VW Type 2
Our VW engine strip takes a sinister turn
Our camper’s engine had new heads, valves, rocker shafts, pushrods, pistons and cylinders: someone had spent good money building it up, and relatively recently, too. It all went terribly wrong at the (new) gudgeon pins. They’d been hammering from side to side and had mushroomed the metal around the circlip grooves. It suggested a lot of shimmy and vibration inside the crankcase. The oil didn’t inspire confidence either: the last pint was a thick soup of deep grey, filled with foreboding and light-alloy. As if to intensify the atmosphere of menace, it also contained a large amount of magnetic material.
On I pressed, to find scored and worn crank journals along with tramlined main and big end shells cratered with debris like the surface of the moon. For the post mortem, I called in Pete Daniels, who’d already very kindly gifted me with his special tools, his civilised workshop and, not least, his years of VW experience.
‘There’s stray instant gasket everywhere, the crank’s new, but badly-worn, the bearings are ruined… and what’s this?’ Pete pointed out that the bearing seats in the crankcase had been hammered to oblivion by the flailing crank and chattering bearing shells. He suspected this was an inherited defect from the secondhand crankcase’s last use and might well have set off the chain reaction of destruction this time around. Fortuitously, the case can be line-bored to fit oversized main bearing shells. Also fortuitous, as it turned out, was the snapped fan belt that sparked this precautionary stripdown.
You’ll be pleased to know that all of this is being documented in a definitive four-part series on how to strip, assess, rebuild and uprate an air-cooled VW engine, starting in the Spring issue of PC. It’s turned out to be more exciting than we expected. The moral of this story, by contrast, is dull but worthy: a well-curated crankcase and bottom end are absolutely key to building a longlived, smooth and reliable engine. Machining this one, last time around, would have cost much less than the value of new parts subsequently ruined. Time for another extensive shopping list...