Hey all

I've been meaning to write this since Easter when it all went pear shaped.

S1fter and his wife came to stay so we could all visit the Wellington Nationals in my 1302, which up until the night before was running well. However we struggled home on 3 cylinders that evening.

The next morning I raced off to Repco for new plugs and points for a quick tune up to fix the problem but found I couldn't get the spark plug back in. Turns out it had a heli-coil which came out with the plug. Doh!

Stuffing it back in didn't work as well as hoped so we drove off to the show and shine in the alternative transport.

That evening we pulled the engine out. Which caused head aches in itself... Some mean bugger had replaced an engine mount bolt with a 5/8 inch one

Being young enough not to own such aggravating sizes I had rang aroung various freinds and we collected one on the way to the show's BBQ.

After dinner we finished pulling the engine, swapped the head with another I had laying around and put the engine back in.

It all went suprisingly smoothly. We also found a good sized crack between the inlet and exhaust valves on the old head.

We crawled off to bed at about 2:30am after a quick test run for a few hours sleep before driving out to join the convoy that morning.

We arrived to join 70 Beetles and about 20 buses and 20 T3's in a cloud of smoke. Oil from somewhere was burning off at an impressive rate causing some alarm with other participants.

However we made it the show in my car

Since then I've tidied up a few of the problems so it seems to be running great again, for the short while. Hence the new 1600 TP in the pipeline.

Photo's of the action to come

Jeremy

Alternative Transport.....

Eerrrr...... engine work

Did I mention my garage doesn't have electricity. We ran a 50m extension cord from the house with a desk lamp and a 12V fluro tube on the car battery. Hence my head torch (I'm the one with the wooly sheep on my head )

Lastly....the offending head

If you want to check out proper photos of the show they're at the Canterbury Club site here
http://www.cantyvwclub.orcon.net.nz/events.html 

Cheers
Jeremy

You should have used a couple of cans of degreaser first

Dave

Probably should have used a 44 gallon drum of the stuff... I'm still finding gunge all over my garage floor