Best TDI for Tuning?

[MrCypherr]

Tuning. I just havent heard of any company that has touched one. Let alone some stand alone tuner who youd have to trust is making the right adjustments. and like said above, you also have to worry about IMMO defeat.

 

[ThePhilosopher]

I'd say the CJAA block is similar to slightly more rigid than the BHW. Here's a guy dynoing a stock CJAA with CP3, big turbo, and intercooler upgrade only and making 230 WHP. He's got a bunch of other vids too.

If the CJAA is just as strong/slightly stronger than I might as well go with that over the BEW. It would let me use the Banks iDash which for me is a big thing as that single gauge alone can log data and display a lot of useful information (5 different screens with 8 parameters per screen along with code clearing). I know parts are easy to find as I've been doing a bit of searching and haven't had any trouble at all so far. I'd be looking at closer to 210whp but getting 230 with stock internals is definitely promising. He's using a much bigger turbo than I plan on using but he also says he's looking to make more power in the future so that makes sense.

CJAA blocks are a good platform to make some power and not worry. Anything past aorund the 250hp mark is when the head starts not following properly from what I've read/seen. Now if you really want to get into it, you can get a CR180 head and use that and push past that barrier, especally with a bigger turbo.

As far as head lifting I do plan on upgrading to the Darkside high tensile CR head bolts to prevent this as from what I've heard head lifting can start at around 240 crank hp. I plan on keeping the standard CJAA head just because there are a few areas that I'm willing to cut cost in as long as I can make the 250 mark safely.

Look at the gtd2060vk.

I'll have to take a look at that. I know the GTD series has a better variable geometry system so I'm sure it would spool faster than the GTB2056VK

 

[turbobrick240]

I think the GTD2060VZ/VK would be ideal for your goals. Good spool, and plenty of flow.

 

[MrCypherr]

As far as head lifting I do plan on upgrading to the Darkside high tensile CR head bolts to prevent this as from what I've heard head lifting can start at around 240 crank hp. I plan on keeping the standard CJAA head just because there are a few areas that I'm willing to cut cost in as long as I can make the 250 mark safely.

Thats a good point as well but I was talking about head flow. I've heard some people say around that mark is when it starts to bottleneck so if you wanted to achieve more, then a CR180 head would be a good OEM fit.

 

[burpod]

not that i've ever worked on a CR car.. but from my experience with other earlier engines... head lift is IMO a direct result of using too much timing advance. always best to upsize injectors and retard timing and that will dramatically reduce the chance of that, + you just get better torque and more bang-for-buck... of course, there will still be that point where you do need to stiffen some stuff up regardless. but the biggest mistake i see is too much advance. advance is a funny thing, at it really depends on the load.

 

[MrCypherr]

The nice thing about the CR engines. You really dont need to upgrade the injectors unless you wanna surpass the 250 mark id day. 210-215 is easily done with stock injectors.

Also, side note; I feel like youd have a decent sized customer base if you started getting into CR Tuning.

 

[burpod]

The nice thing about the CR engines. You really dont need to upgrade the injectors unless you wanna surpass the 250 mark id day. 210-215 is easily done with stock injectors.

Also, side note; I feel like youd have a decent sized customer base if you started getting into CR Tuning.

are you sure about that? do you log and know the injection durations? people said the same thing about PDs... you can't go wrong by shortening injection durations. the stock injectors VW uses are pretty small. i would guess CR would be similar to alh/bew... you can safely do 20% more fuel but after that.. bang-for-buck goes downhill.... i would love to get into CR tuning, there's just only so much time in a day and i have other life-things going on that don't involve cars lol

 

[dieseldonato]

You never really want to "Max's out a set of injectors, 80% is about where you really want to hang around, other wise injecrion durations get pretty long and pretty advanced timing is needed to get the required fuel for x amount of power at y rpm. Larger injectors negate that.

 

[ThePhilosopher]

I think the GTD2060VZ/VK would be ideal for your goals. Good spool, and plenty of flow.

I found out GotTuned makes a vacuum actuated GTD2060VZ on a 2.0tdi manifold that only uses oil cooling. They say its good for 300hp with a lighter 11+0 billet wheel so my spool should be perfectly fine. The more I look into this turbo the better of a fit it seems for what I'm looking for. I'm going to need it to be top mounted but they say you can call them when you order to figure out any details like that. From some pictures I'm finding it looks like the CJAA comes with a top mounted turbo, if that's right then I shouldn't have any trouble with it

are you sure about that? do you log and know the injection durations? people said the same thing about PDs... you can't go wrong by shortening injection durations. the stock injectors VW uses are pretty small. i would guess CR would be similar to alh/bew... you can safely do 20% more fuel but after that.. bang-for-buck goes downhill.... i would love to get into CR tuning, there's just only so much time in a day and i have other life-things going on that don't involve cars lol

From what I've heard the CJAA injectors are good up to 280hp crank. Seeing that, I plan on upgrading injectors along with a CP3 pump so that I'm not pushing the injectors to 89% of their max. I'd rather stay on the safe side and find something like the Darkside stage one injectors that are good for 350hp where even at 250hp I'm still only using 71% of their max

 

[burpod]

From what I've heard the CJAA injectors are good up to 280hp crank. Seeing that, I plan on upgrading injectors along with a CP3 pump so that I'm not pushing the injectors to 89% of their max. I'd rather stay on the safe side and find something like the Darkside stage one injectors that are good for 350hp where even at 250hp I'm still only using 71% of their max

i don't even know how to make sense of all the "hp" numbers people throw out with injectors. i don't really believe in any of it. what i do know is something like this....

a stock alh for example, max advance is ~8BTDC @ 2500rpm, but depending on intake air temps (and also barometric), might be a little higher than that, and that would be for 32mg fuel. most tunes i've seen, are doing 8btdc timing for wayyyy more than 32mg most tunes put max timing @ 9,5btdc @ 2500rpm even, and that could be more depending on soi limits + air temp etc. the stock tune, imo, is already running at the cusp of a lot of advance. so these other tunes, with increased fueling, the effective advance is even higher. EOI is much shorter.. no wonder so many people blow head gaskets before they need to. and while they're doing that, they're getting less power lol. engine fighting itself to rev. egt's can even go up because of that. if you've put in .260s vs .185s... you really don't want to be doing 8btdc @ 2500 unless you want to hamfist max it out. the amount of fuel going in is a lot more than .185s and all that's happening too soon. PCPs too high, bad torque. sure, you get more power, bang for buck is down a lot from what it could be. you really want to retard the soi

those degree numbers on an alh, i believe or cam or close-to-cam degrees.... on a PD, the SOI numbers are in crank. i'm guessing CR is also crank.

 

[ThePhilosopher]

i don't even know how to make sense of all the "hp" numbers people throw out with injectors. i don't really believe in any of it. what i do know is something like this....

a stock alh for example, max advance is ~8BTDC @ 2500rpm, but depending on intake air temps (and also barometric), might be a little higher than that, and that would be for 32mg fuel. most tunes i've seen, are doing 8btdc timing for wayyyy more than 32mg most tunes put max timing @ 9,5btdc @ 2500rpm even, and that could be more depending on soi limits + air temp etc. the stock tune, imo, is already running at the cusp of a lot of advance. so these other tunes, with increased fueling, the effective advance is even higher. EOI is much shorter.. no wonder so many people blow head gaskets before they need to. and while they're doing that, they're getting less power lol. engine fighting itself to rev. egt's can even go up because of that. if you've put in .260s vs .185s... you really don't want to be doing 8btdc @ 2500 unless you want to hamfist max it out. the amount of fuel going in is a lot more than .185s and all that's happening too soon. PCPs too high, bad torque. sure, you get more power, bang for buck is down a lot from what it could be. you really want to retard the soi

those degree numbers on an alh, i believe or cam or close-to-cam degrees.... on a PD, the SOI numbers are in crank. i'm guessing CR is also crank.

I'd assume (hope) that the companies such as Darkside that put out these numbers test the hardware on an actual engine hooked to an actual dyno (the way Banks Power does it), granted some companies get lazy and could be pulling these numbers out of calculations instead. I figure that I've seen enough builds using these parts go clear above the power goals I'm looking for so I should be fine as long as I have a good tune and I'm not stressing the motor by throwing crazy advanced timing at it. The way I see it, I'll be over-building this motor so that I don't max out parts and try to squeeze every little bit of horsepower out of it. That way I can dial back advancement and, as long as I use good hardware and intercooling, keep my tune well within safe parameters.

 

[burpod]

I'd assume (hope) that the companies such as Darkside that put out these numbers test the hardware on an actual engine hooked to an actual dyno (the way Banks Power does it), granted some companies get lazy and could be pulling these numbers out of calculations instead. I figure that I've seen enough builds using these parts go clear above the power goals I'm looking for so I should be fine as long as I have a good tune and I'm not stressing the motor by throwing crazy advanced timing at it. The way I see it, I'll be over-building this motor so that I don't max out parts and try to squeeze every little bit of horsepower out of it. That way I can dial back advancement and, as long as I use good hardware and intercooling, keep my tune well within safe parameters.

you can't "dial back" the advance, that's all in the tune. unless you're doing it yourself, there's nothing you can do about that. you would need to know what stock numbers are, and take logs of what "tune" was given to you, in order to compare and make any sense out of... a lot of people overbuild things that go beyond what is necessary, or even close to needing it. nothing wrong with it of course, but i really don't trust what most people do.

 

[dieseldonato]

Banks is a bad example of "testing everything." They don't and never have. Most everything turbo and fuel wise doesn't actually need tested for every combination on a dyno. You need this much fuel and that much air to make blah amount of power at whatever rpm. Your tune/hardware will dictate how well the parts work in conjunction with each other and obtain that power level, you know what amount of fuel the injector will flow, and you know how many cfm @ whayever psi the turbo will flow.

 

[burpod]

Frankly, this isn't really an issue with most of the CR stuff out there today. (more like EGT and shudder and smoke and odd running issues or...)
Keep in mind, the USA market VW CR factory calibrations tend to use what's already a very retarded combustion, compared to say, BMW or Merc diesels.

So blowing head gaskets is likely not an issue for those cars, the way most of them are tuned, because most of the aftermarket tunes for USA-market CR TDI cars don't actually tune the SOI timing anyway. Most tunes I come across do seem to try and adjust SOI using the "SOI" maps, even though those don't actually work the same way in the USA-market VW Bin5"clean diesel" cars.

(Most tuners believe otherwise, and I won't elaborate too much here... suffice it to say any SOI timing advance seen in a log of "most" USA-market Bin5 ULEV TDI tunes is largely only incidental to the increased injection time (aka duration). That's because timing in those cars is not based on SOI, but is actually based on the position of the midpoint of combustion (CA50), as measured by the cylinder pressure sensors. SOI is not the controlled parameter, but it does vary incidental to the specified CA50 and duration of injection. )

that doesn't really sound right. injection times and soi are still what they are, regardless of all that gobbly gook. care to explain that in laymans terms. you're saying SOI isn't really SOI, and durations be damned and can onlt cause "shudder" or whatever... which i find hard to believe regardless of injection system, the basic principles still apply, aside from the details of how it gets there and engine compression etc

 

[ThePhilosopher]

you can't "dial back" the advance, that's all in the tune. unless you're doing it yourself, there's nothing you can do about that. you would need to know what stock numbers are, and take logs of what "tune" was given to you, in order to compare and make any sense out of... a lot of people overbuild things that go beyond what is necessary, or even close to needing it. nothing wrong with it of course, but i really don't trust what most people do.

When I said 'dial back" I was referring to the tune, my bad. I plan on looking into tuning CR TDI's before the build and if its something that looks reasonable for me to do then I'll do it myself. That's part of why I want the banks iDash along with VCDS so that I can log how the stock motor runs along with what i find online and try to figure out the tuning after all the mods myself. As far as overbuilding I don't plan on going hog wild with a build good for 400hp then tuning only up to 250, I've been looking at a lot of builds with people going up to 300hp and along with what these parts are rated for and a few calculations I plan on building the motor up to handle roughly 300-320 then tuning it to 250. That way I stay around or just under that 80% of max zone of most of the hardware when I'm using the full extent of the tune I implement. Again I'm still new to this so if any of this is wrong then please let me know and as far as the tuning I plan on being as careful and smoke free as possible at my power goal while keeping a close eye on egt's, boost pressure, and anything else that may go wrong along the way

 

[burpod]

When I said 'dial back" I was referring to the tune, my bad. I plan on looking into tuning CR TDI's before the build and if its something that looks reasonable for me to do then I'll do it myself. That's part of why I want the banks iDash along with VCDS so that I can log how the stock motor runs along with what i find online and try to figure out the tuning after all the mods myself. As far as overbuilding I don't plan on going hog wild with a build good for 400hp then tuning only up to 250, I've been looking at a lot of builds with people going up to 300hp and along with what these parts are rated for and a few calculations I plan on building the motor up to handle roughly 300-320 then tuning it to 250. That way I stay around or just under that 80% of max zone of most of the hardware when I'm using the full extent of the tune I implement. Again I'm still new to this so if any of this is wrong then please let me know and as far as the tuning I plan on being as careful and smoke free as possible at my power goal while keeping a close eye on egt's, boost pressure, and anything else that may go wrong along the way

that all sounds good. i'm curious how you're going to get the software and editing capabilities you need to do this

 

[ThePhilosopher]

that all sounds good. i'm curious how you're going to get the software and editing capabilities you need to do this

As of right now that's a long ways out so I plan on doing a TON of research, finding what software I need, and getting help from people I know who tune. If its all too much for me then I'll go a different route either through the forums or through a tuner like Malone or Kerma

 

[adjat84th]

Which we dont get in North America, so if you plan on importing an engine, youll also need the harness, ECU and most likely a couple other things so it would be stupid to not just build a CJAA.

If you want to retain the bi-turbo setup, yes that would be a pain. The CUA uses the standard oval-port design (aside from the EGR port that's different and gets blocked anyway) and can easily be converted to a single big turbo. An engine for the most part is just an air pump, as long as the physical connections are similar enough, you can put one into a different car without much trouble..even better if it's going from an MQB platform to another like the MK7 Golf. I only had to mess with wiring of a single coolant temp sensor (extended to reach the CUA location), and still running the stock ECU that came with the Golf. Not to say it's a straight forward swap, but it's not completely crazy IMO.

The CUA is essentially a race engine from the factory, stronger crank, rods, head bolts, better flowing head, cams...all stock. I think @ryanp managed to get the stock turbos upgraded (or maybe just the LP turbo) and made over 450ft-lbs torque by 1700RPM with a peak of 500ft-lbs higher up. Pretty sure that's why they're using that motor in their TT race cars.

 

[Bigtoy302]

Definitely CJAA with a R150. I have a CJAA with a gtb1752 in my double cab Tacoma with a R150 and it rips. 25 mpg driving like I stole it. If you have FB check out the group TDI swapped trucks. Serval people running CJAA's in that group.

 

[KCCats]

I have a 03 ALH and a 04 BEW and a 2013 CJAA in a 4Motion Tiguan

When was the BHW?

 

[turbobrick240]

The B5.5 Passats had BHW engines. They also had not so great automatic trans. and often problematic balance shafts. Strong block, though.

 

[ThePhilosopher]

Sorry y'all, life got hectic but I'm back lol

Definitely CJAA with a R150. I have a CJAA with a gtb1752 in my double cab Tacoma with a R150 and it rips. 25 mpg driving like I stole it. If you have FB check out the group TDI swapped trucks. Serval people running CJAA's in that group.

I requested to join that group just a few days ago when I stumbled upon it. I haven't been accepted but after hearing that I'm hoping to be accepted soon lol. I'm hoping to make about 30 horsepower more than the gtb1752 can support but I definitely plan on going with the CJAA at this point.

 

[J_dude]

The B5.5 Passats had BHW engines. They also had not so great automatic trans. and often problematic balance shafts. Strong block, though.

I oftentimes wish my friends would consult me before buying TDI's, but they seem to run out in a hurry to get a TDI because "mpg" and they buy all the crappy ones and end up coming to me for help when they break...
Buddy recently bought a BHW, no clue about balance shaft and now the trans is acting up.

 

[KCCats]

Speaking of trans
I got my Tiguan from Jeff (here on the forum)
It was a 2.0 4 motion, now with the 13 Jetta Cjaa and DSG trans
It is a bit too high a gear as I tow with it!
What trans could I get for the 4 Motion TDI?

 

[PakProtector]

BHW rods are heavier. Their big end is 3mm larger DIA. than ALH/BEW. Mains are same across the board, and rod bearings are same length...

Douglas

 

[miniCotulla]

The BHW is closer to the margins of longevity as it left the factory, just remember that. In other words, it was already "tuned". It is/was the highest output SOHC PD engine. The ALH, on the other hand, was the LOWEST output 1.9L VE engine, unless you count the turbo-less SDIs.

Someone really should start looking into using the MB OM651 engine. 2.1L and in its lowest tuned form, DPF/EGR/SCR and all, makes 168hp. The higher output units left the factory at nearly 200... and the torque is amazing at about 370 at only 1600 RPM.

The BHW wasn't the highest output 8V PD! Also not "tuned" from the factory.

 

[oilhammer]

In North America, the BHW was indeed the highest output of the three 8v PDs we got. We only got three, the BEW (1.9L 100hp), the BRM (also 1.9L 100hp) and the BHW (2.0L 136hp).

The OP is from a place called "Tennessee", which is one of our 50 states.... and while not an especially large state, it is larger than your entire country. Yet Volkswagen only sold a handful of diesels there. The BHW being one of them, and the BHW Passats are quite rare here. Only sold here for the latter half of the 2004 model year (came about the same time the side turn signals switched from the front fender to the side mirror) and most of the 2005 model year, before the Emden plant started retooling for the B6.

Stay in your lane.

 

[miniCotulla]

In North America, the BHW was indeed the highest output of the three 8v PDs we got. We only got three, the BEW (1.9L 100hp), the BRM (also 1.9L 100hp) and the BHW (2.0L 136hp).

The OP is from a place called "Tennessee", which is one of our 50 states.... and while not an especially large state, it is larger than your entire country. Yet Volkswagen only sold a handful of diesels there. The BHW being one of them, and the BHW Passats are quite rare here. Only sold here for the latter half of the 2004 model year (came about the same time the side turn signals switched from the front fender to the side mirror) and most of the 2005 model year, before the Emden plant started retooling for the B6.

Stay in your lane.

Still uses nearly the same hardware as the 163hp 1.9tdi you could buy in europe. Saying it's tuned from factory is just wrong. The will live forever even with 200hp! Also 100hp and 136hp are completely different engines further proofing my point!

 

[oilhammer]

We're not in Europe.

Once again...

And the BEW isn't "completely different" You didn't even get the same setup we did... because you didn't have the same standards to meet.

You had a much broader choice. DOHC, V6, SDIs, all kinds of stuff. We got ONE singular diesel engine in the B5, for a year and a half, bolted only to an automatic transmission, FWD. That's it.

We get some nice fire breathing F150s, though.

 

[miniCotulla]

We're not in Europe.

Once again...

And the BEW isn't "completely different" You didn't even get the same setup we did... because you didn't have the same standards to meet.

You had a much broader choice. DOHC, V6, SDIs, all kinds of stuff. We got ONE singular diesel engine in the B5, for a year and a half, bolted only to an automatic transmission, FWD. That's it.

We get some nice fire breathing F150s, though.

It still does not make it a factory "tuned" engine!