It’s amazing how quickly things can go from good to bad to good to bad to good, etc…
This morning, after sleeping for nearly 10 hours on Friday night I woke at 5am thanks to the newly hatched birds in the nest outside my bedroom window. The miracle of life is something to behold… anytime other than 5am. It was almost the miracle of death but I refrained.
Instead, I took the opportunity to hightail it to my work studio to begin either wresting the car into working order or planning its demise.
The tasks at hand were not terribly complicated, yet we all know hoe that goes:
Finish the wiring harnesses for the VW/Audi 1.8 coils,
Get the coils and harnesses installed and button up the engine bay
Remove the SSIs
Drill, tap, timesert and install a new exhaust stud on cylinder 1.
Start the car.
The harnesses came together quickly and I’m satisfied with them. I made them removable from the main harness with Deutsch connectors (something I didn’t previously do… d’oh) There’s a real zen in making harnesses and doing a nice job- it’s one of those detail that I think communicated the care that went into the build. Sometimes it’s the little things that speak volumes.
In any event, with the harnesses built and the coils installed the work inside the engine bay was complete and it was on to the real labor of the day: removing the SSIs.
These were installed by the shop I first took the car to and among a litany of things they did wrong, sloppy, or just didn’t do even though they charged me, was ordering thin flange SSIs. This car is a 1977 and the exhaust studs are long… like 58mm long so ordering the thin flange will of course work but it leaves a LOT of exposed stud. This means that it’s damn near impossible to get a wrench on the stud due to the limited space between the end of the stud and the SSIs.
Even with the SSI wrench that Al loaned me (lifesaver) it was painful and arduous. I cut up a few other wrenches and made some custom ones; what works on cylinder 1 doesn’t work on cylinder 3…
Eventually, after much cursing the SSIs were off. Clearly there were some exhaust leaks. I knew about them- I could hear them after all but this was absurd. Brand new gaskets were used and the car has maybe 500 miles on it since the motor went back in…
Al also sent me the Stomski tool which is designed for drilling out broken studs. For that, it does an admirable job but for what I needed it to do, some modifications were to be made.
I first milled a drilling busing out of some spare aluminum I had lying around. This allows the 10.2mm drill for the Timesert to be held perfectly perpendicular to the surface of the exhaust flange.
With the bushing in the Stomski tool, drilling could commence. I measured the depth of the hole and made sure to not extend past it with the bit. That’s what the very scientific piece of tape on the bit was for.
With the hole complete it was then time to tap it for the timesert. For this I 3D printed a PAHT-CF sleeve that was the same diameter as the tap, ensuring that it too would be perfectly perpendicular to the exhaust flange.
Tapping the magnesium wasn’t hard at all save for the limited space in which I had to work. Keep in mind I was doing all this on my back under the car; I figured it would be faster than pulling the motor.
Some high-temp red locktite (272 IIRC) and the timesert was in. Easier than I thought it would be but of course having the right tools makes hard work deceptively easy. You can see the delta in the length of the studs. I ordered 12 studs and was very, VERY tempted to try and extract the others and replace them with shorter studs until I hear in the distance the words of John Walker: “Don’t” and that was enough, so I left them…
It was then time to put the SSIs back on and I will say this; if they ever have to come off again, they’re staying off for good. Yes, I like heat and want to be able to drive up until the first salt, but these SSIs are a nightmare. Well, now they’re a bit less of a nightmare thanks to one shorter stud that went on rather easily. I was going to mill some spacers to slide onto the studs but I was out of steel and I didn’t want to use aluminum, nor did I want to wait to buy or receive steel so the studs will be a problem for future Julian, F that guy.
I decided to sand the surfaces of all the flanges- on the heads, on the SSIs and on the muffler, just to ensure good contact with the new gaskets.
This is a photo of the AchtungKraft flange that mates up with the SSIs. Notice how buttery smooth and free of imperfections it is… this yields a phenomenal seal to the gasket.
This is a photo of the same mating surface of the SSIs. Notice all the deep vertical gouges. Well, that's what's left of the deep, deep gouges in the surface, like .25-.5mm deep- deep enough that I had to spend a good 40 mins sanding them down. And while an exhaust leak right before the muffler isn’t the end of the world, these gorges were on all of the flanges that mated to the heads. No wonder there were leaks. In addition, the MFI bung weld was open and not complete around the nipple and worst of all, the holes that allow you to feed a socket through the body of the SSIs to tighten the nuts don’t line up with the nuts, making it impossible to tighten them without some very custom offset wrenches. And even then it takes a helluva lot of twisting, bending a contortion the SSIs so that they line up and fit.
Perhaps this is just the norm with SSIs but for the price, these are trash. I can’t wait to get rid of them and go with headers. I’ll run an electric heater or make my own head exchangers.
Anyhow. That work took from 7-about 1pm. Way longer than it should have but also infinitely shorter than it could have.
And then I sat in the seat, heart pounding, hand trembling and turned the key.
And she fired right up.
I took the car out for a 40 min drive to log some data and my initial impressions are that the car is a totally different animal. It’s way smoother, the acceleration under load is much more aggressive and it just feels way tighter and more powerful. The exhaust leaks are gone (oh the joy!) and everything was doing what it should.
I’m convinced that some if not all of the child I bought were duds or fakes. That, combined with a too-high cranking dwell just put too much stress on them and they failed. These VW/Audi could were 2x the price and came from NAPA with a warranty and if first impressions are any indication, they were worth every penny.
It’s too bad this couldn’t have happened 1 day sooner as I would have made RR5 and well, who knows. But, I’ll take the win today and live to fight another…