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Mk4 Astra Gsi Project

18K views 63 replies 14 participants last post by  Peteshood 
#1 ·
Here is my first project. I picked up this beast for £1,800.. 164k miles on the clock suspected faulty turbo, and rear wheel bearing gone, on the test drive the turbo still hit boost okay, grinding noise when it comes of spool and didn't seem to be over heading at all, and no cream in the head! I don't mind about the miles its going to get rebuilt and turned in to a track car.

my plan is to forge the engine, hybrid turbo, aiming for 330bhp, stripped out, roll cage the lot.





no messing about had the car a few days and its up on axle stands getting stripped!



On further inspection this appears to have a vxr turbo! this should save me some money on the hybrid!



every bloody bolt was rusted to shit had to drill them out!





just

Just a few hours work in preparation to get the engine out tomorrow!
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/528/img3902l.jpg/
 
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#2 ·
Here it is this morning:



Engines out :)



Interesting! Spark Plug snapped as soon as I tried to turn it!



Here it is all out! Got to be stipped down to a bare block to be sent off for a hone.

 
#3 ·
hey, at least the weather looks ok!

Good work mate, thats the only way you get to learn all about the car.
 
#7 ·
Those body panel clips, are they also s/s?

If so, where did you get them from mate?
 
#8 ·
Sorry mate wats s/s? I got them off eBay, they are under-tray clips for a lotus Elise £16.

As for what you said about learning about cars, yea I've never taken apart a gsi before but rabbid's vxr was in bits weekly, I had a corse Sri that I tinkered with, crashed a nova and rebuilt it, crashed a focus m rebuilt it ;-)
 
#9 ·
Sorry mate wats s/s? I got them off eBay, they are under-tray clips for a lotus Elise £16.
s/s = Stainless Steel, no rusting. not galvanised.

One way to check put a magnet next to them, if they stick to the magnet, not s/s or not very good quality s/s


As for what you said about learning about cars, yea I've never taken apart a gsi before but rabbid's vxr was in bits weekly, I had a corse Sri that I tinkered with, crashed a nova and rebuilt it, crashed a focus m rebuilt it ;-)
Maybe that tells you not to drive ;)

Young age, I used to be like that. But never crashed that many times though! :p
 
#13 ·
Rad pack off, anyone want a working ac rad and lines?




Picked up an engine hoist and crane! Good job I got a Vectra so they fit in the boot!



Engine out after about 3 hours.



The whole front end of my car





Sticking the subframe back on so we have a rolling chassis.



Stick it in the garage to start stripping bits off tomorrow.



The car looks like a car again, be it ridding a tad high!



And yes that's a zafira gsi in the back ground his and hers mother and son... Sad I know.
 
#15 ·
THe kit you have, the bolts are s/s, the clips are zinc plated, so they will rust again in a few years time.

I can't get them in s/s, the search goes on.

Update looks good though. I also bought an engine stand and crane last month for my work. They are pretty handy.

Another thing you might want to get is a welder. THat might also come in handy.
 
#17 ·
So anyway on to this evenings progress, we had a couple hours this evening getting the rest of the bits stripped off and the head off so its just a bottom end only now.

We'll get that apart later in the week hopefully.









 
#19 ·
There isn't much major stuff we can do until next pay day but I had a bit of spare time this evening, Pete was off keeping the misses happy, so I decided to do some cosmetics.

Update is Pete bought the block which had been treated, frozen solid and with wedged water ways, oil squirters and already freshly honed. Was a good bargin and saved alot of money over having even half of this work done to the previous block.

Pete's also decided on the new courtenay pistons to go with this as the block was originally done for Cosworth's and the Courts new pistons are basically the same thing requiring the same clearances.

Rubbed down and primed the rocker cover with a few coats.



Spraying the rocker cover with Arden Blue, unfortuntely it was only a small can and it acted up as you can see near the breather. So will have to go buy some more... Hopefully we can get away with a couple more layers and cover it else it will have to be rubbed down and primed again.. :(



Block masked up getting hammerited!



Block done! Looks pretty nice! :)

 
#20 ·
So another saturday night out on the drive way, today's objective: strip down the head, clean and paint the gearbox and reprime the rocker cover with another type of primer and hope this one doesn't react.

We used some degreaser to clean off as much as we could from a rather dirty looking gearbox..









Then we moved onto stripping down the head so I got out my trusty valve spring compressor and we got to it:





Unfortunately one of the studs one the head was missing it's torx head. So we tried a number of things to get it loose..

First some grips, then onto a heat gun..



Then the bright idea, weld a nut on to it and use a normal socket to get it out!







Also a primed rocker cover:

 
#22 ·
So nearly Payday for Pete so more bits can be ordered but in the mean time over the past few months I've had pretty much no life. I've spent alot of time trawling though 1880 page documents from Bosch describing ECU functions and parameters and converting lots of German things in to some sort of English. But what does all this effort have to do with the car?









Well, this car isn't just going to be built at home....










It's gonna be a whole lot more fun project than that.....












Yep, it's going to be mapped at home too, well maybe a local dyno too. I've been busy translating the DAMOS file for the Z20LET into english and researching how all the functions and tables work using various Bosch resources and it's been extremely time consuming. We have a flash tool cable of correcting checksums on the ME1.5.5 ECU so there is literally nothing stopping us trying this out.

Apart from the learning experience benefits of this for us both, it will also mean we'll get the car just how we want it to be. Many people don't realise how small changes in the intake tract can affect the MAF sensor and when in open loop mode the ECU can run slightly rich or lean due to miscounted air. While fuel trims in closed loop over time make up for this, you cannot beat a map which is properly calibrated for your modified intake path way. So one of the first jobs will be to rescale the 70mm MAF up to 80mm and ensure fueling is spot on.

Then once we know that's all good we'll convert the standard map to larger VXR injectors and once we know that's all good and the run in period is complete we'll get on and see about upping the boost a bit ;)
 
#24 ·
Pete has purchased rods and some other bits like cool running stat.

Had another spare hour and a half last night so we got the crank out for inspection.

These bad boys are being binned in the rebuild, they're bloody heavy!



Removing the big end bolts



Pistons not bad for 165k miles ;)



Crank exposed read to come out:

 
#25 ·
Pete has purchased rods and some other bits like cool running stat.

Had another spare hour and a half last night so we got the crank out for inspection.

These bad boys are being binned in the rebuild, they're bloody heavy!

what the hell are these? Is this a Z20LET specific item?!
 
#29 ·
A quick google search revealed that the LET and XE do have the harmonic balancer. These are the crankshaft pulleys.
 
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