I believe the carbies on my '73 Type 3 notch are flaming. When I'm driving and I shift down, the engine revs and I hear the carbies giving off a 'popping' sound.

I just had it serviced (he wasn't a VW specialist) and he said the regulator needs looking at. I'm not too familiar with carbies or engines to be honest.

Is this a common problem? Is this something I can fix myself?

Would I be right in thinking this air/fuel mixture is incorrect and it's running too rich?

Cheers for any help.

Are you sure its the Carbies? You could just have an exhaust leak.

Hmm. For some reason I just assumed it would be the carbies. How would be able to check? The sound only seems to come when I'm driving the car. If I'm in neutral nothing happens. So I can't just park it, rev it and get someone to check it out.

my notch has what seams to be the same noise(although I haven't been able to drive it yet). But when in neautral it idles fine then when you give it a rev it pops and cracks from an exhaust leak in one of the j tubes. Also seems to drop a cylinder or two intermitantely not sure if this is the exhaust or not.

were the tappets set

My first 76 used to shoot flames. This happened after I installed a set of extractors and didn't seal off the pre-heat tubes. It seems it was sucking air through the preheat tubes, and on change down and sometimes after a hard rev in neutral, excess fuel would combust as it exited the tail pipe. Looked kinda cool shooting 1m blue flames, but I'm sure it wasn't very safe. Sealing the preheat tubes off fixed the problem in my instance.

Haha. Interesting!

I'll check it out and see what the deal is. If it's still happening, I'll take it to a VW specialist and he can fix it for me. But I'll see if I can figure out what the problem is first and try to fix it myself.

mine was on exhaust too
we were crusing with my mate and he said he saw flame poping out of my exhaust
when i downshift. anyway later at night i saw the reflection off of a building glass
and it really did flame out lol. and i found that there was a leak in the j pipe

now.. the thing is.. my brother lancer cc (SU-like carby) makes that sounds too
after we put two resonators as mufflers lol.. I'm not sure about leaks
but there was no flame out the exhaust probably coz the pipe work is longer than vw
and that it has a cat

sounds like you might have an exhaust leak, cover the tail pipe and see if it builds up pressure or if you can hear a leak!

My car was doing this recently also, the popping thing, not sure about the flame thrower issue though. All new engine and exhaust. It started after re-fueling with some Vortex. I'm was told the fuel may have had some moisture in it and to try putting some fuel additive. Half a bottle of Textron 5000 seems to have fixed the problem after 2-3 days. Perhaps try this simple solution first. Very small expense for such a massive improvement. Will continue to use this even though the popping has been resolved.

Nick.

Finally got a chance to check it out today. When I cover up the tail pipe there doesn't seem to be any pressure building up at all. I can't quite see where it's coming out from though. I'll keep testing to see where the leak is.