n52audi18t

At what point does overevving actually happen and hurt the engine. I was looking at a K04 kit and just realized that they raise the rev limiter to 7600, but can the motor actually go that high. Any time that my motor accidently hits 6000 at the track the computer throws the over-rev code at me.I thought the lifters gave out at 7200.

[ej257]

Safely, maybe 7100--but there is no point to go near it.

Audi2ptzero

You really have to look at a dyno chart of where the power band is and with the K03 and K04 it falls off fast above 5500 rpms. The other trick is to shift so that the next gear puts you right at the base of the power band.

Audi4orce

Until u "float a valve" Nobody knows what RPM's that happens on the 1.8T motor

n52audi18t

But I always try to shift at 5500 but sometimes i hit 6000 and get the code, i just wanted to make sure i wasn't hurting my engine

A400

Dont forget this is an interference engine. This is for custom software and you stock or other aftermarket chips may have a fuel cutoff and timing retard preset to some level. I think you could do some stupid expensive work to the hydraulic system but it would get maybe 200rpm's. I have a friend installing a mechanical setup in the next month or so aand it is also setip for race gas all the time. This setup has been tested to 9000rpm and was stable. I had a 5 cylinder that pulled so strong to 8000 rpm I had to have the tuner pull a hard cutback so I would stay away from temptation by stopping at 7800.
I understand that solids with all head work and parts with the solid lifter stuff instaled is almost 5000$. Once set up correctly they aren't bad to work with and despite urban legend they dont require weekly adjustments and may require nothing more than checking every now and then. But these are for 5-6-700hp efforts.
My $02
rod

[ej257]

you'll just bounce off the limiter like a fool.

Steffen Scheibler

You can safely take it to 7500 rpm.

7500-8000 rpm is 'probably fine' but with age..maybe you could get problems with a fragile timing belt or something else. As none of them are young now, if you want to do this with your car now, I'd inspect the entire engine all the way and very thoroughly, stopping only short of engine-out and removing the cylinder head...and even doing that if there is doubt due to other things you find (e.g. loud ticking idle, weird/bad compression figures, etc).

My 1.8T now has 340.000 km (212k miles) on it and I rev it into the high 7s (limiter kicks in at 7800) for years and years now and its OK with it.
Of those 340.000km, the engine has seen > 300bhp for 290.000km. There have been problems, but honestly, that is damn solid engine.

Oil pressure with stock parts is fine until ~8k rpm, which is why I set 7800.

With the stock turbos your power suffers over 6k and really runs out at 6500 anyway so you'd there'd be no point in revving that high except to make a lot of noise unless you've done a fair bit of modding.

If you regularly rev high, your maintenance free hydro lifters etc become not-so-maintenance free (see above mentioned problems). But if you proactively check the engine in detail every 30-40k, it'll not be too expensive to sort out any issues that arise as you're just preventing stuff rather than fixing broken parts.

With brand new hydro lifters you get valve float at 8600rpm. Very reliably so. Anything above 8500 is thus positively dangerous no matter what you did elsewhere. You need mechanical lifters if you want to set your engine to rev over 8.2k.

Now with a bigger turbo, you can get power all the way up to 8k rpm... but to handle that power you need to change your rods (regardless of engine) and probably your pistons unless you have the 225 (BAM or AMU) or 240 (BFV) engines which came with forged pistons from the factory. To not only stop your engine from blowing itself up but also making nice linear power high up the rev band, you're probably changing other stuff too..so by the time your hitting > 7k rpm and making power up there, your block is 'built' anyway and probably has bigger injectors, stronger piping, bigger BoV, bigger turbo, injectors, etc...