Banchin’ is exactly what these guys are best at.  With many years of expertise, mostly in tuning VW’s and BMW’s, the shop has grown into a bustling tuner garage covered in rare and very cool projects.  These include all manors of maintenance and service, engine tuning and performance upgrades, up to building and preparing full blown rally and race cars.  As the eEuroparts motorsports program grows and flourishes, our friends at Banchwerks invited us down for a casual night of wrenching, dinner, and a tour of this very cool shop.

I noticed that the GPS said were were less than a mile away, as we approached downtown Providence, RI.  As we looked around, past the pouring rain, we were stricken with how cool an area this was, with everything around exuding quaint old-timeyness, an area built up during a maritime industrial revolution.  Suddenly we were there, a small brick building with some very cool cars through the halfway open gate.

There we were met with a happy puppy named Penny, a Mk1 Euro import Scirocco project hanging on a wall, and a full tour of the problems plaguing VW direct injection systems. One of those being the dreaded carbon build-up due to the fuel injectors being moved out of the intake ports. Without gasoline being sprayed onto the ports and intake valves, carbon builds up and causes poor performance.
VW recommends a highly toxic chemical treatment to be done to clean these ports and valves, but Banchwerks took a page out of BMW’s handbook and developed a system to use the much more effective walnut media blasting method. By using this technique, the job can be done in only a fraction of the time, without using dangerous chemicals and polishing the intake ports and valves at the same time.

The main point of the evening was to saw apart a doner car, that would be donating it’s side panels to help repair the Banchwerks house rally car, after being crashed hard into a pole at the New England Forest Rally.  Armed with a sawzall, Ian ‘Smitty’ Smith, David and Kathi Baker, Jesse Whitsell, Jason and Bunny removed large portions of the car to prepare for grafting.

While there, Kevin Andrade (eEuro’s newest motorsports competitor) showed up with his rally car, still in development, but very very fast. More on this team coming soon! Included on this tour was a wall of shame, complete with several high pressure fuel pumps that had been destroyed by warn cam followers. This situation will be addressed separately in another blog post coming soon, so all you TSI VW drivers, stay tuned. Thanks guys for inviting us down, we will be back for more!