Serpentine Belt Setup

I should start by explaining that this swap isn’t as “bolt in” as suggested.  Sure, you take the motor out of the Passat, turn it 90 degrees, throw the Rabbit engine mounts on and bolt it in, but before you can do that there are many things that you have to modify on the engine so that It will work in the Rabbit.

One of the main changes is the Accessory/Serpentine belt setup.  On a stock AEB 1.8t, the a/c, alternator, and power steering are run off of a serpentine pulley, while the water pump is run off of a v-belt, connected to another tract in the power steering pulley.  The Rabbit only weighs about 1800 lbs, so power steering is over-kill and not needed.  Air conditioning is also a luxury that I’ve decided I don’t need in this project (it didn’t have a/c before, why have a/c now?).

Cutting the power steering and a/c out now leads me to a problem.  How do I run the water pump without power steering?  My only option is to have the alternator and H2O pump run off of the same serpentine belt.  Well, aren’t I lucky that a vr6 engine runs the water pump with a serpentine pulley?  After figuring this out, I got on the vwvortex classifieds and found a vr6 water pump pulley for sale and bought it.

Now I can get rid of most of that bulky bracket that held the radiator fan and power steering.  Don’t you love weight reduction? 🙂  So I attached the alternator to the bracket, marked a line right below it, and cut away the rest of the bracket as seen in these two pictures.  The bracket is upside down here, the fan and power steering was located at the top of the bracket in these pictures, and the bottom is the part of the bracket that I needed, which included the alternator and belt tensioner.

Perfect!

I had just installed a new water pump on the Rabbit, only 2 months before this swap, and lucky for me, the water pump from the Rabbit is the same one as the 1.8t (same water pump for 20 years, go VW!!).  So I installed the new water pump on the 1.8t (complete with the vr6 pulley), as well as the new thermostat I had just bought. Now it’s time to bolt everything on and mark it up!

This picture shows my progress pretty well.  The alternator is the hunk of metal with a pulley at the top.  Directly below that is the belt tensioner and directly below that is the serpentine H2O pulley off of the vr6!  Everything lines up pretty perfectly!  This pictures also shows the bracket that we cut in half earlier.   It’s right in the middle on the right side of the picture.

One more picture for better perception:

Well, that concludes the serpentine belt setup, which is a huge step in this build.  1 problem down, how many more to go?

The First Few Weeks

I’m starting this blog rather late, so I’ve got a few weeks of catching up to do!  I purchased a 1999 VW Passat off of a co-worker for $1200.  The engine was the AEB 1.8t 20v (the one with the large ports in the head) and had 130,000 miles on the drivetrain.  Here’s a picture of the day I bought it:

It didn’t look like that for too long! :-p   After 2 days of work, the engine was out: (keep in mind that I’m doing this swap every day after work, so when I say “day” I really mean from 5pm- 9pm)

The next two weeks consisted of me gutting the car and taking every possible thing off of it so that I could part it out and make some of my money back.  I am in the process of creating a price breakdown spreadsheet of everything I’ve bought and everything I’ve sold.  I’ll post it sometime later, but so far I’m still in the red (as expected).

Hello world!

This is my first post to my first blog ever!  This blog is going to be dedicated to my project car:  A 1984 Volkswagen Rabbit Gti.  The rabbit is getting a 1.8t motor out of a 1999 b5 Passat AEB 1.8t, and the steps that I go through to complete this swap will be documented here!

Here are a few photos of the rabbit before the swap: