"if you’re going to try, go all the
way.
otherwise, don’t even start."
–Charles Bukowski
I've been focused on the bug. It's a mountain to climb, but I've definitely made progress. The chassis is pretty much done. After messing about with the original engine (which was not original- it was actually a Type III engine and it had a cracked case), I was visiting my in-laws in Sacramento and Tom presented me with a 1200cc motor that had been sitting in a field for 15 years. Free. This turned out to be a "D" case, which were built in Germany and Mexico as replacement cases for dealers dropping engines into vehicles. The number is D0291462 which puts it around 1965 or so. Maybe someone knows more about these serial numbers than I do. As the displacements very from 1200 over the years, these early cases are usually referred to as the "40hp case".
This car is already such a mongrel, I felt like putting an older engine into it wasn't going to do any harm. the fact that it was free is also working in its favor. I'm not looking to win any races. Also, the body of the bug is slowly shifting to more of a 1966 or even 1965 car, so I think the car I end up with will be a 12 volt mid-sixties bug.
I trucked the engine home and started collecting the parts I'd need to get it running, most of which I was able to take from the 1600cc engine. As Rainman Ray says on Youtube, 'Custom parts will give you custom problems', and that has been forever the case with this car. This is a 6 volt engine, so the starter and flywheel diameters are different. The intake and exhaust manifolds are 10mm narrower on each side, and the engine tins, and the generator placement on the fan shroud, and the pushrod lengths. It goes on and on. So throwing later engine parts on the older engines isn't painless. This motor already had a 12 volt flywheel ring on it. I put the 1600c flywheel on anyway as it was much better condition. A lot of the engine tin was missing. Even nice VW's down at the airport have the tins missing when you peek under there. I'm determined to get them all working properly again..
Well, I did get it on the chassis and I got it started, but there was a ton of blow-by and something was definitely not right. A compression test reveal ZERO compression in the No. 3 cylinder. This is the cylinder that's downstream from the oil cooler in terms of cooling airflow, and it gets the least effective cooling of the four. I think VW even retards the spark timing to run that one cooler; it's a known problem. The later solution was the doghouse cooler, which sits in its own separate chamber so it doesn't throw hot air back down into the engine fins. I won't be doing any of that kind of modification. In any case, it's not uncommon that No. 3 will fail in some way. I just didn't know how badly.
The picture says it all: there was hole on the piston. After messing about with trying to tear down only the top end, I just dove in and broke down the entire engine down to the crankshaft. I took the parts to Old Speed in Paramount, CA, who reconditioned the crank, rebuilt the heads, provided bearings and much guidance. I think I ended up spending about $1500 on all of it, which is a fraction of what a new long block would cost. I put the "big bore" cylinders and pistons in it. It's one of the only mods that is regarded as reasonable for the old 1200cc engines. There's a little vintage scene of dudes lusting after old-school early years Okrasa modifications where people will hot rod the older engines, but even the books from the 1960's make it clear that the early cases are just not built to take any kind of pounding- Bill Fisher's "How to Hot Rod Your Volkswagen Engine" has some very practical advice on al of this. It's probably the best of these VW engine books, in my opinion. Very dense with information- it's deceiving but so many details are in there, and he gets them all right.
But the 77mm cylinders went up to 83mm, and I should get a nice little bump in power. The set is Chinese, AA brand. It's been interesting, and also a little disheartening to see how the smaller, almost cottage industry stuff has moved to China as well now. They make everything. It's not just circuit breakers and power washers by the millions any more. Things like violins and handmade shoes are now made very very well, and in small numbers. You can find the door check straps for a 1970s Mercedes 300D, and with plastic shielding around them to keep them clean, they're much better than the originals. I mean, how any of these do they think they'll sell? A few hundred? Who would bother with that tiny of a production run? Now they do. Parts like this used to be hard to find and expensive but they've just figured out that there is a market there and they make it work. All these little nooks and crannies of old car needs, they are filling the gaps, and all the little producers in the US are disappearing. And so it is with VW parts. They make very good heads, cranks and piston sets. I think in the early 2000s, the quality was highly variable. Some were good, some were junk, but those days are over now. The quality is superb. Russell at Old Speed said they've been running Chinese crankshafts for 10 years now with zero problems. And the piston set I bought- all the ring gaps were perfect. They needed nothing.
I used the original crank and rods,
New camshaft and lifters (Engle, stock profile)
AA 83mm pistons and cylinders
Old Speed rebuilt the heads
I rebuilt a janky old craigslist engine stand first. This was time well spent, though it took a while to do it. I hated the bolt-in-a-welded-nut method of securing the rotation, and I rebuilt it as flexure clamp. the first time I've done that but it works so well. It holds very firmly and won't wear out. I think Stefan Gotteswinter mentioned how the Haas TL-1 lathe tailstock had this flexure clamp on it to secure the ram, and how nice of an arrangement that was. It's so much nicer than a set screw-type thing. Seems like a machining job but it's mostly cutting stuff up with the bandsaw and welding it together. I also made new 'ears' that bolt into the engine mount holes of the case from scratch, trying to make them as accurate as I could so there is zero play. The case is feather light, so you don't think its a big deal when you start building the motor, but once the engine is all together, you're putting the generator and you forget just how little the area is that's holding onto the case, so the fit really matters.
What's also nice is that I took a spare flywheel nut and made a crankshaft holder that uses the same stand. I think after the 2nd day of working on it I was like "This is not worth it." then two weeks into assembling the engine, and rotating it for the 2000th time, I had changed my mind...
I think I must have assembled and disassembled the case about 6 times. The Hot Rod book warned me and I didn't believe it at first. But so many things trip you up if it's your first time. The biggest error I made was assembling the camshaft 180º out of sync, and I was putting the heads on at that point- that's how far I got when I realized it: the wrong valves were opening. I could've made it work- the distributor could have been 180º rotated, but it just bothered me. I used Curil-T sealant. For taking it apart it was fantastic. It never really dries, it always just stays tacky and smear-able, but for that last, final assembly, I wish I'd used the Perma-tex aircraft sealant. The Curil-T seals it, but I'm getting very small weeping leaks after only a few short runs. This might be due more to the condition of the case mating surfaces on the bottom (which is not great) than to the particular kind of sealant.
I might be able to fix this: if it's leaking around the bolt shafts and washers, I can remove one at a time and put Perma-tex Ultra black around the bolt, then move on to the next one. I think for those bolts on the very bottom, the smaller ones, they're not going to do much warping of the case if you remove one at a time.
The part you don't see is all the millions of little issues I dealt with as I went. The craziest one was that the base surface of the driver's side cylinder head (the casting part, not the machined part that receives the cylinder top) was bearing on the cylinder casting. So it wasn't seating properly. At all. I through it was hella loud on the first start up, but it ran ok. Only after I did another compression test did I see that I had another zero compression on cylinder 4. I was stunned. How could this be? And I mean ZERO. It makes sense when you realize the entire head wasn't sealing and had a massive, crescent moon shaped gap that air was going in and out of. I tore it down, confirmed the interference problem with bluing dye on the bench, then took it back to Old Speed. Mike trimmed it on the mill in 5 minutes.
Put it all back together and bam, purred like a kitten. So much nicer than the first run. I think a rebuilt carb and rebuilt distributer, that is static timed before you try starting it is worth spending money and time on. I spent a few more days with details: a riser plate for the carburetor. With the later, 12 volt alternator mounted next to the 40hp intake manifold, the carburetor interferes with that. So I made a quick plate out of aluminum.
I also rebuilt the engine tins. Everything on the 40hp engine is about 10mm shorter on each side because the stroke is shorter than the later engines. So the pushrod tubes, the pushrods, all the engine tins... So if you're trying to get all the tins fitted, you have to trim and customize all the nut plates and attach points. It's a lot of work, and when you're done, your reward, aside from better cooling, is something called "bastard tins".
Now the chassis is in a hangar down at the airport, and I've moved onto the scariest part of the project: the body work...