2006 Jetta BRM Turbo + Cam & Lifter Refresh [Pics]

bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
In the last few months I have had a couple of instances where the car is incapable of exceeding ~55mph, even though the engine revs just fine. I also found that there was no turbo whistle, so it seemed that boost was not being built. It was intermittent, but the car's drivability had become rather poor, with uneven power delivery and shifting. All of this, combined with reading online, pointed to either a bad turbo, or more likely, a problem with the VNT actuation. A friend has a VCDS tool that I can borrow, but I did not even bother with it since the issue seemed fairly clear.

Given that turbo removal is a bit of a pain in the rear, and it has ~250,000 miles on it, I just went ahead and ordered a new one. The entire thing is about 2X the cost of just the VNT actuator at IDParts, and I decided to refresh the whole thing and not have to worry about it anymore. TLDR, the vacuum diaphragm in the actuator was broken and unable to hold vacuum. The VNT linkage was a little gummy and had some resistance, but overall it was nothing that a properly working actuator would have had an issue with.

Anyway, with some background laid out, I'll get into the repair project here. I am more or less at the 50% completion point right now since I am waiting for the camshaft replacement kit to be delivered. Everything is fully disassembled and (mostly) cleaned up, so reassembly is all that is left to do.

Starting from the top, I started pulling stuff off of the engine.




This was about as far apart as I could easily get it from the top side. I removed the ASV and EGR valve as well after taking this picture since those are easy to do from the top. In hindsight, having later unbolted the rest from under the car, I could probably get at all of it from the top.




Yuck! There would be some cleaning to do...




I highly recommend labeling the vacuum lines that you unplug since there are several of them, and it does not hurt to label the various electrical plugs.




I have had this car for a little over 5 years and 50K miles. The previous owner claimed to have done a LOT of work on it shortly before selling it...cam and lifters, cleaned out EGR system, DSG clutch and flywheel, and some other stuff. This seems like a plausible amount of gunk for 50K miles, especially on a higher mileage engine with a lot of original major equipment and a leaky vacuum actuator which will have the tandem pump blasting a lot more air through the PCV system.




Axle removal was easy since I replaced those shortly after buying the car. They both needed replacing again due to torn boots, so I was not too sad about having to remove them for this. The back of the engine was oily and gross. A lot of the nastiness seemed to be coming from leaks around the turbo and boost pipes / intake manifold.




The turbo was pretty easy to drop out of the bottom, and I did not even need to unbolt the EGR cooler. Getting the downpipe / catalytic converter out was actually more difficult. Knowing what I do now, the turbo would be easy to get out from the top side too. You could probably leave the axle in too. Just reach up and unbolt the turbo / exhaust manifold, drop it down a bit so it rests on the axle, unbolt the intake manifold and pull it out the top, and then lift the turbo out the top. You may or may not need to remove the valve cover...I intend to experiment with this when I reassemble things and will report back then.




At the start of this, I had only planned on replacing the turbo. Unfortunately, the fitting for the oil feed line seized onto the coupling nut and the threaded portion in the turbo cartridge was what came loose. I ordered a flexible stainless-braided line from Cascade German to replace this thing since getting a new OEM hard line in is a heck of a chore. Removal was easy with a hack saw. The new flexible line did require some minor modification to fit. I am not sure if this is the case for the manual and automatic transmission variants of the BRM, but in my case with the DSG the sheet metal baffle that goes between the block and transmission housing protrudes out a little and is in the way of the line as it comes off of the oil filter housing. I was able to trim off the overhang with a hack saw blade and file everything smooth, leaving just enough clearance to get the line and fitting in place.




Everything got a thorough cleaning. The intake manifold took 5 or 6 passes in the ultrasonic cleaner. At one point I used a lye-based degreaser to speed things up. Alkaline cleaners are a major no-no with aluminum since it will attack and dissolve the metal. At least in the case of the intake manifold, it is thick and there is nothing on it with a really critical tolerance, so I was fine with some minor etching since the degreaser demolished the sooty build-up in ~10 minutes.






The The rest of the nasty stuff was either disassembled (EGR valve) or carefully dipped and scrubbed (ASV). All of the fasteners got a badly needed cleaning too.






Ok, so things were going well, with the only unexpected change in scope being the oil feed line. Cool. Well, since it is trivially easy to get the valve cover off with the intake out of the way, I figured that I would get a peek under there since I had not looked at stuff since early 2020 after getting the car.

And with that, the project got much more involved lol.

The exhaust valves and lifters were very obviously on their way out. This certainly explained where all the fine ferrous crap on my magnetic oil drain plug was coming from over the last few oil changes.






I briefly waffled with the idea of leaving it alone and dealing with it sometime in the near future, but since things were already nice and disassembled, I did the smart thing and ordered the replacement items. Cam, lifters, bearings, and even a new tandem pump since the original one was still in there and my last few oil changes have returned exactly as much oil as I have put in despite some small leaks and the amount of PCV discharge. I do not know if it was leaking fuel into the upper head or not, but I was not intending to gamble on it.

So, I prepared for cam removal. I am used to a DOHC chain-driven engine in my 1991 BMW 318iS (or 321iS these days), and the SOHC belt-driven system in this car is pleasantly simple to deal with. I made some obvious visual indicators with a marker and pinned the camshaft at TDC with a 6mm drill bit.








Thereafter I removed the timing belt and turned the crankshaft back 90 degrees to ensure that valves would be safe from pistons as I worked on stuff up top.




Removal of the cam hub was easy with a generic harmonic balancer puller tool (can be found at local parts stores for $25-40). I used the long M8 fasteners from the injector pump rockers with some generic M8 washers to hold the puller, and later stuck a large screwdriver between two of the bolt shanks as a counter-hold tool (to break the 18mm bolt loose). I had to hold the 18mm bolt while applying the puller to prevent it from threading it back in lol.




Prior to tandem pump removal, I evacuated the diesel fuel from the head and T/P. One of these little hand pumps is so handy and I feel like it is an essential tool for anyone working on a diesel engine.

 

bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
With that, the cam was removed. Note that you are likely to need a deep 5mm hex drive socket to get the cam cap screws out. A standard 5mm hex drive socket isn't long enough to do the job properly, at least not with the usual lengths available around here. I was able to get a set of ~6" / 15cm hex drive sockets at a local hardware store, although all you really need is ~2" / 5cm.

And yes...time for a refresh. Finding this was a little irritating, but not surprising since by this point there are countless cases of this type of wear documented all over the internet.




I also found this little aluminum thing in the head bolt next to injector pump #1. At the time it was a mystery, but I later figured out what it came from and made a more permanent solution to it. As Frank06 once said to me over the phone, VW engineered a "lot of stupid" into the PD engines, and this is certainly one instance of it, on top of the camshaft lubrication design.




Nasty looking, but FAR from the worst example out there. None of the lifters were worn-through, thankfully. Also, none of the bearings had been worn down through the copper layer either.




The worst cam lobes were on the exhaust valves for cylinders 1 and 4, which seems to be typical.




None of the injector pump lobes looked too bad, with minor marking that I am guessing is copper build-up from the worn bearings. The rollers on the rocker arms all looked fine with no scoring.




The cam is a Kolbenschmidt part, which is a reputable OEM brand as far as I am aware. The previous owner claimed to have replaced it right before selling me the car, but I am a little doubtful that it got this badly worn in 50K miles. I have changed the oil religiously at 5-6K miles, using 5W40 TopTec 4100 and Mann filters. There have been several things on the car that indicate to me that the PO did do a lot of work on it, but that maybe the level of attention to detail was not quite where it should have been (loose oil feed fitting on turbo, broken boost pipe, cigarette butts in engine bay, and several barely-tight fasteners here and there).




Here's the worst lifter...exhaust #4.






The journal bearings had the expected amount of wear, given the condition of the rest of the stuff. Well, mostly, There was some odd scoring in the babbit material that I am unsure of the source of. The scratches are fairly deep, and not radial. I am not sure if dirt or other debris got into the oiling holes or onto the bearings during reassembly by the previous owner, or what. This kind of scratching seems like pure carelessness, but the cam/lubrication design is so bad that it was failing all on its own anyway lol.












With the camshaft out, I decided to clean out the valve ports in the head since there would be no risk of getting solvent into the combustion chambers. YUCK. This is a cleaning job I will never look forward to. Absolutely vile, with putrid sooty grime fluid spraying back out at me and all over everything. I made several passes with this cleaning spray that is specifically for this type of job, and it works well. It seems to dissolve most of the easy/softer grime, but it did not do too much to the burned-on stuff on the valves themselves.




Some scrubbing with an old toothbrush and some zip-ties got out most of the mess.






After many passes with the valve cleaner spray, degreaser spray, and bowing out with compressed air in between, things were at least looking better.




Unfortunately, the valves still have deposits on them and I think that I will need slightly more aggressive mechanical agitation to remove it. I am not really wanting to get in there with any sort of metallic brush, not even brass, so I may or may not leave it as-is. If anyone has suggestions for how to get the baked-on crap off, I am happy to hear them. Cylinders 2 and 3 were the worst mess by far, and I assume that this is due to how the intake manifold is shaped, such that oil condensation in the intake will drip directly down into these ports.

Images are cylinders 1-4 as shown. Intake on top, exhaust on bottom.




So, back to that little aluminum cylinder. I just happened to be inspecting the injector pump rocker assemblies, and noticed that there was one hole that looked different than the other 3. Aha! Well, that explains the little metal piece...and I got to wondering how much this loss of oil pressure contributed to the cam wear I saw. Maybe not at all, who knows. These plugs falling out is apparently extremely common...sloppy design by VW. Mismatched material CTE in a place where the aluminum is staked and (initially) sitting right about at its yield stress point is just asking to have them shrink and pop out over a few thermal cycles.




One of the other plugs was on its way out too.

 
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bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
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2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Initially I hammered them back in and re-staked them with a punch. But, then I thought about it a little more and decided that I wanted a permanent plug solution. I put the shafts into my oven and baked them at ~200°C briefly, and then put them into my freezer. Sure enough, the plugs were loose enough to turn by jamming a flat head screw driver into them (initial heating to expand and yield the plugs, then cooling below assembly temp to shrink them even more...I estimated that there would be ~16 microns of diametral clearance after this).

Ultimately I carefully drilled a 4.2mm blind hole into one in each shaft, and then started running an M5x0.8 bottoming tap into them. Once the tap caught and started spinning the plugs, I gently rotated them while pulling outward until they came out. Then I used a hammer and some long pieces of 3mm drill rod to knock out the opposing plugs.




My permanent solution was to use the shank of some long 1/4-28 bolts. Per a post form Frank06, the diameter he was using for press-fit plugs was 0.242", which is a nice tight fit into these 0.239" diameter holes. I took my calipers to the hardware store and measured a bunch of bolts, finding a few that had unthreaded shanks of 0.243" diameter. After chopping off the head, I chucked them up in my drill press.




Some light sanding and filing with this make-shift "lathe" had them dead on at 0.242", with a little round/chamfer for easier installation.




A dozen or so firm whacks from a hammer drove them home. Be sure to make a mark on the pins at ~0.34" from the end so that you know when they are fully seated. The shaft is ridiculously hard, and some tiny annular chips formed while driving in the comparatively soft bolt shanks. Whatever...these are never coming out.




A little trimming with a hack saw and some filing had them nice and flush. Be sure to tape over all of the oiling holes when doing any of this...the last thing you need is metallic or abrasive debris getting into them!




I tried staking the ends of the shafts with a punch...but predictably it was a futile effort. I need much harder punches for this, and honestly it seems 100% unnecessary considering the force needed to get the plugs in.




So, hopefully these suckers are permanently leak-free now!




Aaaand that is where I am at folks. It is a waiting game for my camshaft kit and tandem pump from IDParts, as well as the break-in oil kit from Cascade German. I am generally of skeptical of the obsession over break-in that people fret so much about with engines, but at least in the case of these PD engines and their camshafts, it sounds like following the established procedures documented by Frank06 and others can set things up for a longer service life.

More to come as I make progress.....
 
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Rx7145

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May 21, 2017
Location
Ohio
TDI
2006 Jetta BRM
Nice write up and pictures. That’s interesting that the head had the 5 mm hex bolts. That means that it’s the reusable bolts from Frank.
 

2004LB7

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Jun 2, 2013
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California
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2006 Jetta
Now you make me want to inspect mine for that oil plus issue

Do you think it would be worth loctiting them in?
 

bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Nice write up and pictures. That’s interesting that the head had the 5 mm hex bolts. That means that it’s the reusable bolts from Frank.
Hmm, that is interesting. I have no idea where the PO got the parts for whatever he replaced.

Now you make me want to inspect mine for that oil plus issue

Do you think it would be worth loctiting them in?
I do not think that thread locker will be helpful. The issue is really just a mismatch of the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) between the aluminum and steel. Aluminum typically has ~2X the CTE of steel, and in an application like this where you have to exceed the yield stress of the aluminum part to give it some grip in the hole, it is inevitable that it will end up shrinking with thermal cycling. So, the loctite would all get squeezed out upon initial installation, and then the aluminum would shrink ,and then you are back to square one.

The best solution is to put a steel plug in. The CTE varies by ~20% across different grades of non-stainless steels, so there's no guarantee that whatever you stick in there will be perfectly matched but it should be well matched enough in this case to not come out.
 

2004LB7

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2006 Jetta
Hmm, that is interesting. I have no idea where the PO got the parts for whatever he replaced.


I do not think that thread locker will be helpful. The issue is really just a mismatch of the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) between the aluminum and steel. Aluminum typically has ~2X the CTE of steel, and in an application like this where you have to exceed the yield stress of the aluminum part to give it some grip in the hole, it is inevitable that it will end up shrinking with thermal cycling. So, the loctite would all get squeezed out upon initial installation, and then the aluminum would shrink ,and then you are back to square one.

The best solution is to put a steel plug in. The CTE varies by ~20% across different grades of non-stainless steels, so there's no guarantee that whatever you stick in there will be perfectly matched but it should be well matched enough in this case to not come out.
Just did a little searching and found that Franko6 has a good write up for an easy replacement plug

 

bmwman91

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2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Great write up!
Thanks. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone!


I got a little more cleaning done today. The intake and exhaust ports were still messier than I would have liked, and I found that the local bargain tool store had a media blaster kit for a very low price. It is cheap, and it works OK...not great, but it is passable. I tend to avoid bargain tools as a general rule, but in the case of this one I am not sure if I will ever use it for anything else. My main gripe with it is that the walnut media kept clogging the feed hose, but I think that it may have been due to the hose being pushed too far onto the hopper's outlet barb which caused it to block off the air bleed hole. Whatever...it got the job done, mostly.




The blaster kit lacked an extension for the gun, so I made one out of some soft copper water line scraps. I put together little pieces of 1/2", 3/8", and 1/4" line and soldered them together to make a little adapter to fit into the gun nozzle. You really don't want to have an outlet diameter of more than ~1/4" / 6mm. This thing uses a LOT of air, and any larger of an outlet diameter would make it unusable for anyone without a >10HP compressor. I just have a little 5 gallon 3HP unit, and it worked fine, but I could only get around 20 seconds of blasting time before needing to stop and let it refill.






I thought about 3D printing some port adapters, but decided to keep things simple and drill a hole in a right-angle brush attachment for my shop vac. In the end it was too cumbersome to try to run it through the attachment, so I just kept the end of the vacuum hose as close as possible to the port and blasted away. It made a bit of a mess, with the vacuum catching maybe 80% of the walnut bits. They mostly just bounced off of the firewall and fell down onto the suspension and floor. There were walnut shell pieces all over the engine bay in small quantities too, but in the end it was all easy to clear out with some compressed air.




I feel like I got things a LOT cleaner by doing this. It is good that I did a lot of chemical cleaning / degreasing first because I am not sure how well this stuff would work on the soft sticky deposits that were in there initially.




Reposting from above, here is how things looked after chemical cleaning and light scrubbing with a toothbrush and a bundle of zip ties.




And here is how things look after the walnut blasting.




It is not perfect, but it is a lot better. There are deposits on the exhaust valve stems for cylinders 2 and 3 that I just could not remove. I even tried getting in there with some flat head screwdrivers, to no avail. Whatever. It is better than before, and I think that I would need either proper professional blasting equipment or to remove the cylinder head to get these in perfect condition.

A couple of tips that I can pass on after struggling with this at first:
- The ports slope downward from the openings, and the valves are low down in there. You need to angle the gun extension downward quite a bit to get the media to impact the valves.
- Mechanical scraping with picks, screwdrivers, and wire brushes will make this go faster. There were some deposits on the tops of the ports that were much easier to break down with some quick picking, and then the walnuts could be shot in a quick pass to finish it off.
- I bought a 25lb bag of walnut media, and I would estimate that I used about 7lbs of it across all 8 ports. Had I not done a thorough chemical cleaning first, it probably would have taken 15-20lbs.
 
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325_Guy

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Jun 21, 2011
Location
West Central Texas
TDI
MkV Jetta
Thanks. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone!
You never know, it may even help you down the road! More than once, I've googled an oddball issue I've had with my vehicle and one of the search results was a thread I started with the exact same issue from years back.
 

bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Minor update. I was sort of dissatisfied with the performance of the cheap media blaster and got to thinking a bit about why it was not delivering walnus media consistently or in much of a volume. After looking at it a bit, I decided to make some mods to try to get it to work better. It seemed worth the $35 I paid for it to void the warranty and give it a shot.

There were two things that I identified as problems. One was the little media feed fitting which is supposed to allow air to mix with the incoming media. The other was the area in the gun where the media enters the compressed air stream.

So, here is the feed fitting. It just installs through a hole in the wall of the hopper near the bottom. Note that there is only a single ~4mm hole for allowing air to be drawn in with the media, and I suspect that this was totally inadequate for the walnut media, which caused a huge volume of walnut shells into the hose and clogged it up.






The other problem area is where the media feed joins the compressed air stream in the gun. The media has to turn a sharp corner, and get through a fairly small gap. The compressed air blows out of the small hole in the center, which creates a low pressure area behind it, and this low pressure is what draws air and media through the hose. You can see how much walnut dust was created and caked up this area.








To address the first problem, I drilled two additional holes of 4.2mm, and chased the original hole out to 4.2mm. It was pretty rough and had a burr on the inside which was not helping anything. Additionally, I ran a 9mm drill bit through the whole length to clean up the inside, and then drilled the outlet side to 10.5mm (drilled down to the 3 air holes), leaving the inlet side 9mm to constrict the feed of media a little.






As for the gun, the casting was sort of rough. There were burrs inside and things needed to be opened up a bit more. I drilled out the in-feed barb to 10.5mm, and also drilled the adjacent bore that it joins to 10.5mm. This really opened things up and knocked out the web of material at the bottom that was causing a lot of blockage to the media feed into the air stream. After drilling, I hit all of the bores with some fine stainless wire brushes that I ran in my cordless drill.




The results were awesome! This thing went from delivering an anemic trickle of walnut media to flowing a torrent of high speed shell chunks! No intermittent delivery, just constant and consistent blasting action. This tool want from a "maybe" to a "great value" rating. If you want to make these mods, I do NOT recommend drilling things out with a cordless drill, or if you do, at a minimum you need a bench-mounted vise to hold the parts. The feed fitting is some cheap grade of steel that will catch your drill bit, and it makes long awful chips that will cut you badly if you are too close. The gun also does not cut super nicely. I got the parts aligned and mounted in a vise in my drill press to make the adjustments.

Before the mods, I got through ~5lbs of media in almost 90 minutes. Pathetic! After the mods, I was able to unload almost 10lbs of media in about 20 minutes.

Anyway, with the tool working properly, I decided to have another go at the ports. This time I skipped the shop vac entirely, and just lined the whole area with some towels and a painter's cloth to contain the shells. This gave me a lot more room to maneuver the gun, and cleanup did not take any longer. if anything, it went faster since the towels kept everything form bouncing around too much.








I will say that you should wear a mask to protect your respiratory system. With the media flowing properly, this process makes a TON of fine walnut dust. Here is my mask after 20 minutes of blasting.

 
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bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Looking nicer! I also spent a little time with a brush and rags to get the old oil deposits off of the back of the engine.




The ports and valves were already "clean enough", but this helped to get a bit more crap off of things. Still not perfect, particularly the exhaust valves, but that is OK.

After first blast session with unmodified blaster.


And here are things after the second blasting with my modified rig.



The exhaust valve stems just look sort of nasty TBH. I guess it is all the heat.

Exhaust #1


Exhaust #2


Exhaust #3


Exhaust #4



There was some carbon on the back of the heads of the intake valves still, but it is in an awkward spot that the wand for the blaster does not have great access to. I am gonna call it OK.

Also, and this is mildly concerning, but tiny bits of walnut shell are lodged between the valve heads and the seats. Compressed air cannot get it out. I am inclined to just let the pieces fall into the engine and burn off, but the only concern is if they end up between the valve head and sealing surface of the seats and prevent the valve from closing.

I may end up opening the valves slowly by turning the new cam and blowing in there with compressed air. I suppose that I could pull the glow plugs and run compressed air through those holes as I open the valves to blow the stuff back out, but I sort of don't want to deal with glow plugs right now (what are the odds that one breaks off during removal?).

Anyone have thoughts on the little walnut bits, or what to do about them? It seems to be a mix of fine dust and pieces that are a couple hundred microns in size.

Intake #1


Intake #2


Intake #3


Intake #4
 

2004LB7

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Jun 2, 2013
Location
California
TDI
2006 Jetta
Nice job on the medications

For those little pieces of walnut, I leave them be. If they lodge between the valve and seat, it will likely only cause temporary rough running for a few seconds before they are all gone
 

bmwman91

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Sep 17, 2019
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CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Update time. I made a little progress while waiting for all of the replacement parts to show up. Odds and ends, mostly.

I did not like that bits of walnut were stuck behind the valves, so I grabbed some scraps of 6061 aluminum and machined them into simple tools to clear out the debris.




The basic idea was that I wanted to be able to blow compressed air into the cylinder and then open the valves one by one to eject the shell pieces. For one of my old tappets that was not too badly worn, I turned out a little solid "dummy lifter" to insert in there.




To connect compressed air to the cylinder, I took an M10x1 bolt, turned off the head, and drilled it through. This gave me a nice little hose connection to hook up to a glow plug port.




As far as opening valves, I took some measurements of the M6 holes that the cam caps are secured with, as well as the tappet centers, and made a little plate with some fine threaded holes to use as an actuator. The spacing between the outer and inner M6 holes is slightly different so I had to slot two of the holes in the plate. The threads on the custom "bolt" are pretty unusual...M15x1. I actually had the tap and die (right and left handed!) left over from a bicycle project where I adapted some power meter spindles to some Shimano pedal bodies that were not originally compatible with the power meters.

The bolt came out pretty nicely! All of this was done on a manual mill and lathe...you can do a lot if you think through the order of operations and set up datums for yourself.








Anyway, here are the little tools in action. Also...if you ever do something like this you need to be mindful of the position of the pistons! With no camshaft installed, there is not really a risk of crashing things, but when you pressurize one cylinder you will produce hundreds of pounds of force on the piston which will quickly drive it to the bottom of its stroke (and correspondingly, 2 other pistons will rise to their top positions). I was running ~120PSI (830kPa). Given that the pistons are 3.13" (79.5mm) in diameter, that works out to 920lbs (4.1kN).






This took care of the lingering shell pieces behind the valves. The intakes all looked good after this.




As far as the exhaust valves, I think that I found part of why those for cylinders 2 and 3 were so much more caked up than those for 1 and 4. I had poured in 5qt of the break-in oil directly onto the top of the engine to rinse off all of the little bits of dust that had settled on things, and it would seem that the valve seals for the middle cylinders' exhaust valves are not doing much anymore. At this point I am not going to pull the head and disassemble it...what started out as a simple turbo replacement has already expanded in scope by almost a factor of 3, and if I pull the head that would just turn into me refreshing the bottom end and other things that I have not planned for. My BMW E30 is my project car...this is supposed to be my daily driver lol.

Being that the intake and exhaust ports are nearly always going to be at the same or higher pressure than the crankcase, oil is only going to be leaking down there when I shut the car off. It may explain the light smoking that the car has upon startup about 60% of the time! Oil consumption was not excessive (less than 1qt in 5000 miles), and if the buildup that I found at the start of this was the result of 50k miles (or more...I do not know when these were last cleaned by the previous owner, if ever), I am fine with blasting things out every few years.




One other thing that I wanted to do was to run the engine with the starter to try to prime the oiling system and flush out and dust that may have dropped into the oil galley through the open holes in the valvetrain area. Boy, I sure thought that I was being clever here! I looped the fuel feed/return back on itself to avoid a mess...




...taped over the main openings in the valve cover and looped the new flexible turbo feed line into the head...




...and was rewarded with a giant mess of DSG transmission fluid. I cranked the engine for a good 30 seconds, got out, and heard fluid dripping on the floor. "What on earth could be leaking...did I accidentally cut a hose?" "Oohhhhh...****. The transmission cooler." Yup, the little rubber stoppers that I had put into the fluid ports on the transmission were popped right out. Overall, I probably lost about 1L of fluid, and was able to collect 900mL of it. Most of it was on the floor, and maybe 100mL was up on the engine in various casting cavities above the transmission. Collection was accomplished with a syringe and a large 14" spackling knife to scoop up the puddle.




Now, obviously the fluid was totally contaminated with solids by this, and not acceptable to put back into the transmission. Being that I just went through the fluid change procedure about 15K miles ago, the fluid is expensive, and I did not want to add another week of waiting for shipping, I did some reading online about paper filters. It turns out that cheap paper coffee filters generally trap particles down to 10-20 microns. Tests on car oil filters indicated that they were getting things down to 20-50 microns. So, I got some paper filters, tripled them up, and set about cleaning up the fluid. It took a bit over 2 hours to get it all through the filters. I did not want to force it through with pressure since that would very likely push smaller / borderline particulates through.




It is a good thing that I filtered it, too. "Gee...where could all of those walnut shell bits have come from?"




The first filter contained the bulk of the detritus. A non-zero quantity of cat fur was present!




The second filter element had the slightest bit of very fine material in it.




The third filter had basically zero visible contamination trapped in it, and I did not photograph it. For putting it back into the transmission, I opted to slowly add it ~70mL at a time into the filter housing, such that it would be forced to go through the transmission filter too. The DSG filter seems to be of a wound paper type, rather than pleated paper. It took a bit over 2 hours to get all 900mL through there. Being that the filter media seems to be much thicker than my 3-layer coffee filter, and it took the same amount of time to pass through, I am fairly sure that the coffee filters were actually catching finer particles than this one would have.






Overall this did not slow anything down meaningfully since I was busy doing other things while the fluids made their way through the filtering steps.
 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Before I removed the glow plugs, I went through multiple cans of degreaser and brake cleaner to remove all of the caked-on grime on the front of the head and adjacent areas. When I bought the car, the o-ring on the injector pump connector body had failed, and oil was weeping out all around that area. I had fixed it by removing the harness, cleaning things up, and reinstalling it with a small amount of RTV. It never leaked again, but the old oil had collected a lot of crud by that point and I did not remove it until now. With all of the crud gone, I was ready to pull the glow plugs.




They all looked to be in good shape, and the conical sealing faces on all of them were still shiny, so it looked like there was no combustion leakage. Zero soot in the threads.




I actually did a 4-wire resistance measurement on them, and they all came out between 301 and 319 milliOhms. For reference, my new glow plugs all came in between 292 and 304 milliOhms. So, the old ones were still perfectly fine. Oh well.




The glow plug harness was in...bad shape.




The big umbilical containing the glow plug conductors was pretty oily and gross, so I took it apart partially and cleaned out the nastiness with some brake cleaner spray.






There are different ways that one could approach replacing the glow plug harness.
1 - The "right" / best way would be to unwrap the harness all the way back to the connector that they run through behind the left headlight. It looked to me like a connector that used standard TE/Amp Junior Power Timer terminals for wire-seal applications. Nothing exotic, and they can be had by online electronics distributors for pennies (or dollars at the VW dealer...for literally the same part from the same manufacturer but in a bag with "VW" stamped on it).
2 - Most people seem to instead opt for a cut-and-splice method. This can result in anything from good to awful results, depending on the competence level of the person doing it. I had thought about using some parallel splices and Raychem adhesive lined shrink tubing for this, but decided not to.
3 - A connector could be added to the harness, making the glow plug harness easily removable. Just like the splices, the results of this can range from great to awful, depending on competence and the parts involved.

I chose option 3 since I have a pretty large collection of automotive wire harnessing parts, materials, and tools from my project car. One project involved building a full custom engine wire harness for supporting an aftermarket ECU, so adding an automotive connector to the glow plug harness was not my first rodeo with this stuff. That project used all TE/Amp automotive connectors, but I also had a bunch of Aptiv Metri Pack 150 parts left over from something else, so I grabbed a 4 position set and got to work with it. The 150 series is rated at up to 14A per terminal, which is slightly insufficient for this application since it sounds like each glow plug can pull 15-20A when cold, but they only do that for a very short time before the current drops significantly thanks to them having a PTC (positive temperature coefficient). I doubt that it will cause any adverse thermal effects in the connector, but if it does then I will put on a higher capacity connector next time I have to order more for other harness projects.






With the new glow plug harness, I fitted it into place, trimmed it to length, and added the terminals.




If you want to use open barrel terminals, you can get generic hand crimpers fairly inexpensively, and they work well. Purists and people in the connector industry will cringe since "every terminal has an exact tool made by the terminal manufacturer, and you should never use any other crimping tool." Yes yes, this is true. Thankfully I am a hobbyist, not an ISO/ITC 9001 facility. Crimp the barrels onto the strands, don't get the insulation in there, don't rip or crush the strands, and you are going to be fine on a road-going vehicle.

These are a set of generic crimpers for Metri Pack terminals, and they have served me well with basically every open barrel terminal type. I have a few other open barrel crimpers to cover a broader range of applications, but these are all anyone would need mostly. Also, do NOT get a pair that does 2-in-1 crimps of both the conductors and wire seals (or insulation grips). They never work out well and seem to often mangle both the insulation and the terminal. Just do your crimps in 2 separate operations (conductors, then wire seals or insulation grips) so that you can do them both properly.




And here it is in the car. I left an extra long service loop on the glow plug harness just in case I ever have a problem with the connector and need to re-do the terminals. The dangling loop will be zip tied into place later on to secure it.




One other wiring issue was in the alternator umbilical. It had come loose and rubbed on the radiator fan hub, getting down into some of the smaller conductors.




The right way to handle this would have been to disconnect all of the endpoints of the umbilical, de-pin the terminals on the damaged conductors, and splice in a repair wire, or at least put some automotive heat shrink tubing on them. Call me lazy, but I just cleaned the wires, wrapped the damaged areas in harness tape, and then double wrapped the whole damaged region of the outer sheath. Where I live it is fairly arid and never snows, so I am not too worried. If there was actual weather here, I probably would have done it the right way.






And here are both umbilicals, all wrapped up and back in place. For those who are curious, I use Tesa 51036. It is used by OEMs in engine bay applications. It has served me well on my E30, and as long as you do not apply it on greasy surfaces (or have greasy hands), it will not come loose or unwind once applied, while still being easy for you to unwind if needed, and with NO sticky mess thanks to the acrylic adhesive.




Lastly, just as a point of interest, here is my magnetic oil drain plug upon removal and after cleaning. It has had a fair amount of ferrous material on it for the last several oil changes, and at least now I know where it was coming from!




Next up will be reinstallation of the camshafts and related bits. I got a tube of the Liqui Moly Montagepaste assembly lube with the cam kit. Here is where I am planning to apply it during assembly:
- Cam journals
- Cam bearing faces
- Cam lobes
- Tappet bore walls
- Tappet faces
- Injector rocker shaft bearing faces
- Injector rocker bearing faces
- Injector rocker rollers & ball pins
- Injector pump ball cup

Is there anywhere I am missing, or where I should NOT put it in the list above?
 
Last edited:

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
but have you finished putting your E30 back together ??

Nice to see another like-minded individual out here ;)
Oh yeah, E30 is all together and running great. Last year I had it totally disassembled for a full repaint, and the whole process of taking it apart, getting it painted, and reassembling took 3 months with most nights and weekends spent on it. It has a 5 year old custom built engine in it, a custom Wavetrac diff unit, and a bunch of other stuff. A nice "OEM+" type ride.
 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Minor update. I prepped the new lifters for installation. Putting them straight in would have been fine, but I don't like having totally dry lifters clapping about as the air gets pushed out of the oiling system.

So I got out my vacuum pot and pump.




Into the oil they went.




A couple of vacuum pulls got out all the air and replaced it with oil.




Then into the engine.




I may get around to installing the cam later this week, and hopefully I will have the whole thing put back together this weekend. It's been almost a month since I started with a simple turbo replacement lol.
 

jetta_coupe_gtd

Veteran Member
Joined
Oct 25, 2005
Location
Westchester
TDI
2006 Jetta TDI 'Dusty'
Oh yeah, E30 is all together and running great. Last year I had it totally disassembled for a full repaint, and the whole process of taking it apart, getting it painted, and reassembling took 3 months with most nights and weekends spent on it. It has a 5 year old custom built engine in it, a custom Wavetrac diff unit, and a bunch of other stuff. A nice "OEM+" type ride.
I know, sorry I forgot that this one page has an old, totally different screename LOL...love that car

Sincerely
-2mAn
 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Ha! So we both also apparently have a love of a different German car with various inherent design flaws and wonderful plastic clips that fall apart when looked at.

Do you have an E30 anymore? I have not really kept up on r3v in quite a while.
 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Update time. The project is finished now and the car is running. Overall it runs about the same as before, but all of the uneven power delivery and surging in second gear is gone thanks to having a properly working VNT actuator and linkage. It starts a little harder than before, but I need to tweak the torsion value setting a little I think. Previously I had set it to +0.5° and got decent results, and this time I am trying 0.0° since the timing belt has probably done most of the stretching that it is going to do since ~50K miles ago. I'll also check the fuel injection deviation values once I have driven it a bit to see if there are any indicators of issues (dirty injectors, leaky seals, etc). Whatever the case, I am glad to be done with this!

Starting with some pictures from where I left off in my last post...

When I was reassembling the turbo oil return pipe, I did not like that there was no gasket or crush washer between the lower housing and block. It was a source of a very small leak previously. Since I had some scrap 6061 bar stock, I made some little washers on the lathe.




6061-T651 is NOT a good material for crush washers because it is strong...it does not crush very well, making for a poor seal. This is easy to handle with a little propane torch, though. Basically, heat it up until it is nearly going to melt and then let it air cool slowly. This anneals it and makes it very soft. Before annealing, I could not bend the washer by hand. After annealing, it was really easy to fold it in half.




So, I heat treated another one and stuck it on the return pipe. Hopefully this eliminates the little leak that was there previously.




I have to say, reassembling a clean engine is a lot more fun than taking apart a filthy, greasy engine.




The other thing that I got side-tracked on was modifying the new cam bearings. I figured that since I was in there I might as well do what I could to improve the known-crappy lubrication design, and people (namely franko6) on this forum have spent lots of time figuring out ways to make things better. Sadly none of the places online that sell Frank's modded bearings had any available, so I figured I would give the DIY route a shot.

I made a little clinching tool to hold the bearing shells in a 3-jaw chuck on the lathe and took some time getting things dialed in with some brass shim stock. The holder was made on a different lathe in a different 3-jaw chuck. This is generally not how one goes about getting good tolerances for concentricity lol. 3-jaw chucks are not amazing to begin with, and trying to set up on multiple different ones is even worse. But, you use what you have access to when you have access to it. Anyway, with the indicator and shim stock, I was able to get the radial runout down to under 0.002" / 50 microns which is more than good enough for making some oiling grooves.




I considered grinding a custom grooving tool, but first I figured I would see how a standard insert on a boring bar would work out. My main concern was around forming nasty burrs at the sides of the groove. Copper is one of my least favorite materials to machine since it work hardens like crazy and is generally sort of gummy/sticky as far as metals go.




I ran some test cuts on the old bearings, and the results were actually pretty good. I found that a groove depth of 0.010" / 250 microns was easily achievable without cutting through the copper into the steel backing. Maybe I will post the pics if I remember to get them on a drive, but I had actually cross sectioned one of the old bearings and found that the copper is ~0.012" / 300 microns thick, and the Babbitt material was no more than 0.001" / 25 microns thick.




It took a few iterations to dial in the RPM and feed rate, but I got to a set of cutting parameters that produced basically zero burrs. One bearing had a raised lip that was not visible but could be felt with a finger, and it was easily taken care of by running a finger nail backwards over it.






For the new bearings, I did them one at a time (using an old one that I machined out), with compressed air clearing chips, and for each one I used a fresh cutting edge on an insert to get the cleanest cuts.






The grooves are only for the top bearing shells. They would be a very bad idea in the lower bearings. Now, since I did not want to drill out the bearing caps or cylinder head to add more oil feeds to get oil into the top groove, I just made some small grooves in the backs of the bearing shells so that the existing oil feeds for the lower bearings could also supply the top. The grooves on the back were made with a small round file. I set things up in a vise with some parallels as guides, and I did each bearing pair together to ensure that the grooves lined up well.

The rear feed grooves do not need to be very large. For the top bearings, the new inner groove is only ~1.25mm^2 in cross sectional area (0.25mm deep x 5mm wide). Given that the steel backing is only ~1.2mm thick, you do not want to file any deeper than 1mm or so to ensure that the bearing shells will still be able to provide sufficient crush force to keep from spinning after installation.








Here is everything installed and ready for assembly.






Here are the new OEM bolts that came in the ID Parts kit. These stupid things are expensive, so I do not plan to pull the cam to inspect the bearings just for funsies.





 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Assembly lube applied to the bearings and lifter buckets.






Camshaft in place and ready to go.




Don't forget to apply a tiny amount of RTV sealant to the outer flats on caps 1 and 5 or you will get an oil leak!




As per Frank's recommendation, I lightly tightened the cam cap bolts and whacked them with a dead-blow hammer in between steps to try to help the bearings settle into place properly.




The ID Parts kit came with some moly assembly lube which I applied generously on the cam lobes just for extra good measure.




At this point I needed to put the cam hub back on, which was very easy with the locking tool that I had ordered. Make sure that the crank is still 90 degrees off from TDC before rotating the cam since it will be opening valves at this point!




Next up was the set of rockers for the injector pumps.




I took the opportunity to re-set the lash on all of them just to be certain that it was correct. I made a little mount for my magnetic base from a scrap of steel I had laying around. All you really need is a 6mm hole to be able to bolt it down. The little step feature in it has nothing to do with this and was already in the piece of scrap from a different project. Anyway, I do not think that the indicator is 100% necessary since there is a fairly wide range of angles at which the rocker is at maximum lift, but since I had the tools I used them.






Installation of the new tandem pump was very straightforward. At the same time I replaced all of the fuel feed soft lines too.




Next up was reinstallation of the timing belt. My locking tools had arrived, so I pinned everything at TDC.






Although the lock tools alone were enough, it was nice to have my marks as a double-check that everything was going back together the same way.




Since the belt has >50K miles on it now, I set the tensioner to the upper end of the range notch to account for the small amount of stretch that had occurred.




The new turbo kit included some special turbo assembly lube, so I pushed it into the feed nipple with the hand pump.




Tightening the turbo oil feed fitting nut was a pain, and none of my regular wrenches fit back in there well. So, I got a spare cheap wrench at the store and cut it down to fit nicely back in there. It worked great and can go live with the rest of my TDI specialty tools. The feed line is an aftermarket flexible one, so the wrench is not the size of the stock nut, but the same technique would work for that as well.



 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
The last item to check off was purging the air from the new fuel section of the new tandem pump and the passages in the head. I was able to get all of the big bubbles out with my little electric vacuum pump, but I later found that it did not really work very well when I tried to start the engine (more on that later). I think that if I was to do this again, I would apply the vacuum to the return line while cycling the key to repeatedly run the lift pump and provide more fuel flow. The return line that I applied vacuum to is at the very bottom of the fuel system in the head, so I think that a lot of air remains in the internal cavities above it.




Cleaned and reassembled. Just needed a battery.




Today I pushed the car out into the driveway and fired it up. Despite my attempt to purge the air from the tandem pump, I think that there was still a lot left in there. I had to crank the engine for a total of nearly a minute until it actually started up. I am really hoping that no damage was done to my new cams and lifters during that time since oil pressure is pretty low during cranking. What's done is done, though.

I ran the break-in oil per the recommended procedure where I held the RPM in the 2000-2500 RPM range for 25 minutes, and then changed it. There seemed to be little sparkly bits in it, but I think that it was mostly stuff from the moly assembly lube. The magnetic oil drain plug had a little stuff on it, but I'd guess that the vast majority of it was left over from deposits from the previous oil where my cam and lifters were eating each other.




So there it is folks. It was a fun project, and with any luck the engine will go many more miles without demanding serious attention.
 

privateTDIjet

Veteran Member
Joined
Jun 21, 2022
Location
Montreal, Canada
TDI
2009 Jetta 2.0 TDI and 2014 Passat 2.0 TDI / Ive got a MK5 bentley manual, message me for a free diagram
How freaking lucky is your jetta to have you compared to the countless owners that have scrapped their cars for a blimp-shaped suv? You went as far as getting the walnut media, in microns, OUT of the valves. Seriously impressed with your work
 

prsa01

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 16, 2000
Location
mpls,mn usa
TDI
14 jsw 6m, 96 B4v, miss my a4 :(
VERY cool! Looks like job very well done and it's great to have all the documentation and pictures.

One thing. You (appear) to live in a state where draining the parts washer into the domestic sewer would probably get you a stronger sentence than murder.

Seriously tho probably better to take it to somewhere that changes oil even tho I know it's a pain.
 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
250 mile update.

So far so good for the most part. It seems to start a bit harder than before, and fuel economy is also seemingly low (10-20% lower). I set the torsion value to 0.0°, whereas it was +0.5° before, but I do not think that would account for it. Once I have the 15W-50 break-in oil out and the 5W-40 back in, I will reevaluate.

Also, I seem to have a leak of some sort. When I am stopped, I smell burning oil or maybe diesel, and tonight I saw little puffs of smoke rising up from under the hood and catching the headlight output. When I got home, I left the car running and popped the hood. Sure enough, it seems that everything under the tandem pump is all wet looking. It is night time so I cannot really tell too much in the driveway. After reaching down and getting some of the fluid on my finger, it had no smell, but when rubbing my fingers together it had the characteristic feel of diesel fuel. There are also a couple of small spots left in my driveway where the car was parked.

So it seems as though I have a fuel leak coming from my new tandem pump. It is a Pierburg unit. Any suggestions as to what might be the cause? The options seem to be:
1. Leaky pump-2-head gasket
2. Leaky TP outer cover gasket
3. Leaky hose connection
4. Cracked TP casting

One of these nights after work I will have to pull the car into the garage to get a look at things. As always, you are never done when you think you should be!
 

bmwman91

Active member
Joined
Sep 17, 2019
Location
CA, USA
TDI
2006 Jetta (BRM) w/ DSG
Problem solved. The leak was coming from the top of the tandem pump at the hose barb for the feed line. The old tension clamp must have been worn out and not clamping well. I tossed it and put on a small worm gear type hose clamp, and there is no more leak. Thank goodness it was something simple!
 
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