The Plan

For as long as I can remember, this car of mine has been made fun of for one fact. Its slow as hell. I cant fault that though, the car was never really intended for speed, granted the Ghia was designed to look like a sports car, but have the reliability and economy of the Beetle. My car came stock with 60hp, which is probably more like 53 hp. Factor in the loss due to the tranny and we are looking at 40 hp at the wheel. Its pretty anemic but there are ways to get around that. Most people like to build engines, the design is straight forward and the block can be bored out so new pistons can be slipped in. The most comon is a 1915 engine which gives good torque and can last around 50-75k miles before a rebuild is needed. Fuel management will need to be upgraded though. Then guys stroke them and can build up to a 2332cc engine. This thing is huge for a VW engine and make around 150-170hp but its not cheap. A good well built 2332 engine that will last 50k miles cost around 3k low side and 5k.


Then there is the type 4 engine. This came on some late model buses and and late model vws. Type 4 engines are stronger, but there is a lot of modification that has to be done oil cooling wise and transmission wise. Type 4 engines are very expensive to certain degrees and the best builder is name Jake Raby. He has done some stuff with these engines that is amazing. I have seen a type 4 engine run to 9 grand and dig into concrete with its tires. They are awesome engines but they are just to expensive to be justified at this point.


And then there are turbos. Turbos for these engines are pretty straight forward. There is a company called CB performance which sells complete kits for around 3.5k. Looking back my car would be turboed by now if I had gone this route. But I decided to go the hard way and build a kit myself. It is more expensive to do it the way Im doing it, but I wanted to put some trick parts on myself, something that was tasteful and combined the parts that I wanted, not just what CB sells. The only real benefit to the cb system is that it has fuel injection. Id like to add that at a later point in time.





I decided to go turbo because I like the idea of being able to switch parts over to another engine externally and still get mounds of hp out of it. So lets get to the parts.


So Im not going to be able to tell about everything right about now, but these are prelimiary parts, some for boost control and what not and or monitoring. They are important as I can see what my engine is going to be doing when under boost. Going to have to make this quick. I wish I had more time but I dont want to keep my friend up.


For boost pressure/control I decided to go with an HKS blow off valve. It is some what ricer I know, but I liked the design. Ive heard mixed reviews but I like the design, look, feel, fit and finish of the part. These get bad rap because of the atmosphere blow off which wistles quite loudly. I am going to recirculate it though so I get better response and not as much boost lag.







For monitoring the boost Ive decided to go with a set of gauges that are akin to the setup of Randalls car. http://garagehumble.blogspot.com Hes got a setup very similar to what Im going with. I liked his choice of gauges and placement and also which gauges he chose to use. I mirrored that to a certain extent. As you can see there is a boost gauge, oil temp and pressure gauge out of a 911sc , and an EGT gauge.






For direct boost controll I really liked greddys profec spec B unit. Next to it you can see an AEM Uego AFR unit. I was going to include these with the gauges above, but I am going to relocate them to the glove box so they can be hidden. These parts are a little more pricey so I wanted to hide them, plus their design is not really in with the others.





Next is a Borla muffler, I liked their build quality but this one is a little questionable, got it from Summit racing, and it isnt stamped like it should be, but it will suffice. All stainless steel an a 3in diameter. It should be quite loud :) but I am hoping for a good deep resonating tone.





Lastly this is the hotside of the turbo. Im going to sandblast it and then ceramic coat it. Should be pretty potent with the coating and a good turbo blanket.



Ps, Randall convinced me on the 60% throw, and Im going for it.