Slightly unusual question for the T4 gurus

[andymc]

A friend of mine is, like me, a bit of a trike enthusiast and has built a few different three-wheelers using either the venerable Beetle chassis or his own custom-made frames. One of his trikes is a bit of a monster powered by a 3.5 litre Rover V8, with matching automatic gearbox, while another is powered by a modern 2.2 litre Subaru boxer engine mounted to an uprated 4-speed Beetle gearbox, which involved a fair bit of time working on the wiring loom and getting various items which are now superfluous - such as airbags, electric windows, etc - switched off without causing ECU error messages or limp-home mode.

As well as being an excellent welder, he can also work with fibreglass and for the Subaru-engined trike he fabricated a compartment in the fibreglass bodyshell above the engine in which the majority of the wiring loom is securely stored. One of the projects he wants to do next is build a turbodiesel-engined trike, and has already been talking about using something like a VW 1.9 PD engine. He has designed a frame/cradle in which pretty much any transverse engine can be mounted, using either a manual or automatic gearbox.

It occurs to me that the CDT engine as fitted to our cars could be very suitable for this application, if it was possible to remove the entire wiring loom undamaged and do the same "switching off" of items no longer connected such as airbags etc. Would the T4 gurus foresee any particular difficulty with doing this? Would it be possible to do via the postal service?

NB - obviously, this would only be done with the engine from a car that was already in the scrapyard and destined for the crusher!

[andymc]

Anyone? Have I put this in the wrong section?

[okenora]

Would you even need anything turned off other than possibly the immobiliser. Not having an airbag ECU, LSM fitted won't stop the engine and if you don't fit the airbag light then no problem?

CDT engine in our cars would not be my first choice, very big heavy diesel for such a project and un-necessarily complex.....

[andymc]

I think in some cars, the absence of an airbag or certain other things could cause the ECU to run in limp-home mode. Not familiar enough with it myself, but as far as I understand it's not just a question of snipping away all the bits of the wiring loom you no longer need.

Engine weight wouldn't really be an issue, as even for a comparatively large/heavy trike, the power-to-weight ratio would be a massive improvement over the same unit powering a car. It just depends on what you want to do and what sort of budget & ability you have. My pal is a curious sort and has already done a VW build, the Subaru build, the V8 build and several others besides, so he wants to look at this sort of project next. Whether the engine & gearbox are sourced from a rear-ended/written-off example of one of our cars or an Audi/Veedub or something else entirely is probably not that important - I'm just curious as to whether it would pose any particular difficulty/challenge in terms of setting up the ECU.

I'll see if I can post up a photo of his V8 trike later.

[Avulon]

Just send the correct signals as if the airbag system and sensors were still there?

[Dakta]

It's not quite a trike, or even close but it reminds me of something i tuned in my last job for a customer which was definitely quite fun:

http://s10.postimg.org/5g7vv2dy1/iphone_177.jpg

http://s10.postimg.org/bxqsekobd/iphone_201.jpg

^ if you've a good eye you'll notice i'm having a sneaky 5 minutes on mg-rover.org :p:

http://s28.postimg.org/wo6lvlgtp/iphone_179.jpg

I'm trying to remember the spec of this grasstrack racer, it was kitted with a VW PD engine, can't remember if it was bored out to 2.0 or if we used the 2.0 straight, anyway it was kitted out with the 2.0 parts but we kept the older EDC15P ecu.

Tuning was a nightmare as this ecu isn't well equipped to trigger the later injectors, but I managed to tune my way around it after a lot of digging, and eventually we could run it with almost everything disconnected, just the bare essentials and have no fault codes or limp.

Got fitted with a GTB2260 turbo in the end and left with a smidge over 300bhp :) weighs about half a tonne, and obviously quite the animal.

The guy who commissioned this project did it entirely because diesel was under-represented in grasstracking competition, by under-represented I mean virtually no representation at all. The power delivery in the end was actually far more agressive ultimately than most things it come up against, and only the initial launches being a weak point.

Doing engine conversions and the like is a serious undertaking and can cost some money, but if you or your mates got the skill, motivation, some pennies and the desire to be a bit different then interesting things can happen.

[andymc]

Hopefully I've successfully uploaded a pic of the V8 trike with this post, as well as another which is powered by the engine out of a TVR. :cool:

[Mike Noc]

Spotted at the NEC Classic Car Show a couple of weeks ago this Jag V12 Trike, suitably blinged up. :eek:

http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h415/MikeNoc/NEC123_zps4a716b3b.jpg (http://s1108.photobucket.com/user/MikeNoc/media/NEC123_zps4a716b3b.jpg.html)

I wouldn't bother with the diesel - why not a 1.8T or the KV6? :drool4:

[klarzy]

It's not quite a trike, or even close but it reminds me of something i tuned in my last job for a customer which was definitely quite fun:

http://s10.postimg.org/5g7vv2dy1/iphone_177.jpg

http://s10.postimg.org/bxqsekobd/iphone_201.jpg

^ if you've a good eye you'll notice i'm having a sneaky 5 minutes on mg-rover.org :p:

http://s28.postimg.org/wo6lvlgtp/iphone_179.jpg

I'm trying to remember the spec of this grasstrack racer, it was kitted with a VW PD engine, can't remember if it was bored out to 2.0 or if we used the 2.0 straight, anyway it was kitted out with the 2.0 parts but we kept the older EDC15P ecu.

Tuning was a nightmare as this ecu isn't well equipped to trigger the later injectors, but I managed to tune my way around it after a lot of digging, and eventually we could run it with almost everything disconnected, just the bare essentials and have no fault codes or limp.

Got fitted with a GTB2260 turbo in the end and left with a smidge over 300bhp :) weighs about half a tonne, and obviously quite the animal.

The guy who commissioned this project did it entirely because diesel was under-represented in grasstracking competition, by under-represented I mean virtually no representation at all. The power delivery in the end was actually far more agressive ultimately than most things it come up against, and only the initial launches being a weak point.

Doing engine conversions and the like is a serious undertaking and can cost some money, but if you or your mates got the skill, motivation, some pennies and the desire to be a bit different then interesting things can happen.

you can't beat a sandrail for fun on the beach;)

[Dakta]

I dunno, it's not really for beach use (more mud) but it can throw up dirt that's for sure, and it can take off like a bat out of hell and get to near three figures in one gear. (bespoke gearbox, it used to have a vehicle transmission but the guys engineered his own).

For a diesel it's a revver, produced peak power around 4000 and was still within around 10% of it at 5500rpm, and it's allowed to do nearly up to six. Engines had a lot of work for that though.

I think the main discovery though for us was, diesel doesn't always have to have this reputation of being slow, people are cautious, even when aware of how high diesels can be tuned of taking a risk on the diesel and it can pay off.

Launches were always a bit iffy due to the lag, but when we sat down to work out times and see if we could improve anything in the tuning we realised we were disadvantaged for the first 5-8 seconds and for the remaining 2 or 3 minutes of the grasstrack racing nothing could touch us.

It almost took all the driving skill out of it with sheer brute force haha. Basic idea was, because the races take place in an oval, just get it on boost, sit on the outer rim, yes you've further to go, but you're on undisturbed ground and you've about twice the speed of everyone else.

People aren't attracted to diesels really for these sort of projects but perhaps they should be. You can see this at santa pod and the like where perfectly street sensible tuned diesels find themselves doing 12 second quarter miles. The place you wouldn't expect a diesel to have an advantage and they just rip the petrol equivelent a new one.