TDI - Day 1

I figured the first 8 hours of clowning with that TDI engine qualifies as a "day" of work. I wouldn't exactly call the hours terribly productive, but they were fun. The hours started with the receipt of the pallet at my house. The picture shows what it looked like. It was completely encased in a plastic sheet and that stretchy plastic stuff that's like saran-wrap for pallet building. I used to use it when I worked warehouse. It was held down with rope and load locking straps.

I can't say enough about how well packet and carefully assembled the engine was. Eric, the cat from Georgia that sold and shipped the engine, removed the alternator and power steering pump. These were packed separately in bubble wrap. The instrument cluster and the ECU were also separated into bubble wrap and another box. The pallet itself had 2x4's nailed to it so the engine sat in a kind of cradle. I think a few little bits broke in transit, but I'll see how bad that is later.

This next picture shows all the other parts that came on the pallet in various boxes. Roughly in the center, there's the catalytic converter.
Below that is the top edge of the intercooler. Next to that is an assortment of plastic for the routing of the intercooler air under the exhaust header. Above that, is the belt tensioner. To the right of that is some of the coolant hosing and the accelerator pedal. What it doesn't show is the thick bundle of wiring, nor all the wiring that was still attached to the engine... nor the main engine itself.

You can see the engine after it was unwrapped and popped onto a rough engine scoot I built. It is my hope that I will be able to get this engine into the engine compartment and aligned with a transaxle just like this: straight upright. The flywheel (and eventually the transaxle) are on the other end. In the picture, you can see the gap in the lower right-hand corner where the alternator goes. That lower pulley (actually its the drive for the serpentine) is not resting on the wood. I measured it to make sure that it didn't. There are lots of wires and bundles all over this engine that need to find homes. Just figuring out this wiring bundle will take some time.


Finally, here is the scoot by itself. Its construction took all of a couple of hours, and alot of that time was spent finding the wood. I made it with recycled 2x4's from a scrapheap in my backyard and some casters that I got on clearance a few years back. Its basically a 3 sided square that's 15" deep and about 8" across. After assembling the simple square (where the backplane was 1" lower than the tops of the supports), I added 2 more pieces at a right angle to the supports to help make it more rigid. The extra inch lowering helped provide a way of attaching the supports to the back. I then bored holes for the caster screws. I used screws that were leftover from a backyard swingset that were 3" long. Last, I added a thin piece (1/4") of trimwood across the bottom to help prevent the open ends from pushing outwards. Why is it open at one end? Because the flywheel comes down so far, it was really necessary.

The scoot actually works surprisingly well. I have moved the engine around a few times and it doesn't wobble nor feel like its going to tip over at any second. I will probably have to buy an engine stand at some point, but until then, I have a place to keep my engine that is upright and accessible so I can get the components back onto it. The engine floats just inches off the ground, so with the low center of gravity, it should stay relatively stable.

That's all for now..