I've always wanted the power of a turbocharged Audi but I've never liked the type 44 chasis. The choice for me was obvious: Swap the turbo engine into the small type 85 body. Ideally I would have just bought a UrQ but those are becoming increasingly scarce, and at the time I didn't have the money to buy such a car.

My project goals started out simple enough: try to stay under $4000 and do as nice a job as possible. I soon learned the true menaing of "while I'm at it" with this project. What started out as a modest budget soon exploded into a very expensive hobby.

I started with a 1987 Audi 5000 turbo quattro. The car had a little under 200k miles on it and I bought it for $800. The car had no headlights (I mean no headlight BUCKETS... ), no turn signals, and no plates... so being my usual daring (or is that stupid..) self I drove the car home with the help of one of my friends. I can't believe I actually made it home since one part of the trip involved travelling through the state capitol.. State trooper central! Anyhow, no tickets and a few hours later I arrived home and dove right into labeling EVERYTHING upon removal (1234). While I had the engine out of the car I brought it to R & L engines (a local and reputable engine rebuilder) to have them do a leakdown test on each cylinder. The results were not so good. it turned out I had low compression in #2 and #4 (less than 90 psi if I recall). I had them remove the head to physically look at the cylinders and there was indeed excessive wear on the cylinder walls. This is a bit surprising since Audi engines are typically very reliable.

So I was at a decison point. Should I get a new engine and hope it is in better shape then the one I had? Did I scrap the MC and go to a 20vt ($$$$)? Or should I rebuild the engine that I had? I wound up deciding to rebuild the engine that I had. This turned out to be a very expensive and time consuming process since gathering the parts took me a while. I had custom pistons made by JE Pistons and I used gapless rings from Total Seal. There was some discussion about gapless rings causing more oil consumption but having had the car on the road for over 5k miles, I can say that this is not true. I also replaced all of the stressed bolts in the engine (connecting rod bolts, main studs, head studs) with ARP bolts. R&L engines did all of the rebuilding work for me so I also had them port and polish the head, bore out the cylinders to 82.5mm, and precision balance all internal engine components. I also put larger 40mm intake valves from the NG code engine in place of the smaller stock units. While the manifolds were off I sent them to get coated by Jet Hot. The coated manifolds came out pretty nice and the coating has not shown any sign of wear as of yet.

Since my afterrun coolant pump was missing on my parts car, I decided to use the Shogun Systems pump. This pump was designed as a replacement for the mechanical waterpumps on race cars to elimante the drag on the engine. In talking with Nate Stuart, I learned that it was very important to have a good strong ground at the pump and to position it low in the cooling system to avoid burning out the impeller. I think I did a pretty good job mounting it because I haven't shredded an impeller yet...

While I had the engine out of the car I decided to get the engine bay painted. At the same time, I also re-inforced the mounting flange for the clutch master cylinder, since this is a common failure point on the type 85s.

For the Intercooler, I decided not to use the stock 5kt unit. I purchased an UrQ intercooler from Chris Semple of Force 5 Automotive. This was a VERY tight fit (pictures to follow). I used silicone turbo hose from Turbonetics and custom plumbed all of the intake hoses with T304 stainless steel pipe. I basically ordered some mandrel bent pipe from Burns Stainless and welded the pipes together whenever I needed a "T" fitting (like for the afterrun pump and the turbo bypass valve). I also sourced an UrQ downpipe from Chris. This made the exhaust routing ultra simple. The mounting points are in exactly the right spots and no hammering of the passenger side footwell was necessary (as is necessary when using the stock 5kt pipe).

All of the stock afterrun features that came on the 5kt I used on my car. The injector cooling fan blower I mounted on the original plate that goes over the passenger side engine mount on the type 44 and instead bolted it to the side of the head like the factory did on the UrQ. I also drilled holes in the bottom of the plate to mount the afterrun pump to it. A very tight fit but it fits nicely in that space behind the radiator.

For the tie rods, I bought a pre-bent unit from 2Bennett. I think it cost me about $100. No complaints here. The other thing I bought from 2bennett was the adapters for my oil cooler. The oil cooler I used is a Setrab unit that I bought from Javad Shadzi at New Dimensions. Javad also supplied me with this special stainless steel braided hose that is wrapped in an outer layer of rubber to prevent damaging the paint.

Since I also swapped over all of the 5kt fuel system components, this required some re-wiring of the electrical system. I owe a huge THANK YOU to Huw Powell and Nate Stuart for helping me out in that regard. Huw stripped out the stock afterrun wiring and Nate helped with the interior wiring once the engine was in place. The most annoying part of the conversion was probably just putting the darn interior back together!

So, here is the finished product. I will be putting more shots of the underside of the car once I finish off the next roll of film. All of the special coatings that you see are done by Universal Powdercoat(except the intake and exhaust manifolds, which were done by Jet-Hot). The end result is everything I thought it would be. With the K24 turbo, all I have to do is mash the acellerator and this car FLIES. Even running the stock boost level (roughly 6 psi), I can run with many modern american muscle cars in a straight line and surprise the HELL out of them at the first corner. I can't wait to up the boost!

Next Project: EFI