In about May of 2001, I had the bright idea to rebuild my ancient, decrepit 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle into a race car, for road-racing. When I started the project off, Jon, Shane, Teeleton and Junior all donated some weekend days to help out, but as the project has worn on, most of the help has dropped off. The latest crew has been composed of Teeleton and agidius for the most part, both from the HASTE gang, and they've been keeping me focused on getting done, and whaddya know, it worked!
It's finally made it down the drag strip, and still needs work. I've finally got all the fire-damaged stuff replaced, and there's a bit more tuning yet to do. Then I'll see about racing the thing.
The list of modifications to be done, more or less in order:
Future modifications:
24 November 2007: agidius came by, and we did some more poking at things. Another compression test yielded everything looking good (and the same), so we went to my dad's to get a torque wrench in order to put everything back together. Nobody was able to come up with anything other than "put it back together and run it, hopefully it'll settle down." Ken's going to talk to some people he knows, and I'm going to talk to a local speed shop to see if they have any ideas, and we'll compare notes and see what we have.
23 November 2007: My dad came over, and we got the engine out of the car, and the 1/2 head off the engine. The bore was very clean, the rings looked great, there was no hole in the piston, there was nothing apparently wrong with the #1. So then we worked on getting the header apart, which we also accomplished. So now I'm going to reassemble the 1/2 bank, and run some more compression tests. Maybe the bad value was a fluke? But then that raises the question: just what is the problem?
20 November 2007: I worked on getting the 1/2 head off today, and thought maybe I could get lucky and not have to take the engine out of the car. Almost. I can see threads on the back side of the head as it runs into the body. And of course I can't see into the cylinders well enough to be able to figure out what's wrong. I also did a little cleaning out of the garage, and pulled apart a set of half-shafts and CV joints that were gunked with old grease; they're still gunked, but at least they're apart, ready for cleaning. It's now possible to actually walk all the way around the car, without having to step over anything. Amazing.
22 September 2007: I decided to try to get the engine out of the car today, and failed. I got all the hoses and wires unhooked, but I couldn't get one of the slip-joints of the header apart. I tried banging on it, pulling on it, putting the hydraulic ram on it, to no avail. I probably need another set of hands. I dunno.
03 September 2007: I finally got around to doing the compression test I've been needing to do since the last time we went to the track. The #1 cylinder reads 70 psi, and the rest read 100. I'm not totally thrilled about the 100s (seems that almost-brand-new engine parts should be a bit higher than that), but the big difference on the one cylinder means I need to yank the heads and see what's what. Incidentally, the plugs on #1 and #2 looked pretty good, the #3 plug was a soot bomb, and the #4 plug looked like it had been running super-lean. Not sure what, if anything, that means.
01 June 2007: We went out to the track, and after some low-end tuning, I noticed a fairly large wet spot on the grass underneath the passenger-side head. Turns out that the breather fitting in the valve cover had been leaking oil pretty severely; I was down about 2 quarts. So that was pretty much the end of my night. I didn't even make it to tech. I've known for quite some time that the heater hose and hose clamps that made up the breather system would eventually need to be replaced with AN fittings, but the cost was a bit on the high side; it appears that now is that eventuality. On an up note, there was no fire, and there was some decent racing at the track.
15 May 2007: I ordered a couple parts today from MA Motorworks, including an aluminum oil filler cap (yaay!) and the one piece of engine tin I'm lacking. Some of it is back-ordered, so hopefully that stuff will show up before track day.
12 May 2007: Having gotten the jet kits in this week, I did a couple small tweaks - installed the zero-bypass accelerator jet, and bumped the mains up one notch to 140s. The resulting drive was good, but the stupid oil filler "cap" reared its stupid head again. Having no clock to compare, the mains felt like they might be a little stronger, and the transition to the air-correction jets felt a little more pronounced (it fell on its face a little harder). Until I get some actual hard data, of course, this is all just conjecture. The idle jets and accel pumps still need work, but it was just too damn hot, and I've got too much other stuff I need to do today, so it'll wait. I've got a few weeks until track day, so it's not like there isn't time.
08 May 2007: The jet kits arrived today. It's amazing how something so small could cost so much money! Also, the trip to the track for tuning (say that three times fast) will be on 01 June.
28 April 2007: I finally got off my butt and installed the new Bilstein shocks this morning, and then took it for a drive. Those old shocks really were trashed; the new ones were solid as a rock over the lumpiest section of road nearby. During the drive, I managed to blow the top off my oil filler cap - it's nothing but a threaded ring now. Cheap plastic parts. I ordered the carb jet kits last night from Carbs Unlimited. They should be here in a couple weeks, so then I'll just have to do some baseline jetting, and then out to the track.
25 March 2007: At long last, I finally got employed again, so I ordered some rear shocks for the VW. They should be in by Tuesday, so I'll put 'em in next weekend. Then I just gotta score some jet kits, do a little boresighting on the tune, and take it out to the track for fine-tuning.
14 July 2006: Well, we went to the track, and managed to get 3 passes in. Times were fairly poor, and got worse as the night went on, though speeds increased. Not sure how that works out. The scale was on, so I got the actual weight of the car: 2300 pounds (1330 front/970 rear). It turns out that the rear shocks got trashed in the fire, because I was having wheel hop problems something fierce on the burnout. HotRodV6 got video of the first pass, and Jon got video of all three, but everybody seems to have lost their videos. Buncha slackers.
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