20vt B3 (The Bandit)

[deaner]

Wooohoooo! Moving forward! Coil mount looks good man. You have a spot in mind for those bad boys?

[DE80q]

Thanks, I still need more practice tig welding alum. They will hold, but don't look as they should. Most of the alum. Welding I do is cast alum. pieces, and that is totally different than welding extruded.

The plan is to use a piece of alum. angle to make a mount that goes from the radiator to the firewall. Only time will tell if that works out. That mount will also be used to mount the Saab relay/fuse box I snagged.

[elaw]

Hey when you do that, make sure to use a rubber mount at the radiator end of the bracket. I used one like this:


Attaching a rigid mount to a radiator is a recipe for trouble...

[DE80q]

Yep, I actually have a couple of the small OEM radiator mounts to use. I'm hoping it works as I have it planned in my head.

[Sparkyjack]

I would love to have the new turbo setup in an running well for Carlisle next year.

Hopefully it's not running lean so we can have fun on the ride from York.
Watching the bandit damn near get sideswiped was not fun.

Jack

[DE80q]

Yeah, you has a front row seat for that near miss. The plan is to have it all set up and running over he winter, and get as much tuning done as possible before then. Should be a fun trip up the turn like.

[DE80q]

Just a small update. You may remember me picking up Jim Green's old crank trigger setup. It is designed to use the Audi VR sensor, which is a PITA to get to work with MS. So to simplify things, I went ahead and made up this.



This adaptor fits properly in the hole for the Audi VR sensor, but is threaded to accept a threaded body hall sensor. This is pretty much what it will look like in the end




Should work out quite well with the new setup I think.

[LeafBox]

Wow, nice. Quality as always.
Thought I would start cheering you on now that I finally made a user

[DE80q]

Wow, nice. Quality as always.
Thought I would start cheering you on now that I finally made a user

I appreciate that. I do what I can to make things work without having to change too much around in the engine bay. Hopefully I can clean thing up a little more with the new setup.

There isn't much love for the old 20vt these days, so it was great to see another one join.

[LeafBox]

Wow, nice. Quality as always.
Thought I would start cheering you on now that I finally made a user

I appreciate that. I do what I can to make things work without having to change too much around in the engine bay. Hopefully I can clean thing up a little more with the new setup.

There isn't much love for the old 20vt these days, so it was great to see another one join.

Well I'm not surprised, it's a pretty silly engine...
You'd have to have some kind of mental illness to want to use one

[DE80q]

Slowly but surely packages are rolling in. I now have some euro goodness for the interior!


The ashtray is well used, but it came with a cleaned chrome insert, so that was nice!

[LeafBox]

You guys did'nt have those? Hmm, I never knew that.

[DE80q]

We only got the wood panels for the Aux gauges and ash tray lid. I wanted the proper black plastic ones to go with my 80's interior.

[LeafBox]

Ah, interesting.

[DE80q]

While waiting to get the bandit towed away to start the real work, I have been receiving packages. I received this earlier this week.


As you can see, there are a few cracks and is scuffed up a little. So I decided to try my had at fixing it. In another thread, I was referred to a thread on Quattroworld for what to use to "solvent weld" the lens back together. It worked, but not as well as I was hoping. That was probably my fault. So I did what I could to fill in the main crack. After that there was a lot of careful razor scraping, then wet sanding with 600, 1200, and 2000 grit paper.



In the second pic you can still see the crack, but I figure unless I grind it out, and fill it in with pigmented epoxy(yes its out there for this job) I'll have to live with it or now.

So I went about polishing it. Started with rubbing compound, then polishing compound, the Meguiar's ultimate compound, then some Ice polish. Came out pretty well, and the crack is much harder to see. Sorry about the pics, best lighting in my apartment was in my bathroom




And after all that work, here it is on the Bandit! Makes my other lights looks like crap, so I'll have to polish those now too...



Now I need to figure out what to do with the license plate. I have actually thought about trying to use the plate tub from a 90 and mold it into my bumper. It's going to be interesting.

[DE80q]

I was surprised to have a knock on my door today, and find the postlady standing there with a somewhat large package. Turns out it was the package I had been waiting for from Germany! I was very nervous as the box looked like this...



I was pleasantly surprised to open it up and find 2 very well packed Bosch Ecode heights! These are in amazing condition with nearly perfect lenses.


They also have the leveling motors with them. I'm trying to decide if I want to pick up a switch from Europe and and wire them up. Thoughts?

[DE80q]

Finally got the bandit towed to George's place today.


Hopefully this is the last time I get to post a pic like that!

No work done today, spent today moving things around in the shop to make it work better. Hopefully next weekend I can get over and start to rip into it again.

[DE80q]

Thanks to George, I have a pic of it not on the roll back!


Plenty of room to work on it now!

[deaner]

Yyyyuuuuuuuuuuuuussssssssssss. Is it done yet?

[DE80q]

As of now, its in a proper work space, so hopefully next weekend I can get started. After today I finally done with all of the family Christmas events.

I wanted to keep it moveable for now, as it is taking up one half of Georges work space. Soon the other half will be taken up by his 1.8t 90, so one of both may end up needing to be moved for him to work on paying jobs.

[DE80q]

Spent a good portion of today at George's housing working on the Bandit. Made some pretty good headway in terms of break down. Got the old MS wiring out, fuel system removed, vacuum system out, front end and timing belt removed, also pulled the dash again.



Here are some of the parts removed, many other not in the pic...


We also got to test fit the trigger wheel damper I got from Jim, it fits amazing, and won't need to modify the timing covers! Very happy about that!


The plan is to run the new harnesses next weekend. Hopefully all goes well there, and it will start to look like a car again!

[DE80q]

In the past 48hrs, we had 30" of snow fall here in South Central PA. I just received this Pic.


I guess the bandit will be staying in the garage for a while... Well unless I get some crazy ambition and go over to George's place and shovel out all that snow in front of the second garage door...

[DE80q]

Yesterday I spent large portion of the day at Georges place working on the Bandit. I feel like I should have gotten more done, but at least I got something done.

I made up the mounting bracket for the LS coils. Came out pretty well. The harder part was making the 1" aluminum angle clear the heater hose, accelerator cable, and brake booster. It mounts to the original coil mou ting studs on the firewall, with rubber pads between the firewall and aluminum, then to the radiator with a lift bracket and a small radiator mount.


I then tackled the turbo intake. It is much shorter than it was, and will be using a larger filter. This will change again when I upgrade to the header and holset, but for now it will do.


That's it for now, hopefully soon I'll be able to get all the wiring run, and install all the poly goodness I got from HPR.

[88a5tq]

Looks great under the hood. Somehow we missed all that snow in Erie PA. It's 60° up here today!

[DE80q]

Yeah, most of the snow stayed towards the south east of the state. We hit about 54° today, so it helped the melting process.

The car is getting there. Cleaning up a lot of the things that were done in a rush, and upgrading a lot of it too.