Tom's UVA fugitive, Tom runs a 14s quarter mile :)

That's the one. A nice compact solution that's designed for the job

Been doing some more today,

Went to fit the sump plate, had bought a Mexican one with a drain plug which doesn’t fit... meh, fitted the original one

Checked the valve clearances, fitted the plugs, a billet distributor clamp, fan belt, flywheel oil seal, flywheel, oil pressure switch, coil and a few other bits and bobs..... all very time consuming and nothing to show... but here’s a photo anyway





We filled it up with oil, changed the oil filter and pre-filled it, turned it over by hand a bit

Then we made a starter box



Wired that up, took the engine off of the stand and bolted the bellhousing to it,
Plumbed the fuel lines and the fuel pump up, primed the fuel pump and all seemed good



Gave it a crank over to see what happened.... and it peed fuel all over the floor



That’s almost the same photo... but with petrol all over the floor

So I’ve ordered some service kits from eurocarb, so not much else we can do this weekend


Then we went and picked the Fug up, we are going to Rods and Customs breakfast meet in Aylesbury in the morning
Then we’ll be on mother’s day duties for the rest of the day

I've had more than a few breakfasts at Aylesbury Tuck!

Carb rebuild kits turned up



I think there are more gaskets for the carbs than for the whole of a beetle engine!
Will have a go at the carbs at the weekend... Lucy is working Friday night, so we may have a big well lit bench to work on (will have to burn some bacon to get rid of petrol smells though )


Having read Quatermass thread about the vacuum advance and Darkspeed response , got me thinking...

The preferred beetle dizzy for a nice running engine seems to be a SVSA (single vacuum single advance) these work well with standard carbs providing the vacuum.
There was also a SVDA dizzy (single vacuum as above, dual advance because they also use the centrifugal advance of the 010 and 009 dizzys). These dizzys work really well as the vacuum when you put you foot down advanced the timing and there is no hesitation.

If you change cams though, can overlap and the duration can change and the vacuum isn’t right. And if you change the carbs, you can lose the vacuum take off as well. For these reasons Bosch produced an 010 dizzy in the early 60s for modified engines.
This was later to be superceded by the Bosch 009.

The 009 was originally fitted to stationary engines, was cheap, was the dizzy to fit in the 90s and uses a centrifugal advance.
They are good for racing applications where the throttle is on or off, but can be horrible on the road, with a flat spot just off idle, the way around this is to blip the throttle before you want to pull away allegedly.

But on a modified engine like ours with a different cam, the 009 is said to be the best solution, I guess the increased bore and stroke will give more torque and that should in some way compensate for the flat spot.

So our engine already has a 009 fitted, so it would seem this is the best dizzy for us, and we should install electronic ignition to replace the points (which will probably be pertronix igniter 3 (because it has a built in rev limiter) and a flamethrower cook.
Or we could fit a billet centrifugal dizzy which would give us the ability to change the advance springs.

Any thoughts or comments?

Just worth putting here that when you put your foot down there is no Vacuum - Vacuum is created at idle when there the throttles are shut and at higher rpm with a light throttle - same result, engine running against a partially closed throttle - Race cams also develop very little or a very erratic Vacuum.


Vac advance provides the following

Stage 1 very little initial advance when starting to make starting easy
Stage 2 engine fires and there is a large vacuum that advances the timing
Stage 3 when the engine is floored the advance is removed and the centrifugal takes over providing the correct curve until it's all in a specified RPM.
Stage 4 back off the throttle for light load cruising and the vac adds more advance to the high rpm centrifugal to compensate for the lean mixtures at these running conditions
Stage 5 floor the throttle and the vacuum advance is removed and the timing reverts to the centrifugal to prevent over advance detonation.

An engine will start easy enough with quite a bit of static advance - no vac is therefore required
To perform and meet the power requirements all that is needed is a correct mechanical advance curve

The only point that a non vac loses out is on part throttle light cruising where the advance curve will not be optimal for the mixture conditions - not advanced enough which leads to poorer economy and higher emissions due to un-burnt fuel.

If running a tuned high performance engine the quality of the spark and the timing is far more important than part throttle cruising economy

Finding a decent vacuum signal with twin chokes is not the easiest of things , unlike single carbs and tame cams in road engines, which is why most stock performance cars of the time with twin 40's did not have vacuum advance systems distributors.

Clearly the best of all words is a 3D fully mapable system

A vacuum advance on a performance engine is in my personal view more trouble than it's worth. Unless you know the vacuum your modified engine will pull and the quality of the signal so you can map that vacuum signal to the vacuum canister to give the correct advance required by the engine at any given RPM you are better off without it.

ETA

It is probably worth explaining that in the dizzy the two advance systems work completely independent of one another - the advance weights and springs move the cam (that operates the points etc) on the rotating dizzy shaft relative to the fixed gear being driven by the engine, and the vac canister moves the plate on which the points / pick up is fixed.

I found this a very informative book.

Did something different today

The Fug is still at home after using it last weekend
So we set about making some rear mudguard brackets...

Back before the Gathering, we cobbled up some tube and made some temporary brackets.... we did it rather too well as they were very very functional, they looked terrible! But worked very well

So today we unbolted all of that and started making some new brackets, we started with some box bolted to the spring plate brackets



Then started to make some arms with some 5mm bar....
But we couldn’t bend it so had to be creative and cut grooves into the bar, bend and then weld







So we ended up with this



Which should look like this



Which at the very least is a lot cleaner looking


We also had a play with the bonnets, we fitted the aerocatches to the bonnet, but didn’t fit the pins underneath as we’ve run out of gas for the welder



Then messed about with some rattle cans (sorry Grumpynorthener )



We do know that it’s all in the prep... but couldn’t be bothered to move that small pile of washers we can rub it down next time and do something a bit better paint wise (but not much better... this bonnet is worse than the yellow one!)

Hopefully get some more gas tomorrow, then we can finish welding up the mudguard bracket and make another one for the other side

I fitted a simon bbc dizzy and coil to my mates t25 but still haven got round to firing it up yet, so cant give a propper verdict, i can sat the quality looks ok and it fitted well.
Dan

What blackpop said - it's surprising just how stiff they need to be with aero loads and vibration when they're hanging out there.

The reason we don't have cycle wings on the buggy was because even mounting them with a couple of pieces of 1.25" CDS tube they always bent and came off.