Kent and Volkswagens

> It makes me wonder if he ever worked on the "heater-box control assembly" on any of the (probably) pre-'65 bugs. They later replaced it with 2 levers that sat directly behind the stick shift, between the two front seats.

The 1961 Beetle I drove had the white plastic knob. Fortunately, the heater didn't exactly get much of a workout in Austin, so I never had to work on the assembly. I still have the owner's manual somewhere.

I had seen VWs on the road in passing. My first "hands on" experience was the result of a local farmers roan hair daughter's faded blue VW clamoring along the road on her normal route home one day and she finally stopped a few hundred yards away because of the increasing noise and flying sparks.

Apparently the motor was held in place by a single engine mount. That bolt was missing. I backtrailed the event and a few yards past the spot where the engine hit the sand road was the bolt.

A short time later with a addition of a lock washer, the help of a breakover bar and socket, her VW was good as ever.

B-)

30 years ago my Sister had a 1969 Beetle. I borrowed it one time and drove down to the Bay Area. It started having trouble on the way home. It started to lose power then died. Let it sit for 15 minutes then it ran fine again. It did that several times but I made it home.

I always wondered about that.

Were the VWs prone to carburetor ice? Or maybe it was vapor lock.

My memory is the conditions would've been right for carburetor ice, that is about 70 with some humidity.

The old 40hp engines did have a 'carb-heat' tube that ran from the cooling shroud to the air 'filter' (oil bath, I believe) assembly. But I bet carb ice wasn't the culprit..

I bet the fuel pump was getting hot and cavitating. Let the rubber diaphram inside the mechanical fuel pump cool off and you're good to go. A better description would be a vapor lock..but it really wasn't due to 'vapor', just an air leak in the fuel pump. Tightening the screws of the top of the pump might have helped.

Even a complete mechanical idiot like me tinkered with and did maintenance (busted many a knuckle adjusting valves and changing oil every 2500 miles, faithfully, grrr) on my old VW bug, and later, a bus. Not too many women were doing that in the early 70's, so I was proud! I could quote passages from John Muir's guide verbatim.

Ahh, the good old days. I might not've known HOW to fix something on the VeeDub, but at least I knew what I was looking at when I opened the engine compartment.

> The old 40hp engines did have a 'carb-heat' tube that ran from the cooling shroud to the air 'filter' (oil bath, I believe) assembly.

What I think you're describing is what I recall as being a tube attached to the intake manifold that bolted to an opening on one of the exhaust ports of each head and piped exhaust gases through it to warm the manifold which didn't have much contact surface with the heads.

I still have the front badge from my '71 Micro Bus. Kind of a rarity because some kids liked to collect them and those were a hot item because they were large. lol! I also had a '73 Squareback with dual carbs. It originally had fuel injection but was converted.

They were easy and CHEAP to work on. A complete rebuild with new piston, rods, valves, heads, crank etc. was only $500. I could adjust the valves in 2 minutes because I did it so many times. They required tinkering to be reliable.

I put a 2-barrel Weber carb and new intake on my bus. The kid I bought it from enlarged the jets by drilling them out slightly and port matched the intake manifold. He knew his V-Dubs. Good Lordy. I could lay rubber in first gear! Unbelievable..

But it was not meant to be. About six months later cruising home from classes one day I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a lot of smoke. Blue smoke. The kind of blue smoke as in oil consumption blue smoke. I thought to myself "Man, somebody's car is really smoking....Hey...That's me!"

Crap. A week before finals in my senior year and I had no money. What had happened was one of the piston rings broke up in one of the cylinders on the left side. Pieces of the broken ring floated through the intake valve and on over to the other cylinder. It was a chewed up mess. But someone actually gave me another bus that had suffered from the dreaded VW rear main seal failure. The rods were knocking nice and loud. But the jugs, heads, and pistons were in much better shape than mine so I swapped them. It ran great. Good enough to get me back home for the summer 400 miles away with it fully packed.

A must have if you're going to own a VW.

Can't really figger out what the tube was for....

One very nice thing I can say about the old bugs was that on the coldest day of the year heat would be pouring out of the vents by the time I was three doors down the street. That heating system worked!

> Can't really figger out what the tube was for....
>
>

Well, the hoses connected to the (oil bath) air cleaner were (L) the pre-heater hose for the warm-up period that pulled intake air from the heat exchanger manifold and (R) was that the crankcase breather hose . The small diameter tube welded to the intake manifold was the item I mentioned above that piped exhaust gas from an exhaust port to heat the manifold up that otherwise would run cool for complete vaporization of the gasoline in the intake mixture.

yeah, yeah,

I remember, part of the intake manifold. I remember they "crudded" up after a few years. Probably still transfered heat, though.

Strangest things I ever saw on a bug:

One of the neighborhood kid's father had an old vw with a split back window. Couldn't tell you what year, but it was an oldie. The pully on the generator had an extra dish on it that had a slot for rope starting, just like an old Briggs-Stratton lawn mower. Don't really know if it was factory, but it worked.

Every once in a while, probably when there was a big enough audience of wide-eyed kids, his father would get the rope out from under the spare tire and start it with a healthy pull. There was always at least one nay-sayer that wound up a believer.

> Well, the hoses connected to the (oil bath) air cleaner were (L) the pre-heater hose for the warm-up period that pulled intake air from the heat exchanger manifold

Actually, I found the Manual to my old VW and am reminded that the way the pre-heater system for the intake air worked was that when the ambient temp was below 68 deg F, there was a flapper valve on the air cleaner intake with a counterweight on it that kept it closed at low engine speeds as when the car was just started. When the flapper was closed, intake air was drawn from the large hose running to the air cleaner from the heat exchanger that pulled heat from the exhaust pipes. The driver was expected to clip the flapper valve open when the ambient temp was above 68 deg F.

The heater was a model of simplicity. It was a finned aluminum alloy casting around the exhaust pipe, inside a sheet metal plenum. A fan pulled air into a sheet metal shroud and blew it over the oil cooler and cylinders. Air was ducted through the two large hoses coming off the fan shroud seen in the photo above to the exhaust heat exchanger. That warmed up very quickly, which was why the car heater that used warmed air from it came to temperature so quickly.

Volkswagens and Texas

Back in a former life, many galaxies away:

I had a two small boys, a 1963 VW bug and a father-in-law that lived in Fluvanna, Texas. Every holiday, summer or winter, we packed the bug as full as we could. The boys, their mother and I would drive down there to visit. I think top speed with all four of us and the cargo hold full was about 75 or so, on a down-hill, with a tailwind.

There was a local minion of the law in either Roby or Anson that watched the outskirts like a hawk. He might have had radar, I can't remember. Anyway, he wrote me a ticket for doing 85 in a 60. Ridiculous...

Since I was from out of town, I was required to post bond before proceeding. I think the ticket was 45 bucks (a lot for back then and probably all I had on me). I was laughing. I told him it was worth the money to get proof that my VW would do 85 mph.

I think I borrowed 20 bucks from my father-in-law for the gas to get home...

Volkswagens and Texas

> Every holiday, summer or winter, we packed the bug as full as we could. The boys, their mother and I would drive down there to visit. I think top speed with all four of us and the cargo hold full was about 75 or so, on a down-hill, with a tailwind.

I'd be surprised if you were running over 70mph if that was a stock VW. If you'd actually been doing 75, you could have starred in a VW ad. :>

yeah, yeah,

> I remember, part of the intake manifold. I remember they "crudded" up after a few years. Probably still transfered heat, though.

The trick was to use an oxy-acetylene torch to heat the carbon deposits up and then just run oxygen over them once they were red hot. Carbon burned off as CO2. I didn't myself have such a torch, but had it on good authority that it worked. I used cruder methods.

"How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive" - A great book, a real classic, I used it years ago to repair my VW. The author was great about hands on repairs but must have been a part time surveyor, he had his own standards. I wanted to repair the automatic choke on my VW so I opened to the choke repair section of the book and found "I don't like automatic chokes so I won't explain their repair but I will tell you how to disconnect it."

I was A VW person when I was young.
First experience was borrowing a friend who I lived in a boarding house with in the first year of college about ‘68. All the tenants would loan cars to each other. It was a 62 red bug with the ragtop sunroof. I remember once when the brakes were really bad and one hade to downshift and use the hand brake to stop and in rare case find a nice size shrub on campus to come to a complete stop.
Next was a 63 bug that a girlfriend owned and we decided to drive around the USA. This would have been in 1970. I think it took about $80 +/- worth of gas at about 30cts/gallon via Chicago, Boulder, Yellowstone, Oregon Coast, SF, Santa Barbara, LA Vegas, Grand Canyon, El Paso, Houston, New Orleans, Cocoa Beach and Philly. Carburetor cable linkage came undone somewhere in Nowhere in the NE corner of Utah but managed to put it back together somehow after finding by providence some of the parts along the road along with other temp rigging..
Next was a 67 VW van in 1976 in New Orleans which was owned by a local Swiss Bakery owned by the Swiss envoy to N.O and then complimented it with a 67 bug in 1978. The bug I bought off a VW mechanic in N.O. east who had modified it to run on alcohol for a local TV station for a report during the energy crisis. He put new engine in it and sold it to me. He also use to fly ultra-lights he made with VW engines..
I replaced the engine in the van with a help of a co-worker. We found a van at a junk yard and I got the engine ad he got the body with my old engine that needed to be rebuilt. Old flywheel didn’t exactly sync with the junk yard engine and one in a blue moon would get hang up. Solution was to get on the rear bumper and jump up and down for 10 seconds or so. : )
I had the original spiral bound John Muir ‘guide’ and used it a lot. I still have it here in storage somewhere along with another one in mint condition in an protective envelope somewhere. I remember a lot of kitchen tables with VW parts on them.
Sold both of them in the Ozarks in 1985. Van went to a Ozark family with little kids who were jumping up and down in it as they drove away and the bug went to a classmate maybe for dune buggy conversion. I don’t know.
Never needed a heater in N.O. and they never worked right for me. When it was real cold they were pretty useless especially in the van. I think I had to disable the heater in the van when I replaced the wiper motor.
I believe that I got to 82 +/- mph in the bug going downhill in the Rockies or Tetons. It had a little shake. The 67 was fast but I b=never reaslly push it. It had the porsche manifold/exhaust on it.
After that, I was always leery of the post 67 VWs because of the emission changes even though I had friends with rabbit diesels who loved them. But the new bugs and vans , I was always suspicious of dealing with in any way.

Many DIY assemblers fail to use a small hole gasket on the right side and large hole gasket on the left when installing the intake/preheat system. That is what creates the heated air crossflow. German tricks to perfect function cannot be ignored. Both the bain and beauty of German engines.

I currently have a 72 Bus with 210k miles. Got it mid 90's at 125k. Wasn't at all in the market looking for any vehicle. Just saw it at the post office with a for sale sign. 5 minutes of cursory inspection and I could see original carbs and a correct engine assembly as to all visual evidence. Otherwise a basic bus with poor repaint and very little rust. Called the guy, made the deal.

At the time I was operating my Euro Shop. I know the German tricks in detail and follow them. Fixed the brakes, pulled the engine for a reseal procedure. Noted more correct fasteners in the assembly. Even the tricky wire holdown for the push rod tubes was installed properly. High spec comp test. Replaced the worn out carbs and viola, superb utility vehicle, just the best. Nothing but basic maintenance since.

The only crap on the machine are the Brazilian brake cylinders on the rear. Couldn't get German anymore.