Welcome to the garage. Its not uncommon for rallyists to spend most of their free time in the garage. Here we'll keep you up to date on what the team is working on.
Sad news: We clipped a tree at Idaho and the shell is finished. No fear though! I’m already in the process of finding a replacement mk2 GTI shell and hope to be ready with a new car within 9 months.
There are two things everyone must know about rally:
1) Its not a question of if, its a question of when. Everyone will ball a car eventually.
2) Given Rule 1, people who stay in rally are those that can afford to throw their current car away and start another. Never rally car that you cannot afford to duplicate.
I’ll post soon with more pics!
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 1 month ago at 9:03 am. Add a comment
Erik C and I put the 268 cams in last weekend. TT says that they will idle rough with fuel injection and sure enough, they ain’t lying. We pushed the timing out to get a reasonable idle, i.e. the engine is no longer trying to jump out of the engne bay, but I wish there was more we could do. We adjusted all the CIS-E tuning parameters and can’t seem to get much further.
I’ll give more details after I take the car out for a test drive.
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 2 months ago at 10:57 am. Add a comment
We did some testing on May 1st at Johnson Valley which is a dry lake bed about 100 miles north east of LA. The car ran quite well although we have the appearance of a gremlin when the car cut out during a recce run of the course and refused to start. After a couple minutes the car started up and I had no problems throughout the rest of the session. Strange..I’m thinking its either electrical or something in the fuel system.
but first, I’m stopping off at Jim Pierce’s shop to have him reinforce my tranny bracket replacement. Jim runs Pierce Motorsports and can be found on the web at advanceoffroad.com.
We’re not running Desert Storm, but we will be stage captains. =)
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 5 months ago at 11:10 pm. Add a comment
A week after pulling the car into the garage after High Desert Trails and I have yet to touch it. Its nice to have some down time after a hectic off season.
Well, not directly but Jinxy Hoche-Mong while strolling through service at High Desert Trails this past weekend remarked that I did not reinforce my 020 tranny bracket. Next stage I pull back into service, pop open the hood and find that my tranny bracket had completely sheared in half. One stage after Jinxy Jinxerton pointed out the potential shortcoming in my car!!! To his credit he did help try to get it straightened out but sadly we couldn’t get a spare. A big thanks to Chrissie Beavis for taking me and my service guy back to her house to look for parts on her old Jetta. We didn’t find exactly what we needed but we surely appreciate her trying to help us out!
Before the bracket broke we were able to fully test out the new engine and it ran great! Pulled and revved great and thats before we put in some decent cams or the 50mm intake! Looking forward to getting out in the car again.
Lastly, seems like the sticky clutch problem is going away. After bringing the car home from the event we had no problem shifting into reverse. We’ve got our fingers crossed that our problems will be gone for good.
Double lastly, I don’t really blame Michel for my problems. That stuff at the top of this post is a joke, yes, it really happened as I wrote it, but clearly its not his fault. Or is it? =P
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 6 months ago at 8:09 pm. Add a comment
Good news! I’m back to only one problem. The overtemp issues have been resolved. I had forgotten that I had moved to a low temp thermostat in the 1.8 engine and bought a standard thermostat for the new 2.0. I swapped out the thermostat for a low temp one and I’m back to around 180 deg F which is where I like to keep the motor (on stage it will get much hotter!).
I looked at the shifter turret and so far so good, trimming back the heat shield a bit seems indeed to be a quick fix.
Thus, I’m left with only one problem…the clutch sticking to the flywheel..I do have a lead on it but I won’t be checking into it until after HDT this weekend.
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:36 pm. Add a comment
We pulled the tranny again inspected the flywheel/clutch. We could see where the clutch was rubbing on the flywheel by examining the wear pattern on the edge of the clutch. So it definitely seems like the sticking is indeed on the flywheel side. We cleaned the flywheel, lubed up the input shaft, and reinstalled the tranny. Bad news is the clean up and lube did not work, there are still some clearance issues with the new clutch. Its not as bad as it was and it should be an issue during HTD coming up next week.
In the mean time I discovered some other issues. The catalytic converter heat shield melted a hole in the bottom of the shifter turret. This is a known issue in VWs but I thought I was ok. Well it turns out I wasn’t. I replaced the turret and trimmed the heat shield abit to get a more distance from the hot parts to the turret. This is a short term fix for HDT, the long term fix will involve layering an isulator between the turret and the heat shield.
I drove the car with the new motor around more as well. Seems like I may have a cooling issue. The 2.0L is running about 15F degrees hotter than my 1.8. I have some reasons to believe that the coolant is not circulating as well as it should. I will be pulling the thermostat to investigate.
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 6 months ago at 10:15 am. Add a comment
Well, it was running like crazy this morning so we decided to do the work tomorrow. I have a very small garage which means the chances of getting wet when its raining is quite high.
Instead, I played around with Richard Burns Rally:
With just two weeks before High Desert Trails this is our last chance to get the clutch problems sorted out. Too bad the weather will be miserable all weekend. Oh well, it could be worse, it could be freezing.
Posted by eddie, 1 year, 7 months ago at 8:42 am. Add a comment
