James from Donut 2.5t MK3 Build - Start to Finish!

[Music] [Music] oh [Music] in this video we're going to show you taking this car from a european econo box to a 5-cylinder engine swap with a turbo this car belongs to james from donut media now why would he want to swap a five cylinder into his car one because it's different you don't see a lot of those two it shares a lot with audi rs3 and ttrs and there's a lot of people doing some pretty crazy stuff with those there's some fast rs3s out there i've always been a fan of five-cylinder audis er quattro and all those awesome group b cars from the 80s so i thought it would be neat to have a little bit of that dna in my car plus mike from euro-wise hit me up and he was like hey i want to develop a swap kit for the mark iii uh do you want to use your car and i was like yeah i've been a fan of mike for a long time and to have him work on one of my cars was kind of a dream come true so [Music] this is a european imported mark iii golf that's getting an engine swap it has a 1.8 liter eight valve and is mated with a five-speed manual transmission the mark iii came in a variety of models including the 172 horsepower vr6 and the harlequin this 1.8 liter eight valve however came with a whopping 90 horsepower and because it's a cl this sweet clock instead of a tachometer are you telling me that it's 8 25 now you may be wondering how james acquired this european import from this guy jamie orr is an automotive world traveler renowned vw enthusiast and importer of interesting vw things he acquired this car and well let me let him tell the story i am going to the airport in about seven hours and flying to germany the volkswagen grip's bringing me over for their coming home event i don't have a car to drive over there i had the idea of like why don't i just go on craigslist ebay or something and just buy a car when i get there and i mentioned it to kw suspension kw like yeah yeah no problem we sent a set of coilovers to your hotel now i have coilovers at a hotel in germany waiting for me when i don't own a car or wheels or anything else i'm in a car in a little village about 20 miles northwest of wolfsburg this car has a hundred and ten thousand miles it's lived in the village its entire lifetime so now i just have to make sure that it runs and drives okay and then do the deal basically we've got the kw suspension we have a lot more parts we have the interior to do we have the wheels to do everything else we are here in the basement in the parking lot of the hotel we have the guys from denmark working on lowering the front springs we have the guys from mi vw in holland doing the left side the ringers the guys from belgium and from luxembourg doing this side after the event in europe jamie shipped the car back to the us at which point he drove it across the country to the sema show in las vegas i decided that i wanted to buy another mark iii golf that was my high school car and now that i'm a grown up i have a job and with the job uh comes paychecks that i can you know it was finally time for me to build the car that i always wanted and i started talking jamie right before sema and he was like you should just buy my car and i was like i don't think i can afford your car and he's like you might be surprised so we struck up a deal met him in person in las vegas for the first time and bought the car from him [Music] we're at eurowise a european automotive shop known for swapping things into older water cooled volkswagens the plan is to take this 90 horsepower engine out and swap to a 2.5 liter while fabricating the parts to make it possible for you to do that at home for yourself we're providing the parts to make this use engine like new first let's see what's left of the 90 horsepower from the factory this vehicle had and get this thing on a dyno [Music] today we're at shift fast motorsports uh our goal is to dyno this card is get some baseline numbers we're getting some numbers for before and then after we do our motor swap we're gonna do numbers after i didn't know anything about how much power this car makes before i googled it like 10 minutes ago because this motor actually didn't come in these cars in the us i mean [Music] this car doesn't even have a rpm gauge it's uh it's a clock there you go pretty excited to see about what kind of power it puts on uh nothing i don't think we need to strap it down 70. okay you guys got 65 70 and 95. and i already lost so you're betting this he's betting it's blowing up on the dyno [Music] so mike said 90 and yeah i originally said 90 not knowing anything about this matter and i was absolutely wrong they made 57 at the wheels james said 45 right no james said 60. so it's actually really close our dyno results were a staggering 57 horsepower and 89 pound for the torque now the guys zero-wise are going to get this thing out and swap into 2.5 using their custom fabricated parts on this car [Music] [Applause] [Music] because we specialize in viabi and audi parts mike hit us up to see if we could help get the parts he needed to refresh james's car we provided parts like ignition coils spark plugs timing components to keep the engine running right a water pump a coolant flange and all the gaskets required for this job if you need parts for your vw or audi make sure you check us out at shopdap.com next the guys at eurowise had to tear down the engine to make sure everything in the 2.5 cylinder engine was in good working condition on older water cooled models you have a mounting system for the engine that is shaped like a triangle you have a rear engine mount a rear transmission mount and then a front mount for both so the trick is to convert an engine that is intended to hang from the frame rails and make it mount on this triangle system these brackets allow you to use the original rear mounts of the mark iii and using eurowise's custom front cross member you now have the ability to have a front mount on your engine now this engine is in the engine bay and mocked up and there's a couple differences with this setup using the mark ii mounts that are mocked up here the biggest issue you'll see is this frame rail is a little snug on this engine here so they will need to move the engine towards the driver's side as you can see here he's working on getting some of the cad stuff done so that they can make the mounts for this car now that our drive train has ample support we need to work on our shafts our axle shafts the drive shafts that would have come with a donor car wouldn't bolt up to the vehicle because it uses different outer axles on newer cars they are going to be using custom axles which have the same outer and inner as this but have a correct length for this custom application now the drivetrain's connected we're gonna get rid of this linkage style shifter assembly for a cable style that's found in newer cars as you can see with the linkage style the shifter has rods that it uses with a bunch of bushings attached to it these bushings do have a lot of wear issues over time and usually are destroyed on older vehicles on the cable style the only major bushing here is in the base here and then it uses a cable on the other side for it left and right movement so this one you'd see which is left to right and then this one's going to be four and a half i'm not saying anything at all [Music] another thing to modernize this car it's required is going to be putting a drive by wire gas pedal in here so this is going to be a similar style manual linkage setup that would be on the car and then they have a custom fabricated bracket that they use to make it drive by wire set up retrofit on now the control engine management for this car they have a custom wiring harness that they've modified using the original harness from the 2.5 to retrofit into the vehicle after that you need tuning software to make the immobilizer defeated so that this ecu will allow the car to start and improve performance now that we got the engine all mocked up all the mounts built and everything we're moving on to more important things like stopping the car with all this added extra horsepower this is the factory front brake rotor overall diameter is nine and a half inches compared to the new brake system that we're going to be installing is going to be 11 inch that uses a willwood four piston caliper uh it's nice and lightweight paired with a vented 11 inch rotor compared to the factory rotor is non-vented so you can get some additional cooling you can get additional clamping force and you know obviously better braking we obtained new hubs for him or spindles rather went ahead and got him powder coated uh installed new wheel bearings so everything basically is brand new will be on the front end all right so we're slowly piecing this mark 3 back together and basically we're just going to hook up the battery charger to the battery and try to fire this thing up for the first time today [Music] uh it doesn't have any exhaust hooked up right now we will plan on making our own bolt-on downpipe some other cool things that we have on this car on the 2.5 some of these models came with electric steering in this case this car did have electric steering so we use a 1.8 liter power steering pump and then we manufactured a billet bracket and billet alternator that uses the factory belt so since you can just go buy the belt that's supposed to go with this ac compressor that's typically sitting right here strap it to your 180 power steering pump and everything's bolt on and you can basically have parachuting in your mark 3. [Music] this one [Music] so they mounted the turbo they have an external wastegate on it they have to mount a downpipe and get all the boost piping figured out and add an intercooler now because this engine does have the stock bottom end they're not going to be pushing a huge amount of power right from the go it's going to have around 10 pounds of boost and they got to do a lot of fine tuning to get there now all these things sound easy for me to say but all those things require removing it installing it testing it all custom fab items on this car so this is taking place over quite a period of time they also have rotiforms which are custom matched to the paint scheme of the car in addition to that they're gonna be taking the coilovers off the car and installing air suspension with a custom trunk set up with all hard lines so we just kind of got together and teamed up with garrett built the turbulent manifold strapped a g25 660 turbo on there got fabricated a bunch of the intercooler tubing vibrant donated the intercooler and all the piping and you know hd clamps and whatnot and we basically just built him a full turbo kit james wanted to keep this car as stealthy looking as possible that's why we painted the intercooler black you know it's california and guys get put over there all the time for silly car yeah carb details so once they finish all the tuning and stuff like that the transmission is going to come back out of the car because they're going to put a limited slip differential in it because this thing is going to be with an open differential just going to be a one tire fire and it's probably not going to go anywhere very quickly off the line just better handling overall these are like og mods that people did back in the day in mark threes and then also you can see here these stubby mirrors were also another thing that were super popular because they're just a little guy that yeah look at that little mirror so the idea was always to find you know super rare period correct parts for the car i lucked out with finding some cool parts there wasn't like a super specific plan that i set out to begin with i just wanted period correct 90s and just kind of collected pieces as they popped up on instagram the wheels were kind of like the last decision the wheels and the bumpers the car came with fully textured bumpers so originally the idea was to run color matched wheels with the textured bumpers but last minute we decided to just paint everything the same color and i think i'm going to lean into that even more and color match a little bit more of this stuff this swap is something that isn't normally done yet this is becoming kind of a more common swap or i suspect will be more common over time because two fives are becoming more affordable and because of the rs3 ttrs of the current two fives are making a boatload of horsepower so yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] we're here at euro empire in short north carolina going to get some baseline numbers uh we got the turbo kit wrapped up got the car washed and drove it over here hoping to see what kind of numbers it puts down do some tweaking on the tune if need be and go from there it's a bone stock motor socket internals everything like that it's got a five pound spring but it hits about 10 pounds uh peak we don't want to push over 10 pounds of boost on the stock motor so we'll see what it makes we have all the air what is this cold air intake why is there ice on there jake mike he just drove 20 miles to get here so i'm trying to cool it down a little bit [Music] the dip in the graph is because he uh led off and got back into the throttle 304 304 and 269. not bad for stock ecu base map 10 pounds of boost we're able to get a manual electronic boost controller we're gonna throw it on there and turn it up a couple psi okay [Music] we're gonna do it again you know we can't just leave anything alone so [Music] so successful day made 327 and 301 torque at the wheels a little a little over 250 horsepower over stock motor so that's a success it's going to drive a lot different than stock i think james would be really happy with the power results [Applause] [Music] a little torched here uh plans for the car coming up i'm just gonna try and enjoy it as much as possible drive it as much as i can keep collecting weird little things from europe that are very just expensive pieces of fiber class i want to do some work maybe this winter clean up the rocker panels find uh some matching side skirts the ponctus kit i want to complete that do some shaving and smoothing stuff out so in general more green and more smooth but mainly just enjoy the car and drive it as much as possible [Music] you

Channel: Deutsche Auto Parts

Views: 403,894

Rating: 4.9747615 out of 5

Keywords: james donut media, mo powah james, james Pumphrey mk3, donut mk3, 2.5 swap mk3, vr6 swap, 5 cylinder turbo vw, 2.5 turbo build, Donut media, James from donut MK3, Donut media VW

Id: 0JosQiMwH2E

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ThreeOverFour]

So weird to see James calm like that 🤣. This build is gonna singlehandedly revive the WV hype from the start of 2010s.