Skip to main content

Reply to "The Mice Strike, AGAIN!"

Didn't want anyone to think I'm being a slacker or something, so a quick update:

My new cylinder tins arrived and needed moderate "adjusting" to get them to fit right.  I also realized that I had previously installed the engine breast plate and rear heat shield tin in the wrong order (the rear tin goes under the breast plate - Who knew?  Most photos don't show this well).  This required that I re-work the rear tin to fit properly to the breast plate (and beat the crap outa the breast plate to un-do what I had done 20 years ago to make it fit around the deeper Berg oil pump) and then "adjust" the head tins to fit everything else.  Lots of Dremel cutting and hammer forming has been done lately.

This turned into a BIG F'in DEAL to get everything to fit right, especially because my headers have rusted together and cannot be removed without wrecking them (the slip joints no longer slip) so there's very little space to fit everything in.  It required that I remove the crankshaft pulley for better access.

What I found is that, if you run a stock VW oil pump, all of the after-market tin sort of fits with minor/almost no adjustment.  Add a Berg 30mm oil pump which is a lot deeper and it interferes with the breast plate behind the crankshaft pulley, requiring a lot of tin rework (translation - You need to beat the crap out of it).  Reworking the breast plate tin then requires reworking of the rear tin to get it all to match up.  ðŸ¤¬  This means putting a 1/4" "step" in a piece of 19 ga. sheetmetal with limited tools (mostly, a vice, a hammer, a torch and patience).

So I'm almost done with these little, time-consuming "adjustments" but now the tinwork will need stripping (powered wire brush or maybe I can find a sandblast booth) and re-painting before everything goes back together.  The toughest part was getting the head tins and the rear tin to match up where they meet, to have a continuous, flat surface to match the rear heat shields.  I hope to have everything done by the end of next week, just like a week ago I hoped to have all this done by the end of this week.

Time flies when you're having fun......   🙄

×
×
×
×
×