Here's a honkin hello from my family here in northern Vermont.
I bought my currently stored 1981 Vanagon on eBay for $1000 (my first Vanagon rusted out and I sold it to a Hippywannabe for $1500). The family got out the sandpaper, and I painted her Regal Red with a cream top - came out beautiful for $7.99. We ran it four summers and it started exhaling blue. I knew I could rebuild the engine since I rebuilt my last Vanagon's engine 11 years ago with great success. So anyway, the kids are all bigger and I felt the need for more power
, but not necessarily speed. I've grown up quite a bit and have tired of the snappiness that is so characteristic of Jettas and other liquid-cooled conveyances. Why not tick off the tourists up here and do the speed limit? So to get her done, I tore into the job last spring. But this time I changed a few things. I added a balanced/counterweighted crank and new GEX heads with larger valves. I also junked the 94mm scuffed pistons and jugs, replacing them with new 96mm ones. The GEX guy told me my fuel economy would drop a little, but after running it all last summer it went up about 1mpg to 21 (of course this is running around town with kids and groceries, mixed with the 8 miles of highway to town, and also the mile of gravel - uphill - to get home). My wife and I went to a sawmill seminar at Woodmizer in Maine and got 24mpg one trip without the kids.
At present, with the mountains of snow we have everywhere up here, I'm dreaming of getting the bus out once sugaring is done. I got an "electric turbocharger" on eBay and have it connected in before the air filter box - I just removed that 90 degree snout and clamped in a short length of 3" dryer duct. I need to rig up an electric switch to the throttle body so the fan kicks on when I'm just starting to go uphill. Anyone out there try this before? It's supposedly going to get me about 2psi of boost - maybe better fuel economy, and definitely more power. With six kids (eight when the Fresh Air kids are here :shock: ) we wanted a little more than my engine mods gave us on the rebuild - the mods sent us from the stock 67 hp to just above 80 (GEX's guess). That doesn't sound like much, but I've noticed many hills around here that I no longer need to downshift on! Happy trails one and all!!!! Dan Martin