Rebuilding a 25 year old 12v VR6 Engine for a Swap!

[Music] hey guys welcome to the channel third gear grind today i am rebuilding this 12 valve vr6 motor the first thing i want to do is check the compression ratio regardless the motor is going to get a full teardown and we're going to do rings bearings head gasket resurface the head we're going to do valve stem seals and i'm just going to document all of it how i'm going to do this compression test is since the transmission is still on i'm going to connect a straight battery to these jumper wires [Music] okay so i compression tested the motor this corner is 155 psi number two was 165 psi number three was 170 psi number four 180 psi that was our highest cylinder five was 165 psi and number six was our lowest at 150 psi brand new this motor should have 210 psi or around there all right guys so the intake's off the exhaust is off the valve cover's off and check this out as you can see there we've got a cracked guide right off the bat also if we look at our upper guide it's worn down pretty far there's a crack in the lower guide and it runs all the way through it's hard to put the camera far down in there but yeah fun times good thing this motor didn't blow up that's one way to do it all right so managed to get the lower cover off and the bottom guides are actually okay the bottom guide and tensioner um but we can see more of the the damage on the upper one all right so the cylinder head is off there's a bit of rust in some of the bores but also this head gasket has seen better days okay so one thing i found while i was tearing this down earlier the front knock sensor the plastic housing cracked on it and it's been exposed to the weather so that's going to get replaced all of these accessories on the front of the block are going to come off because the block is going to get painted all right so i'm just taking the lifters out of the head here there we go our cams our lifters our cam caps all organized so to replace the valve stem seals basically what i have to do is i have to press down on that spring and use a magnet to catch the locking collets and the valves can come out then we've got the tower of parts that came off the block got the flywheel the intake all the coolant parts all the timing covers ah this is the head gasket we pulled off the block it's seen some things here's the original cylinder head i got it back from the machine shop they said it was garbage and uh yeah it makes sense because there is some extreme pitting here it's kind of hard to get an idea of the depth on camera but that is almost that's like over halfway through but that's not the only issue the biggest issue is that some of it's pretty close to the fire ring there's a good divot around the firing and it's like that on quite a few so when you do the cylinder head resurface you really want to send the upper timing cover out to machining as well so i didn't do that so i ended up having to flat sand the bottom of this tiring cover worked out though now it lines up with the dowels so i brought the machine shop a new cylinder head it's a from a mark iv that already used a multi-layer steel and it doesn't seem like any of that kind of corrosion happens it got cleaned up and basically i went ahead and bought this ultrasonic cleaner before i put the pistons and connecting rods back in i want to clean them and i've got some cylinder head components that i don't want to put in dirty it just looks kind of bad with a brand new fresh head and then you got all these dirty parts inside of it okay so i've already painted the lower timing cover but for the upper timing cover since it's a bit more visible i wanted to pay a bit more attention to it so as you can see here there's a bit of sanding marks these castings they come pretty rough from the factory they have a lot of bumps on them oh yeah and if you were wondering what that noise was it was the ultrasonic cleaner so i bought a 30 centimeter by 33 centimeter unit 15 liter mainly so i could do things like this this is the entire valve train of the cylinder head in the one basket i'm just gonna drop it in the ultrasonic cleaner okay so just finishing up the final cleaning of the rods and pistons over here all the valve train is uh as clean as it's gonna get okay so i'm gonna show you guys everything that i've ordered for this rebuild project just before i do i just wanna show you these beautiful vr6 pistons and rods these are the stock rods and pistons they turned out incredible they look brand new we picked up a new vr6 oil pump just because someone i had known was selling one for a good price as you guys remember front knock sensor was destroyed so here's a new one this is the oil filter housing cap i just have it here to demonstrate this is a new oil filter housing cap seal this one goes between the oil cooler and the oil filter housing this one commonly leaks and then this is the one from the oil filter housing to the block just the two little circles and we got the belt tensioner pulley oftentimes the bearings in the grease will wear out in there and they'll start squeaking on you here's the tensioner here the tensioner never usually fails we have two oil cooler hoses i had one of these swell actually both of them swell on my old 24 valve vr6 oil cooler it split and started squirting coolant everywhere so on this project since these hoses are like 25 years old just these ones in particular i just wanted to get brand new right over here we have our oem guides for the timing chains and the tensioner the upper one and the lower one we have a brand new water pump came with a seal two l ring intake manifold gaskets one's upper one's block uh head side and then we have our l ring head gasket and oil pan gasket moving on we have arp rod bolts ngk ruthenium spark plugs got different kinds of spark plugs you got copper iridium platinum and then these are ruthenium which are the best the uh they're the fastest responding spark plugs oem piston rings these are quality um made in germany this is the original piston ring on vr6 blocks that volkswagen used a lot of these suppliers here that you see um is actually oem we got ios chains this is the double row style the early mark iii 96 that's what this motor is i didn't want to bother converting it and um with this newer style guide here it shouldn't be a problem uh in terms of where we have um brand new bearings these weren't too bad it was like 80 bucks i'm gonna give a uh full parts list linked in the description or i'll just write it all out with prices i believe overall everything ended up totaling about 1100 canadian dollars which is actually not too bad we even did uh coolant pipes here so we got a new thermostat upper and lower oem their vehicle housings and then uh just uh the crack pipe here feby or no these are owl ring as well valve stem the seals so i'm gonna be pulling out the old ones they're pretty crusty and definitely leaked oil can't see them right now because the shriek cams are just kind of sitting in place still have to build this head up here so we got the shrik lifters oem springs here's the valves the caps painted the oil filter housing um just because it looks better than corroded aluminum speaking of painting did the same thing with all the covers so this is dupli-color engine enamel it's uh the silver stuff and it turned out amazing i don't know if i ever got this intake manifold on camera before it was painted but now it just looks like pure bright silver no corroded aluminum it's going to protect the aluminum against corrosion we did the lower one as well and then all the covers so as you can see here i've numbered the pistons some of them are already taken out i took the rod caps off all the rods and the oil pump off the block now it's just a matter of just taking them out all right so having a look at the bores doesn't look like there's any deep scoring that i can see so far but we'll see whatever the flex home can't clean up now to protect the crank from debris as well as hitting the crank with the flex zone there is some bubble wrap i snaked a long piece down one of the cylinders and then pulled it over the crank there's space behind the crank and the block to put bubble wrap just like this here's a original boar and there's the honed one [Music] all right guys so we hit a snag in the build this ended up costing me about two weeks of time so i want to share this experience with you guys so that you can prepare for this in your rebuild if you want to go with oem piston rings so in the past i've rebuilt vr sixes with aftermarket piston rings i've used grant rings and itm rings for vr6 standard bore and they've always had these three piece oil control ring so if you can see there there's a top piece there's the middle copper wavy bit and then there's the bottom piece it's three pieces it doesn't stick out past the piston very much it's very easy to compress on the oem piston rings it's a two piece design goatse will have this design and also coleman schmidt this is a two-piece design bring the middle single outer piece and basically the problem i was running into when i was putting these pistons in to the bores i was trying to do it with my fingers like i've done the aftermarket ones the spring was just too tight i knew i was going to break an oil control ring so i really didn't want to do that so my i knew my only other option was the tapered piston ring installer tool and ysco has a bunch of tapered piston ring compressor tools but they don't have ones for vr sixes so what tectonics tuning does is they take this part number and cut it 15 degrees the same bore angle as vr6 so that basically you just plop the piston in this tool and you hammer it down into the bore and you're good to go so i ended up having to spend the 140 canadians for this tool if you have a machine shop hookup uh you can get this part number for about 25 to 30 us dollars and then you can have a machine shop just machine the bottom at a 15 degree angle and you're good to go um so yeah there are two styles of oil control ring that you can get on vr6 pistons if you go with aftermarket oem piston rings so if you want to avoid having to spend the money for a tool like this go with the aftermarket piston rings it's going to save you a lot of headache or if you really just want oem piston rings we shell it out for this tool all right so this is what the piston ring compressor tool should look like before you put the piston into the block so as you can see here at the bottom we've got some pistons sticking out that will attach the bore then there's the lip of the tool all the rings are seated in this taper tool ready to be fully compressed you want to do this so that you don't run the risk of jamming the rings in the tool so do this all by hand first make sure that your piston rings are rotated accordingly the bearing is on the conrod i'm gonna put some assembly lube on it the crankshaft here is all perfectly clean [Music] okay so we're also going to want to make sure that the crank journal is completely out of the way and then throw this here so one thing you can do as well to help you guide the connecting rod onto the crank is you can get a quarter inch extension and grab the bolt hole just like that and then you can go ahead and turn the crank until this slides into it perfectly obviously you want to make sure that your prong design is on the correct side here's a closer shot without the cams in of how the cylinder head turned out so now i've just got to get down in there replace the valve guide seals i just kind of go in at it with some needle nose pliers and what i'll do is i'll like squeeze the top it'll still be kind of stuck oh it actually came off if it's still stuck what i'll do is i'll go on the opposite side that i squeeze and then squeeze again kind of makes it go from like a circle to a square and it helps with removing it but this is coming out pretty easy okay so for installation of the new valve guides basically what i do is i take a 3 8 extension a 10 millimeter socket if you see like it kind of fits okay it's gonna be yeah it fits on the outside so what i'll do is i'll shove that on there and i have my it just kind of sticks in there and i just place it on top and a three pound sledge is definitely overkill but i just give it like a couple taps till you hear the metal clanking take it out and that's it installed so this is one of the exhaust valves i'm assuming and as you can see there's a lot of crap on here some of this is really rock hard and this valve it just doesn't look like it's in the best shape so i'm just gonna replace this with one of the better ones from the old cylinder head believe it or not this came from the new one okay so now i'm going to show you how i lap the valves on a vr6 cylinder head using my special tool right here it is a piece of hose stuck in a drill bit so first you get your drill [Music] you stick the drill in the drill and then you drill into a piece of hose approximately the size of one vr6 valve slap it in the head here's our new decked out cylinder head wanna slap in some valves bro all right so there's there's two more in okay that was the last valve so before i do this before i start lapping the valve first thing i want to do is lube the stem of the valve where it rides on the valve guide because we're going to be spinning this at pretty high speeds now before i put it in all the way obviously we need our valve lapping compound so this is the stuff that i use it is permatex valve grinding compound pretty widely available blue graphite looking stuff just gonna smear a bit on the back side of the valve seat and we got our drill hooked up at the back and so basically i'm just going to press down with a light force just like make sure it's like seating on there and improperly grinding in we're just going to spin it okay so here are three valves the one in the middle is an exhaust valve and the two on the outside are intake valves and the one on the left is the one we just ground the one on the right is one we have not yet ground honestly i'm not expecting a huge difference between the intake valves because their intake valves they remain pretty clean as you can see the exhaust valves here uh pretty dirty around the seat and then on the seat itself you can see quite a bit of carbon or just like little marks from carbon being like stabbed into there or whatever so if you're planning on doing this just be careful that you don't touch obviously the valve grinding compound on the valve stem and then put it in even if you get a little bit of grit on it it's gonna screw up your your valve guide okay if you guys remember earlier i did replace one of the exhaust valves and so as we can see here i did a bit of valve lapping and you can see just on the first pass it didn't get everything there's a small polished part the rest it got i'm gonna spend a bit of extra time on this because this valve uh never was uh in this hole before yeah this is how i've set up the new tool you know the bar through the side these guys kind of offset out of the way so now i'm gonna go ahead i've dropped one of the valve springs and retainers down there so i've got two valve keepers here and i've got a straight pick and basically what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna put a bunch of grease on here put it up against the keeper and it should stick and this will allow me to kind of insert the keepers onto the valve so i'll try and get some footage of that now i'm gonna get this valve keeper all the way to the end of the straight pick okay guys so we're gonna move on to bottom end timing now when you get a timing chain kit it doesn't normally come with bolts you you normally will order those from volkswagen directly now the ones that you're going to want for the bottom end is this one here this is a revised bolt for the lower tensioner here most of the time they come with five millimeter shallow hex bolts that strip and sometimes you gotta drill them out so volkswagen revise these two much heavier duty torx bolts so these are t30s they're a lot stronger than those wimpy shallow five millimeter hex bolts the second bolt that you're gonna want is for the intermediate gear here this is the part number for that one it goes through two of the gears okay so i just slapped everything on there so this is on here loosely and obviously when i take all the slack out on the left side we're not at the mark so basically i'm gonna kind of take this gear off of the chain and rotate it until we get that pointer to line up with the mark on the block okay so that was pretty easy so if you see if i rotate it this way and then there we've got no slack on the left side and our pointer is exactly on the mark and 100 of our slack should be on this side now we can go ahead and install the tensioner and just like that our bottom end timing is perfect okay so now we're going to need to torque this intermediate gear bolt and to do that i counter hold the crankshaft with the 27 mil socket i got a 15 ml socket on this guy and we're going to 75 foot pounds [Music] so [Music] all right so the motor's flipped up oil pan oil pump is on engine mount is on we've got the water pump on water pump pulley and so we're about to put the cylinder head on so before we do that i did a little bit of a cylinder block resurface a bit of a diy one just a very flat sanding block i very evenly sanded the block we can even still see the factory machining marks on here so just before i put the cylinder head on what i want to do is make sure the block is straight so this is a straight edge if it's perfectly straight put it flat up against the block then you want to look underneath to see if any light passes through so let me get a flashlight here so this straight edge was about 25 us dollars on ebay it's not super long but as you can see it covers the entire distance of a vr6 block i could put it this way this way this way this way and basically check the levelness of the block because you want it to be very level before you put the head on otherwise you could risk blowing a head gasket now the cylinder head we had sent off to the machine shop and it's perfectly level so we just got to make sure that the block is also perfectly level and most of the time they are because they're cast iron and what i did with the 80 grit really is i just took some of the gasket material off and if there were any high spots then they were shaved off so let's see how we're doing you can also check with a feeler gauge now we can see some light in the bore there but then if we go over to the flat on flat there's really nothing this is perfectly flat so before we put the cylinder head on we really want to make sure that we have these dowels in the block sometimes they get stuck in the cylinder head obviously you want to take those out before machining so that you don't destroy one of these because these are pretty crucial there's one on each corner here okay so before i put the head on i'm gonna put the cam shaft nuts on the cam caps so one thing that we want to double check is that all the cam caps are on exactly the way they came off and to help you with that volkswagen marked and put arrows on all of the cam caps one two three four five six and seven so first off before we throw these on we want to rotate the cam to where we can see the tops of all the studs so exactly right here and then we're going to put all the nuts on and then you're going to want to tighten them down i like to use the two caps in the middle just cross pattern torque them all the way down okay we're gonna do the same thing for the other cam shaft all right now that everything is sat down we're gonna go ahead and torque the cam caps to 15 foot pounds we're going to do a cross pattern on each cam shaft so what we want to do now is we want to get the cam shafts to top dead center specifically so that if we had the cam tool i don't have the cam tool that we could slide it in so this this slot is not in the middle i may have mentioned that already uh so you want uh the smaller part of the slot to be facing up uh and not down because if it's down you won't be able to theoretically fit the cam tool in when you do this you're gonna push some valves up on on the cylinder head so it's a good idea to have some sort of foam pad underneath like this okay so now our cylinder head is top dead center so i'm going to grab my 27 mil again and just rotate the crank over till we're at top dead center so this is the last time we're gonna see either the pistons or the deck of the cylinder head so before i throw it on i'm just gonna give it a bit of a break clean we got some oil from or the assembly lube that kind of leaked down all right so we are at top dead center we also want to make sure that we could see the notch up here first if you can't see the notch then you're going to want to rotate it once more okay so it's just sitting loosely just want to move it until we hear it sit on the dowels now it's time to throw head bolts in so for 12 valve vr6 there are three different sizes these are the sizes here so the tallest ones go back here on the front side of the motor you'll know the bolt is in the wrong hole or is the wrong length for that hole if it just sits down all the way and it's not sticking out of the cylinder head in the head gasket we got this piece of paper from l ring and it gives us the torque specs and the sequence first tightening sequence 40 newton meters this pattern second 60 newton meters this pattern and then after that you do 90 on all of them and then one more 90. okay so now it's time for our 90 degree turns so basically i'm just gonna grab a paint pen and i'm gonna dot all of the the bolts at the very top once we do our first 90 it's going to be to the right side and once we do our second it's going to be exactly to the bottom all right so the head's all torqued time to dress up this bare timing cover area so if you notice there i was struggling with the upper guide and it turned out to be just euro parts garbage the entire rest of the kit was genuine i was components and and some feby stuff in there and this one is a euro parts part and the entire guide is twisted so not only was it really hard to get on the actual guide pin but when i bolted it on it it then sat flat against the cylinder head but if i took the bolts out it was all twisted and it wouldn't sit flat so now we've got a genuine guide these aren't actually super expensive [Music] now before this cover goes on you want to make sure that you have this green o-ring in here sometimes you can reuse the old one if it's still bumpy but if not this is the part number for a new one from the dealer it's pretty cheap [Music] so i had one of these brand new oil caps lying around that's the part number if you guys want it now all right guys so this is the finished result of the 12 valve vr6 rebuild project it turned out really good i'm actually blown away at how well all the paint came out all these brand new shiny parts and the inside looks just as good as the outside this thing should make some power i didn't originally want to throw the exhaust on for transportation reasons it's a little awkward sticking out of the side of the motor but i had to because this lift bracket here actually mounts onto the exhaust manifold studs and it's not going to sit straight or still if there's no headers on the engine so so that's it guys i hope you enjoyed this 12 valve vr6 engine rebuild video i hope to cover the car that it's getting swapped into it's actually going to be a mark ii jetta coupe so stay tuned for that guys and see in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Third Gear Grind

Views: 74,249

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Id: tWIlRUhjCU8

Length: 29min 47sec (1787 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 16 2021