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For those who don't know Teby, He's one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. The first night my wife and I met him we had a blast. We laughed so hard our sides hurt. He is truly a class act. I just love to give him a hard time. Mostly because his car (Jill) is near perfect.  That and because he got to kiss Terri Nunn. 

Love you Tebs!

 

Which motor is in the Knuckle dragger?  My goal is to keep up with you this year in SLO. I'm still gathering parts for the 5 speed. I think I'm down to the 10 tooth spider gears and the axle end gears. I've amassed everything else, even the elusive beef-a-diff.  I found one that was new in package for 50.00 delivered. I've actually found two of those now. The one in my 4 speed box and another for the 5er.

Need to send my shifter off on Monday. Vintage Speed is going to convert it to a 5 speed unit. Other than that, I'm at the mercy of the Kens. Ken Jansen gets the Motor next week. Just a quick pass under his magic wand. I'll get the tins chercoated while the motor is under the knife. Hopefully Kenny P can get the trans turned around before March/April. 

Kicking around the idea of a synclink set up for the carb liknage. I'm not looking forward to learning about the finer points of Weber Idle jets and the dreaded yoga moves necessary to reach them. Downward Praying Mantis Lotus Dog? If I have to run 2 metal fuel filters in line, I will.  Are those hex head idle jet holders worth it?

Anthony has been a veritable guru along this journey. He's a gift to the VW world. The patience of a saint.

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3.88 R&P and a new main shaft. 

Should be fun.

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Ahhh...the Synclink! The best $300.00 I've spent on Penny. All the little Weber gremlins disappeared when I installed the linkage. You will not be disappointed, Ted. And, yes, the Jaycee hex head idle jet holders are worth every penny.

My engine, you ask? It's just a Ken Jansen sedately-built 2110. No porting or polishing, just slightly enlarged valve openings and a 120 cam. The Weber 40 idf carbs have a moderate boost on the venturis and I'm sporting a MSD 6al box.

I keep waiting for something to fail but I haven't had to touch anything since the last rebuild and Synclink installation. That was 18,000 miles ago.

Knock on plastic...

Last edited by Terry Nuckels

Very cool Ted! The closer 3rd and 4th are so much fun to drive, and then to be able to shift into 5th- it doesn't get any better! Is your mainshaft a 3.80 or 3.78 1st? Are you going with a 4.125 or 3.88 r&p? Have you decided on what 3rd, 4th and 5th will be? What are you doing to the engine while it's out? 

Is your car swingaxle? (sorry, don't remember) There's a thread on the Samba where Ray Vallero (may he rip) modified a superdiff for better oiling, as the swingaxle diffs are said to not pass enough oil through the spider gears. It's not really a concern for a street car that only goes to the drive-in/hangout on Friday and Saturday nights and does a little bracket racing, but it apparently (this is just what I've read) does come into play in cars that spend more time at highway speeds. When I find the thread I'll post it. Al

PS-

Found it- http://www.thesamba.com/vw/for...wtopic.php?p=7602210

Last edited by ALB
Caretech-IM posted:

Interesting Rabbit Ears concept to replace a Kafer bar and stabilize the tranny to prevent twisting... wonder if this can be done on a 356 ? 

In a replica, Bruce, you'd be bolting them to fiberglass. I think you'd be better off with a kafer bar, tieing the shock mount tops together and triangulating down to the frame horns. You'd then have a place to run roll bar supports to.

DEAREST TED:

After wasting 3 -4 ounces of good Guinness laughing my a$$ off at your comment:

"Slower than Teby in a singles bar."   which was obviously taken from Terry Nuckles book; "113 Witty Dive Bar Comebacks" (Circa 1965) ..

It seems you are engaging me into a challenge  in which I must retort.

As we speak Pat Downs and I are working on a super secret engine build that is so secret that anyone who reads this post has to eat it after doing so.. (SEE VIDEO LINK BELOW)  I cannot stress to you enough that your car may "go to 11" when completed....  rest assured  mine will go to 11 & 1/16th.   with a 4 speed!!!!!!   do I need to send pics of my tack and speedo representing  3400 rpm at 90mph?    Now with the new super secret engine build I'm looking at hmmmmm  let see ..............  I'm sorry too secret to say!!!    Lets just meet on HWY 1 in June..      LOL LOL !!

(FOR ALL WHOM ARE THINKING A TRANS REBUILD, tips on a 5 speed effect with a 4 speed trans)

Ted I know your set on a 5 speed but if configure your trans like I did you can get that 5 speed effect without the extra expense,  and keep it a 4 speed, just need to do your home work.   Working with Scott Sebastian ( Metal Craft ) transmission guru and all around transmission genius.  He guided me to the Weddle Industries site  weddleindustries.com.  They have a gear ratio calculator and you can input all sorts of scenarios..   That's how I was able to decide my trans gear ratios .. Its driver preference.  I wanted to keep the 4 speed, so with a taller 4th it acts as an overdrive without any lug on the engine..(depending on the ratio you pick)  also allows me to have more peddle if needed without maxing the RPM!!  It's simple to read and it has all of the info you need  like, Vehicle speed, top speed, rpm drops and alternate gear combinations...  What I liked most is the Vehicle Speed chart that shows the gears and the speed for each ( after you enter the ratios).   You could spend hours fine tuning the exact ratios that suit your needs.. 

Yes the Synclink is the way to go.. although mine is behind the shroud it still works flawlessly.. Although when Pat Fine tunes my engine he does mumble something while tinkering with it...   The Jaycee hex head idle jet holders ARE worth every penny and work great Wish I had them last year    Big thanks to Sacto Mitch for all of his help, even though I had to limp Ms Jill home.. Mitch worked hard to help fix my situation.. Thank you again sir..

other than that   " I Got nothing"....

see you all soon ...  looking forward to meeting some newbies as well  the SLO run is a blast..   !!!!

Tebs

ps  TED  please see video link below...     did I say my car will go to "11 1/16?"        

 

Last edited by Teby S

Don't worry, Ted; Tebby is just messin' with you.

VW's gear spacing is perfect for it's purpose- getting the car moving in traffic and still being able to run at legal highway speeds with such low horsepower. If you want your car to go like a bat out of hell (with shorter spacing between gears to take advantage of the engine's power output) AND have decent highway speeds, a 4 speed ain't gonna cut it. If you go to a longer 1st you lose that stop light "jump". Closer 2nd, 3rd and 4th gears are incredible to drive (and will make your car SO MUCH MORE FUN! ). You've got to drive a car with close gears to appreciate what they can do. But then (and this is the trade-off) max highway speed (3500rpm) tops out somewhere between 50-60mph (depending on tire size and the ring & pinion used). Pretty hard to have it all, when you consider the constraints.

I've done it (in a Cal Look bug); a 4.375 (short for acceleration) r&p, stock 1st and 2nd, 1.48 3rd and 1.12 4th (instead of the 1.31 3rd and .89 4th) and with a 1750 (69x90- this was before 90.5's were on the market) the car went from being a high 15/low 16 second car to running mid 14's in the quarter mile. It came with a price, though- 3500 in 4th produced a mind numbing 52(?) mph, and it took forever to get anywhere on the highway. The answer- a 5th gear. 

 

Last edited by ALB

Ted,

Once upon a time, there was this gearhead guy from some hicktown on the plains who argued until he was blue in his fat face that a 4-speed could/should be all anybody would ever want and need (assuming "anybody" was ready to buy a new mainshaft with better 1 and 2, and go with a nice 3.88).

This guy was right, too. He did it, and his gear-spreads were really, really good-- almost perfect, in fact (he declared). Except the reach was a bit long from third to fourth, and the car was kind've soggy under 3000 RPM. A guy can dork around for years, buying this third or that R/P, playing with the ratio calculators and sending really large checks to Weddle or Erco for what (in the end) are just little bitty $400 gears.

Don't go down that road. I figure my desire to prove the 5-speed evangelists wrong is probably when my choo-choo really headed around the bend, and I lost all sense of financial prudence. 

Here's why: a 2110 with a 120-ish (FK43, et al) cam is a happy and eager little motor, which sings along nicely between about 3000 and 5500 or so RPM. The power is perfectly adequate, as long as the engine operates within that fairly narrow RPM range. When you ask it to pull hard at lower RPMS, it's kind've soggy for a guy raised on 'murican V8s. So what does a corn-fed boy do when presented with this situation? He does what anybody would, right? He tries to build a motor that won't be so soggy at 2000- 3000 RPM, and still make brutal power at 5500 rather than just add another gear to fill in the spots where the engine is lugging-- the theory being: extra gears are for guys without enough torque.

At this point the world goes kind've akimbo, and normal stuff stops making sense. A flat 4 is not going to pull like a 400 cubic inch motor, unless it's turboed or pushing up on 3L, no matter how much you wish it to be otherwise. After considering both-- in the end, our white-trash hooligan had built "King Kong" a 2332 Type 1: a long stroke, short rod 2332 beast with ports the size of golf balls with a crank that was constantly trying to yank the wrist-pins out of the slugs. Such an engine takes a 1-3/4" exhaust-- so our protagonist constructed not one, but two such exhausts.

While stuff was apart, I decided to tweak the gearing a bit. I kept the expensive mainshaft, went to a .89 fourth (from a .82) and added a ZF LSD. This was transaxle rebuild 1. It was sooo nice. "Perfect, for the new motor," I opined. 

Hypothetically, if a guy were to head down this road, he'd find that there's a reason LN Engineering gets about $20 billion dollars for a set of nickasil jugs. The Chinese knock-offs would be perfectly adequate, assuming they stayed round and didn't split in half under side-loading. I personally learned this in Salt Lake City coming back from "the first great road trip" to the golden state (your part of the world). That 2332 made power, yes it did-- tons of it. Waves and waves of power. Crazy, soil your pants power. Tilt the axis of the earth power. It started at about 3000 RPM. It was kind've soggy below that. It threw oil out the breather like the Exxon Valdez at highway speeds.

So I went back to the drawing board and pulled Mr. Kong's teeth. I de-stroked to 2276. I put in iron bores like everybody else. I kept the heads and tried a strange narrow lobe-center cam to try to bring the power on sooner

... and I put a few more Erco/Weddle gears in the 4- speed. I kept the high-dollar mainshaft (do you see the theme here?), put in a 3.44 RP, and bought a nice little Erco .93 (I think) fourth. It was nothing a stack of Benjamens didn't take care of. A couple thousand here, a couple thousand there, and pretty soon you're talking about some real money-- but a better, more powerful lawn-mower engine is worth whatever it costs, right? 

The transaxle was better(ish), but the motor was just weird. I had succeeded in taming the beast, but at the expense of cutting off it's gonads. It was now soft everywhere, but at least it was consistent. It was at that this point that my choo-choo, chugging unseen around a far-off bend, jumped the rails for good. Some would argue the point had been arrived at long before-- but those folks are cowards, and greatly underestimate the power of real, abiding insanity.

I pulled the 2276. I purchased some CB Super-Pro CNC heads and port-matched manifolds and sent them to a gentleman in WY who claimed he'd twin-plugged hundreds of heads. 6 months later, I had some really cool $1000 boat-anchors (with nice valve-springs and retainers). There were an extra set of holes in the heads, to be sure. He may have done hundreds, but he never did tell me if any of them worked.

Not to be deterred, Don Quixote started over and obtained a nice new set of Revmaster 043s perfectly set-up for twin plugs. There was joy in the camp, and large piles of money changed hands. The whole kit and caboodle went to Blackline Racing in Salt Lake, who were kind've reluctant to indulge my insanity (the nerve of some people!). There was a backlog, and this part of the program put me deep into June. I wanted to drive.

So, I put my spare 2110 in the car and drove it to CA again. It was... nice. Really, really nice. I didn't need to babysit that little motor. It didn't try to kill me. I never got the vibe it wanted to leave me to die alone in the desert. It just sang along happily back there-- not using oil, not making a commotion. Even when it got way too hot in Barstow. Even when I drove it for 1100 mi one day. Even over 100 mph for a couple of hours.

I came home after 3 weeks of driving pretty much non-stop with that little feller back there, and I thought, "You know what? This would be a perfect drivetrain for this car... if I just had another gear to fill in the low spots".

The twin-plug motor was finished eventually, and I'm still dorking with the timing map. And yeah-- it's pretty cool. It runs really, really good... but it's just a bit soggy under 3000 RPM or so. It makes a lot more power than the 2110 or the de-nadded 2276, and not as much as King Kong. It's an order of magnitude more cool.

But what it really needs is another gear.

Just sayin'.

So, Stan The Man from Stanistan, you have been around the barn w/ these AC engines more than most.  You change engines like I change socks.  well OK then.  I have a 2332 engine, and think it is pretty swell.  I love torque too. It works at 2500, and is happier still above 3000.  OK with me.  So here is what it is, according to printed material supplied by the builder:

84x94, CB pent-roof case, full flowed, shuffle pinned, cut for 84 crank, filled behind #3

Scat 84 crank 8 dowel forged nitrided chevy bearings

chevy H beam rods arp 8740 bolts; CB billet cut straight gears; Scat lifters; Engle 110 cam, clearanced for crank; german bearing kit; Scat chromoly flywheel lightened, 8 dowel, chromaly gland nut and head studs; Mahle 94 pistons; CB 044 heads 40x35.5 single spring; Manton pushrods, Scat 1.1 pro-rocker assy.

Scat welded and balanced fan; 2 x Weber 44IDF, Sidewinder ex; Kennedy 1500 ilb pressure plate and spring disc; blueprinted.

So the deal is: I understand about 50 or 60% of this. At least from a basic "what is that" PoV. What I do not understand is why this or that might have been chosen, how ths or that might have been chosen differently, and what one gets/gives up by doing this vs. that.  This seems to be where you are with all of this -- you understand what going one way will do, and why it might be good or bad.  Given the specs for my motor as stated, what would be your off the rails and around the bend analysis of choices made here??  Just curious.

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