The Big Brown Van

Alternate Titles: Bronze Bullet, Hazel House, Copper Cathedral, Maximum Mahogany.

Turbos and Busted Knuckles

Through the years I have worked on tractors, cars, trucks, vans, motorcycles, bikes, and boats through a mix of necessity and interest. Before I went to College I had 2 Subaru WRXs, 1 Subaru STi, a Datsun 280Z, a Correct Craft Ski Nautique, and a series of questionable Mustangs. I also bought a 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon Westfalia, here I document the story of cleaning, fixing, and finally engine swapping the stick-shift brown van.

1985 Volkswagen Vanagon Weekender

Over the years I have picked up a love of climbing and running, often a big adventure is made much easier by sleeping at the trailhead, enter my 1985 Vanagon. I found it on a salvage auction site and picked it up for $450 with auction fees and having it towed to our shop. When I first opened up the rusty sliding door I had a bit of buyers remorse; the whole interior had been worn away by 220k miles of driving along and several years of mouse occupation.

After installing a new battery, the engine would turn over but even with starting fluid it wouldn't fire, pointing to an issue with the ignition system. The system was an early points-less distributor. A new coil, plugs, distributor cap, control unit and hall effect sensor were sourced and installed, and with crossed fingers the engine fired right up. It smoked a little on startup but not so much that I couldn't drive it to work and back.

With the help of a shop-vac and respirator, the mice were evacuated and remnants discarded, but the interior still needed to be addressed.

New Upholstery

The front bucket seats and rear bench had both seen better days, and before I was to daily it I wanted to make it a bit more livable. I had heard about a material that was used in long haul truck seats and is supposed to be both tough and comfortable. I talked with Midwest Fabric and they ordered me some thick woven polyester fabric with a respectably 80's brown and tan pattern. The vinyl was in pretty good shape so I decided to reuse it.

I had done light upholstery work for sofas in the past, but never automotive work. Coaxing our sewing machine through the layers of thick vinyl, piping, and foam was a fulfilling project.

Shift Bushings

Finding 1st gear proved tricky and I often ended up in reverse, surprising both me and the people behind me. New shift bushings significantly improved the situation.

Driving the Vanagon

I drove the Vanagon from 2016 to 2018 while I was home, enjoying the ability to fit a canoe on the top with 2 bikes in the front while sleeping in the back of it. It worked great but had its quirks, the paint was still flaking off and the sliding door didn't always stay on its tracks. I wanted to use the van on cross country road trips, and decided that if the engine didn't like midwestern hills, it wouldn't stand for the rockies, more power was in order (along with fixing the sliding door).

The 1.9 liter WaterBoxer engine produced 83 HP at the crank in its hey day, and likely less than that after 35 years and 220,000 miles. Every morning I had to coax it onto the I94 entrance ramp on my way to the lab, generally garnering either smiles or worried expressions from the passers by. Swapping an EJ Subaru motor (flat 4) is fairly common in these old busses, and I was fairly experienced with the motors from many past WRXs and STIs, so I had my eye out for a nice EJ to swap in.

I came across a 1996 Legacy with the EJ25 motor that I was after. This particular motor happened to be the only year that the naturally aspirated EJ series came with quad cams. Our van was now going from cam in block, to quad overhead cams. The Legacy ran fine, but had no exhaust past the headers and the automatic transmission was stuck in 3rd gear. None of this presented a problem for the swap, since the engine and ECU were all I wanted, but getting it home proved tricky. Walter (my brother) dropped me off at a farm in southwestern Minnesota, I made a deal with the seller, and bought the legacy for $250, with the promise that we would send him pictures of the project, and took off in the direction of home.

With all the windows down to avoid being asphyxiated and a top speed of 40 miles an hour (in the previously mentioned 3rd gear) the car made it home without trouble.

My apologies for the text on the pictures here, I documented the experience on Instagram.

The 2.5 liter EJ engines are known for having weak head gaskets, they are a bored out version of the EJ22, and the larger bore means less head gasket. This can be remedied by replacing the head gasket with a multi layer steel unit and having the mating surfaces resurfaced (MLS head gaskets require a smoother surface than the original composite head gaskets. Having the heads off the engine, it will also be easy to have the valves ground and new valve seals put in. Once the engine was pulled, the intake manifold and heads were taken off and given to Sampson Racing Engines for a breakdown and rebuild.

With a new lease on life, the cylinder heads were installed with fancy new MLS head gaskets and new head studs to seal the deal. A new timing belt and seals were installed and the engine was buttoned up.

Cooling is taken care of by a soft-line off the coolant out from the engine, to a stainless hardline that runs to the radiator in the front of the van. Another hardline runs the coolant back to a soft-line and finally to the engine return. There are two heater cores in the van, one in the front by the driver, and a second underneath the rear passenger bench. The complexity and size of the system makes it difficult to bleed, but several bleed valves throughout the system make it more possible

Using a trans adapter and flywheel from Kennedy Engineering, the much wider Subaru engine was shoehorned into the bay.

Initially I had planned to run the original ECU for the van. I had pulled it and all of the wiring for it from the Legacy and tried to bench test it for a couple days. This ECU was before CAN communication was widely used in cars, but it does have an OBD2 diagnostics system. Everything from door locking to the fuel injection was done on one ECU. I worked on separating what I wanted (engine support functions) from what I didn't (vehicle support functions). I had gotten the ECU working to a point, and was using an Arduino to sent it a crank signal so I could see it fire the spark plugs and fuel injectors, but I did something dumb. I was using a variable voltage power supply and while working on it, I accidentally an input pin 48 volts. The ECU was not happy with what I had done and gave up some smoke and quit working.

At this point I could find another ECU and start over, or I could buy a stand alone system and install that instead. A stock ECU was very enticing as skilled engineers had already spent years tuning the engine for me, and I wouldn't have to worry about accidentally blowing it up. Standalone ECUs are nice as they give you full control, but tuning was an art I hadn't mastered.

After scouring the web, I decided to go with a MicroSquirt stand alone ECU. I have had success with DIY Autotunes products before, and we used this exact ECU on our Supermileage car at Michigan Tech during undergrad. I bought the ECU and a wiring loom and got to work.

The little ECU is capable of running four injectors and four coils with lost spark ignition. Wiring everything up was fairly simple, and the computer was reading intake air temperature, manifold pressure, and coolant temperature no problem. The most important signal is crank position, this tells the computer when to fire the spark plugs and how fast the engine is going (crank signal also contains lots of information on misfire, IMEP, and other combustion parameters, check out my work at APS labs for that). The crank position is fed to the ECU using a 36-2 tooth wheel and a hall effect sensor. The RPM readings were erratic, jumping between 0 and the correct reading.

Looking at the crank signal through an oscilloscope, the system was dominated by noise. We were only interested in the 36 tooth signal, but were getting noise both above and below that frequency. The scope had a built in digital bandpass filter, and filtering out noise above 3600 Hz and below 240 Hz (6000 rpm redline = 100 rotations per second, 36 tooth signal = 3600 Hz signal) the crank wheel signal became much clearer.

The controller is not capable of bandpass filtering real time, so a hardware filter is needed. After looking into building one and doing some Simulink modeling, I found out that you can buy one prebuilt! I bought two, one for the crank and one for the cam. Installing them went smoothly and the scope showed a much cleaner square wave. Hooking it up the the MicroSquirt and it started right up and was happy throughout the rev range.

The Vanagon has been a fantastic vehicle since I got it. After the engine swap I installed some new cabinets and a butcher block countertop and lived in it during the summer months in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

I still get a mix of smiles and worried expressions, but at least I have confidence it will keep running.

(This isn't my van, but my brothers with the original Waterboxxer)

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