TDI into Toyota (another one)

Working on the rig tonight. The motor is back in the engine bay and I'm beginning to fabricate the engine mounts and figure out where everything will sit in the engine bay. Just looking at everything and curious if someone has any idea how to run the alternator standalone without the ecu. I'll do some research but wondering if anyone has an easy solution to this. I assume getting the alternator to charge shouldn't be too difficult, otherwise I may just run some custom bracketry for a single wire chevy alt and eliminate the a/c though i eventually want to turn it into a air compressor for on board air.


Thanks,
Jesse

I would look into older diesel VW alternators, not 100% sure it will work but i would start there. I'm sure someone else can chime in on this.

Luke

Finally starting to get a fire under this project.... Motor mounts are DONE!!!

They came out much better than I had expected and the engine just looks like it was naturally supposed to be in there.

Really happy with how the transmission mount worked out as well.

Hopefully over the next week, I will be building my exhaust mamifold and get the turbo mounted up.

Still deciding whether I want to stick with my Air to water intercooler or if I will just put a fmic in for simplicity. Decisions decisions.

Hope to throw some pictures up soon.

Here's the pic of the driver's side mount ready to bolt in...



The drivers side installed.... this is looking from the bottom up



The passenger side



Another view of the passenger side..

In that pic you can also see my crank "lock pin" in the background. It is at the bottom of where the starter would mount with "TDC" etched in black (a 3/16" drill bit that goes through the adapter plate and into the flywheel)

ccnversion in (far) future and intro

Hey JayTee,
I'm the guy you spoke to at the Stafford Springs swap meet who had the "wanted TDI or VW diesel Engine" sign on my back. I've wondered when I would figure out who you were on here. Kind of easy to find you when I actually went on the Toyota Truck Conversion topic. I remembered Union, CT as well.
I looked at a bunch of 1.6 engines engines and transaxles near the swap meet that afternoon, lots of parts cheap, but not TDIs. A week later on Craigs near Boston I found a 96 TDI engine and 5 speed that ended up costing only a bit more than the 1.6 would have. Now to figure out how to get it in my spare Fiero. Obviously I've made a great file of ANYTHING about that series of engines from this club, and read most of the conversion stories. Another Craigs item just came yesterday, the Bentley manual as recommended here. Great info on this website.
My build will be after several other projects at home though. I'll just keep watching and learning from the rest of you guts who actually are putting hardware together.
Thanks all,
Wes

Wes,

Anytime you want to come check it out let me know. I'm not too far from you. You'll just have to excuse the gigantic mess in the shop...

Jesse

More pics

Got all my pics on photobucket, so here's a few more.

Passenger side mount looking up:


Another angle of the driver's side mount:


The driver's side mount from the wheel well:


Injection pump before being sent out to giles to be converted to M-tdi. Since it was lost in the mail I bought another core and am having him rebuild that one and I can keep this one for a spare for my Jetta.


Dual transfer cases mated up on trail gear dual steel mount:


Transfer cases mounted before sliding the motor/trans in - with the new tilted mount in place.


The motor in its final resting place - all bolted in tight.....


More too come over the next couple weeks. Hopefully tonight I'm going to tidy up the radiator mounts as well as the a2w intercooler heat exchangers (yes there will be two). Got a guy laser cutting out my flanges for the custom header I'm building and hopefully they will be done this week (already sent him cad files) so I can build the manifold and get the turbo mocked up and begin intake plumbing.

noticed how low your engine is in the bay....another added feature of the solid axle and lots of lift ....do you have a body lift?
where did you source the core of your mounts from?

3" body lift. It's going to be interesting to get the shifters to work on both the xfers and the tranny. I will be cutting the floor out a little and making a removable boxout/doghouse with longer shifters and since the dual transfer kits like to "slip" into nuetral for some reason I'm going to incorporate some sort of lockout into the sheetmetal. That's the plan but its always subject to change. haha

The engine mounts were sold as toyota to ford small block mounts. They were what was in the truck with the 302. A little convincing and the seem to support the TDI just fine. I'm a little worried they ma be too stiff (poly) but I guess if I wanted a diesel, now I'll know for sure that there is a diesel clanging around under the hood.

Nice work, dude - you work fast, too. Super envious of the dual case set-up, but it was not to be for me this time around. Engine position looks good, too.

Do you have rear discs on that beast?

What's your firewall clearance look like?

How far forward did you move transmission, t-cases etc...?

Thanks, yeah I have to work fast. haha. Have very little time for the project as I have a 2hr commute one way everyday, so when I'm working on it, I have to make it count.

Funny you should ask about the disc brakes, I was drooling over some of the kits last night. Maybe someday when the truck is actually running. They also make a really sweet transfer case mounted e-brake kit that I also would love to have.

There is plenty of clearance on the firewall. I am not going to have to modify that back coolant nipple or the firewall for the vacuum pump. Gained this amount of clearance by moving the transfer case mount forward 3". I came up with 3" by mounting the transfer case in its original mount and then setting the mated motor/trans where I wanted it clearance wise and measured the distance between the trans and transfer case and then made the new mounting locations.

Last night I got the radiator mounted up with one of the a2w exchangers and the electric fans. Going to try and get the other exchanger mounted up tonight.

Alternator

I know I asked this before, but does anyone know how to wire up the alternator as a Stand a lone? It can be done, found that much out in my research but no one explains how. Seems like it would be a matter of getting the right elec signal in on the other (non batt) prongs as it has an internal regulator. Let me know if anyone knows how to, otherwise once I get it running I will probably be doing some experimentation and see if I can get it to charge.

JayTee013 said:

I know I asked this before, but does anyone know how to wire up the alternator as a Stand a lone? It can be done, found that much out in my research but no one explains how. Seems like it would be a matter of getting the right elec signal in on the other (non batt) prongs as it has an internal regulator. Let me know if anyone knows how to, otherwise once I get it running I will probably be doing some experimentation and see if I can get it to charge.

Click to expand...

the MKIV alts will run with only the big power wire connected (i found this out by accident) ....but if you want the toy alt/battery lamp to function you'll have to connect one wire of the small connector to the toy alt lamp wire and the other to ground (can't remember which) it's very clear in the bentley diagrams

jimbote said:

the MKIV alts will run with only the big power wire connected (i found this out by accident) ....but if you want the toy alt/battery lamp to function you'll have to connect one wire of the small connector to the toy alt lamp wire and the other to ground (can't remember which) it's very clear in the bentley diagrams

Click to expand...

jimbote and JayTee013,
I had the same q. Thanks for the guidance - I'll let you know if I can find it/make it work on the '84.

Jimbote,

Well that is awesome news, cross that off the list of things to worry about. Nice, Thanks.

Made some good progress today. Got a jig made for making the manifold and located the turbo as well as routing the oil feed and drains for the turbo. Also got the powersteering line all set. Hope to get some pics up tomorrow, photobucket is down for some reason.

turbo placement

Here is the oil return lines I made out of the connections on either end of the stock drain line from the VNT15. Worked out nice that the connections are exactly the same on a 2256.


Here's the flanges I drew up and had a friend of mine laser out for me. 1/2" 304 s/s. Thanks, Dennis.


Here's the elbows that will be making up the manifold as well as the straight tubing. Thanks alot luke for making my life soooo much easier here. Ace stainless is a great source. I also got all my aluminum charge pipe through them as well.


I can't help myself, here is a sampling of the gorgeous exhaust tubing I purchased. All 409 S/S. The 2 1/2" section will be the downpipe when I get around to bending it up at my cousin's, and the other section is a 4" system for a ford diesel. Looking at my ford this will work out well for the bends I am going to need and was fairly inexpensive for 4" stainless. I know 4" is a little overboard, but that's the whole idea of the truck. haha


Here is the jig for building the manifold. It will hold the flanges in place when tacking together off the truck. My turbo will reside in between the motor and radiator. You can also see my braided s/s kerma oil feed line, which is JUST long enough in this config.


Top view. The radaitor setup is also visible here. The secondary atv radiator will be acting as a reservoir for the a2w intercooler with some cooling capacity. (there will be another exchange in front of the radiator)


here's a better idea of what the manifold will look like eventually...


I was also able to get most of the intake plumbing done today including placement/mounting of a2w intercooler. Fooled around with that for hours and ended up using the same mounting setup as used with the ford s/b 302. Just have to do the water circuit of that yet, but need to go to the hardware store and get some fittings/hose. The charge pipes worked out really nice and are very direct and short which I was pleased with. More updates as the week progresses. Definitely will have the manifold done this week.

Manifold is DONE!!!

The manifold is done... Came out really nice thanks to the help from a guy at work and my buddy who lasered out the flanges for me. Thanks to Luke Wilson as well for the idea and method. Luke I know you said that you were going to have your machinist notch the bends for you which is what I originally planned but I just went in Solid Works and drew a the elbow with the pipe notch in it. I then made a drawing of the side view and printed 1:1. I cut out this side view and traced it on the elbow. Then I used a 4" grinder and rough cut out the notch and sanded to fit. With a couple swings of the hammer the fit ended up pretty nice and took all of an hour to do. Up to you... Check out.....

This will be looking from the back of the head forward.




This is looking in one of the ports.



Some tig action:






More pics to come of the manifold all mounted up with turbo and all intake plumbing.

Wow!!! Looks great. I think I'm going to have to do a little copying. I've been dragging my butt on mine because of some other projects. Can't wait to see it all mounted up.


Luke

More progress!! Intake plumbing done...

Got some serious work done on the TDI. Memorial day weekend I came down with a serious cold and Did not feel like doing anything. Ended up being bronchitis and the doctor told me to take a couple days off of work and since I can't sit around and do nothing I figured I would do some toyota time. Weld fumes aren't bad for bronchitis right????


Any way, got the exhaust manifold mounted up. One of my buddies suggested I put some relief cuts in the flange as the different expansion rates of the pipe and flange would make a weld crack. Well after dong this the whole manifold went PPIINNNGGG and racked really bad. Needless to say it was a little work to get everything to fit. Talk about thermal stress. Here's a pic of it installed with turbo mounted. In the pic is the ALH manifold I modded to accept a 2-1/2" to 2" coupler for the charge pipe coming from the driver's side.



I was able to make a air box under the A2W intercooler with a nice oval K&N sourced from ebay. Its less of an airbox than just a seperator shield but should work well enough to keep any slop and hot air from the engine bay out. I might blow a few holes around the headlight to allow some cool air in.



another shot:


one more:


I was also a little concerned about the turbo just free-hanging off the front of the manifold so I made a little brace to hold the 2256 from below. This was just made from a couple long carriage bolts and some pieces of steel sleeve. It bolts to two of the holes occupied by the front motor mount of an ALH.



mounted up:



DOes anyone know if this will be a problem? The red line is the turbo drain line. This picture was taken pretty level so that is a true angle that the line follows. WIll this come back to bite me? It is pitched the whole length but not by much for about a 3" section. I hope it should be okay as it is all downhill but want to make sure. (see next pic)




Here's another view of the drain line. I was thinking maybe putting a 45* fitting on the bottom of the turbo which would probably help, but then make the line smaller diameter. Right now I have all the fitting open as much as I'm comfortable with by reaming them larger to get maximum oil flow. This pic also has the modded 2256 compressor housing with a leg of 2.5 aluminum charge pipe welded and blended directly to the housing.

Here's all the charge piping with the radiator removed.



another angle. Its all nice short runs and pretty direct. Its all 2.5 inch so it should flow nicely. You can also see the start of the downpipe in this photo as well. If you look close in bottom left corner you can also see the crossover pipe for crossing the over the top of the transmission. Exhaust is all 2.5" until it reaches the driver's side and then will go 4" All 409 s/s which I picked up pretty cheap on ebay. Getting there!


Here's the custom crossover pipe I bent up at my cousin's shop. I would have like to go 3" but he only had the dies for 2.5" so I went as big as possible.



Here's the flanges I made for the exhaust (also S/S) 1/4" thk. there are two sets of these. One from the downpipe to the crossover and one from the crossover to the big 4". The black stuff is the gasket material I bought out of summit. Like $15 for a 10" x 10" pc. NICEST EXHAUST GASKETING EVER!! cuts nice with tin snips. Its perry's full carbon exhaust gasketing. NICE STUFF.


Okay, this is getting long but last thing. Had my cousin make up a hydraulic line for the power steering I then cut one end and tigged on the VW pump fitting. Hopefully it works, I can't imagine it will blow apart the tig weld, but maybe. If it does I'm back where I started from and out $20.





More to come of the exhaust this weekend!!

Jesse

Sick man, really sick!

I m very interested in how your air to water cooler will work out. I ve heard a lot of people saying it will heat soak on a steep climb when EGTs are much higher.

A2w intercooler

Yeah, I'm not really sure how it is all going to work out. I had the A2W in the old setup on the truck with a kenne bell supercharger and it worked fantastic, but that was with a honda civic radiator/fan setup providing the cooling in the bed of the truck. I wanted to clear out the bed again and figured I had plenty of room in the engine compartment so it would be no big deal to move everything up there. Unfortunately, It is amazing how fast that engine bay fills up when you have a spiderweb of pipes everywhere. Anyway, my cooling will now be done via an ATV radiator (from a swap meet for $5) and a Ford superduty powerstroke trans cooler. The atv radiator is mounted behind the radiator and will be used as a reservoir with cooling capacity and the trans cooler will be up in front and is almost a perfect size to suck all the fresh air from behind the grill. I clearanced out the grill (chopped out plastic crossbars) as much as possible to let in as much air as possible without looking stupid. I am also just using a bilge pump which will be mounted after the water comes through the ATV radiator so it doesn't melt. This is the cheesy way to go but a lot of guys use the bilge pumps with success and it worked fine on the old ford /supercharged setup and those kennebell's are known for pumping out some serious heat. If the pump doesn't work, I'll buy a good bosch one off the ford lighnings but they are very pricey. It is definitely not an engineered system (just threw what was sitting on the shelf at it, But if it doesn't work, I'll just try again and improve it, but maybe I'll get lucky. Only have about $40 into the whole setup at this point.

Exhaust done!!

Got the exhaust done today. I talked to giles last week and my pump should be back the end of next week. Can't wait to get that bolted up and hear the little toyota knock knocking under the hood. DOes anyone know how I will set the advance on the Mtdi pump? I know to just adjust with the slotted bolt holes on the pulley but I can't fine tune it without electronics, so is it a guess and check affair?? Hope to get all the cooling system done next weekend so I an start it up the weekend after, Might be a tad optimistic...

Here's some pics of the exhaust all tacked up with the mig machine, I will finish weld with tig...

downpipe:


Crossover pipe to main exhaust:



From the 2.5" downpipe to the 4" exhaust:


From the back looking forward


Farther back:


exit:


It comes out in one big piece:



All in all very happy with the exhaust. Got really lucky ordering stuff only had about 6" of 4" pipe left over and maybe 3 1/2" of 2.5" pipe.

Just a thought. The flex pipe you have in there would probably be best if it were after the mount to the tranny and that hanger to the tranny would be provide better support if it were solid with no rubber. Since the motor and tranny are solid mounted together. It s only when you habd it off the body or frame that you need a rubber flexible hanger.

It is a nice straight shot back, no restrictions to speak of really.

Slimbadboy,

After a little thought, you are 100% correct, I should have done it that way for sure. I think i will run it the way it is for now (It would be painful to chop apart my pretty exhaust now) and if later on down the road if I do run into a rubbing problem with the exhaust shifting around, I will make that tranny mount rigid and just put another flex joint after the junction of the corssover to 4". for now it seems like it would not move around, but vibration has ways of making things move and break that don't seem like they will. Thanks for the suggestion...

Jesse

Still waiting on Injection pump so......

Since I'm STILL waiting for my injection pump I decided to keep plugging along....


Wanted to wrap the crossover pipe with some heat wrap in order to keep the floor pan/transmission as cool as possible so I found some on summit and:



Got my a2w system all plumbed up. It's kind of two folded to know that something is complete and knowing that soon it will all have to be ripped out again to pull the motor clean/paint and put back in. Let's hope for only once, but fat chance of that...

Here is the complete radiator setup. Got a little more elaborate than I had originally planned, but came out decent enough. Now only if it works..



Pic above is the rear of the radiator. Hopefully these fans will keep the tdi cool enough, they were able to keep the 5.slow ford cool with the same radiator fan setup, so (crossing fingers).

Here is the bilge pump that will be circulating the water. Worked well on the old setup with a much larger volume of water it was pushing. Should work fine here. the pump is a push only and won't pull so it had to be mounted in the lowest point of the system.



Front of the radiator. This is a ford superduty transmission cooler with larger bungs tig welded to the inlt and outlet to allow my 3/4" hose connections.



side profile:


I couldn't find the right size barb fittings to go into the intercooler at home depot so just bought some brass nipple pipes and made my own fittings on the lathe like this:


installed:



another installed:


So basically the water starts off in the atv radiator behind the main radiator and that feed the ford trans cooler which then feeds the a2w intercooler wher it goes back into the atv radiator.

Last shot with the grill in:



I may make some more oblong holes in that main bar of the grill to let the frontmost cooler breathe a little better.

You are kicking some ass, JayTee013 - nice work. It's very different than my machine and cool to see how you're building it. Mine is as stock and recycled as I can make it. I like the transmission cooler idea, and now that my intercooler's in, I need to reintegrate old original Toy PS cooler... The exhaust and exit look tight. Where'd you put the MAF?

Thanks for the encouragement. I'm still worried about how everything is going to perform. I'm just trying to use what I have kicking around with some ebay stuff and make it happen. Hopefully everything will work like it should and if it doesn't I just have to improve on what I have.

There is no MAF. This is an Mtdi build. I'm still waiting for my pump from Giles. I'm almost second guessing myself as the wiring for the electronic seems less and less intimidating, but then again those are hours I can put into fabrication as I initially planned. As always, time is tight but I still want it done in time to enjoy a little of the summer with the tube doors on. (still have to order those). As soon as my pump comes back in, I will be firing it up and then tearing back down again for cleanup and final assembly. I also still have to build a mechanical turbo control. I have it figured out, just haven't put it in motion yet.