Maintenance mode, it's been good

[Digital Corpus]

I'm going to keep this brief. It has been a good long while since I've been active on here. The last time was attending the wake for John Jackson. It's been a good run. I'm not gone, but I won't be terribly active beyond just some maintenance once I do the computer things I intended to do a long long time ago. I bought the other family member white B4 and have been using that as a DD. My pictured silver Passat has been on the side yard due to family politics and time. After fixing why I pop head gaskets, I intend to dive into the idle control loop and drop it's upper limit from 2K RPM to 1.5K RPM. This is why big turbo upgrade fail to spool below this marker... I digress.

I love diesels, manual transmissions, and turbo chargers. Thanks go out to this community for everything. I became invested in *these* cars and it is sad to see how VW and politics f'ed things up. I'm retiring the white B4 Passat. The 1Z is being replaced by a L15B7 in a Civic Hatchback Sport Touring, with a turbo, with a stick. Within the next month I'll be putting the white Passat and a spare block up for parts. I'll be around and slightly more active than the past 4 year as I want my silver Passat's build to persist as a testament to the community, even though it was never fulley completed in the real of reliability. That car will remain, but needs some serious TLC and I have other things in life like my health that need attention.

This is a proof of life message. I've been gone, but have never forgotten the community.

Post soon,
DC, aka Michael O'Brien

 

[kooyajerms]

You old fogey

 

[Matt-98AHU]

I suppose that's what's brought me back from the brink of going with a super custom turbo on my personal cars: I actually want to drive and use mine and not have to fiddle with the tune and adjusting the turbo itself for weeks or months on end only to have it blow up.

Known OEM+ style upgrades are knowable, more drivable and more likely to yield reliable results.

But, maybe that's just me. I like upgrading, I just don't like sinking more time into working on it than I do driving it.

I've been without a 1Z/AHU for a few years now, but ALHs, BRMs, BHWs and a BKW V10 are frequently in my fleet. Did have a CKRA Passat briefly, but it was just OK. Nice and quiet, great chassis and feature set, but the emissions stuff is pretty ridiculous, the seats weren't so comfortable for me, the fuel economy was not as good as I thought it would be, probably thanks to dieselgate tuning. So, back to Mk4, B5.5 and early Mk5 stuff I go!

Good memories with you SoCal B4 Passat guys, though. I definitely miss John Jackson. He was a character.

 

[jhax]

I've been wondering if you have been okay. I miss looking through your very detailed threads. Glad to know you are still around.

 

[Digital Corpus]

Had a minor, but still needed general anesthesia, surgery about a week ago so I've been doing prep and recovery around that. I still am keeping the silver Passat in the thumbnail/avatar, though it has quite a bit of dust. Figuring out what to pursue in life means things constantly change. Still enjoy the work I did and want to do more of it.

You old fogey

That ain't changing anytime soon

I suppose that's what's brought me back from the brink of going with a super custom turbo on my personal cars: I actually want to drive and use mine and not have to fiddle with the tune and adjusting the turbo itself for weeks or months on end only to have it blow up.

Known OEM+ style upgrades are knowable, more drivable and more likely to yield reliable results.

But, maybe that's just me. I like upgrading, I just don't like sinking more time into working on it than I do driving it.

I've been without a 1Z/AHU for a few years now, but ALHs, BRMs, BHWs and a BKW V10 are frequently in my fleet. Did have a CKRA Passat briefly, but it was just OK. Nice and quiet, great chassis and feature set, but the emissions stuff is pretty ridiculous, the seats weren't so comfortable for me, the fuel economy was not as good as I thought it would be, probably thanks to dieselgate tuning. So, back to Mk4, B5.5 and early Mk5 stuff I go!

Good memories with you SoCal B4 Passat guys, though. I definitely miss John Jackson. He was a character.

The 1.5l turbo'd Civic Hatchback, L15B7 engine with mods for economy to my understanding, shares a surprisingly large number of construction paradigms with these Passats, chassis-wise, engines, not so much. It is a pleasure to drive, just a bit different. Front suspension, overall simplicity of the layout of the engine bay. The gearing between the two is notably different, aside from having 6 instead of 5. I still have the 6th gear kit that I need to install at some point... I've acheieved a reliable highway fuel economy of 44 mpg after break in of the engine, and thanks to the gearing, that's in the lower 3rd of "economy" RPM highlight @ 60 mph that Honda designated.

A quick acceleration with tall gears is pleasant, but yeah, nearly gutless if you know what a diesel can do. Manual transmission, not giving that up for as long as I'm able.

I've been wondering if you have been okay. I miss looking through your very detailed threads. Glad to know you are still around.

Yeah, I have a custom/DIY tune I put on the white Passat. Mostly just redid the smoke map, put my custom throttle map in, which needs some adjustments. I have since determined that the limiting factor that everyone has complained about with at least the MSA15.5 MK IIIs is that there is an idle control subroutine that stays engaged until 2000 RPM and then blends with the normal operating parameters. It is the only time "2000" pops up in the binary, and changing it will f'up the control parameters. I accidentally nuked that bit of an SSD so I lost a sizable bit of the documentation I hadn't backed up, including the layout of the tunes in address parameters that I spent a good deal of time trying to locate. I did change the 2K RPM to 1.5K to see what would happen and it behaved like a whacked out PID loop. Everyone has tried for many years as to why they couldn't get turbos to spool sooner than 2K RPM, or larger ones no sooner than ~2.2K RPM. *THIS IS WHY*. Most of the time smoke maps are barely touched, cause you need the VE of that RPM to adjust it properly. Excel makes that quick work. Because I nuked my work and hadn't gotten back to it, I never posted about it. Hell, before than, I loaded like dozens stock tunes to see what binaries would boot on the MSA15.5 ECU. Found out that most anything setup for an MSA 15-15.5 would boot, too.

How them apples?

 

[Digital Corpus]

Car is up for sale

FS: 1996 White B4 TDI, SoCal (Southern California) - 1K, obo

I bought the car off my mother who wanted a car with less maintenance so I didn't have to support it. We were the 4th or 5th owners of the car. Body leaves a bit to be desired. The car was used as a beater/daily driver, while I worked on my silver B4, then the pandemic hit. I haven't been active...

forums.tdiclub.com

 

[Digital Corpus]

Taken about 2 weeks after the start of the thread here:

 

[burpod]

if you ever want to chat about what you think might be wrong with the car.... as far as regarding tuning details, PM me from a quick read, there are things that likely aren't the problem but you think they are