21/10/2011 - DEFI Boost Gauge

A boost gauge will tell you how much pressure your turbo is creating in your intake manifold. A piston engine works by creating a vacuum in the intake to draw in more air. A naturally aspirated (NA) car can only draw in as much air as there is pressure outside of the vacuum it creates. For instance, there is one atmosphere of pressure on the outside of your intake, and on the inside once it reaches one atmosphere of pressure there will be no pressure difference to cause movement of air. A turbocharger spins a turbine driven by exhaust gases from your engine in order to force air into your cars intake. The more air you get, the more gas you can combust and the more power you can make. What a boost gauge does is tell you how much pressure is being generated in your intake manifold. It's also beneficial to have a boost gauge as this will show you if your turbo has a leak and isn't allowing it to make as much pressure or if it's set up wrong creating too much pressure, which could damage critical components.

There are a few different kinds of boost gauges as well, mainly by the way that they measure pressure. For instance, you can have a boost gauge that will measure in 'Bar' or 'PSI'. 1.0 Bar is equal to one atmosphere or 14.7 PSI, which is basically the limit an NA car can make at wide open throttle (WOT). On most boost gauges, 0 is one atmosphere of pressure, i.e what you feel on your body at all times. This is to show that you've got the same pressure in your intake manifold as there is on the air outside of it. Anything above 0 is how much boost or increased pressure above one atmosphere you are making. However, there is also another half to the gauge called a vacuum gauge. This shows the deficit of pressure in your intake manifold when it is below one atmosphere. This is what causes the engine to pull air in to it by creating a space with less air than outside the intake manifold. Vacuum is measured in inches of mercury (inHg) or millimetres of mercury (mmHg). These two gauges are generally in one, and display vacuum first then boost. Using this combination you can tell if your engine and your turbo are running correctly. Each car is different, however most will make approximately 20 inHg at idle, give or take.

I contacted JDMYard and I purchased a DEFI 2.0 bar boost gauge from their new Advance BF series, which supercedes the old DEFI-Link BF series. You can choose between a red face for the dials or a white face. I decided to go with a white face to match the white dials on my dash. It would have been nice if the needle came in blue as well to match the Golf R blue needles and I had initially thought about ripping the gauge open and painting the needle in blue to suit. However, this would void my warranty on the gauge and it would have been a redundant exercise anyway, as the LED light which lights the needle is also red in colour. So that meant if I wanted a blue needle, I would have to not only paint the needle blue, but find a blue LED to solder onto the DEFI gauge circuit board. Too much trouble and too many things can go wrong so I scrapped that idea.

I had always loved the DEFI gauges as the quality of the gauges are second to none and I love the fact that when the car is turned off, the face blacks out as well, revealing nothing on the gauge. The numbers and the needle on the gauge only turn on when the car is on. It also has a cool start up and shut down ceremony too, like the gauge sweep that the Golf R needles do when you turn the car on. The DEFI gauges however shows the vacuum in kilopascals (kPa) x100 rather than inHg. 1 kPa is approximately 0.30 inHg, so when my Golf R is idle, I should be expecting about 60-80 kPa, which is 18-24 inHg for the vacuum. The DEFI gauges are electrical gauges and they use a control unit to get the gauges to work. The DEFI Advance system allows gauges and displays to be attached to the Advance control unit with a single "daisy chain" wiring system. The system is also designed to allow all sensors to be attached to the Advance control unit so that gauges and displays can be mounted separately without the need for multiple tubing or wiring to each gauge. This is great for when you want to run multiple gauges such as oil pressure, oil temp, water temp, exhaust gas temp, fuel pressure etc.

Diagram showing the DEFI daisy chain using the control unit.
The Advance CR is DEFI's 52mm gauge range and the Advance ZD is the DEFI's LED display unit.

DEFI Advance CR Series gauges on Justin's MKV GTI. You can see the DEFI Advance controller behind the wiper stalk.

The Advance BF series gauges are all 60mm gauges, and I needed a place to mount them. I didn't want to screw any holes on the dash or anything like that, nor did I want to use the supplied gauge cup holder and double stick tape the holder down. OSIR had released their O-Pod Mono gauge holder, which replaces the driver side air-con vent with a gauge pod holder designed for both a 52mm gauge and a 60mm gauge. I purchased this from Ian at Rennenhaus and then promptly dropped it off to Frank at Dural Prestige Smash Repairs to get the pod painted in gloss black to match the rest of my gloss black trim. Once I got it back from him, I test fitted the boost gauge.

OSIR O-Pod Mono gauge holder, painted in piano gloss black.
DEFI Advance BF 2.0 bar boost gauge with DEFI Advance control unit.
Notice how the gauge face is black. This will light up when the car is on.

Initially, I tried to DIY this myself but because this was an electrical boost gauge, I had to hook up the Advance control unit so that it turned on only when the car was turned on, otherwise it would drain the battery. However, I didn't have a multi-meter or anything of that nature and as I stated in one of my previous posts, I'm clueless when it comes to all things electrical. So, I headed on down to see Dedy at Top One Automotive to get him to install it for me. Dedy is another mechanic who I can trust regarding any installs that need to be done to my car. He had previously installed my H&R front and rear sway bars and KW V3 coilovers on my old Jetta before the car got written off. He had also installed Justin's DEFI gauges as well as installing Christina's air suspension on her R32. He is a car lover and enthusiast as well and won't charge you an arm and a leg for anything. Top quality work every time and an all round great guy.

Top One always has some fancy cars being modified. Everything from simple coilover installs to race prep for time attacks.

Engine cooling off before commencing work.

Top One recently moved locations and although it was only a few hundred metres from the old location, it's at least three times bigger, which is good!

Dedy getting busy.

In order to get the gauge working, you need to connect a vaccum line to the boost tap.

Close up of the boost tap.

Wiring everything up.

While waiting for the boost gauge to be fitted, I saw Dedy's ride parked outside the workshop. He drives the only genuine FD2R Honda Civic Type R in Australia which he personally imported from Japan, meaning it was a yellow plate import. Apart from his, I don't think there is another FD2R in Australia. Like the Golf R's, GTI's and R32's, it's a very unassuming car as it looks like every other Honda Civic out there on the road, minus the rear spoiler. However, I'll bet that his car can be quite an animal when it wants to be.

Dedy's Honda Civic Type R (FD2R) in Championship White.

A car worthy of the Type R badge.

FEEL's titanium catback. My fist could fit through the exhaust! Crazy!

Standard FD2R Brembo brakes behind AME Tracer TM-02 wheels. Very similar design to the Enkei RPF1.

Dedy finished up the wiring and the DEFI boost gauge was now installed. The control unit was hidden away behind the spare compartment just under the driver side air-con vent and the boost gauge was now snug fit into the OSIR O-Pod Mono gauge pod holder and located where the driver side air-con vent used to be. Clean install and again, always happy with his work.

Boost gauge installed! Notice that it idles at approximately 0.7x100 = 70 kPa, which is about 21 inHg, which is spot on.

Video of the boost gauge in action installed on my Golf R. The startup and shutdown ceremony is pretty neat!

If you would like to purchase the items above and go to a reputable place to install your mods, please visit : 

Top One Automotive

http://www.toponeauto.com.au/

JDMYard

http://www.jdmyard.com

Rennenhaus

http://www.rennenhaus.com.au

16/10/2011 - VWG DIY Parts Installation Day

Miles organised a DIY day for the VWG members. There's lots of new folks in the community, many with new parts but without the knowledge on how to go about fitting it themselves. So he figured that VWG should have a get together day to educate everyone, get help installing some of the parts we may have ordered for our cars and give a hand to others. It was a great idea and a big success. Marko kindly offered his workplace as the location for our DIY day and it was the perfect. The day was quite hot as well. It was a very nice day, blue sky, no clouds, perfect way to spend a Sunday.

I personally had 5 things I wanted to get done to my car. They were :

• Install quick drain tap for my 42DD oil catch can
• Get rid of the rear wiper
• Install garage button modification.
• Use VAGCOM to deactivate the rear wiper water jet spray
• Use VAGCOM to get the indicator blinking 4 times instead of 3 for when you pull the stalk down just enough to activate the indicators.

The 42DD quick drain tap is a brass tap which is designed to fit the 42DD oil catch can that I had installed about a month ago. This provides a quick and easy way to drain all the gunk collected from the engine instead of having to physically remove the oil catch can every time to drain it out. However, I still had not purchased the hydraulic hoses from Enzed to replace my heater hoses which were currently connected to the catch can. I decided to install the tap another day once I have the hoses, empty out the gunk and have a nice, empty catch can ready to collect the next batch of crap with my new hoses.

Quick drain brass tap from 42 Draft Design to attach to the oil catch can.

Just a matter of attaching a pipe to go over the drain tap, put the other end of the pipe into the opening of an empty bottle, open the tap and let all the gunk come out.

The rear wiper for me is useless. I never use it. Plus I hate how when the rear windshield is covered by water droplets and when you select R to reverse, the rear wiper automatically activates to remove the water from the windshield and give you a better vision. That's all well and good but quite unnecessary as I have a rear view camera which activates when I'm in reverse, allowing me to see clearly what is behind me on the head unit. Plus when the water dries up, I have a nice semi circle in the middle of the rear windshield. It looks ugly. 

With help from Ray, I removed the boot lid trim to access the wiper. After a few minutes, we had disassembled the wiper. To plug the hole which will be left after I remove the rear wiper, I decided to get a glass grommet from GeCleant. They guarantee that their glass grommets would be a 100% accurate fit for all Volkswagen/Audi models.

The glass grommet from GeCleant, which guarantee a perfect fit.

What bullshit. The glass grommet was a fraction too big and the hole left by my wiper was a fraction too small. The glass grommet would look good if it had fitted perfectly like they claimed. I tried everything I could to get it to fit snug, but the inevitable happened. The glass grommet cracked. This was the same fate that Ray's grommet faced when he tried to install it on his Audi A3. The fact that it cost approximately $40.00 for a little tiny glass grommet which didn't even fit properly was the worst $40.00 I've ever spent in my life. In the end, I had no choice but to rock blue masking tape until I could come up with a solution. I've decided to buy an OEM Honda wiper delete plug which is used by the Honda boys on their Integra's, CRX's and Civic's. Justin had one installed on his GTI and it looked really good. He mentioned that he purchased his from JDMYard so I might hit them up real soon.

Removing the wiper motor with trim already off.

What the Gecleant.de glass grommet would have looked like installed had the grommet been a perfect fit.

The end result due to the glass grommet cracking. Temporary ghetto solution.

Justin's OEM Honda wiper delete plug, courtesy of JDMyard.com

If there's one thing I don't know anything about, it's electrics and circuit boards. I had purchased a garage door button from CarStyle4You to replace the blank buttons located just under the ash tray lid. There were two buttons which came with my Golf R from factory and that was the Electronic Stability Program (ESP) button, which activates/deactivates the traction control, and the parking sensor button. The other 3 buttons were blanks. I had decided to get 3 buttons to fill up the blank spaces. One was the Golf R's "R" logo, one was a button depicting an driver ejector seat and one was a button which can be soldered and wired with my remote control garage door opener so that when I pressed that button, the garage door would open. The good thing with these buttons is that Carstyle4you uses genuine OEM VW buttons and engrave their own pictures on the blanks and they are also LED lit to replicate the interior OEM red lights on the centre console. You can choose a variety of LED's but to keep it looking as factory as possible, I chose the red LED's to match the rest of the interior. 

Miles brought his soldering iron and with me just watching on, he soldered the wires onto my garage door remote control. I was surprised at just how easy it was. I guess once you know how electrics work, it's not that hard. We installed it on the car and it looked great! Big thanks to Miles. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have been able to install this.

The "R" logo and the garage door push button. Notice the wire coming from the push button.
This is what needs to be soldered onto the circuit board of the garage door remote.

All five slots utilised. Of course, the "R" and the "eject" button are just for fun, but I'm really happy with how the garage door button turned out.

Video demonstration of the garage door button in action.

Finally, Cam gave me a hand with his VAGCOM prowess and did his thing. He deactivated the rear washer jet as I had no need for it now and if it were left activated, there would be no wiper to wipe away the water residue. It would have been cool to re-adjust the position of the wiper jet stream so that whenever there's someone who you think is too close and tailgating you, you can just give them a squirt...and piss them off even more! He also made sure that the indicator blinked 4 times now when you just lightly flick down or flick up the indicator stalk. This is great for when changing lanes. The default from factory is 3 blinks, but I realised that I would be in the middle of changing lanes by the third blink. A fourth blink and I would be in the next lane. Yes, OCD. Many thanks to Cam. Probably one of the most easy going fellows I have had the pleasure of meeting from VWG and always willing to lend a hand to anyone and everyone!

Cam with his laptop, making sense of all the numbers and letters on the VAGCOM/VCDS unit.

Really pleased at how smoothly everything went, bar the glass grommet. I guess there were a few more things I would have liked to have done to my car today but because I had to wait for other parts to arrive first, I was done for the day and I thought I'd lend everyone else a hand with their installs.

Here are some photos from the day.

Marko's work. Blum headquarters. Some fantastic hinge and storage systems sold here! Very impressive to say the least.

A massive shelter to stay nice and cool where we could all perform our DIY jobs.

Quite a big turnout!

The boot of Miles' GTI. I was amazed at how much the GTI could fit! There's also 2 large speakers in there somewhere too!

About half of what was in the boot of Miles' GTI. It's still a lot of gear! And he managed to fit it all in!

Miles' MKV GTI with colour coded rear bumper, sideskirts and powercoated 17" OEM Classix wheels. Fresh!

Everyone started unloading their gear and got stuck in.

Ian took apart his bumper to remove and replace his headlights for OEM style Xenons with DRL's.

Mark had installed his Stage I APR cold air intake to his MKVI GTI.

Hadn't seen Adam for a long time. He popped in to say hello.
This is the other Golf R32 with ABT supercharger, just like Jose's. Built by Ramspeed.

Adam's mod list are just as tasty as Jose's. 18" ADV7.1 wheels, Capristo exhaust, Vogtland coilovers, plus many other goodies.
He recently installed OEM smoked rear LED tail lights as he's going for the full "murdered out" black theme on his car.

Miles and Alan trying to install slotted rotors to replace the stock rotors.

Jason's MKV GTI Manual 3 door. Such a lovely car, this. Love the Tornado Red. You don't see many GTI's in this colour, let alone modified this nicely.

The death of "shitbox" signaled a new beginning for Ray. His new ride? A 2001 model Audi 8L A3. It basically has the same 1.8L engine from a MKIV Golf GTI.
Now that reliability is not an issue in this car compared the MKIII Golf GL he had, expect BIG things from this! Personally, I cannot wait.

Cam never really bonded with his Golf GTI Adidas version, so he did the only sensible thing and sold it. His new ride is now a 2011 model Subaru WRX.
Such a beefy car, and so much potential to be had! Much more than his old Golf GTI Adidas...plus a lot more fun with the manual box compared to the DSG.
Needless to say, Cam is one happy chappy now that he has this! And I can see why after having a short blast in it. Expect big things from this WRX!

 The BBQ smelled so good. Miles cooking up a storm.

DIY Halftime.

Chillaxin' before getting back into it.

SUGA's new shoes : 19" Work Meister 3pc wheels with black bolts. 

This definitely completes the look, much more than her old 19" Alpil 11's. So sexy!

JDM Style MKV Golf R32. Does it get any better than this?

SUGA on her daily driving height and me on still stock suspension.
After looking at this picture, I want wheels and suspension ASAP!

And finally, a little video Cam took of both his and my car. Launching and doing a drive by. Listen for the diverter valve flutter! Haha!

What a great way to spend a Sunday. Big thanks to Miles for organising, providing the music, the food, the drinks and all sorts of tools and also thanks to Marko for providing the premise. Perfect location for a DIY install day.

If you would like to purchase the parts for the mods listed above, please visit :

Carformance

http://www.carformance.com.au

CarStyle4You

http://www.carstyle4you.com

GeCleant
http://www.gecleant.de

JDMYard
http://www.jdmyard.com

27/04/2011 - Gloss Black Interior Trim

The interior of the Golf R came with a few interior accents that the GTI and other Golf models don't receive. For example, the Golf R receives gloss black accents around the steering wheel buttons, compared to the brushed finish on the GTI's. It also comes with grey stitching on the gear boot and also the steering wheel, compared to red stitching on the GTI's. The trim in the Golf R is silver with embossed "R" logo, instead of a black grey trim in the GTI. The needles for the speedo and tacho are red in the GTI, whereas they are the signature blue in the Golf R. Just subtle details which stand out just enough for the enthusiast to recognise but still inconspicuous enough for the every day driver.

MK6 Golf GTI interior.

MK6 Golf R interior comparision picture.

For my Golf R, the gloss black accents are also added by the back shell of my Recaro seats. The shell of the bucket seat comes in a lovely gloss black and I thought it was a nice touch. It loses the pouch that the normal Golf R seats have but I never used them much anyway as I found that whatever I put in there just ended up stretching the material and ended up sagging more than a granny's boobs.

Back shell of the Golf R's Recaro seats.

I have also seen pictures of the interior of the Scirocco R and there was something that caught my eye. The head unit surround had a gloss black surround and the air con vents also had its own little gloss black accents. I thought this was a very nice touch. I looked back at my Golf R and by comparison, it just looked quite bland. The surround was more or less the same as any other MK6 Golf. This wouldn't do. So in keeping with the gloss black accents on the steering wheel, and the back shell of my Recaro seats, I decided to get my interior bits coated in gloss black as well. Of course, this would have to be a custom job.

Scirocco R Interior. Notice the gloss black surround around the head unit and also accents on the air con vents.

The parts I would be coating in gloss black would be :

• Left and right air con vents
• Centre air con vent
• Head unit surround
• Climatronic surround
• Ash tray surround and lid
• DSG shifter surround

Now the last two dot points is something I thought I would do just to add a personal touch. I thought that since the centre of the car is being coated in gloss black, I may as well extend it as far as the DSG shifter. Taking off the left and right air con vents was easy. The centre air con vent was the one that gave me the most grief. Prying everything off without breaking it was a mission for such a big piece like that as it's all just held together by plastic. Once you snap off the plastic, that's game over. Eventually after breaking two fingernails and a lot of swearing, the piece was off. The rest of the parts were easy. I also had a spare DSG surround which I could use as a substitute until my one was finished. 

I wanted it to be painted professionally because I didn't want it to turn out like a rattle can job. Granted, with proper prep and parts, DIY jobs can look almost as good if not better than professional work. I'm all for DIY myself. However, if done incorrectly, it can look very shit and I knew there was that chance of that happening. You spend most of your time inside your car so having a shit job done inside will be like having a bad painting hung up on the wall inside your house. I dropped these off to Frank at Dural Prestige Smash Repairs. I've known these guys for at least 7 years now ever since I had my Honda Accord Euro and they always did flawless work. I asked them if they could do a little paintwork with these interior bits and they took it on with no hesitation. A week later, I get a call from Frank and this is the end result.

Interior trim pieces. Professionally painted in piano gloss black.

DSG shifter surround.

Centre + Left + Right air con vents.

Head unit surround.

Ash tray and ash tray lid.

Climatronic surround.

Parts installed. Notice the gloss black steering wheel button surround. The centre compliments it very nicely.

Ash tray and DSG shifter surround installed. Looks so much nicer!

All in all, I think it was mission accomplished. Nothing too extreme, and trying to keep it looking as OEM as possible.