment, as well as a led display. The way I placed it is off sight, I just want to hear the beeps in case I get engine knock to step back from the pedal and not cause any damage to the engine, so far is has not beeped, but you never now!, better be prepared.

I purchased also a Peloquin differential and some .:R things fro the wheels, pedals and so on, but they are still in the states, I have not traveled to pick them up. Pics of that will be available when I receive them.

Here is a pic of the peloquin differential just before installation (right). It looks quite different than the stock one. It was not a straight installation, two pieces from the interior, where the driveshafts are held had to be used from the stock differential to be able to bolt the driveshafts to the differential.

Since we took everything out I took the clutch, plate and flywheel to the clutch shop, there they machined everything again and they took aout 6-7 pounds from the flywheel to make it ligher so the engine revs up faster.

The stock dogbone bushings were replaced by urethane ones, so far no noticable vibration on the interior.

Here you can see some stuff I got from ECS tuning: the peloquin's differential, turbo s pedals, wiring for the front and rear fog lights, euroswitch, dogbone bushings, .:R center wheel caps (they don't fit I have to figure something out), and VW valve caps. Also an .:R line cap and tee shirt (they sent me the wrong size, hahahaha).

The exhaust manifold cracked... apparently the material did not stand the high temepratures due to the Thermo-tec wrapping and fractured after 1.5 years (no wonder why they void header warranties if you wrap then, hahaha). I took the wrap from the turbo and the exhaust manifold out of course.

This is the new exhaust manifold, built much stronger, on this one we used nodular iron, which is better than the one we used before. Due to the slight offset it has for the turbo we had to make small modifications on the intake and exhaust piping.

The MSD installation is in progress, I made a new circuit that converts the ECU signal to something the DIS-4 can trigger on, it works but it seems there is s slight reatrd on the timing I have to fix, therefore I took out the MSD setup and left the stock ignition meanhile, but I will install that MSD ignition!.

Here is the testing setup. Those MSD coils look nice!.

Take a look to the crappy stock spark, thin and really red, this means it has no power at all.

This is the spark from the MSD DIS-4 and MSD coils combo, thick and blueish spark, just what I need to fire at high cylinder pressures with a rich fuel and nitrous mix!.

The car ran fine with the MSD ignition, however the plate that holds the DIS-4 started to hit the CAI pipe, so we had to modify it. Also there is a small delay on the circuit because of the way the stock signal comes out and the way the DIS-4 needs it. At low RPMs you don't notice it but the retard increases at higher RPMs. I have to modify the circuit to get rid of this spark retard, meanwhile I'm still using the wimp stock ignition.

I'm reinforcing the whole electrical system. So I replaced thecrappy stock battery for an Optima red top. Has lots of cranking power and will not spill. I had to modify the stock cover so it would seat properly on this battery so it looks stock. Also had to place it with a rotation of 180° because the connections on VW and US cars are opposite. This way I did not have to modify any of the car's battery harnesses.

This another device used to boost the spark of the stock coil, it increases the input voltage in the coil to around 16V-18V, it has a boost sensor so it only increases the voltage when the intake manifold pressure rises above 1psi. I need it to fire at high cylinder pressures with a rich fuel and nitrous mix!.

I replaced the sotck fuel pump.

This is the new 255 lph fuel pump, a walbro setup. It works just fine but you can hear the noise a little bit inside the cockpit.

The oil cooler for the turbo was upgraded for a larger unitl. I measured a 15° celsius oil temp difference at idle, I guess it increases while cruising because of increased airflow.

The DIS-4 didn't work as expected. I spoke with the guys at MSD and the ECU signals, even with the level converter I built, are not compatible with the signals the MSD needs to work fine, so I sold it. I purchased 034 motorsports beffed up coils for the 1.8T, they told me the are good for over 400HP so they should do on my application. I had to fabricate a new plate and mount the voltage amplifier that feeds the coils on the back of the plate.

Here is the bare plate when I was measuring and making holes to it.

Here is painted and with the arness already in place.

Here is with the MSD superconductor wires already. I had to build them myself, I got a bulk set to do this.

Here is with the cover, I tried to make it look as OEM as possible.

This is the side view.

I installed a TT grille on the driver's side, to allow the air filter to breath better and i think it will make more "pssst" noise too.

The sparco air filter element was replaced by a K&N one, for some reason it was not filtering correctly and the intake side of the turbo has already some hits on the blades, hahaha.

Another thing I want to add is a small cooling fan for the oil cooler. I think I will have to get a motorbike fan or something, I will wire it to turn on with the radiator fan to improive cooling.

Got a set of racing camshaft springs from autotech to match my cam.

The cast exhaust manifold was apparently shrinking, check out the exhaust marks on the ports.

Here is the new one, with larger diameter runners and made of stainless steel. The pis shows it before we mounted it, we boosted up the compression from 7.7:1 to 8.6:1, the car runs great, much stronger at low RMS.

Dyno again!, June 2008

3 years and a few mods after the last dyno run here we are. The results: 217.32 HP and 275.91 ft-lb at the wheels. Boost was around 1.2 psi less than in the street % correction because the dyno load is less than on the pavement. With a 17% correction factor for transmission and altitude loss we end up with 254.26 HPs and 322.81 ft-lb at the crank.

This the graph from the nitrous run. I have a "75HP" shot, but turned out to improve a little bit more than that. The result: 304.65 HPs and 405.26 ft-lb at the wheels!!. With the 17% correction factor we have 356.44 HP and 474.15 ft-lb at the crank.

 I upgraded my clutch again to a solid disc around the center to withstand the torque:

Finally got my turbo and nitrous cam, here it is mounted on the head:

 

The result was +9HP and +12 lb-ft at the wheels without nitrous (226whp & 289lb-ft), with nitrous it gave slightly less power due to the different cam design, but I have changed my 60HP jets to 75HP and if it works okay I will rise it to around 85HP so we stay above the 300whp while using nitrous.

I had to change my nitrous solenoids, for some reason the purge one started to leak while closed, this didn't bother me I just installed a plug in there, but then the engine nitrous solenoide leaked and then I had to change them. Got 2 new NOS solenoids to replace the original edelbrock ones.

 I'm looking to upgrade my turbo, I got this babe, what do you think? (T3-T04E 11019-BB from Turbonetics):

 

 Got this fan to mount it on the oil cooler that goes to the turbo, I wired it so it turns on with the OEM radiator fans:

     

 

 I got this 228mm clutch for my car, it has a vr6 pressure plate upgraded to be 30% stiffer than the OEM one (from the vr6).

Here you can see my "stock" (on size only) clutch on the new flywheel, as you can see it's much smaller. Check the other picture of the larger clutch disc, we are currently modifying it with a solid plate around the center and race pads like the old one.

    

I modified my intake as a shor ram air intake for rain seasons because this year the engine sucked water twice. I used the old K&N filter I had on the ranger. This how it looks on rainy season:

 

    

 

This is how it looks when it doesn't rain!

I changed my final drive from 4.24:1 to 3.65:1, tha change is amazing, the car burned the tires way too much during hard launches on 1st and 2nd gear but did not go ahead, now the gears are a lot longer the car feels great. it does 60mph on 2nd gear!, hahaha.

 

Today with the oil change we installed an ECS magnetic oil nut.

        

 

Got this recirculating BOV from Forge for my new GT2560R setup:

 

Due to space constraints we decided to install instead an atmosferic discharge, double piston BOV, also from Forge. This way we will only need one connection instead of 2:

 

I sold the turbonetics turbo, I was not sure about the RPM range when I would get full boost, and since the rev limiter on the 2slow is 6350RPMs this was a concern. I got installed on a 1.8T jetta, giving 377 whp and 470whp with nitrous. Really sick!!!, hahaha.

I purchased an IHI VF34 turbo but got ripped off, I received an OEM air box instead, tried to get my money back but obviously the seller was a thief.

These are the pics from the latest turbo I purchased, a GT2560R - 466541 - 1 from Garret. We expect around 30-40 additional WHP's. Due to the new gear ratio I need the turbo to spool fast, that's why I chose this ball bearing baby with 0.64 A/R on the turbine side:

 

        

This is how it looks installed (a lot bigger than the previous one!):

 

 

Mounting this turbo took a lot more work than I anticipated, I had to make adapters to connect all the hoses, we had also to modify the exhaust manifold to be able to attach this turbo, the downpipe had to be redone, the oil and water connections was kind of easy, just needed some special angle connectors to avoid hitting the firewall.

 

The forge BOV also had to be added to the setup, the sound is nice... hehehe. The air/fuel mixture obviosly had to change, needed to add a lot more gas, I'm still tuning it to get the most power from it.

 

 I really like the results, you can feel the engine push much harder than before, even with the long gear ratio. Sick!

 

I modified the heat shield too, since the rubo us now more to the back, I got a new shield and it has a larger coverage area than before, this protects from heat other engine components.

Got these too to make the engine bay look nicer!

 

I had to modify the oil one, because it was sideways when tightened as it came, now it looks as it should.

I had powder cotated my upper stress bar, but instead of red I painted it satin black so it lloks more OEM.

This is how they look now mounted:

                        

 

close up:

      

 

This is the blow off installed:

I replaced the whole engine harness to solve a problem I had with the additional injection. It turned out to be a bad contact on the turbo computer, finnaly got that one resolved!.