TRYING to Rebuild an Air-Cooled Engine in 16 HOURS

[Music] air cooled engines are kind of like the step grandfather to our modern day engines they're kind of weird and much like a step grandfather i've never worked on one so naturally we're going to try to rebuild the engine from top to bottom that's in this bus today in 12 hours i'm zach and this is money pit huge thanks to our friends at off the record for sponsoring another episode of money pit we've all been there before you're cruising down the highway late at night maybe doing a few miles an hour over the speed limit when all of a sudden you hear it no those can't be for me they are for me now what well let's face it that ticket is gonna cost you and with how much money the miata's been costing me there's just no way i can afford it and it's not just a pricey fine you're also looking at a potential increase in insurance premium no one can afford an increase in insurance premiums especially just over one stupid ticket well don't put up with it anymore fight the ticket with the help of off the record all you gotta do is download the app and put in some basic information like what happened where you got the ticket why you got it and then off the record we'll connect you with a licensed attorney that'll fight the ticket on your behalf and better yet they offer a money-back guarantee if they're not able to reduce your fine now i know some of you got speeding tickets over labor day weekend so what are you waiting for go to off the record dot com slash donut or use the off the record app and use code donut to save 10 now let's get back to the show so as you might be able to tell i'm not in la i'm actually in the beautiful city of albuquerque new mexico but why am i here well our friends over at chinatown market are rebuilding this bus and we're here to help them rebuild the engine today and i hear that they sent us some merch ooh daddy oh yo that is too cool oh my god oh my god are you ready dude all right why are we talking fashion and what does it have to do with cars well a big part of chinatown markets collaboration with the grateful dead is this bus they're building this 1969 vw bus as an homage to an old deadheads van that would have driven around the country back in the 60s and 70s so helping us achieve or attempt to achieve our lofty goals today we've got quirky local dan brockett you are a stunt driver you're an fd drift car haver tell me about what you've mechaniced so far drove to arizona to pick this thing up drove it overnight got home took it to my buddies next level paint here in albuquerque and they knocked out all the dents all the dings did all the bodywork primed sanded sealed in one day in one day so during my off week while the paint was outgassing i did the entire interior i did it all in my driveway and for most of the upholstery which i had to google how to do i used this really sick top of the line sewing machine so without further ado we're going to get this bus on the lift and yank the engine out of it and along the way as we do that we'll talk about the air cooled engine what's different about it as i learned because i've never been that deep on one so it's going to be an interesting day let's get to it right now i'm trying to take out the bell housing bolts to disconnect the engine from the trans axle once those are out i think there are two engine mounts attached to the subframe we should be able to drop those down and then i think that's it uh yeah so you got to be organized especially when you don't know what you're doing so as things come off label them put them in a bag and that should save us some headaches uh in a few hours this afternoon you know this is all the electronics this thing has that's it baby that's it so the idea here is to take all the uh peripherals all the accessories off the engine get ourselves down to a naked engine and then we'll use that naked engine as a reference for when we're putting together our new stuff like i said before air-cooled engines are old technology the big difference between these and new engines is that air-cooled engines don't use coolant they just use air to keep cool it's literally in the name these things were originally put into production in the 1930s so not only are they kind of weird they're also old so there's bound to be a lot of stuff i've never seen before so this is uh part of the exhaust pipe and the heater tube so you can see the exhaust pipe runs right through here which runs through the center of this big old tube that just gets all hot in here and then sends air to the cabin so this is how this thing gets heat and it looks like a duck dude yeah i was gonna say it's got a duck face with a rat he's been excited you can also i don't think we've mentioned it but you can see it's a horizontally opposed engine sort of like a porsche 911 basically the same thing or a subaru or a subaru with less ring land issues shots fired not even just fired they know so these these cases tend to crack over time too and i think that's part of uh you know i think that's partially because they're made out of magnesium which dissipates heat well and it's very light but eventually they'll crack and uh leak tremendous amounts of oil drive you're saying what you want is there a nut on the back of this that you haven't told me about i'm just spinning yeah well okay yeah one fell swoop baby one fell swoop okay so all these old air-cooled engines need rebuilt pretty frequently but they can only be rebuilt so many times before they're just too worn out and we didn't know what kind of condition the engine that was in our bus was in so we went with a kit from jbugs that will essentially replace everything on the old engine however we are 100 trusting that this kit has everything we need to complete this rebuild so speaking of rebuilds let's talk about engine oil so on the topic of oil one of the best ways one of the most surefire ways to know if you need to rebuild your engine is based on how much oil it consumes while you're driving it and everything will kind of have a spec for how much it's appropriate to consume like these consume a lot of oil by today's standards they're within spec if they're consuming about a quart every thousand miles which is kind of a lot but you know the spec then if you're consuming two quarts every thousand miles you know you're consuming too much which means something inside the engine has a problem and it's letting oil go into the combustion chamber or just leak out onto the ground your piston rings can be too worn which allows oil to get past them go into the combustion chamber and out the tailpipe or your valve guides could be worn letting oil down into the combustion chamber or you could just have some leaks externally which this had many so how much oil your engine is consuming is really the the most surefire way to know whether or not you need to rebuild so with the engine out of the bus we started putting bits together from the kit starting with our bottom end our crankshaft our connecting rods our pistons but as you could expect we skipped a few things so it's 7 30 p.m which puts us at about nine maybe almost 10 hours into all this and the parts table still looks like a parts table it is a pile of parts we've got a few things stuck together but uh we're not moving too quick uh the guy we were kind of relying on to help us through the hard spots he ain't here so we're gonna keep tracking see what we can get done i don't think it's gonna be that big of a deal for the time consuming part okay so uh the main bearing for the crank uh and this one yep two of them should have been put on before we put our timing gear and our flywheel on which we just realized so with uh the very small amount of work we've gotten done we have to go back undo it and then redo it all right so we've got the distributor on you've got a distributor drive shaft so this thing's ready to make spark it's a little ways away but that's okay uh so now we need to start putting some of this stuff together for real get uh half the new engine on the engine stand and then start putting stuff in it how many hours are we in right now about 10 maybe 11. too many we don't have that many left just found out this band has to be at the wrap shop for a wrap by 8 am so we better get bogin soon after we realized we needed an expert so we put out a call on instagram david showed up and immediately realized that we had a mix of dual port parts from the kit and single port parts from the original engine so this kit is supposed to increase horsepower a lot and one of the ways that it does that is by uh changing it to a dual port intake manifold so it can get in more air you see the two ports there dual ports get it well the problem is the stock engine is a single port you see that singular port the problem there is that the intake manifold that we need to use is a single port intake manifold because the kit didn't come with a new intake manifold so david went back to his shop and found some bits that we needed to continue assembly and before we knew it we went deep into the night all right it's 3 30 in the morning we've got this engine pretty much together still working on the valve train got to get the push rods figured out listen the list actually continues there's a lot left to do but we got a lot of the big stuff done and we're gonna call it for tonight [Music] okay we are back in the shop got a few hours of sleep last night and we're getting it going uh working on a push rods and trying to put them together currently which is going less than smoothly which makes sense given how this has gone thus far but i think we're gonna get this thing together and running today thoughts yes um i got nothing dan and i then got right back to it and started assembling as much as we could of the main engine block and then a few hours later all right the basic engine is together the bottom end is in the top end is in and it spins valve's open seems to be pretty much there so the last step of basic engine assembly is to put the rocker covers on which are kind of funny they use a cork gasket like they did things back in the day they also don't use any hardware or any you know fasteners so with these rocker covers our short block is assembled short block means that it's basically the engine without any accessories so next wow we got to put on all the accessories from our old engine like the generator and the fan system and all those pieces of sheet metal that direct all that air that's how you put the valve cover on and then shove the thing back in the uh in the old bus you know busarooni so i mean no time to sit and uh be proud of ourselves we gotta keep moving well as we continue to put the engine together i continued to run into questions and things weren't feeling quite right until another quirky miracle happened and we found another air-cooled volkswagen expert all right so this is getting ridiculous we've got our third volkswagen expert here rocky from general parts thank you so much for coming i don't know how we keep finding bolts what air-cooled volkswagen experts but we do and honestly i think you're going to save our lives look at this we're already back down to just the case and crank and rotating assembly which is frightening but when we got everything put together it was too tight when we try to spin it so we got to figure out what's going on which is a bit of extra work but not too bad we're pretty good at taking this thing apart and putting it back together now uh maybe eventually we'll put it back together such that it runs but we'll see so we're concerned that the rods are in backwards this is very ambiguous there's a lot of conflicting information out there we used our best judgment and did what we did but i think the rods might be reverse of what they should be so we're getting back down to the rods uh we'll see what happens with rocky and all of his experience here to save the day we got back to assembling everything the right way oh yeah and did i mention these engines don't even use a head gasket uh this is actually the closest thing we've got to a head gasket on this where where the top of the jug meets the head it seals up nice and flat metal on metal i think i said that the yamabond does that but really that's just to seal the case up to keep it from leaking oil out the bottom if we were leaking compression out there that would mean our rings would be uh gone so yeah this the kit came with paper gaskets for the bottom we ditched those in favor of this sweet yamabond stuff and uh at the top we just seal up metal on metal air cooled stuff baby quite but hey like we were talking about at the beginning before we took everything apart the whole big shroud that you know the air runs through and runs down the sides of the engines to cool it all that air would just go through the jugs right between them and out the bottom if it weren't for these deflectors on the bottom you see these phil these big ones that keeps all that air from going between the jugs and then those keep it from going between the gaps of the head so these are super important and i forgot to put these in the first time around too until i found in a hidden section in the book that these are very important and they need to be installed and to backtrack as far as you have to put them back in so backtrack we did and in they are unlike my nose and my mask had such a big face rocky's experience really came in clutch as we continued to assemble the short block and it was finally time to test if we were doing things right oh that feels great that feels really good so we turned around the connecting rods since uh i put them in backwards and now things feel exquisite so i think we're on the right track there's hope of this thing yet you know it's something every step of the way the new o-ring for the distributor was huge and we were trying to get it into this bore and it just sheared itself so we're just gonna use the old one it's still in good shape and hopefully it won't leak if it does it'll only be a little leak it's something every step all right this thing's starting to look like an engine again we've got some accessories on like an oil cooler our distributor our fuel pump now we need to put our oil pump in place down here the heart of the engine that pumps the lifeblood uh obviously super important uh did you see all these shiny parts we got dang look at my handprints come on man that's right baby this thing looks like a real race car engine well we got some new tins for our dual port head you see so these tins uh have room for these two ports it's bigger than the stock stuff that we had so we needed new tins and luckily we were able to get these locally today which is kind of crazy but we got them they look sweet and they're on and it'll work okay we've got all our tins on most of our peripherals i think we're ready for what's going to make this thing look like a real engine again let's do it dude get her on there oh yeah yep so this is uh the upper part of the fan system for the cooling uh as you may recall from what feels like a month ago and it's finally going back on maybe kind of sort of fighting us all right so i oriented orientated this so that it was pointed down right and now the battery post is up against the generator does that tell you that [ __ ] was assembled wrong in the first place so this whole time it hasn't been hasn't been venting like it should have it's always something rocky it's always something well it looks like an engine we got all our shrouds on and honestly we've made so much progress and we go all to rocky honestly so we're going to call it for tonight it's almost 4 again and we're going to be back here in the morning again and tomorrow's the day i swear tomorrow's the day this thing's gonna run and run inside of the bus it's gonna move the bus tomorrow that's what i'm yeah [Music] obviously things have been taken a little bit longer than we originally were hoping for but our original goals were absolutely ridiculous the fact is we're making progress and this thing is going to run but we've been having to roll with the punches along the way since this has taken uh like four times as long as we were originally hoping so the guys from one click stick the guys that were gonna wrap the van for dan instead of doing that at their nice shop that they have all set up for wrapping they came here and did it here yesterday take a look it's sick just kidding psych you can't see it yet if you want to see it and trust me you do you got to check out chinatown markets youtube video check it out in the link wherever that year felipe puts it so anyhow the plan for today is to get this thing buttoned up and into the vehicle pretty soon so i'm getting some uh odds and ends bolted up we got to get the intake and the exhaust on those are the big things but i'm gonna wait for rocky to get here on that because maybe he'll look at it and go no you dummy it just goes like this that'd be cool hopefully he'll be here soon did you enhance the duck he's got eyebrows now and he's angry about it probably because his mouth is full of hornets we've done it again memphis stop again and uh and then now we can't get the manifold shoehorned in i just should have done it earlier is what we're trying to say here you should've coulda woulda well you know how are we supposed to know until we found out okay so those are there nothing on top of the valve covers these have to go underneath and from the back let's see so while i tried to figure out where things went and as dan also struggled with the carb guess who showed up rocky's back rocky's back this engine's going in all right everything's fine now he gave it once over it looks like we didn't do anything too bone-headed and that the issues that we were facing were actual issues so that's good uh this thing's almost complete putting the clutch and pressure plate on right now and then slam this thing into the butt of that bus we sorted the final bits with rocky's help and finally got to throw the new engine in the van mind you it did need some persuasion whoa how much how close is it the bell housing bolts are tight oh my god this thing looks complete it looks about the same as it did three days ago but slightly shinier and uh with more of my fingerprints all over it pretty sweet uh we're so close so we're gonna put some oil in it and break it in which means we're gonna fire it up we're gonna run it at about 1500 to 2000 rpms for about 20 minutes then we're going to shut it off let it cool down we're going to change the oil dump out all the oil that's in there from break in because there will be little pieces of metal in it from that break-in from all our new engine components then we'll drain that out let it cool down we're gonna have to readjust our valve lash and then we'll put fresh oil in it put this thing on the dyno and see what it makes are you ready let's go all right dan's about to crank that key and this thing might just fire to life so you're going to be blocking air because we're trying to get a bunch of fuel into the carb right exactly so then are you going to pull your hand off while he's still cranking yeah as soon as he wants to start i'll remove it alrighty daniel you ready let's crank this i got the throttle dude well everything's covered in oil that's not what you want can you see anything [Music] can you tell me what happened no i don't know so with a big puddle of oil on the ground rocky pretty quickly thought that he knew what was going on welp looks like this one's completely on me so these two springs oil relief valves and the long one goes in the front of the engine which i put at the front of the engine except the front of the engine is at the back of the bus so this is the front of the engine i put the long one at the front physically speaking but literally speaking this is the front of the engine so that's what caused that and i'm pretty sure it just blew the oil cooler apart so now we need a new oil cooler rocky says he might have one here's the hoping well rocky did have a new oil cooler so we got it in and we've got everything buttoned back up and we're ready to put oil in it again and fire it up and then break it in hopefully this time it'll be a little less dramatic are you gonna throttle yeah so what have we learned about air cooled engines so far well like a lot of old stuff they're pretty simple but they are unique and there's just no replacement for having experience when you're working on this kind of stuff especially when you're trying to rebuild an engine from scratch now as far as pros and cons go well man i can't see too many pros other than not having to use coolant i guess that's pretty cool but these things well they make a lot of noise they need rebuilt often and they don't make very much power so i can see why people replace these in a lot of the old vw buses but overall it was an awesome experience leaching on other people's experience to figure out how to get this thing put together see rocky there goes my hero well rocky just rolled off and our bus runs and i honestly can't really believe it i can't believe how much came together over the past three days look yeah we were talking about getting this done in 12 hours that was never realistic i just can't believe at this point that it got done so many people came together and gave up their life to help us get this thing done that i honestly am in amazement right now i'm in awe of the people around here and then even ten tenths giving us this shop space they gave us two bays prime time space run of the mill let us use all their tools let us do whatever we needed to do and we're so helpful i couldn't be more thankful i literally can't believe it and then rocky oh my god i don't even know how he got hooked up with rocky but he's got he owns an air cooled vw shop it's called general parts and it sounds so cool this is what he does and he is the reason this thing runs and i realize i see this van and see how damn cool it looks it honestly looks awesome like i can't believe it and you guys can't see it so if you want to see it which you should you gotta check out chinatown markets video

Channel: Donut Media

Views: 1,090,624

Rating: 4.9552512 out of 5

Keywords: VW, Volkswagen, VW bus, westfalia, vw westfalia, 1969 vw bus, 1969, air cooled engine, engine rebuild, jbugs kit, chinatown market, ctm, grateful dead van, Donut Media, Cars, Automotive, Money Pit, automotive history, Donut, Donut Miata, car build, car mods, Zach Jobe

Id: tC9TSkxnYqQ

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020