Living with a Scirocco 1.4 TSI 160 (118kW) – Part 2, Turbo Replacement

It’s been a little over a year since I posted the introduction blog article on this car and more specifically on the unusual twin charged engine it has. Unsurprisingly over the last year or so I’ve found a few things that need a little work but generally the car has been excellent, needing minimal thought but certainly has some aspects to be aware of for prospective owners to keep the the engine working correctly.

When I bought the car it was a bit lacking power compared to what I was expecting and when accelerated hard in one gear (which due to a seemingly large gap between the supercharger and turbo rev ranges required revving it high) and changed up it would randomly have no power at all. I managed to trace this to a couple problems both related to the turbo wastegate. Firstly the requirement to rev it high was caused by serious wear on the wastegate pivot meaning the wastegate didn’t fully close so the turbo wouldn’t spin up properly. A temporary bodge to get round this is to tighten up the actuator rod to take up the slack but while this sort of helps it actually wears the housing even faster but it can get you by while you wait for a replacement. The second problem of lacking power after a high RPM change was that the wastegate actuator rod was actually bent and touching the turbo housing so it was actually getting temporarily stuck when fully extended so going into the next gear the turbo was basically just dumping the exhaust out the wastegate rather than doing anything useful. So this definitely needed looking at!

First off let me just say I initially looked at the position of the turbo nicely sat at the top front of the engine and thought a couple hours and it’d be done. I was wrong, very wrong! It looks lovely and easily accessible but it just isn’t as easy as it looks for many reasons mostly relating to it not being a turbo mounted to a manifold. the entire exhaust side manifold and turbo are a single unit so you need sufficient clearance to pull the whole unit out.

There it is under the heat shield – looks simple right?

I used various guides to do this swap and generally was in a rush (that didn’t work out so well) so I have very few photos of this but the information is fairly widely available anyway (try searching for guides to the mk6 Golf with the same engine) this is to highlight a few points people may find useful. I suggest referring to workshop manuals for a handy guide with diagrams of each section you need but strongly recommend an ad blocker before you do.

  1. The hard plastic boost pipe which runs from the supercharger to the turbo inlet is retained at the turbo end by a single M6 torx bolt with the threads tapped into the aluminium casting. On the rebuilt unit I bought this thread turned out to be ruined to the point it was impossible to tighten. I suspect this is because undoing the captive fastener during disassembly tries to push a metal sleeve out of the plastic. This is fine in itself but I think it wears the aluminium, similarly tightening it back in will also be hard on it. The reality is the pipe should be pulled back a little at a time as the screw is undone to prevent the load on the threads but this is a bit awkward to achieve as the pipe has very little ‘give’ in it. I strongly recommend checking this before you start – I had to call in a favour because having spent a lot of time swapping the turbo it was rapidly approaching closing time for all the shops to get anything to repair this and without it the car shouldn’t be run. If you’re in any doubt just buy an M6 helicoil kit and put a shiny new insert in place in the aluminium casting because there is only the one screw and if it fails your car will not be happy! Helicoils in softer materials are actually stronger than directly tapping the material the right size because the insert is a stronger material than what it’s going into and because they’re fitted by screwing into a larger thread in the parent material than the desired final thread they have a larger contact surface area in that material.

2. To fully undo all the bolts of the manifold flange you have to undo the alternator mounting bolts and twist it out the way. To do this you have to take off the alternator belt by releasing the tensioner then remove the top mounting bolt for the alternator entirely and slacken the other. This requires removing the engine bay undertrays as well but if you’re doing this job save some time and just pull them all off now. The alternator can then be rotated down and away from the block to get at the bolt. Someone out there might have some creative way of getting at that bolt but I had nothing that would get at it from any angle and couldn’t see any other way if could be done because it’s in a recess with manifold one side, oil filter casting the other and alternator in front of it.

3. Remove the radiator fans. In the picture above you can see how tight this is relative to the turbo and so you need to do this to have enough clearance both to get tools in to undo the manifold nuts and also to remove the the turbo itself from the exhaust studs. Removing these is done from the underside and also involves removal of the pipe between the turbo outlet and intercooler to give sufficient space. You need this removed to change the turbo anyway so it’s no inconvenience.

You’re looking to remove pipe sections 15, 16 and 17 for clearance. Item 11 are two bolts holding the charge pipe to the engine. The radiator sits between the charge cooler and this charge pipe.

The fan module can be removed as a single unit downwards with both fans in place by simply removing the four bolts holding it to the radiator and unplugging it at its electrical connector (item 13 on the bottom edge in the image above).

4. Buy a fitting kit off eBay or somewhere – there are load available but this is the simplest way of making sure you have all the replacement seals and gaskets you might need. Get the most comprehensive one you can find if you can’t easily go to get more parts once this car is apart!

5. The oil drain hose from the turbo is an absolute pig to get at.

The part I’m referring to here is number 12 above and consists of a section of solid pipe at the turbo end with a very short section of hose crimped on. I used a socket on a series of extension bars to get the bolt out of the turbo end but the block end is very awkward to get at because you can’t see it from any angle and the access is tight because the bolt sits virtually under the downpipe. Good luck! When you’re struggling to put it back on after changing the turbo don’t forget the gasket. Also this pipe is apparently common for leaking because the bolt doesn’t get put in sufficiently tightly or the gasket gets damaged during reassembly. I’ve highlighted this below in red.

6. The coolant hard line on top of the turbo needs to be removed which leaves an open rubber hose end. An M8 bolt fits perfectly to block this and stop coolant pouring out over everything so have one to hand before you take it off.

7. Carefully check the boost control hoses – apparently these commonly crack and certainly in my case they were quite degraded around the turbo. You can buy the proper replacement VW part if you wish but it may be cheaper to just order some 5mm vacuum hose and put a run in. In my case I didn’t notice the damage until I started taking it apart and managed to get a random bit from a friend. His wasn’t the common stuff it was thin walled and reinforced so the standard clamps didn’t fit but luckily with some persuasion I managed to fit the thin hose into an offcut of the original one. When combined with a suitable hose clip it’s working fine and has been for ages – that said I do not recommend this option!

Damaged section of hose in red above. The image below shows the hose I replaced marked in red going from the turbo housing back to the boost control solenoid and then the second similar line from the solenoid to the wastegate actuator marked in green.

Unfortunately as I mentioned earlier I didn’t take extensive photos of this replacement but I hope these few points help someone out there!

Good luck!

Living with a Scirocco 1.4 TSI 160 (118kW)

So recently I finally decided it was time to retire my previous long suffering car – a 2003 1.4L Mk1 Seat Leon I’ve had for 10 years! When I bought the car in 2009 it had 62,000 miles on the clock, now it has 198,000 miles on it and needs to be run on 10W40 rather than the specified 5W30 just to stop the engine rattling. The Seat did well but it had a hard life including 3 years commuting 400 miles a week and had got to the point where I was fully expecting it to fail sooner or later and wanted something that wasn’t as underpowered.

So I started looking about for another car and the new style Scirocco caught my eye. After looking for a while I found a decent condition version with reasonable mileage, service history and not reaching a high bid. Detail on this car was a little lacking as it was just described as a 1.4 TSI but the car had no engine/spec badges (a factory option from VW) so I wasn’t sure which version it actually was but on the basis it wasn’t advertised as the higher power option it would be the lower power turbo only 122 bhp model. So I went for it and got it for a decent price. When I arrived to collect it having never actually seen it before I checked it and found the identifying sticker in the boot which showed the power as 118kW, this is 160bhp so I’d got the more powerful one.

Image of a 2010 Scirocco
Something like this one.

This is both a blessing and a curse because while obviously it goes better the 160bhp version also have a reputation for unexpectedly experiencing catastrophic engine failure.

That said always take forum posts on the internet with a pinch of salt – people rarely take to the internet as much when their car works perfectly.

By this point its too late to back out so I’m now the owner of a Scirocco with a 1.4L engine! So now I start looking into things I need to watch out for. The engine is the first interesting thing here as it’s both supercharged and turbocharged to give a much better low down grunt than expected from such a small engine with supercharger boost while still having a wider power curve by the turbo taking over at about 3000 rpm and working higher up. The engine peaks out at about 1.5 Bar of boost (22 PSI) from the factory. This system obviously adds complexity and potential points of failure with various valves and clutches to make it all work so a number of things to keep an eye on.

VW Technical guide to this engine available here

Clearly we’re playing with a fairly highly strung engine so my first thought is what the maintenance schedule on these was like. People tend to ignore their cars so long as they keep working and from my previous 1.4 VW engine in my Seat I’m aware they have some issues with oil consumption. On my first look at some of the reports of damage online most seemed to mention failures that could easily be a result of oil starvation. Again, something to keep an eye on.

Moving beyond the engine that car itself is fairly advanced as well. These cars come as standard with adaptive suspension designed to react to road conditions. It has four sports seats which are very comfortable and the boot is quite reasonable for this type of car. Internally the Scirocco is very similar (depending on model year) to either a mark 5 or mark 6 Golf but is a bit less practical due to the style of the vehicle and lower roof line. That said I’ve had four full grown adults in mine and while it’s not hugely roomy it’s comfortable enough.

Now for the the but – I think mine was cheap partly because it has none of the extras. It doesn’t have cruise control, it doesn’t have HID headlights, it doesn’t have the more common 18″ ‘turbine’ wheels (I have the 17″ shown above), no DAB radio and no bluetooth. Other than the twincharged engine its a basic model and for most people that would be all there is to it but that’s not how I work. I will improve it as I go along and hopefully record how I do it all on here!

Engineering – Removing Stuck Bolts

This post seeks to record the ways I generally go about removing a stuck bolt using a particular repair I did – Skip further down if you don’t want the background.

I recently agreed to help out a friend with her first car which she had bought for a few hundred pounds and then found out how much a cam belt replacement actually costs when you get a garage to do it!

The car in question was a fairly common 2004 Fiesta 1.4 – this is the Ford Sigma engine which was also used in the Puma and Focus. Having done a few different cam belt changes over the years I figured it would be comparatively simple. Turns out that logic was badly flawed due to a design “feature” included by Ford which makes the job very difficult. This “feature” is a single bolt which can be almost impossible to remove – the crank bolt!

To explain the technical problem you need a bit of background knowledge on how pulleys are normally mounted on shafts. The method normally used is called a Woodruff key, this is a lump of metal which goes into a slot on the shaft. A corresponding slot is machined into the pulley/gear to be driven preventing any rotation. The key can be seen on the bottom left of the shaft in the photo.

RX8 Crank Key

Now the problem caused by Ford on the engine I was dealing with was that to save money (machining that slot adds a manufacturing operation) they did not use a key and instead relied solely on friction. The Ford engine uses the crank bolt to not only hold the pulleys on the crank but actually tighten it sufficiently that the friction between the pulley and the crank prevents rotation. The down side being that the bolt has to be incredibly tight so it can be very difficult to remove and if replaced must be absolutely torqued to specification because if it allows the timing gear to slip the engine would likely be destroyed!

Removing a stuck bolt…

In terms of getting out a bolt start small and build up. In this case there’s no chance a ratchet will do it so I started with a normal short breaker bar and an 18mm deep socket (a slighly unusual size not found in most smaller kits) so I had to buy one) and not terribly surprisingly nothing happened. So I got out my big breaker bar – it’s 800mm long so allows a significant amount of torque to be applied. To get clearance to use this I had to use two long 1/2″ drive extensions so the bar could be positioned outside the wheel arch. Again this didn’t do as much as I’d hoped…

Normally at this point the common next step is to put a bar in place resting against a cross member and then crank the engine. This uses the torque of the starter motor with the mechanical advantage resulting from the starter ring gear to apply a very large torque. Unfortunately you can’t do this with this engine because of the above issue with the crank not having a key. The moment the bolt undoes the engine would lose its relative timing and would probably be badly damaged or destroyed. Unfortunately at the time I wasn’t aware the crank had no key so we tried it anyway. After several goes on the starter and still having no luck I thought we might get more force into it by pushing the car rolling and having the driver let up the clutch like a bump start – using the inertia of the car as the force. Astonishingly even this didn’t get it moving (actually very lucky as it later turned out!).

Having exhausted hand tools I contacted a mate of mine who has an impact gun. It was a fairly basic one but rated at 220Nm should give the bolt a good beating and the percussive action will free up a good many stuck bolts but in this case it just wouldn’t do it!

I started drilling small holes in the bolt head to try to relieve some of the friction between the flange under the bolt head and the pulley. The idea being to remove enough material from the back of the bolt such that it relieves the force by the head flexing a little. After quite a bit of drilling and several goes with the gun it became apparent it just wasn’t going to cut it on this one!

Having accepted I needed a lot more force and having few ideas how to achieve this I decided I would finally splash out on a tool I’d been looking at for ages…

http://products.dewalt.co.uk/powertools/productdetails/catno/DCF899P2/

XR 18V BRUSHLESS 3 Sp High Torque Wrench

This is a Dewalt DCF899. The torque ratings for it are amazing for something of this size at 950 Nm continuous but it is a bit pricey. That said it will undo almost anything I’ve found and the batteries last forever!

So having bought this beast I gave it a go and after a number of goes at full power and some rust falling out the bolt still didn’t move! Careful inspection of the bolt head showed that the impact gun was hitting it so hard now for a comparatively small bolt head (18mm hex) the steel of both the bolt head and the socket we getting damaged. I made the choice to give it one last go and ended up rounding off the bolt head entirely!

Most people at this point would probably give up but I had one last idea I wanted to try! I realised that an M20 nut could be drilled out to a 20mm round hole and then it would fit over the rounded off bolt head. The benefit being an M20 nut is much larger hex than the original 18mm across flats bolt head at 30mm, this would replace the stripped head and resist a huge amount of torque before rounding off. I also needed to drill the nut half way through to 24mm as the m20 nut was much thicker and I needed clearance for the next part of the plan…At this point a mate of mine turned up so we broke out the welder and proceeded to join the combination of nut and bolt with weld. After a couple false starts where the new nut sheared off because we didn’t use enough weld we just filled up the head with weld as a last ditch attempt and once the whole bolt was glowing cherry red we used the big impact gun and out it came!

Fiesta Bolt comparison

Spot the difference! The one on the left is the replacement ready to go in because on this engine the crank bolt should not be re-used.