In lowering the car, we've discovered a unit problem due to my custom rear end. It was only ever built to be 1/2" lower than stock, to 2" higher than stock. In it's new lowered position, I have
tonnes of droop travel, but run out of travel on compression. New shocks allow me to move 20mm of droop travel into compression travel, which is significantly better (and actually causes us to need to map out the ideal springs again). Yes, we're at the point where there is value in moving 20mm of suspension travel around. Who would have thunk?!
One of the items I've been meaning to address for a long while is the wear in the oil pump. Shortly after I built the car, Bugpack was purchased by Empi and dissolved. The drysump oilpump that they made, disappeared along with the Bugpack name. This is slightly more than a minor inconvenience, because the body of the pump is all aluminum...which means it does wear. None of the
other drysump pumps are interchangeable without me doing new oil line configurations or more. When a stock oil pump wears against the cover, you can polish them up on some glass with sandpaper. With a dry sump pump, which is actually three pumps stacked together, it becomes a little more challenging.
Mine has worn to the point that the scavenge (removing oil from the engine and back up to the tank) occasionally will stop scavenging at idle. This fills the engine with 12L of oil, and then goes to zero oil pressure. Not an issue if you're driving, it scavenges just fine above 1,100rpm. But I haven't been able to leave the car at idle unattended for a long time. Taylor and I are are going to do an event in the car this summer, and having 12L of behind you at 220F in the summer heat is less than comfortable, so swapping over to wetsump while I work on the drysump oil pump seemed like a win-win solution. As it turns out, it would be rather frustrating for a day and then a win-win-
WIN solution.
A good opportunity to snap a photo and note that this motor is running an FK-8 cam. I should probably dig up all the motor specs and put there here in one post.
The Rally Bug engine bah has always been dry as a bone. So dry, in fact, that the rear sheet metal rusts out and has to be painted every so often. This is not a trait that the German Look or '58 Beetle share. At random intervals, and in a totally mind-bending makes-no-sense manner, they will spray oil all over the engine bay off the crank pulley. Sometimes it's a light bit, sometimes you are mopping up the engine bay at each driving day end wondering how it could possibly be that bad. It's so weird, I drove the German Look beetle for a day and had almost no oil, dad drove it
the next day and had to mop up all the oil in the engine bay
by lunchtime! It seems to make zero sense. So, imagine my frustration after swapping the Rally Bug to wetsump, and coming home from a test drive to see this:
Over the next few days I did high-rpm highway run tests, low speed city tests, mixture tests. When the oil comes out isn't consistent in time or quantity. Even weirder, the back of the pulley is almost completely dry. Whereas on the '58 and German Look it will be soaked. Comparatively speaking, it mostly drips/runs out of the Rally Bug, but sprays all around in the '58 and German Look. The drysump pulley is significantly smaller, 5" diameter, vs the stock size that the other engines run. And very quickly I figured it out...On my wet sump engines, instead of hanging an extra sump below the engine (as is typical for VW's), I'm using a 1.5L or 2.0L Accusump. It essentially holds pressurized oil ready to feed the engine if the pickup starves. So while whipping around sustained twisty corners if all the oil ends up in the cylinder head, the accusump keeps sending pressurized oil into the engine until it uses up it's 1.5-2L capacity. Typically an Accusump is set at the idle-oil pressure of an engine, or the minimum pressure you want to see. I've always set mine to 20psi. Enough to keep the bearings alive in a full-starve situation, but should have little bleed down at idle. Turns out, at 20psi I'm probably emptying the Accusump at idle, waiting at a red light. My current theory is the oil level rises high enough to become an issue inside the case, resulting in oil pushing past the crank pulley onto the tin. If the only thing I changed was drysump to wetsump, it can't be blowby or other engine issues. So let's try a sandseal to see if that will work? Rob Frose overnighted a sandseal setup from AVR, and I went to work fitting it to the car. 250km of high-revving, 20min of idling, and any other test I could throw at it...dry as a bone. Guess I need to order some sandseal setups for my other engines :P
My ignition issue I was experiencing on the way to the show and back had gotten worse, so I decided to swap out my CB Blackbox setup to the Magnaspark II that I'm running in the other cars. I got 85% through the swap when I found the damage in the wiring harness I use with the blackbox (user error) and the likely problem. I was already 85&% done, so I decided I would just continue with the swap. The last step is to change out the ignition mapping with the fuel injection, which was going to be a problem. The laptop I have for the car, which runs Windows XP, has had a drive failure. By some sort of miracle, I actually backed up the files and maps I had a few weeks ago. Miracle number two? I actually got the CB software running on
my Macbook using Parallels and windows 11. The only problem is the mac won't recognize the cable conveniently ziptied all through the car, and I am going to have to replace it. Swapped the ignition settings, and all my problems are gone. The only issue is the map I was using is right-messed-up due to trying to tune around ignition problems, and forgetting that I have to recalibrate the throttle position sensor at every map change. Who
knows what that poor computer has been trying to compensate for. So I loaded in the last known good map from a couple of years ago, and will have to work back towards a more efficient tune. I did some mileage tests on the now current-map, and then decided I would note it somewhere on the car since I seem to be forgetting more about it than I remember. Gave myself a 5 litre window too.
Lastly, I've been thinking about that upcoming trip with Taylor...and where we're going to put camping and weekend gear. Even just a
little extra storage space would be nice. The battery area always seemed like such a waste of space, and I had a spare aluminum cooking sheet...so here we go. Extra luggage capacity! I think once I decide to learn composite constructions, re-doing this in Carbon might be one of my first projects.
