Dave wrote to Rob –
My son's got a friend out there in Milwaukee who is also a VW buff. Apparently the guy showed Michael a picture of his engine with it's dual carbs. Now Mike's expressing possible interest in putting dual carbs on Beauty. I wrote Mike to say -
My emphasis to this point has been primarily to fix everything that was wrong -- and the result was pretty much a full restoration. All I did by way of souping it up was to install the Capacitive Discharge Ignition system, which improves the engine performance dramatically. I'm not really sure what dual carbs buy you -- yes, some increased horsepower, but what's the point? A VW isn't exactly a race car. If somebody wants a muscle car they should buy one in the first place. If you want to do things like that I will certainly help you, but like I said -- to this point my whole emphasis has been making the basic car good (and pretty, too! :-) )
Having said that, I turn to my mentor to ask -- is there any real advantage to installing dual carbs on a VW engine, other than to try to "soup it up"? Like I said, I really don't see the point -- a VW isn't a dragster and was never meant to be. I'm open to persuasion, but it seems to me that such things as you often see in "Hot VWs" and (unfortunately) in "VW Trends" are just an attempt to put muscle in a little car that was never meant to have muscle -- that's not it's appeal.
Or am I missing something?
Rob responded –
The VW engine is very amenable to souping up, but there's always a price.
Twin carbs will produce only a little extra power by themselves -- you need to use them with larger valve heads (041 or 044 heads for example) and a mild (or hot) cam to get any real increase, and with ANY twin carby set up they take a lot of extra tuning to keep in synch, otherwise your extra hp just disappears again.
You also really need a better exhaust system, though your sports system would be OK for a mild soup-up.
Great for those really into cars who don't mind spending extra hours on the weekend getting dirty, but is Mike like that really?
He needs to think to whole process through -- to get more hp out, you need to get more air and fuel in. Bigger or twin carbs is only a small part of the story -- you need bigger valves and higher duration cams, maybe ratio rockers (to lift the valves higher). And that's just to get the stuff in - then you have to get it out too (exhaust system)!
Twin carbies will cost some big pennies -- it's useless going the el-cheapo route with carbs, you get what you pay for, and they can be touchy enough even with only one (as we well know). You could also try fuel injection, of course, but ANY significant increase in hp comes at a proportional cost.
Oh -- and if you increase the "go" performance you also need to increase the "stop" performance (preferably first!). Disc brakes and maybe an upgrade of the rear brakes to the larger Type 3 rear brakes (very easy conversion) etc.
A well built 1600 is actually a decent performing vehicle in my opinion. I've always thought that the appeal of the VW was in it's "cute" factor and engineering, rather than in a screaming performance.
That said, I've thought frequently of how to get a little more grunt, and still retain the ease of maintenance etc, and the solution I always come back to is a 1776 conversion, still using the 34PICT/3 (with slightly larger jets for the increased capacity), so that you get plenty of acceleration, but without much more top speed (carby limited). This still keeps everything close to stock, performance in the "safe zone" and retains reasonable reliability. Maybe one day, but until then - 1600 does me just fine anyway...
Disclaimer stuff: Rob and Dave have prepared this information from their own experiences. We have not assumed any specialised mechanical knowledge, but we DO assume that anyone using this information has at least some basic mechanical ability.
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Last revised 5 May 2004.
