So it all started 2 summers ago when I decided to cut the lines going to my power steering pump on my Golf. The tabs on the front of the block had broken off for the power steering pump mount so it was kind of swaying in the breeze. It was impossible to keep the belt tensioned and as a result I was afraid that my waterpump would not be spinning enough. What I should have done was hook the 2 lines together but I didn't.
Fast forward to last fall, the steering now gets "locked" in position when I go near full lock. I have to yank very hard on the wheel to get it to straighten out.
I picked up a manual rack from a friend and decided that I should get a beater car on the road while I swap the rack out. From what I have read these things either go smoothly or everything breaks and you are without a car for weeks. Well I get the beater on the road (my 89TD pos) and one thing leads to another and I still hadn't touched my Golf. Since I had swapped in the non turbo AAZ I've been playing around with different 1.6 NA intake manifolds trying to find one that gave good power and fuel economy. Then I stumbled across this little gem in Germany.
I was buying a GTD intercooler setup off the same guy so I had him throw it in the same box to save on shipping costs. Unlike all the other NA intakes in North America this one requires a separate air box and unfortunately it has an EGR so it's full of crap. This is what the plenum looks like, gross eh?
So this weekend was the weekend. I pulled the Golf into the shop on Friday morning (we were closed because of Canada Day) and started pulling stuff out. I've replaced one steering rack before and I did it by dropping the subframe. Since there were so many other things I wanted to do to my Golf I figured I would yank the engine out and do it that way. 3 hours later and the engine was out and the new rack was in. My only oversight was the fact that the boot that goes from the rack to the firewall is totally different between power steering and manual steering. I have a garbage bag ziptied in place for the time being. The stupid boot is NLA as far as I can find
I took the time to pressure wash my engine bay while I had everything out. It was pretty messy from my "performance exhaust"
It's about this time that I recalled that my engine used to have an EGR when it had a turbo on it. All my intake runners looked like this.
Dr Diesel has been harassing me to make my NA "fast" ever since he and I did all that work measuring camshafts and whatnot. I've always regretted the carbon buildup in my head so I figured the engine's out, I have a performance cam to install, it would be wasted if I don't clean this crap out.
I figured the best course of action would be to pull the head and give it a good, proper cleaning.
You can probably see all that rust below the front coolant flange. I've overheated this poor engine more times then I care to recall so I was pretty worried about the head being warped. It's at the maximum allowable warpage so hopefully the headgasket seals. I'm undecided if I should use a fiber gasket instead of the metal one.
I've also decided to replace that lovely green valve cover. I could never get it to stop leaking so I'm going to go with a G60 valve cover instead. Hopefully that will solve my oil problems.
So while I was cleaning the head I figured hey I'm this far along, I may as well port this thing a bit. A quick phone call to Dr Diesel for some know-how and out comes the Dremel.
I started with the exhaust ports. I've always read that they should be smaller then the exhaust manifold to create a step. I don't know if this is just a gasser thing or not but figured I would follow suit. I placed the exhaust gasket over the port and traced an outline of gasket opening leaving about 1mm all the way around it. Here you can see my scribe line
This one just shows how much extra material there is.
And this shows stage 1, porting it to match my scribe line
Then I smoothed out what I had just removed to the stock runner diameter over about an inch into the runner. No pictures of this for some reason.
Then I turned my attention to the intake ports. They were very good but there was a bit of room for improvement. Since I didn't have a bunch of soot to scribe a line into I used a permanent marker and colored the area around the port. Then I copied the intake gasket pattern onto the head using my scriber. This is the result
You can see in that picture that there is very little material to remove. Again, I blended what I did into the runner over the course of an inch.
Here is a picture of the final product after I sanded everything with a flap wheel.
Now it was time to turn my focus to the valve area. Once again the intake was pretty good from the factory but the exhaust was crap. There is a huge hump all the way around the runner about 3/4 of an inch into the runner. Dr Diesel said it has to go so I did what I could.
Anything that is shiny has been ported. All the runners were either black with soot or EGR crap when I started. Hopefully you can see what I did in these pictures.
My head now flows this much better (that's a 13mm cam cap nut)
I sure hope what Dr Diesel was telling me over the phone translated properly into my head
Here is how I removed my valves
And this is how I checked my valve guide wear
Now to put it all back together and show some turbo people what's what
