Apparently I've got the turbo bug bad, as at this point every vehicle I own is going to be turbocharged

I've owned this 1980 VW Transporter Riviera camper for a couple of years, my family travels in it and since I work from home it often does duty as my office out in nature.
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I bought it bone stock, but shortly after purchasing it it blew up it's stock aircooled 67HP engine... So out that engine came for a 150HP built stroker engine from a 1974 Porsche 914. Its now riding on airbags and is all kitted out with fun parts.

I've been running around quite happily with that engine up until last week when 2 blocks from home the engine goes POP! and locks up solid. Those aircooled Porsche motors are known for dropping valves, and unfortunately thats what this one did...

So out came that motor. I've learned a hell of a lot about forced induction since that motor went in so I decided I was going to go a different route this time around, and ordered up a Japanese market Subaru WRX turbo engine from an importer here in town.

A few days later, a pallet shows up on my driveway:
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Shortly after that my transmission adapter shows up!

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The aircooled engine was running a Megasquirt, so it was no big deal to rewire and reconfigure the Megasquirt to run this engine... And as of last night, a week after blowing up the old motor:



It runs!

I've got a few things left to sort out before I can drive it around... The donor engine is drive-by-wire, so I have to adapt an older throttle body from an earlier model of WRX to it before I have throttle control, and I don't have the cooling system fully installed as its a big task to convert an aircooled vehicle to water cooled. But a few more days and it should be back on the road so I figured it was time to give this project it's own build post.

 

I think its gonna be a really fun sleeper... VW Busses are known for being about the slowest thing on the road, but this motor is 280HP stock, and can be pushed to 350 or so with not much more than good tuning. This thing won't be slow

 

They're awesome for that, the amount of space inside is amazingly large thanks to the cab-over rear engine design. They just suck at going up a grade at faster than 40MPH

 

Been fighting a war with the drive-by-wire throttle system. I had purchased an adapter to install the cable throttle body... That didn't fit. So I said screw it and wrote a DBW controller from scratch!

Worked decently for a first spin around the block! Its wild hearing my vanagon make turbo noises! My blow-off valve is whistling though which I need to fix ASAP before it makes me insane.



Its got zero tune on it, and I've gotta sort a noise issue with my DBW controller still. But it moves under it's own power!

 

It lives! First real run out of the neighborhood, took it down to the gas station and back. A couple miles.
Have a basic tune on it now, it's VERY peppy. Throttle is much more sensitive than with the old motor. Further it's power feels effortless even treating it nicely while I get it dialed in.
The twin scroll turbocharger that's unique to the JDM motor spools QUICK. It came up to my waste gate pressure of 7 psi without any effort. I'm gonna leave the boost there for now while I get it dialed in, but with all forged internals this engine is supposed to be fine at 20+ psi.

 

Way cool. What engine are you using?

 

I stuffed a JDM Subaru EJ20x in the VW. Its a 2.0L turbo boxer 4. The JDM variants are cool for having a 9.5:1 compression ratio, forged everything, and a twin scroll turbo. None of which the US models get.

 

So since I've currently been running low boost I've been without an intercooler as the WRX top mount intercooler isn't going to do me a lot of good mounted up against the Vanagon's engine cover without any airflow, and the motor didn't come with it anyway...

Today I found a much better option. This front mount intercooler out of a Ford Focus ST! Should provide plenty of charge cooling as a rear mount intercooler on the bus!

And as a bonus I took the bus to get it out in a town about 20 miles south for a tuning drive. Its kinda unreal how much power this has even compared to the previous motor which was more powerful than stock.

I'm used to flooring it up steep grades to maintain speed. Now it'll ACCELERATE up steep grades with just a tiny bit of pedal.


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Got my intercooler all mounted up and my tune going decent. Also decided to paint my Transporter badges to fit the new engine better!

I've had to turn my boost down a little bit. At 14PSI its pushing about 330HP and pushing through the clutch. I've turned it back down to 10PSI now while I look at options for stronger clutches. I've found one place that sells a 'stage 1' and 'stage 2' clutch for this transmission, but they don't actually say what their clamping power is so I've got an email in to them to find out. Being that its a VW transmission stage 2 might still not be enough for this engine. But I'm hoping, as they make transmissions for sandrails that often use VW transmissions and can have all sorts of engines behind them..

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