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1987 Quantum Syncro AAN swap / 24 Hours of Lemons insanity

6190 Views 21 Replies 9 Participants Last post by  ejfluhr, 
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2
Some backstory here: viewtopic.php?t=52045


So, we done-blowed-up our 10v engine in the Quantum -- and it seemed like finding a JT block was going to be just as hard/expensive as something faster, but ultimately less rewarding. I had then resolved myself to pursue a V8 or 10vT swap because going slow is boring.

Then, this appeared on my local CL for $2k:

A 1993 S4 in a slight front end collision! After a little hard bargaining, it became mine for $1000! No idea what it looks like inside (yet), however the timing belt was torn/cut (hoping it was cut post-accident), so needless to say I never heard it run. Engine still had coolant and oil, but no fuses, battery, or key -- and obviously no timing belt. Cam gear spins with relative ease by hand, so that's a good sign.

---
An aside on the 24 Hours of Lemons and $500 cars:
By now, surely you're all exclaiming "no way that's a $500 car!!" -- true. The way Lemons works, however, is that after each race you are assessed a residual value based on how much of an asskicking your car took at its last outing. My residual value is $1, which means I have $499 to spend on cheaty go-fast parts! Thusly, as long as I sell $500 worth of stuff from this S4, I'm set -- should have no problem getting that once I send the car to the crusher
---

Back to the project at hand. Let's start this out simple:
-obviously, need to swap over the motor and ecu/harness. what else, if anything from this S4 is usable on the Quantum?
-I was thinking of keeping the Quantum's 016 syncro trans, but since I have a complete S4 parts car, anything is possible! From where I stand, it seems like the only good reason to use the S4 drivetrain would be to leverage the center torsen diff -- might be nice for road racing. but that's more work.
-chip would be nice, but probably will forego that since it would break my budget (*cough* someone sponsor me with a chip *cough*)

Final note: I really have no idea what I'm getting in to. I've done some basic searching and it seems like this is pretty much bolt-in-ish... right? Hoping to cobble this hunk of crap back together for the Road America event November 2/3... all advice welcome.

Oh, and if anyone needs any UrS4 parts- I'm the guy!
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D
I'll start this post off by saying that I'm a terrible build-thread updater-guy: I barely have time to do all the work required on the car, let alone take any meaningful pics and write update posts :(

Also, I see my previous pics are broken- I will try to fix those and upload the remainder that I have soon... however today's post is a plea for help!! :

The engine has been mated to the transmission and is now in. The car started for the first time yesterday! There are still tons of odds and ends to tie up, but I ran into a rather disturbing problem last night: when attempting to drive the car out of the garage, I cannot get the car into /any/ gear while the motor is running (I was able to jam it into reverse once). With the motor not running, I can get the car into all gears (not perfect, but pretty darn good feeling).

When the car is running, I depress the clutch pedal (feels pretty firm) and as I attempt to put the car into gear, I feel resistance on the shift knob and the engine will bog down proportionate to how hard I am trying to jam the gear in.

Furthermore, the car does not want to roll while in gear & clutch depressed.

The initial bleed of the slave cylinder was done by having someone pump the pedal. According to the Bentley, you need to pressure bleed it. Thinking this was the problem, I hastily built a pressure bleeder - still no luck :( [as an aside- while the bentley tells you to do a pressure bleed, it doesnt tell you how to do so... so I may have been doing it wrong?]

other relevant facts: firewall is broken by slave cylinder, and the slave cylinder is angled slightly upward preventing the ideal pedal+plunger angle, but it still seems like it should be working. (I'm going to weld on some sheet metal to fix it).
7a flywheel
ClutchNet pressure plate and disc from a 200 Quattro ("3b", I believe)
Re-used whatever TOB was on the car (it had a sub 1k mile clutch, so the TOB was new)

PLEASE HELP ME FIGURE THIS OUT! Less than 2 weeks until the race. REALLY hoping not to have to drop the tranny again...
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D
8
Alright kids, its been about a week since the race and I promised I would circle back and give some updates!

The good:
-We finished! Not only did we finish without blowing up, but we managed P16 overall and P4 in class (out of 75 cars)
-Our best lap time around Road America was 3:12:xx. Easily one of the top 10 fastest cars. Based on my internet research, this is about the time a stock Subaru STI would run.
-226 laps completed in 14.5 hours, for a grand total of over 915 race miles
-diff locks!! OMG!! more on this in a minute
-034 street density motor and trans mounts worked GREAT! we ran without a snub mount (mostly due to huge radiator and intercooler) and had about 1/2" of clearance between the crank pulley and intercooler. Engine didn't budge at all.

The bad:
-I put the car 4 wheels off on the first lap. I blame wet track, cold tires, and all the other lame excuses you can think of.
-We use a lot more fuel with the AAN than the JT. 18.5 gallons used to last us 3h15m (LONG stints) and now we are refueling every 2h-2h15m
-Invisible wall of power loss at high RPM. What RPM? I have no clue- the only instruments we had working were the alternator indicator light and hazard lights (-: Speedo? Nah. Tach? Unlikely. Fuel gauge? Who needs one. Oil & water temp? What kind of luxurious world do YOU live in. Boost gauge? YEAH RIGHT!
-This car DESTROYS the front driver's tire in about 7 hours. Worn to the belts from new kind of destruction. We're running about -3/4* negative camber on each side and neutral-ish toe. NEED MOAR CAMBER
-034 LWFW didn't arrive on time to make it onto the car

The ugly:
-That exhaust I fabbed up in the last 24h before the race hung hella low. Thankfully, it only fell off once during the race, costing us about 15 minutes of track time

The pictures!!!:









RE: the diff locks,
The initial plan was to lock the center diff and have 1 wheel front/1 wheel rear putting power to the ground. As an experiment, I locked both center and rear. HOLY GRIP! Braking ability was greatly increased, as was ability to get on the power earlier. Had it rained AT ALL, we would have DOMINATED
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D
oh, and we didn't have a radiator fan (no room). not a big deal until we stopped moving and the car would boil over. kinda like an F1 car, right? fixed by adding 6oz of water wetter.
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D
one last thing... here's my old car:


you can view the full gallery here: http://www.murileemartin.com/UG/LWI13/LWI13.html
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mdg3369
That's pretty badass. If you're ever short a driver drop me a line, would be nice to drive a turbo QSW again.

As for negative camber, yeah, it sucks. And yeah, front tires wear out like crazy. I was going to make some offset delrin control arm bushings for mine, never got around to it, delrin is easy to find free :wink:, just need some time on a lathe to make them. Since it's Lemons, you could also chop/reweld the bottom of the strut, but that always seemed more risky than I wanted to do. If you stopped kicking ass and got some more allowance money, you could upgrade to 2 piece struts in the front and use crash bolts.

The rear end has a passive rear steer mechanism built in that promotes understeer. The subframe bushings are soft in one direction and allow massive toe in during hard cornering. You may experiment with filling these with JB weld, making solid mounts, etc. Don't know what it will do but I always wanted to try.
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nismo
Is the passive rear steer something that the Audi B2q had as well?

Eric
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pilihp2
derekste said:
-034 street density motor and trans mounts worked GREAT! we ran without a snub mount (mostly due to huge radiator and intercooler) and had about 1/2" of clearance between the crank pulley and intercooler. Engine didn't budge at all.
Click to expand...
I don't believe you. :wtf:

Glad to hear it ran without any issues!
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fundahl
How did you lock the center and rear diff?
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D
man I wish I could multi-quote on this forum...

mdg3369: shoot me an email! derekste [at] gmail [dot] com. Next race is 2014/4/19 @ Gingerman raceway- would love to have someone who is experienced with these rare birds. anyone else in the midwest who would be interested, please feel free to contact me.

nismo: yeah I'd like to hear more from mdg3369 about this setup. I will say that I had some pretty epic AWD drifts, when the car was making good power

pilihp2: to be honest I was a bit skeptical of running on 4 out of 5 "street" level mounts, but it seems to have worked out well. i opted for street density because (a) driver comfort IS a factor in endurance racing and because (b) I feel it's good to have a little "slop" in the system. we did have a broken OE mount at the end of the June race and I didn't check for this, but would be surprised if I found it.

fundahl: since I am still running the 016 drivetrain, I just pulled out the diff lock knob 2 clicks.
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D
bump back from the dead.

I sold this car, new owner blew it up (stupid plastic water neck on the back of the head disintegrated on his first time out, LOL)

I then bought a semi-sketchy (and expensive) AAN motor from F5 out on the east coast... and blew that up really quick last summer at the Corvette Museum in Kentucky. (This may have been partially our fault).

AANs are too damn expensive and rare for us to keep blowing up. The car is back in my stewardship and I am trying to buy a 97 A8 so we can swap the 4.2 in.

No major questions at this point, but I'm sure I'll have some in the next 6 months.
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R
Awesome! Props for not giving up. Post some pics of the car sometime.
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ejfluhr
Have you considered a 7A? We run a 90q20v and it is exceedingly reliable, probably because it's essentially a turbo without the turbo. I think we have 16 races of 16-24 hours duration on this engine since 2008, and it had > 200K miles when we started. Power isn't tremendous, but it happens mostly in the right RPM range for racing, and you can make a few tweaks (e.g. big MAF) to help. Plus it's a pretty easy install given the AAN, and generally cheap.

Eric
Team Unintended Acceleration 90q20v "Raging Inferno"
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D
Fuck my life we're on our third AAN (long story) - third time's a charm though, right?
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D
ejfluhr said:
Have you considered a 7A? We run a 90q20v and it is exceedingly reliable, probably because it's essentially a turbo without the turbo. I think we have 16 races of 16-24 hours duration on this engine since 2008, and it had > 200K miles when we started. Power isn't tremendous, but it happens mostly in the right RPM range for racing, and you can make a few tweaks (e.g. big MAF) to help. Plus it's a pretty easy install given the AAN, and generally cheap.

Eric
Team Unintended Acceleration 90q20v "Raging Inferno"
Click to expand...
you guys still racing Lemons?
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ejfluhr
2
Yes, but in ChumpCar/ChampCar the last 8 years. The 90q20v w/ 7A is a durable machine; not terribly fast, but we have never DNF'ed a race. Best finish was 6th place overall out of 40+ cars. We are currently building a replacement motor to run at Circuit of the Americas this summer.

Current car #456:


Prior car #444, RIP:
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5
The car runs and drives on engine #3!

I swapped the rear suspension out to Mk1 Rabbit GTI parts... much better (lowered the rear 3")

The gearing in this thing (stock 016 QSW) is shorter than I remember, boy does it rip.

Here are some pictures! :pics: :woowoo: 8)

Too bad our first race of the season (Autobahn, Joliet IL) was cancelled.

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J
Hells yea love it!
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ejfluhr
Nice pics, car looks good. I like the theme! Bummer to hear your race was canceled; our COTA race is scheduled for late June and we are currently holding out hope that it will continue.

Do you run 4x100 or 4x108 wheels? I like those rims; we've struggled keeping good sets of 15x7" 4x108 rims.

Cheers, Eric
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88a5tq
love the rear plate area message
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