Project Resurrection: "Movement"

Have you ever opened the hood on a car and thought "What the hell is all that crap?" I remember thinking this many times early on in my early years of dealing with automobiles. The seemingly tangled mess of hoses, wires and mystery items that only fufill the purpose of blocking your hands when you need to access something as well as performing the magic that prevents your check engine light from joining you in your travels in the early stages of your cars life, and transforms into an ugly demon hell bent on keeping it on in the later stages.

This is an AWP code 1.8T engine (not mine) still carrying most of the factory equipment, looks tidy? No. Go ahead, put your hand in there.

My engine in particular had some of this stuff eliminated before I got it but was still in need of much more help. Some of the stuff in there was questionable on initial inspection, and there was still a maze of brittle plastic breather hoses that had been along for the ride since the car had rolled out of the factory. It needed to go. If there is anything that drives me nuts, it's an engine that has a mess of crappy crap all over the place (which is a bit odd, because I am generally not a "details" guy) random looking hoses and just crap in general.

Same view as the last except my starting point. Like I said, a bit less but still a mess.

So after reading all the threads on the mystical and all knowing internet, I assembled everything I would need to delete all of these things and after work one Friday I fired up my garage heater and pulled the 337 in.

Always with other issues to address and just some fun stuff to add I got started several hours later (with the temps outside at negative stinking cold, it took about 3 hours for my heater to get the garage anywhere near sort of comfortable. Thanks Wisconsin).

Before I dug into the main task, like I said I had a couple other odds and ends to address. Fist one was an upgraded engine mount known as the "dogbone". See the photo and the name will make sense. One great effect changing this mount to an upgraded unit is it will help keep things sound and planted in the event of wheelspin.

The new one installed with the old one held up. With the old units bushings all worn and floppy, the switch to another one from VF with poly bushings is a strong upgrade in itself for this car.

With that out of the way my next piece was a turbo inlet pipe ie: how the engine gets it's air. I am not going to drivel here long about how a turbo works, if you are unsure see here for a full tutorial:How a turbo works.
Ultimately the working theory is the better the engine can breathe, the better it will perform. So to help it breathe better the first thing to do would be how it takes in air. Start at the beginning and work your way to the end.

So one of my purposes under the car was to get a good shot at the lower end of the inlet pipe from the bottom of the car to release said pipe from the turbo. Of course as I do these things I am generally under my car making crude noises and mutterings mixed with barely intelligible curses every so often as I figure out how to get to something. As with most projects there is far more dis-assembly to access one thing than you would anticipate so instead of taking photos (that process is forgotten and out the window by the time I figure out what comes off next one reason I will never be able to publish an accurate and thorough "how to" article) I move forward and realize far to late for any in progress pics and move on to this:

The new (left) and the old (right)

As you can probably see, even if you have no idea what you are looking at, the pipe on the left would probably allow far more volume of anything through than the one on the right. On the right is stock equipment from VW, it's worked for years, but doesn't mean it can't be improved upon. Note on the stock piece how at the bottom it pancakes and has to impede airflow at least a bit and the replacement holds the nice round pipe shape all the way down. The one on the left is from APR and is absolutely an upgrade from factory. This particular pipe is actually for a different application than my exact engine so I got an ok deal on it, and with the ports in slightly different spots than original it actually worked a little better for me as I was putting everything back together I relocated some things for a little tidier finish.

So now the meat and potatoes of this. The main purpose of this project is to get rid of all the old, brittle evap system and secondary air injection system hoses, as well as rebuild the meddled with and substandard crankcase ventilation to a system that doesn't fill my intake tract with oil causing a burning oil smell from start up on due to a faulty pcv valve. Ultimately they are emissions related and not absolutely needed for proper engine operation.

These plugs each get a 1watt 330 ohm resistor to plug into the harness to "fool" the car into fueling correctly without the emissions stuff  that was plugged in those spots.

Really. These items, a couple resistors to go in those plugs (not pictured) and a bunch of hose clamps. And time, and maybe about a c-level technician skillset. That's it.

I did miss the 90* and "T" pcv fittings as of course I forgot to take photos as I was doing this. Surprising.

This is without a doubt a "some disassembly required" project. As always some photos I'm missing are the removed intake manifold and a couple "disassembled" photos.

I managed to snap this as I was starting to take everything apart. This barely even scratches the surface of this process.

So after alot of removing, and less reassembling, this was my pile of stuff on the floor.

This is the "deleted" pile. All kinds of stuff taken out. 

Now, as this is my daily driver, I needed to get it back on the road asap. Hence I did not take everything off and clean, paint or polish. Not a big deal to me, some will chastise me for this but hey, I did do some major cleaning in this bay with good noticeable results.

Access to the engine is far easier now, and the engine bay doesn't look like a hose factory barfed in there. I also installed a set of silicone coolant hoses while I was in there this time too. 

Next steps in the engine bay are: find an intercooler set up that the piping is less obvious. I am not into that big shiny pipe traveling through the bay. I would much rather sticker bomb it than have that much brightwork. And maybe I'll take the components off and run them through the hot tank. Not a priority by any stretch. This works, it's not a show car. More for purpose than beauty.

Now the outside, well, that's a different story. Somewhere in the area of a week this will look like a completely different car......

Wonder what this means?

So in the end, I get a cel about every 200ish miles for an improper flow in the secondary air injection, which I clear and it goes away for a couple hundred miles. Not a big deal considering this is was a beginning point for this car:

stock

my starting point.

And this is current:

I'm ok with an infrequent check engine light......