Alain's Brasil-style turbo Fox build

4 minute(s) of a 85 minute read

Here's an exciting update :)

I never liked how my intake plumbing took up so much room, running all the way to meet the throttle body right near the battery. This gave me basically no room for accessing anything on that side of the engine bay. Removing the differential pressure regulator on the Mercedes fuel distributor to tune it was always such a pain. It'd make so much more sense to have the throttle body at the front of the engine.

I had two options in mind to accomplish this: the simple way, with an easy to find intake manifold from an early A2 Golf or Jetta; or the other way, with an Audi 5000 turbo manifold, with the 5th cylinder runner cut off and welded shut among a few other modifications needed. Why choose the easy way right?

Meet the candidate, mid-surgery:

I had actually began cutting this manifold up a couple years ago, but it was one of those long drawn out projects that stayed in the backburner all the time partly because of all the modifications required to make it work, and partly because of other higher priority needs that always seemed to come up.

Other than deleting the 5th runner, this mod also involves some port matching; some material needs to come off both from the manifold itself (very little on the bottom of the hole for each runner) and from the head (the openings need to be made about 1/4 inch taller). I don't recommend you try what I tried (to port match the head without removing it from the block), but it worked. Plugged up each runner and had a vacuum running while using some carbide bits on a Dremel knockoff.

I added some vacuum nipples to the welded plate and now the manifold now lives in its new home:

A few other things also need done for this mod; modifying the throttle cable holding bracket on the valve cover and figuring out a way to make the cable work with the new throttle body, figuring out the vacuum connections, and of course new intake plumbing to go with it.

It's running well and throttle response is quicker since this throttle body is just one 2.5" throttle plate rather than the Fox' dual setup.

I am also starting to experiment with making some videos of the Fox and the Puma; here's a quick preview video of the Fox:

Much more to come... hope to have this Fox back on the road this summer.

Happy new year everybody!