Guess who will be busy this weekend

Last weekend I disassembled, this weekend I reassemble.

Basically I have decided to finally do two things that I've wanted to do for ages.

1 - replace my temporary (only been there for 5 years) $20 exhaust system with something a bit better. So I am going for a 2.5" system with a basically straight through muffler (old 2" one had muliple chambers and I think restricted the top end). Seemed like a good idea since I recently put some good headers on the motor.

2 - Install a Davies Craig electric water pump (EWP). This allows me to remove a belt, a power steering pump (that was full of grease and acted as an idler since I don't have power steering), and the tensioner idler assembly. Nearly 3.5kg of junk.

Old 2" exhaust with chambered muffler (5yrs ago when it looked nice);


V6 with relatively new headers and gutted water pump (had to pull the timing belt off to get to the water pump)


Crap I can throw away since I have an EWP;


Most of the new bits to fabricate into something useful;

Looks like fun.....😂

wow you have a lot to do, I feel much better about my pile of unfinished cars and garden orniments.

Then again after a week of the tow truck guy coming in every day my front yard is now void of VW's and the last one shoudl leav Sunday from the inside yard..

Hmmm...looks interesting!! Are you going to use a controller for the pump or remove the thermostat and wire it up for continuos use?? Do you think it will help your "hotter" highway temperatures???????????????

I'm removing the thermostat and using the fancy temperature controller which cycles the pump and varies it's speed. The controller is actually more expensive than the pump!!!

I haven't had any hot highway temps since I added the "temporary" (which can mean a long time for me it seems) air scoop on the passenger side trailing arm. It may help though, as the old water pump was turning pretty slow with my tall highway 4th gear.

Will be good to see the results/any change in your cooling system after the install...have fun!!

I finished the exhaust today. It was very very fiddley. I had to put each part on and off a number of times to keep test fitting things. It's a very tight fit back there. 40mm clearance to the rear tyre on one side, 40mm clearance to the headers on the other side, and 20mm clearance to the secondaries underneath. The new pipes and muffler were significantly bigger than the old ones.

And I spent a while die-grinding the merge in the factory secondarys, so it flows better. They came from the factory with the low budget method of merging two pipe, by squashing them into hemi-spherical shapes and then welding them together. I also found I needed a flange just before the final exhaust tip, because if I didn't have it then I couldn't get the muffler off with the engine cage still in place. It's all very tight. I made the exhaust tip part from a piece of 3".

This view showed how tight it was with the old exhaust (and a bike muffler at that time);


Side view of new exhaust with engine cage removed (so I could put the timing belt back on);


rear view;


I put the timing belt back on, and started it. It's definitely louder. It sounds like it will be ok when driving normal, but will be very loud when I rev it out at full throttle.

So tomorrow, it's on to the electric water pump.

i have the same pump for mine (110L with the fan) so I will be interested in how you go. Let me know if your keen for a ride some time.
Stephen

I just went with the 80L pump. Davies Craig (manufacturer) reckons it's good for engines up to 5L.

I really doubt my heater will work after I install the EWP. The heater was a bypass for the radiator in the orginal set-up of the car. But with the EWP installed the heater will essentially be a bypass for the engine.

So, it's all done. The EWP controller wouldn't work and kept me frustrated for ages, so it will be going back for a refund. In the end I just wired the pump in to the ignition to run the whole time, and it worked fine. It didn't overcool the engine at all, as my rear radiator set-up obviously relies on the thermofans to maintain the temperature.

Exhaust done;




video of some acceleration runs, it was raining so I couldn't get a video of the sound from the outside. Besides, it's going to the dyno on saturday and I will get a good video then.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GyyzcwK6EY

Sounds good!! Did you notice any top end gain or is it still early days?? Seems to rev fairly easy...👍😵

There is more top end power, it doesn't flatten off like it used to. It's hard to say whether it was the water pump or the exhaust, but I'm thinking the exhaust. You can see now it revs to 7,500 without slowing down or flattening off.

so to get even more HP all you need to do is fit a buggy body and away you go :>

looks like someone is chasing for more HP atw !!

Going back to a beetle box would get more power at the wheels, but not everything is about HP numbers :P

How long does it take to get up to operating temp? If the thermostat sticks open normally the car will use a lot more fuel as it takes a lot longer to warm up and stays on the cold start circuit. I'm sure this would be the case with yours as well not having a thermostat at all and the water pump running full time

I warmed it up by letting it sit there and idle as I was tinkering with things, so haven't done a proper cold to hot warm-up. I think my radiator not getting enough air means the water pump can go as fast or slow as it likes, it's the thermofans providing air flow that is effecting and controlling the engine temp.

besides fuel consumption isn;t an issue if it never gets driven ....

The Baja used to average around the 9L/100km mark, but I've just put two new oxygen sensors so I'll see if it improves. The O2 sensor on one bank of the V6 was dead, and the plugs on that side were black as a result.

However the Passat averages around 8L/100km (and the wipers are useful in the rain) and the bike averages 4.5-5L/100km. Since Petrol is $1.60/L, which vehicle would you use most often? 🙂 And you can't talk, your building another car because you won't pay for fuel in your cruiser 😀

nice work looks great wes. lets see a blower strapped to the klze 🙂

I took the car for a drive today to get fuel (before it goes up for the week). Yes, with the EWP going flat out it did take longer than normal to heat up. It also didn't hold temperature on 60-70kph roads, it kept hovering around normal but slightly below, particularly on any long down hill runs. So looks like I do need the EWP controller after all.

The new EWP controller is ready to be picked up. I will get it when I get back from Canberra on Friday and have it at my place.

You know you are just jealous you didn;t think of building a car to save money on fuel ....

Dyno run
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBo7dLy93sg

140.8HP at the wheels. The VW kombi gearbox I'm using, the offroad tyres and the high CV angles seems to add up to about 30% of losses (70% efficient). We've noticed this sort of losses on a range of suby conversions and my car. So using the 30% losses the 140.8HP relates to the KLZE 200HP at the flywheel quite well.

My car was quieter from the outside than I thought it would be. The U-bends in the exhaust probably still restrict the system a bit and keep the noise down. I thought it would have been louder with e 2.5" straight through muffler.

do you drive it around town with the "offroad tyres" just to look cool

yes

Baja Wes wrote:yes

why ???
would'nt it drive (accelerate and handle better) with tyres suited for the road

It's an offroad car...he drives it off road.....

i very much doubt that a beetle that nice sees too much off road action i bet that its close to a conservative 70/30 split 70% on road that is
easy to have a second set of street wheels that wont stress the cog swapper and in guessing it has an adj front and rear end????

Why would I build a car capable of offroading and then put street tyres on it? A Baja with a body lift and small street tyres would also look ridiculous. No I don't have an adjustable rear, and my adjustable front is a thing front end that is in it's lowest position.

Beside if I wanted something that handled I would have built a street beetle. If I was after something that accelerated really fast I would have put an EJ20 turbo in it. And I have my motorbike for something that goes fast and handles well on the street.

It gets used offoad......

Wes dont those dohnuts make the 180 turns so easy. Didnt know they existed until the other day when I moded my exhaust on the fasty.

Yeah, the donuts are nice tight bends, but probably aren't so good for flow 🙁

I have one in the exhaust, and one in the intake. This is my 3" intake piping, a little restrictive with so many bends, but it serves it's purpose.

MickH wrote:

for what it is thats quite impressive❗

X-I-TED wrote:

MickH wrote:

for what it is thats impressive❗

As I say in that video description, that hill was a lot steeper than it looks. When we got to that hill there was a Landcruiser Ute that was having several attempts but couldn't get up it because he didn't have the axle articulation and he would spin a front and a rear wheel and get stuck.

I only started spinning the back near the top where the opposing ditches get particularly deep, but a bit of throttle fixed that. It's essentially only 1 wheel drive.

X-I-TED wrote:i very much doubt that a beetle that nice sees too much off road action i bet that its close to a conservative 70/30 split 70% on road that is
easy to have a second set of street wheels that wont stress the cog swapper and in guessing it has an adj front and rear end????

u must be new round here 😂

Joel wrote:

X-I-TED wrote:i very much doubt that a beetle that nice sees too much off road action i bet that its close to a conservative 70/30 split 70% on road that is
easy to have a second set of street wheels that wont stress the cog swapper and in guessing it has an adj front and rear end????

u must be new round here 😂

ok enlighten me 70% road 30% off road was my guess if its much more than that id say it doesnt get driven much say less than 200k /week (thats still 60k's of off road torture) and i dont mean dirt road i mean OFF ROAD!

So I got a new controller for the electric water pump, and this one works. Maybe.

It has a major disagreement with the engines temperature sensors. When driving around the engine temp gauge sits in the middle. The thermo fan cycles on and off occasionally and the ECU doesn't give any abnormal temp errors. So basically everything appears normal.

But the EWP controller beeps and flashes and reckons the water temp has exceeded 95 degrees. It's weird because it's on the cold side of the radiator. It's where the stock 82 degree thermostat was (and the gauge shows the same temp as it did with that thermostat). Not sure what to do with it at the moment. I guess I will complain to Davies Craig, and if that doesn't work try and put a resistor or something inline with the sensor to calibrate it?!?!?

It's annoying because using the controller I'm meant to be able to set which temperature I want the pump to run the engine at. I can't do that when it thinks it's overheating the whole time.

Baja Wes wrote:So I got a new controller for the electric water pump, and this one works. Maybe.

It has a major disagreement with the engines temperature sensors. When driving around the engine temp gauge sits in the middle. The thermo fan cycles on and off occasionally and the ECU doesn't give any abnormal temp errors. So basically everything appears normal.

But the EWP controller beeps and flashes and reckons the water temp has exceeded 95 degrees. It's weird because it's on the cold side of the radiator. It's where the stock 82 degree thermostat was (and the gauge shows the same temp as it did with that thermostat). Not sure what to do with it at the moment. I guess I will complain to Davies Craig, and if that doesn't work try and put a resistor or something inline with the sensor to calibrate it?!?!?

It's annoying because using the controller I'm meant to be able to set which temperature I want the pump to run the engine at. I can't do that when it thinks it's overheating the whole time.

Wes did you sort this out ok?

I want to fit one in the kombi to avoid the cold water at the thermostat issue and also on long uphill bushtracks i don't think the stock pump gets enough water up to the radiator at the front.

I was wondering whether it would work to parallel connect the pump to the fans or seeing i only run one fan use the connection from the other.

This way hopefully the engine would reach operating temp quickly as there would be no flow....

whaddya reckon🤓

Yeah I did, and posted the findings in another thread - I'll try to find where. The short version is that it reads temperature increments a lot more accurately than the Mazda temperature guage. The temperature really does swing all over the place without the factory gauge working.

As for your problem, the car facing up or downhill shouldn't change the load on your pump if you have no air bubbles. It's like using a piece of hose to siphon something, it's the height of the start and finish that matter. Where the siphon goes in between doesn't matter unless you have air bubbles. The except to that rule is if it goes too high the liquid will reach it's vapour pressure and boil, but the pressurized cooling system and coolant additives should stop that problem.

I wouldn't connect the pump to the thermo switch. It will let water in some parts of the engine boil before the water near the thermoswitch gets hot enough to activate the pump. That's why the Davies Craig controller cycles the pump occasionally.

If I was doing it again I'd probably consider not getting the fancy controller, and just running the pump flat out with a traditional thermostat. The controller just doesn't do as good as job as the stock thermostat. My warm-up times are quite long and the heater doesn't work as good as it used to.

Rob, here's the update http://forums.aussieveedubbers.com/viewtopic.php?tid=44693&page=5#pid679109 , info is on page 5 if you see 25 posts per page.

X-I-TED wrote:ok enlighten me 70% road 30% off road was my guess if its much more than that id say it doesnt get driven much say less than 200k /week (thats still 60k's of off road torture) and i dont mean dirt road i mean OFF ROAD!

The car probably sees 10% offroad these days. Even if we drive straight to the offroad spot we still drive further on road getting there than we do offroad once we're there, so it's hard to get higher than 50/50 really. The Baja is an occasional weekend car.

For commuting to and from work I have this;


For real abuse in the dirt I have this;

good info wes...saves me a bit of experimenting and money! i havn't been running a thermostat at all because it would never open but i want my latest engine to run at optimum operating temp so will place an external one at the hot side...just need to make a spacer ...


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and bolt these two together

i have a genuine subaru thermostat and here it is sitting in a pot of boiling water...only opened about 1 mm


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had to actually sit it in the jug whilst boiling to get it to open 10 mm....

so...external thermostat, electric water pump hardwired(maybe with a manual switch for cold morngs) and ubeaut header tank to make sure radiator is full and should be sweet👍


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thanks wes...i think...more reading heheh🤓

Thanks for doing allt he research for me Baj Wes,
I bought a davies craig 115L for the kombi then and decided not to go for the controller after reading this.
I plan to mount the pump under the front of the car and wire the pump to the ignition via the same manual swith as the thermo fan (for cold morning as you sad), and leave the thermostat as usual.

Good write up mate

Thanks