VR6 Engines Hub - Calling all Volkswagen Watercooled V-Reihenmotor freaks!

Hey all, just reaching out to see if anyone here is into the VR6 platform, be that the 12 valve AAA blocks, all through to the 24 valve and variable injection models.

I myself am rebuilding a BUB 3.2 - there's a fair bit of good info on these and their fairly robust. I will be however placing the motor into a T3/T25/Vanagon/Kombi or whatever you wanna call the brick of a thing. It's been done before, but I'm sure it will be a challenge for myself.

Would love to hear about your projects and share tips, tricks as well as the blood sweat and tears.

I recently reconditioned my first VR6 engine earlier this year - the 3.2L BHE motor from a Mk1 Audi TT - pretty sure that one came just before the BUB motor for Mk5 Golf R32 applications. The 24V BHE has the mighty forged crankshaft so its up for big power according to some other build threads I have seen. We keeping it in mostly stock format for now. The main challenge was transplanting into a Mk5 VW Polo that previously had a diddy 1.2 TDi motor. The worst part of the wiring work was the slog of removing the dashboard. Other fun was working out and sourcing the correct driveshafts for that setup.

The CAN Bus integration mostly lined up very nicely, with the only known annoyance being the Polo cluster does not broadcast oil temp on the CAN iD that the ECU expects, but a bit of logging and guidance from an ME7 expert had us figure out the ECU does a nice job of ignoring the invalid oil temp info from the cluster and uses a substitute value derived from water temp.

The biggest learning curve I had on the actual engine rebuild was there is a curious thing about VR6 about priming the oil pump - it won't make any oil pressure unless the fill the rear oil gallery via the little access port with approx 0.5L of oil. We had a mechanical oil pressure guage attached to the oil filter housing for the first cranking tests after we built up the engine and there was zero oil pressure until I discovered the need to prime the system in this way.

After the motor is run in, I will look to some mild remapping to see if we can reap the benefit of the custom exhaust and a hopefully decent cold air intake (that we havent even thought about yet). Thing runs great and makes all sort of wookie noises.