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240 Wagon - VW TDI inside

cj.surr

New member
Joined
May 24, 2013
Location
Upstate NY
Started this project of building a daily/roadtrip car in January of this year. I wanted to combine the awesome practicality of a 240 with the economy of a VW TDI engine. I started with a 98 Jetta (AHU TDI) and a '90 245. I found both cars in CT, for $500 and $400 respectively. The jetta ran and drove great, was just rusty and beat up. The 245 was in incredible shape for the price, ran and drove, had brand new Nokians, and had an auto trans that was acting up. Barely any rust at all on the body, too.

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Got to work that weekend and removed the TDI engine in CT, put it in the back of the volvo and drove it 350mi back to Upstate NY where I go to school. I picked up an m47 trans setup on the way up and the auto trans only slipped badly once.

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Trimmed and sorted the engine harness while we were having a cold spell.

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Yanked the B230

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Did the first test fits with the engine and trans clamped together. There was an obvious issue with oil pan and subframe clearance

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That's how much I would have to remove from the subframe to fit the oil pan with only minimal pan notching. I wasn't too happy about having to box that in.
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I picked up another subframe and started cutting into the oil pan instead. This would allow me to run a completely stock subframe.

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I cut part of the angled rear section of the pan and bent it upwards. This would make up for some of the capacity I was removing from the front. In the end, I lost only about half a quart of capacity, which I'm fine with.

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Getting the pan as close as I safely could to the rotating assembly.

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Started cutting out pieces

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All welded up. Was interesting to weld, a few spots seemed to be impregnated with oil, and would constantly bubble up as I TIGd it.

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Also had to shorten the pickup to draw from a more rearward section of the pan

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The work on the transmission adapter and starter mount would prove to be the most difficult part of the project. I machined all parts on a Bridgeport with a 2.5 axis CNC.

The starter mount blank

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The transmission bellhousing adapter would be made out of 3 separate blocks to save money on material and make it easier to produce.

Here is the top and passenger side bellhousing blocks being indexed on the starter mount.


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The placement of all of this was critical to ensure good starter tooth engagement. I set up the blocks on the engine to get the proper location and then clamped them together. I would later press dowel pins into the blocks to keep them from moving. This fixed the 3 pieces together, and the only adjustment that could affect the starter tooth engagement would be through the allowable movement within the bolt holes for securing the bellhousing adapters to the block.

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Starter gear backlash was set to about .020? by the direction of some hotrod articles I have found.
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Final chips taken off of the adapter pieces and cleaned up

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Here is the final adapter setup. I had to use an aftermarket single mass B5 A4 flywheel and pressure plate because the VW tdi flywheel has the ring gear on the transmission side. The clutch disc used was a rigid rx-7 one, because a sprung one would not clear the pressure plate fingers. At this point the author does not realize it, but his clutch selection would later bite him in the ass?.

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I made sheet aluminum covers for the empty spaces between the adapters on the top and bottom

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Due to the thickness of the adapter, the throwout bearing would have to be spaced out. I did this by getting a second clutch fork and welding the center section of it on top of the existing fork.

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Here is the final product for the engine mounts. The driver side engine mount was definitely interesting as the original engine mount was at the bellhousing (for the fwd application). Therefore, I had to make use of the only bolt holes possible. Also, clearance was pretty tight near the lower radiator hose outlet. These mount arms would use the stock 240 rubber mounts.

Also pictured are the power steering pump brackets. I had to move the power steering pump because it interfered with the steering rack. The PS was originally on the v-belt drive but I moved it to the serpentine belt by using a ribbed A4 PS pump pulley of the same bolt pattern.

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The K03 turbo needed a cleaning and rebuild from excessive thrust bearing wear. Obviously every stud broke out of the exhaust housing and had to be drilled and re-tapped.

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You can see the thrust bearing wear here. It was about 10-15 thou of axial play.

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Cleaned up and rebuilt all of the front end components.

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The rear end bushings were a bit worn out? Replaced the axle and torque rod bushings with poly

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Also picked up a 3.31 gearset and g80 locker to replace the open 3.73.

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I cut out 3 of every 4 sensor ring teeth to use the g80 locker in my non-abs car. This required spacing out the stock sensor with a shim I made of sheet aluminum. The speedo works great with this.

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Cleaned up the engine some. The intake ports and manifold had an incredible amount of sludge. That was cleaned out and will be cured with an EGR delete.

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There is it sitting for the first time. Tons of room to play with.

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Started up with the plumbing. The radiator hoses would prove to be super long because they come out on the driver side of the engine.

A couple of couplers for the upper and lower radiator hose. The tee is for the heater core feed.

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Lower hose

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Trimmed and plugged the original heater core outlet that interfered with the firewall. These engines are funny in that they use 3 glow plugs in the coolant (pictured) to help with warm-up.

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Turned a couple of adapters for the fuel and heater core hoses.

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For some reason the fitting I ordered for the fuel filter return line didn't fit so I machined a plug. That fitting would allow warm return line fuel to be routed through the filter to save every last millijoule of energy?

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Fuel filter mounted in place of ignition coil. I ran a new nylon line to the sending unit and removed both pumps.

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The stock turbo return interfered with the starter, so I trimmed it and rewelded to be used with rubber hose. Also a banjo was welded on the 240 power steering high pressure line to be used with the VW pump.

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Made the downpipe and exhaust. Just welded it into the original section before the first muffler.

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Knocked out the electron plumbing

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At this point I was ready to start up the car for the first time. Primed the fuel line and it fired up on the first revolution.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGW8z8ZPXzE

Used a 740 intercooler to keep it simple and made up some intercooler piping.

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I then ran into the problem of driving the VW Drive-by-wire throttle sensor with the 240 cable throttle. I made a bracket to hold the sensor and 240 cable housing. There wasn't any easy way to clamp the 240 cable into the sensor, so I welded the two cables together.

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I took it for its first drive and stopped at the gas station. It was hysterical when I realized that the diesel pump nozzle wouldn't fit in the filler neck?

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Luckily the flap was able to be hammered out to allow the diesel nozzle to fit

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Here are the pictures of the engine bay as it sits. Still some parts to clean up and finish.

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Everything seemed to working well off the bat, the major hitch being a massive drivetrain vibration that would shake the whole car. It would occur from 1500-2000 rpm, and get worse with increasing gear. I went through a ton of diagnosis to try to figure out where it was coming from before a friend asked if I had any clutch damping within the flywheel or clutch disc. Not having a lot of experience with diesel clutch setups, I hadn't thought I really needed a sprung clutch disc or dual mass flywheel.

Well, the lack of torsional clutch damping turned out to be the cause of the vibration. There was still a problem of finding a setup that would fit, however. A sprung rx-7 or 240 clutch disc would not clear the pressure plate fingers. I either had to have a custom sprung hub disc made up, or switch to a dual mass flywheel.

I got a great deal on a new A4 dual mass flywheel, so I went with that.

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However, there was another issue in that the solid rx-7 clutch disc wouldn't clear the flywheel bolts on the dual mass. The clutch disc needed to have an offset hub like the A4 one. I talked to a few clutch shops and they all wanted a good bit of coin because of the non-standard offset hub. I decided to take things into my own hands.

I started with the FC non-turbo rx-7 disc (same spline pattern as 15/16? input shaft M47) and the B5 A4 offset clutch disc that I had. First I cut the hub out of the rx-7 disc.

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And pressed the hub out of the A4 disc.

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Machined down the rx-7 hub to fit the hole in the A4 clutch disc.

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And welded her right in.

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Lined up and cleared everything great

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Threw the car back together and the massive vibration is gone and it's driving great. First tank was 36 mpg with a lot of cold starts and short trips around town. I will be taking it on a long trip shortly and I am hoping for closer to 45 mpg on the highway. After all was said and done, over the last 2.5 months I put about 300-400 hours into the project and stayed within my target $2500 budget. Plus it was a ton of fun building this. I plan to take this car on a roadtrip around the country this summer after I graduate.

Also, a video of a cold start. I tried to show the glowplug indicator in the video, but it didn't really come out. I found out there was actually a glow plug lens in the cluster for the diesel 240s, so I added a bulb to that slot and wired it in.

https://youtu.be/yxrhk0tIkMo

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Thanks, all.

Nice swap!

Is it fair to say that it is similar to the stock B230F, performance wise?
If you were drag racing it, then yes. I find it to be more driveable though, because of the torque. It's obviously still slow. I plan to chip it and turn up the boost soon, anyway.


Oops, I realized this thread is not in the project forum it's supposed to be in - If someone reading this has the power to move it.
 
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Fun read. Interesting solutions to getting the running gear installed, especially on the clutch disk. 36 MPG city is tits.
 
Oh hey, you're the guy that used to have my car right? Just needs a wooden bumper and this one will match.
 
I love it. I don't even understand the things you did there, but it is fantastic. Very neat. Nice fabrication and mechanical skills. Pretty neat that you did it all for $2,500.
 
Neat. I've occasionally pondered putting a TDI motor in my old PV.

Buying an '03 TDI Jetta wagon has sort of made that project idea a bit moot, though.
 
Looks to be the perfect road trip car!
It's ever so slightly awkward on road trips. Our TDi Jetta wagon gets about 45 - 48 mpg on the highway (going 75 - 80 mph), combine that with a 15.a little tank (ventectomied) and that's 700+ miles between refueling.

Which is a little pointless since no one but a trucker who pisses in a bottle and throws it out the window can go that far without stopping. :lol:

So incredibly cheap to drive though. Ridiculously cheap. We've taken two 3500+ mile road trips so far this year just because the Jetta is so cheap to drive, we'd have likely stayed much closer to home if we were driving the 4Runner (Jetta goes almost three times as far per gallon/$).
 
Which is a little pointless since no one but a trucker who pisses in a bottle and throws it out the window can go that far without stopping. :lol:

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OP, I was the one on Sloppy that was confused by the effort to fit an M47 behind this. Being on sloppy, I assumed you'd modified the TDI motor. If it's just a DD car, that M47 will probably be perfectly happy.
 
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