Site Navigation:
Craig's twitter feed:
Tweets by @gevmage
I passed a major milestone working on the beetle this evening.
Recently I've been working on getting a usable intake manifold for the engine and prepping it for installation. Over the weekend, I got the heat riser tubes set with JB Weld. One task remained yesterday, to put a vacuum port in the neck of the manifold for the thermosatic air cleaner valve. The manifold that was other wise right just had a threaded hole in the neck instead of the vacuum port:
I JB Welded a small piece of fuel pipe into the threaded hole. So when I started this evening, I had the intake manifold with the riser pipes fastened into place
and the vacuum port installed
so this evening I continued assembly.
The intake manifold is in 3 pieces, and it connects to the muffler. The heater boxes also connect to the muffler. It really is best to put everything together without gaskets and make sure that everything fits and tightens down before you begin assembly, because inevitably you'll end up loosening some things.
I think the way to do it is to put everything together with the fasteners loose, and then once everything is connected, tighten all the connections together slowly. This evening I had to loosen the muffler to get the heater boxes to connect to it.
In fact, at the end, the left heat riser flange didn't quite tighten down to a good joint. As you can see the flange doesn't quite meet up:
After all that work, I wasn't about to pull everything back apart, so I slathered all around the flange with high-temp silicone caulk. I know it can stand up to the exhaust gas temperature, I just hope it will hold up against the exhaust pressure.
SO...finally...the engine is assembled up to the intake and exhaust systems. Huzzah!
There's lots still to come. The assembly of the intake and exhaust systems is probably the biggest single sub-assembbly step in the engine, and the most annoying because everything depends on everything else. The sheet metal is easy to bend or modify if the need arises.