What am I doing?

By Clinton HulleyVW Polo Classic Project Car
What must I do
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The Toyota SC14 Supercharger was in a box for a while. Well at least till I decided what I was going to do with it. I had all these ideas of what I am going to do how I am going to do it. My master plan was to have the Polo up and running within a weekend. I am very good with my hands and there is very little I can’t make or get made. I made a set of mounting brackets for the supercharger to mount the charger in front of the 2E Block. It just fitted under the individual throttle bodies. Once the bracket was made and sprayed, I assembled the supercharger in place. Now I can see what else needs to happen.

Do I need to fit an intercooler with the engine?

I needed an intercooler as well. I have read that the air coming out of the superchargers is extremely hot. One of the guys that worked with me at that stage had an intercooler. He was going to fit in his ISUZU pick up but never got that far. The Intercooler had an inlet at the bottom of the one en tank and an outlet on the top of the opposite tank.


I took the front bumper off the Polo. This intercooler setup isn’t going to work. As this was a custom intercooler I took a band saw and cut the one sides thank off. I turn the tank 180 degrees around and welded it. Now the inlet and outlet of the intercooler were at the bottom. I made some mountings for the intercooler and bolted the intercooler in place. The Bumper went back on without issues.

Building a plenum.

Next, I built a plenum by using 2″ stainless steel dairy bends and tees. The ram tubes were removed from the throttles. The plenum was bolted on in its place. Another job was done. Over the next few weeks, I would do small bits of work on the car. I decided that I am not going to use the clutch on the supercharger. A smaller pulley made out of aluminum for the supercharger. I wanted to over-rev the supercharger to make a nice boost. I built nice 2″ stainless boost pipes from the charger to the intercooler. From the intercooler to the plenum. I fitted a turbo dump valve on the boost pipe to the plenum. Then connected the dump valve vacuum line to a little manifold underneath the throttles. This manifold connected all four intake runners together to get a common vacuum source.

Need to get the compression lower…

One thing that I did not think of was how would I get my compression lower. Running a double shim as I did on the MP9 setup was not going to do the job. I used the CAD software we used at work and modeled up the head gasket shim. Made it 5 millimeters thick in total. I had the shim laser cut. Then I got it surface ground to get nice sealing surfaces on both sides of the shim. This part was now complete.

What cam must I use?

Next, I had to decide what cam to run. The 298 deg is way too aggressive and I will end up blowing the boost out into the exhaust. The overlap between the intake and exhaust lobe is too big. Luckily I still had the 272 deg cam which is a mild cam. I would have preferred to run a 268 deg, but I didn’t want to spend more money on cams.


The day arrived!

Now that I had all the parts the weekend of the swap over arrived. We took the head off and cleaned it nicely. I took the standard steel gasket apart and cleaned that as well. I sprayed all the layers of the gasket with Spanjaard Copper gasket sealant. A 5-millimeter thick shim was fitted in place of the standard 1-millimeter shim. The head went back on.

Running into issues…

The first bolt we torqued we ran into an issue. The crossflow head uses different head bolts in its standard configuration. It turned out that the bolts were longer than the standard U flow head. There were just enough threads in the block for the head bolts to accommodate the standard head gasket. With the thicker head gasket there just wasn’t enough thread. We torqued the first 90Nm stage but as we did the first 90 deg turn we heard a clap sound. The bolt was loose. Yes…we stripped 5 millimeters of thread out of the block. The head came off again. We took the head apart and took it to work. There we machined the bolt head landings to the same height as a standard U Flow head. The head went back the same day.


Most of the charger parts were pre-fitted on the car. Changing the head gasket and the cam was the biggest jobs on the list. The last thing to happen was to fit the charger belt and connect the MAP sensor. The MAP sensor and dump valve shared a connection on the common manifold. I made some changes to the maps on the management system. I just needed a base map to start the car.

The first start

After a few swings, we got the Polo started. Once again my thoughts were, “Why am I do this…”. The charger whine was extremely loud, and the dump valve stood open just blowing off constantly. It sounded like an air compressor that blew a fitting. It actually sounded cool in its own way. After the engine was on temp, I revved the engine to see what boost it makes. The boost gauge shot up to 2 bar boost quickly and I heard a terrible screaming sound. I rev ed the engine again and it made the same sound. Suddenly smoke was coming out underneath the bonnet. The Multi groove belt shredded into pieces. The charger pulley was so hot I could not touch it.

Being disappointed, I parked the car at my friend’s house. I had to do some research on the way forward. Obviously I didn’t know what I was doing…


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