Happy New...Not Yet!

On the last day, with only a few hours left of 2014, I get to announce some good news:

The engine is fully installed, all bits and pieces aligned and the Rocky Mountain Westy carrier bar fully installed as well. The engine is now entirely self supporting and all of the lifts, jacks, cherry-pickers, etc. have returned to their regular storage spaces, e.g. not in the garage where space is limited and they are badly underfoot.

The fully installed transmission, adapter, engine and engine carrier assembly. Sorry for the Soviet era picture: my camera was slightly on the fritz.

You can see how the whole affair bolts together, and I've included this second picture of how the main carrier bar not only bolts to the body of the bus, but also how it connects to trailing outriggers which extend to the rear of the engine compartment to bolt through the frame hole intended for the original carrier bar:

As per usual, I worked diligently to do everything the hard way. I previously mentioned replacing the the throw-out bearing before mating the engine and adapter to the transmission. I replaced the TO bearing with whistle-while-you-work unconcern, then spent an atrocious amount of time getting the engine mated up to the trans. Don't let anyone kid you: an EJ engine does not appreciate being supported from the bottom, and even if you have a cherry-picker style engine hoist, the center of mass of the EJ engine makes hanging it a challenge.

You'll just have to do what I did: Try, try again-- and don't ever give up.

Having got it all the way together, I bolted up the carrier bar and hung the engine from it. Some jiggling and the use of some 3mm aluminum shims from Rocky Mountain Westy to correct engines that were not aligning with the body and I looked all set.

Read over my Bentley manual that night which I had left open to the section on replacing the TO bearing just before I did the work. I reviewed it again....and discovered I'd really humped myself.

There is a sleeve that the TO bearing rides on: inside the sleeve is the transmission input shaft. This sleeve is bolted onto the transmission. There should be a light coating of new lubricant on the outside surface of the sleeve for the Inside Diameter of the TO bearing to ride on.

That sleeve was dry as a bone. Clean! But dry.

There's nothing that improves your speed of performing a procedure than practice. To my credit, it only took me 4 hours to take the whole thing apart completely (engine, carrier, transmission adapter) lightly lube the outside of that throw-out bearing sleeve and put the whole mess back together again. Along the way, I discovered that the transmission hanger bolts (at the top of the bell-housing) were installed incorrectly as well. I fixed that, too.

So the engine is in, complete.

Next up will be installation of the throttle valve reverser.

Once the TVR is in, that will put the throttle valve assembly within reach so I'll be grafting the stock throttle cable end together with the cable end that came out of the donor 97 Impreza. I've seen an installation trick I've wanted to try...

Ok...now. HAPPY NEW YEAR! (Because I intend to run this engine in 2015!)

The Cool Fool

I've been saving up posts to this blog for the holidays. (Actually, I've been run off my feet at home, at work, with parents and in-laws and at church. I've just slowed to sub-lightspeed approaching the holiday, so this has been the first chance since Thanksgiving to write this all down.)

Having taken Thanksgiving delivery of the Champion Cooling EC281 Radiator (Originally for a 1965 Chevrolet Bel-Air) as the radiator of choice for the Bus, I decided to get it out there immediately and confirm that all of my measuring and fretting and waiting hadn't been in vain. (5 weeks is a long time to wait for something that is supposed to be a stock item. I'm lookin' at you, JEGS.) Having assured myself that the the product was in good condition when it arrived, the first thing I did was to armor it.

I put on the armor because I had this unfortunate encounter with the Scirocco radiators that my Father-in-law had bought me for Christmas last year, and which I spent much of this year preparing to install: When parts are within reach of children who do not understand their importance and fragility, bad thing happen. In this case, it was my son who used his thumbnail to 'draw' on all of the cooling vanes of the radiator. When I discovered it, you could hear the scream from the next continent.

Not kicking my son over the horizon was a herculean effort. He survived, and I learned that if I wanted something safe, keeping it out of the house was the first step, and if it was especially delicate (as radiator fins are) I'd better have a buffer over it to keep me from dropping it on my head and denting it. (The radiator, not my head. The radiator's worth more.)

Thanksgiving weekend, I found that the 1/2 inch styrofoam sheeting that the radiator was packed was perfectly suited to the job of armor, so I cut pieces to protect the fins and taped them in place. Then I went out and, biting my nails down to the knuckles, (this had BETTER fit!) slid under the bus and raised the radiator into the gap between the frame rails.

WAS...BEAUTIFUL. I grabbed a pair of clamps to hold it in place so I could marvel at it and take pictures. It fit like a stinking glove, almost as if I knew what I was doing.

Note the styrofoam face to the bottom. The top is likewise protected. The wide flanges with pre-drilled holes conveniently located puts the unit within easy reach of a drill to drill up through the frame rail and permanently suspend the radiator.

So the radiator is in place and only awaits a call to a TIG weldor to perform the input/output pipe modifications needed. There will also need to be some clearancing work done above the radiator to ensure puller fan clearance. I might not get to use dual 12" fans (which would provide me with 226² inches of active area air movement, but a single 16 inch will likely do enough at 201² inches of active area.

Heck, the whole rectangular area is only 404.25 inch. A single 16 inch fan is only an 11% reduction in active cooling over a pair of 12 inch units. I think we should be able to handle that, right? Other than the 11% improvement in cooling, it feels like the only win for the dual fans is redundancy, and you'd have to wire your fan controller circuits to make them truly redundant: Two of something on the same switch doesn't automagically make them redundant. It has to be redundant end-to-end.

With the radiator sized and sorted, our next adventure will be final coupling of the engine to the transmission, and the addition of the Rocky Mountain Westy Carrier Bar.

Ready, Ready, Ready, Aim, Aim....Aim....Fire.

I hate doing things twice. It offends my sense of parsimony as my money and opportunities are limited. 'Go back and do it again the right way' is also an embarrassment. It implies that I didn't think things through well the first time.

So obviously, VolksarU has been very embarrassing, especially when I found out that I had taken people's word for things that I should have checked on first. Some of this goes back to the parsimony: Why should I spend my time doing something first when others have already preceded me and my contributions to the craft can be refinements, rather than wholesale invention?

After having run aground in September with the Sirocco radiators, I was forced into this kind of retrenchment. I already have more into the project than the vehicle is worth. Yeah. So what. If you want to get rich, pick a different hobby. Instead of crying too long in my suds, I took the information that DW in Connecticut captured with his successful underbelly design and started considering my own state of affairs: The very best solution is available is just conveniently on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean: Fellows Speed Shop in Birmingham, England, UK.

So I got in touch and dropped a simple query: How much? For air intake, chassis strengtheners, custom radiator and scoop, mounts, and (gulp) shipping. The number I got back caused my mouth to go dry: $1400 give or take, depending on the exchange rate and the banking fees to convert USD to GBP. This might not sound like much, but consider: If everything arrives in one piece (and that's no guarantee) and I hook everything up, dump in 4 gallons of coolant, fire up the engine and the radiator springs a leak, then what? Ask for another one? RMA the first one back in exchange for another that may or may not work? Is Fellows going to eat the shipping both ways across the Atlantic? Let's not be silly.

That is a very high risk / high reward opportunity to buy your way to success. I was frustrated enough to ring them for a price, but not nervy enough to put all of my eggs in that basket. So back to DIY land: What radiator will fit the space between the midship cross member and the major rear cross member, and also fit between the longitudinal frame rails to be held up out of harms way in the same manner that the fellows design is? At the same time, the core surface should as large as possible within the space, given less than ideal orientation relative to the direction of travel. Maximum radiant surface.

So I measured every which way and then went shopping.

Modern factory radiators were out. Too much plastic and epoxy and other things that don't take well to being nicked or sprayed by gravel. This radiator, even protected from major damage by the frame rails, is going to have to be tough.

Vintage style brass and copper radiators are out because they're heavy and have too many serious compromises, U.S. Radiator notes that "The thermal conductivity or heat transfer rate of copper is 92% versus aluminum which is only 49%.  However, the copper fins are bonded to the coolant tubes using lead solder which is very inefficient [not to mention toxic] and slows the heat transfer rate to just slightly better than that of aluminum." So in short, your average brass/copper radiator will weigh much more than aluminum, fail to transfer heat any better, and is assembled of toxic components. Um..no.

So this left me in the realm of high performance aluminum radiators. Prices can take off for the sky here, or have historically. That's one of the reasons I was happy and surprised to find Champion Cooling of Lake Elsinore, California. They build all-aluminum radiators for the high performance market and do so at a reasonable price. They've got a fantastic reputation for customer service, and the country is dotted with their dealers, including domestic online dealers. Their radiators are assembled by TIG welding and furnace brazing which gives them a leg up over the competition.

Because I need minimum vertical thickness to fit above the frame rails, I can't use a radiator that has a very thick core. I've only got an absolute ceiling height of 6.125" to stack the radiator and the fans, so only a two row, 1.75" thickness core. Also take into account that the core is halfway between the front and rear (or in this laid down orientation, top and bottom) faces of the tanks, that leave marginal space for dual 12" fans which are 12.75" thick at the central hub motor. Total it all up...and that's less than an inch of vertical clearance left for wiggle room and air output.

So that alone confined me to two row radiators. I found myself with an embarrassment of riches, as Champion Cooling makes hundreds of specialty radiator models in two, three, and four row designs. Just narrowing myself to two row radiators, I had to sort through the specifications of 270 radiators and applications to find the unit with the maximum core area that would also fit in the space. This past weekend, I narrowed it down to eight, and by evening, I had it down to one.

The heir-apparent is the DPI 281 model, which was a workhorse designed for Chevrolet applications from the 1950s through the 1960s, and was found in models as diverse as the Corvette, Chevelle, Impala and Bel Air. This is a design that is going to be available for a long, long time. All of the right attributes were there to be the winner: designed for heat dissipation for about 400HP, or three times the output of my Subaru EJ22 (123HP.) The design has wide brackets TIG welded to the radiator frame, top and bottom tanks (that when laid down, will become 'front and rear tanks.') There is one major hangup, though.

The one attribute that is critical is the the coolant inlet/outlet. In a traditional installation, the inlet/outlet is on the back face of the radiator, toward the engine. By contrast, this radiator will be laying down and vertical space is at a premium. No matter what, I've got to have a radiator where the inlet/outlet fittings are mounted inline (not perpendicular) with the radiator core. So even though I've found my radiator (and purchased it, today) it will still require modification to go into the space.

Yes, it's going to get the fittings removed and relocated to the 'front and rear.' No, I won't be the one doing it. TIG welding isn't the point-n-shoot that MIG welding has become. TIG is fussy, specialty work. I've already got a quote from a TIG weldor for about the same price as the radiator itself to fuss with the inlet/outlet pair and move them according to my requirements. At the neighborhood of $350 for radiator and customization, it is a much more cost effective to modify an existing radiator than having Northern or Griffen or Wizard perform a custom build for me. About 3 times less expensive.

The characteristic that charmed me to this product are the wide flanges (28") and the comfortable fit of 3/4" on each side of the core body, which will ride above the level of the frame rails, well protected by the flanges. Instead of requiring me to add support pins to the ends of the tanks for a suspension mount like Fellows does, the brackets can bolt to the bottom of the frame rails and be very secure. This design also gives me another warm fuzzy that the Fellows design did not: The Fellows custom radiator has the scoop bolted to the radiator body itself. I'm sure that's wonderfully secure, but what happens when you cream a hard-headed raccoon at 70mph? Probably tear the scoop right off, and mangle the radiator badly enough that it bleeds out all over the road. Then what happens? Have Fellows ship a new one? Please. (I'll grant that this isn't likely to happen, and there haven't been any reports from the UK of that happening, but still...)

My notion is that the scoop should be firmly secure to the frame...with shear bolts. A shear pin or bolt is a safety device designed to snap off in the case of a mechanical overload, preventing other, more expensive parts from being damaged. As a mechanical sacrificial part, it is analogous to an electric fuse. If I clock Rocky Raccoon in the brain-pan, I'll lose the scoop, the bolts shearing away. But because the scoop can break-away, you lose it and preserve the radiator, a much more valuable component. You can limp out of Death Valley running your fans full blast without your scoop. You can't without your radiator. In the best case scenario, you pull over, walk back 100 yards, brush the busted bits of raccoon off the scoop and remount it when you hit the next town with new shear bolts.

Using the wide flanges on the DPI 281 radiator, the flanges can connect to the frame rails with 8.8 hardness galvanised steel bolts. But *also* using those wide flanges allows me to mount the scoop to it with the shear bolts. Everybody wins, and a 12 gauge steel scoop will be able to take a good shot without folding up like origami if it happens to hit something soft.

Assembling the Stack

After the Hamster Dance to get two lousy dowel pins, I was more than ready to get on with the bolt-up of the adapter plate, flywheel and clutch components as the next step to moving the engine into place before the weather drops to freezing. I don't often get to spend sustained time on this project; I just maunder along, chipping away at it like sculptor chiseling on a monument. There's a lot of mountain left, but there is wisdom in just looking at the piece of stone in front of you and just working that bit, rather than trying to constantly hold every step in your mind while you work: That way lies madness...or failure.

So I happily unpacked the components from Outfront Motorsports / Rocky Mountain Westy and got to it.

First: The addition of those silly dowel pins. They were a pinch fit, so I put them in the freezer overnight, then the next day heated the case bosses with a torch. Then I used a lightweight 6oz tack hammer to tap in the dowel pins. Fortunately, the depth isn't critical when working with the adapter plate. I still did it properly so that both tips were flush when I was finished. No one will ever see it. But I'll know its there, and that it was done right.

Now I was finally set to add all of the goodies in the kit. The first job was to remove the bottom studs that came from the factory. They're being replaced with bolts from the kit because it isn't the engine that bolts to the transmission, it is the adapter plate, which has its own set of properly sized studs relative to the size of a VW 091 transmission.

Not much to get ahold of to remove the old studs. Thankfully, they didn't protest when being removed.

With the old out, I rehung the adapter plate on the dowel pins, which blessedly fit perfectly. 

I added the bolts to secure the adapter to the engine, and then added the studs for the transmission side. Threads for each were liberally juiced up with red loctite, a thread sealer that cures in the absence of oxygen, meaning when you juice up the threads, the adhesive cures from the inside (no air) to outside. The red color coded loctite is industrial strength: If I want those bolts or studs back out, I'm going to need to heat the adhesive around the metal to 560°F before it will let go. So better do it right the first time.

Now that I had the adapter mounted permanently, it was time to add the flywheel.

The flywheel slid over the crankshaft hub. The perimeter bolts were turned into place by a few threads just to keep track of them. The same for the three small roll-pins that act as dowel pins for aligning the clutch plate: If they won't be in the way, put fasteners in early so that you don't lose track of them. At this point the flywheel is just set in place, not secured.

Starting to look snazzy! Note that the types of steel that the flywheel is made up are different: the teeth around the edge that the starter engages are specially hardened to take the punishment of being bashed into by the starter gear before it gives the flywheel a twist. The weight of the flywheel also smooths out acceleration and deceleration: Too heavy and you spend a lot of power getting it turning, too light, and every microscopic variance at the throttle is immediately translated to the transmission. 

That's fine for a race car, but for a road vehicle, especially a heavy one like the VW Bus, you want the moderating effect of a fairly heavy flywheel.

Now we permanently mount to flywheel to crankshaft. Here's where we break out the monster tools:

Eight bolts gooey with loctite were added and torqued down to 55 foot-pounds each. 

 In the foreground is my Christmas present from a few years ago: a beautiful Brownline Digital Torque wrench with a 2 foot long body and a thick handle so you can really lean on it without worrying that something will break. Despite being built like a tank, it is probably one of the most precision tools that I own.

I don't just magically 'know' what torque is correct: each of the bolts that has been added in the build up of the stack has come with values from the vendor for what torque they should be set to. This is not something you want to guess at. So you tell the wrench what the value should be, then start pulling on the wrench until it chimes. Ta-da. You're exactly on the mark.

With the flywheel in place, it was time to add the clutch disc, one half of the friction portion of the clutch that does most of the wearing when shifting and then add the clutch pressure plate, the other half that the disc rubs up against when engaging and disengaging. The trick is that the disc has to be centered in the middle of the flywheel, but you can't get to it because its covered by the clutch cover. To the rescue: A clutch alignment tool: A plastic shaft with flutes on it to mimic the transmission input shaft that the clutch disc mounts on as it is alternately clamped between the pressure plate  and flywheel (power engaged) or released by the pressure plate (power disengaged, like when you're changing gears.) 

The grotty looking clutch pressure plate being slowly bolted down in a criss-cross pattern of the six bolts that hold it on. The clutch disc is hidden under the cover, but you can see the input shaft alignment tool in the middle that holds the disc centered perfectly as the pressure plate descends over it, eventually holding it in place.

The 'fingers' in the middle of the pressure plate are actually springs that you are pushing against when you put your foot down on the clutch pedal. When you overcome their initial resistance, they flower out and cause the pressure plate surface that had been clamping the disc to retract and take pressure off the disc, causing the turning power of the pressure plate to be disengaged from the clutch disc which is attached to the transmission by the input shaft that our alignment tool is mimicking for now.

So why did I re-use the clutch disc and cover plate from the Bus? 1) Because there's nothing wrong with them. Treated well, a clutch will last 100,000 miles or more, and this clutch had less than 5k miles on it when the vehicle was put into storage 14 years ago. 2) A new disc and cover plate is about $160. Why would I spend that just to have something new and pretty that is a 'wear component,' that is, it is designed to be used up during its lifespan? A tire is a wear component, replaced every 40k miles or so. The wheel that the tire is wrapped around is not a wear component: unless damaged, it does not need to be replaced. I'll be back in to replace this clutch pressure plate and disc eventually...in about 20 years if everything goes right.

The final reveal: adapter plate to engine (3 bolts), flywheel to crankshaft (8 bolts), clutch disc added and held aligned to the center of flywheel by the alignment tool, shown withdrawn. The smooth tip of the tool goes all the way into a recess in the center axis of the crankshaft (which you can see all the way down at the middle of the picture.) The fluted neck of the tool holds the clutch disc perfectly centered. Finally the pressure plate (6 bolts and aligned by 3 pins) is bolted down to the flywheel. The stack is now complete, and ready to be mated to the transmission.

This was a good afternoon to go slowly and document as I went. With the engine side essentially finished, the next step is to maneuver the engine into the compartment and with it oriented correctly in 3 degrees of rotation (roll, pitch & yaw) slide the input shaft from the transmission down into that cavity without kinking anything. For that part, I'm going to need help, because I can't single-handedly keep 250 pounds of engine supported and oriented all while its being mated together. That's when it will be time for 'a little help from my friends.'

For Want of a Horseshoe Nail...

So I am all rigged up with my engine finally back on the hoist and off the stand. Huzzah! Now I can install my Outback Motorsports Subaru to 091 Transmission adapter! I had to have free access to the flywheel end of the engine to be able to bolt all of that on. Up onto the hoist, and then rested at a 45° angle in a tire with the flywheel end up.

Look at the shiny! All I need now are the alignment pins...uh oh.

I slid the adapter plate onto the bottom studs, and turned the top studs in a few rotations just to get the gist. It is a 'gist' because the studs only clamp the engine and transmission together, and in this case, sandwich the adapter plate between them. They are for *pulling* load, not a shearing load; they are not meant to keep the engine and transmission aligned with each other around the rotating axis. That's the job of tiny little pins, commonly called dowel pins. Apparently Subaru calls them 'Straight Pins' and I'm about to tell you how I found that out.

Since the aluminum adapter plate pretends to be a Subaru transmission bellhousing so that everything must successfully align to it, that includes offering a pair of drilled holes for the dowel pins. The engine crankcase also has very precisely sized holes for the dowel pins because they *precisely* align the engine with the transmission in the stock Subaru application. When you try to separate the engine from the transmission in a Subaru vehicle, it is often the dowel pins that everything hangs up on. Any corrosion of these tiny steel studs make for an ill fit, They are essentially a friction fit when installed new at the factory.

If corrosion can hang it up, that has to be a beastly close tolerance, indeed. Often when the engine is removed, the dowel pins stay stuck in the transmission side. Or on the engine side. Or one on each side. You've got to have them both to re-mate the engine & transmission, or a failure to
perfectly align might cause parts to meet that ought not to.

Both of mine were missing from the engine. I can't check the transmission side, because it went away a month ago when I finally had the poor carcass of a 97 Impreza Outback Sport hauled away. Likely, those alignment pins went away with the transmission.

The only thing stopping me from moving forward are two lousy pins. Aw...crap.

Subaru has an excellent reputation for keeping exploded diagrams online for all of their products going back decades, so I figured I'd swallow my pride, hit the diagrams and then order the part number for the pins.

Except there was no part number for a 97 model year. 1998 with a different engine and transmission, yes. But not 97. The part number from the 1998 probably works, as Subaru doesn't change things around unless there is an engineering reason to, but there's no way to know without buying and trying from the dealership. Dealer parts departments aren't any nicer in Subaru-land than they are at any other dealer. Subaru just publicly documents their parts more liberally.

I called my local dealer, explained what I needed, and..hmmm, 'I don't have any P/N for 97MY (Model Year) Impreza. Hang on.' I sat on hold for 15 minutes, which made me wonder if the parts rep had gone to lunch. When he finally returned, he had news that caused me to bang my head on my desk, startling my co-workers.

"I really went digging for that part, but it isn't anywhere in the references. I checked every cross-reference I could and didn't find it either. This has only happened to me once or twice since I've worked here, so I called over to corporate, which is why you were on hold for so long." Here, he at least had the decency to sound abashed, "They said that you can't buy them singly, they only come with the whole shortblock, which is about $2500."  WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP. (My head, beating my desk.)

These are two metal stud and are as common as grass, and I just want to buy the *right ones for my engine.* Will the 98MY fit? No way to know but to buy them. They're special order (two weeks.) You have to buy them in advance. ($1.73 for the pair) and can't be bought online because they're too inexpensive: I would have to go physically to the dealership, walk around the back of the building and stand in line at the parts department so I could push my $1.73 + tax across the counter...Just like it was 1939. What....the....hell.

I made other calls around to independent shops. Nobody would take the time to even consider an assist for such a small item. So I did what I am loathe to do: I went out to my garage, got out snap-gages and calipers and measured the holes. 1cm in diameter, and with both sides added up, about 2.2cm long. I called Fastenal (who specialize in exactly this kind of product) and was told that I could order them, but I'd have to pay 6 times their value in shipping for delivery to the store a week from now. If I didn't like my phone so much, I would have thrown it out the window.

So I ordered the part from the Fastenal website for delivery to my own address. (Why have it shipped to the store for the same price? To make an extra trip to go fetch them? What monkeys are running that company?) $1.53 each, plus $9 shipping, with no guarantee that they'll fit correctly if I have not measured accurately.

There is a poem, old, but which perfectly illustrates how complex and important affairs can be undone by the absence of a trivial component. If anything, it illustrates that today's world is ruled by the same laws of happenstance that have always been with us. I'll end with this and read it over and over while I wait a week for two tiny steel studs to be delivered.

For want of a horseshoe nail, a shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, a horse was lost,
For want of a horseman, a platoon was lost,
For want of a platoon, a battle was lost,
For want of a battle, a war was lost,
For want of a war, a kingdom was lost,
All for the want...of a horseshoe nail.

Lie to Me

It is with a sick feeling in my gut and a bitter tang in my mouth that I write this.

I've been had. The VolksarU 0.1 design, as described here over the last 18 months, is not sustainable. In short, if you've been pursuing a solution based on the VolksarU 0.1 work to date, you're in the same hole I'm in: Wasted time, skull sweat, useless products, squandered money, and hours of my life that I'm not going to get back.

It is the hours that I'm the most pissed about, because they're the only currency that matters. You get a certain number of them when you're born, and like a unmarked gift card, you redeem its value one heartbeat at a time without ever knowing what the balance is left on your account. When you run out, you're done. Kaput. So I resent the hours lost more than anything else.

So I'd better define 'not sustainable.' The reasons that I started down this path, not just of a liquid cooled engine but of the dual, in-bay radiators were numerous:

• In-bay offered more protection
• In-bay leveraged the use of common stock VW components that are still in production
• In-bay leveraged the cooling intake already built into the body of the T2B (73-79, aka 'Late Bay') 
• In-bay offered the greatest potential for an inexpensive solution that could be accomplished by the owner/operator with only common home tools and very few inexpensive, specialized services.
• Most of all, in-bay had several 'worked examples' which advertised themselves as 'working solutions.' So in-bay was prior art and not especially innovative. Making the installation simple was what required the innovation, and that's what I set out to do with VolksarU: make it simple.

Instead, I've been had by builders who have done in-bay installations, crowed about it to the world, put up videos, shown off their work in pictures and forum threads, and claim 'it just works!' The most important details were left out: What are your coolant temperatures? At what speed? What fans are you running? How much are you running your fans? Under what load? At what mph? What RPM? What gear ratio and final drive? Early bay with small intakes, late bus with large intakes...etc? There's a saying in science: If you can't explain it using numbers, it is opinion, not data. Or put another way, (this one's mine) "anecdote is not the plural of data." So lots of chest beating out there, but damn little data.

This is common among whirly-gig shade-tree mechanics: Make it work just well enough to say "It runs! It's Miller Time!" This makes engineers scream and start pulling hairs out of the back of their hands. The blame is shared: The shade-tree mechanic over-represents the work and the claims are accepted at face value by other "shadys" and by a few engineers who unwisely let the contagious optimism get the better of their natural pessimism.

There's a saying that has been around in various forms since the 18th Century (and probably longer) that sums up this Murphy's Law-esque phenomenon: "Never blame intentional malice for what is more likely unintentional carelessness." I'd say that sums up what's happened here pretty well.

What caused this fiction to topple was when D.W. in Connecticut (who I'm acquainted with and who does dead clever fab work that would make NASA proud) finished restoring his 1970 low-light Bus, did the dual in-bay VolksarU 0.1 style installation: and Voilà, Instant Overtemp Conditions! When he properly started asking the engineering questions, some facepalm inducing facts came to light:

1. No one had built a test harness to see what the true temperature in the engine bay actually was.
2. No one had instrumented what the coolant temperature differential (the ability to cool) was under various scenarios. No one at all.
3. No one actually knew how often their fans were running.
4. Critically, there are no worked examples capable of sustained freeway speed without overheating. (There are reasons for this, which I'll get to.)
5. But most important, until D.W. 'put his hand up' publicly to report the design failure, no one who had spun these tales of inexpensive functionality had ever reported 'what the final results were.' Not one of them. (Though props to BoxerMick in Colorado, who was discovering and truth-telling the limitations of his installation about the same time (August 2014) that the rest of this all came to light. To date, he's still running at temperatures that would cause a production engineer to give a thumbs down for running without a safety margin.)

All of the shadys eventually justified their half-truth one way or another: "It's good enough for in-town driving."  "I drove mine cross country!" (And your engine blew up less than 6 months after you got to your destination, a fact you failed to report until someone ratted on you.) The haters & purists (which are usually synonyms) came out in force to laugh and make personal attacks...against those who had uncovered the fraud! These are the types of detestable vermin who cheer when someone fails.

Viewed in retrospect, there are several show-stoppers, all of which are addressable if you spray enough money at it. So if you've been following VolksarU as 'cheap speed,' then you missed the whole point the first time around. Stamp 'CHEAP DREAMER' on your forehead and then go back and read the FAQ, specifically the part about priorities: Reliability, Cost Control, DIY Friendly and Longevity.

The VolksarU 0.1 design fails for the following reasons:

1. A Subaru 2.2L engine / transmission pair makes 65MPH for 2700RPM in 5th gear. The VW engine / transmission pair makes 65MPH for 4200RPM in 4th gear. We have a fundamental collision of assumptions here. If you're turning a Subaru at 4200RPM for mile after weary mile, you're wearing the engine at a tremendous rate by combination of more heat, more friction, more wear just to keep up with traffic in an already cooling limited environment. Result: short lifespan for the engine in real-world use. Fail.
2. A traditional Subaru factory installation puts the top of the engine about even with the top of the radiator. The coolant pump only has to be able to lift a 'head' of 6 inches, then it's out to the radiator inlet, and falling with a free gravity return the whole way. Also, counting all of the turns the coolant must take, I count 4 turns (stock) until it is back at the engine. By comparison, using dual scirocco radiators creates 11 90° turns. All of those turns require pressure and power; they're not free. If a stock Subaru configuration lifts the coolant 6 inches before gravity takes over, the scirocco radiators require a head of 18" from the pump because they are completely above the top of the engine! 3x the lift? That's crazy. The majority of the pump's energy goes into getting it pushed up the first hill, just like a roller coaster, and then has to keep pushing it through the labyrinth of turns of those two radiators. That's bad news when you're beat'n the dog at 4200RPM just to keep up with traffic. Fail.
3. Finally, and most damning, the engine compartment was only ever designed for active cooling, meaning when the engine's running, there's a fan running, too. Nothing short of body surgery is going to change that. Fail.

There are fixes for each one of these, but if you think I'm going to test them all, you're nuts: I'm already a year over-due on this project. Some of the things that might be done to change the game are:

• Have your VW transmission rebuilt with a different 4th gear and final drive gear. Now put the biggest tires that will fit on it: 27 inches tall. All of these changes mean that you won't have to turn the engine as fast, so you won't be making as much heat. That won't make your transmission any more tolerant of the much greater torque and horsepower from the engine, but it will lower your RPM. Another alternative is to replace the VW transmission with the proper Subaru one with a flipped ring & pinion. That will make the engine very happy. But will that fix the overtemp problem and allow you to keep the radiators in-bay? I look forward to someone else being the first to spend their dough to find out.
• Active cooling: When the engine turns over, stone-cold in February, start the radiator fans on high. You might not overheat before you get where you're going. So do you feel lucky? What's your travel range in the dead of summer in Galveston? You might get to the grocery store. Or not.
• Change radiators: something that doesn't require as much work from the coolant pump. I cannot fathom how you would do this successfully in-bay without murdering the exterior aesthetics, but again, I'm letting someone else figure that out. I'm done with trying to make 10 lbs. of bologna fit in a 5 lb. bag.

Instead, I'm revisiting one of the alternatives based on actual documented success. VolksarU 0.2 "Pot-Belly Pig" will use an aluminum radiator with a small scoop between the frame rails.

So the moral of this story is three-fold:

1. Don't trust. Politely verify. 
2. If it sounds too good to be true, it hasn't been measured enough.
3. Don't be an optimist. They may enjoy their lives more, but they make lousy engineers.

And finally, to the liars (not telling the whole truth is a lie): Your personal pride interfering with sharing the whole truth has cost a lot of people a lot of money and their more valuable currency, time. You've made yourselves and the rest of us look ridiculous to the haters. So take a lesson: When your 'Miller Time' engineering goes wrong, don't just sit on your hands and hope something magically gets better. That is the logic of a 5 year-old.

Be an adult: Put your damn hand up.

Two Radiators, One ECU

So typically, in these scirocco radiator installations, the logic for fan control is um...dumb. I mean that literally: The thermistor (coolant temp sensor, aka CLT in Autogeek terms) that screws into the radiator turns the fan on at 196°F and off at 191°F or thereabouts depending on which CLT you buy.

For a dumb, un-coordinated system circa 1974 (when it was designed) it works. One radiator, one fan, one thermistor (CLT.)

But when you put two radiators in a series coolant loop, yet still hand over simple minded fan control to separate uncoordinated CLTs, you've got a case where your cooling fans are not working in concert with each other: they still think they're each in their own single car and they manage cooling their radiator independently.

As an example of bad things that can happen: the coolant exits the engine past the factory CLT probe, but since we don't use it for fan control, it can't help us. The coolant enters the left radiator, and does one full pass before the thermistor CLT (LEFT) gets hit, giving an artificially low reading. If the artificially low reading is still hot enough, CLT (LEFT) turns on its FAN (LEFT.) RAD1 (LEFT) cools better for the help of the fan. By the time CLT (RIGHT) sees the temperature, we've already done 3 passes through the scirocco radiators. That means that CLT (RIGHT) may read just cool enough not to turn on its FAN (RIGHT.) So the left hand fan gets a work-out, and the right hand fan gets...less action.

Instead of trusting these blind switches that were not designed for this engine, let alone this daffy application (A Subaru in a Bus?!?) I'm keeping all of the control with the Subaru ECU, because it is using a HELL of a lot more sensor information to determine cooling requirements than just simple thermistors.

Look at the diagram below, and then read the description at the bottom.


There are two types of fans available for these housings: single speed and dual speed. They get two speeds by having two windings. Power one winding: low speed. Power both windings: high speed. In the factory scirocco applications, the low speed winding was connected to the AC compressor; When the compressor comes on it automatically switches on the low speed winding to cool the condenser (inline with the radiator) as well as to slightly over-cool the engine, since running the AC produces more load and more heat. The high speed side still operates for coolant over-temp situations triggered just by the screw-in thermistor. Cars without AC had only a single speed fan, triggered by the thermistor.

With its stock fans and radiator, the Subaru ECU controls two single speed fans, a smaller fan (AC ON and/or low heat load) and a larger fan (over-temp conditions.) Unlike the blind thermistor however, the Subaru ECU uses multiple sensors to determine conditions: the CLT sensor measures coolant temp at its hottest point where it exits the engine, and the VSS which measures the Vehicle's Speed and can take into account how much ram air the radiator should be receiving and therefore whether to trigger the small fan, the large fan, or both for maximum cooling.

If you follow the diagram, you'll see that I'm only just twinning the number of relays that FAN1 & FAN2 low amp circuits control. When the ECU triggers for slow speed cooling (FAN2, in blue) then FAN2A & FAN2B are both energized, cooling the flow through both radiators concurrently instead of relying on the blindly independent control of the thermistors screwed into each radiator.

The Subaru ECU can compute needed cooling based on load (MAF data vs MAP & BARO correction,) plus the vehicle's speed (VSS) and the CLT temperature value all at the same time. If FAN2A & FAN2B aren't doing the job, the ECU will add FAN1A & FAN1B (the green circuit) for maximum flow. In this way, the ECU waves the baton for all four circuits on both radiators concurrently. No chance of two different thermistors deciding to do different things with their fans.

That's the concept in a (very verbose) nut-shell. The wiring is actually very simple (which is good, because I'm sort of rubbish at wiring) and Jeff Robenolt fabbed up a fuse and relay box for me from Subaru parts based on my design. It all works, and spending 60 seconds with it would allow the idea to make sense to someone who can't follow my ersatz wiring diagram. I'm going to do a slightly higher end build using new Cooper-Bussman fuse panels and relay blocks to really clean up the appearance and make it very simple to mount and diagnose. It also removes the need to harvest the mounts, fuse panels and relay blocks from the donor Subaru which always look bodged together when hacked into a new vehicle. Better to spend the extra $50 on an off-the shelf solution of common industry parts than unnecessarily harvesting brittle old plastic from a 20 year old Subaru.