Marvin

Last trip for Marvin still being an air-cooled bus, carrying his own replacement parts.

Lets start by measuring the Golf deck height.  From the center of the engine shaft at what was the current installed angle to the top of the deck lid as flat. Record this.  Measure the bus deck height.  It is going to be about 15mm too tall.  Rotate the engine CCW a few degrees. Fits now... 

Forget the deck height.

Figure out what that angle from vertical actually is on the Golf. Record it. Transfer this critical angle to a large center drilled AL plate with both the engine and transmission bolt pattern.  

Machine a groove in one side of the plate to match the bell housing ring.  

Thank you to American Fabricating of Ann Arbor, MI for the shop time, 21 years later.

Machine in the pockets for the bolt heads/studs.  Hammer fit.

Machine away all markings.

Forget the angle.

This is of course of no consequence to this project, but it does throw a wrench in reconstructing the actual parts created for others.  Pictures work though, with some patience.

A friend of mine had very recently rolled their 88 Golf.  

As fate would have it she was an organ donor. 

The car that is... and the friend I suppose... but we haven't needed her parts yet.

Well now we have some target starting and end points, and probably most of what we need to get there!

Thank you blessed Golf for your gifts to Marvin.  

Lets get started.

In the immortal words of Ryden, Yoink...

Out of all this to make everything work and be compliant, you need to keep 2 relays which I ran on one.  Fuel pump and O2 sensor pre-heat.

The old engine bay. There are many photos from before this, somewhere else. 

This one was taken at the point I was already planning to remove everything up until the firewall. I wish I had kept that blower. That would have made some of what is to come a bit easier.

The 67hp was actually ok to deal with unless you were fully loaded and/or trying to climb any kind of grade whatsoever. You can also kindly forget about ever towing anything substantial.  Of course the times you were fully loaded were the times you were most likely to be doing said grade climbing. 35 wide open in the slow lane.  You could feel when you were all alone.  It was spry by comparison then.

I really wish I had captured some before and after numbers now. I'm sure Google has collected this information for me on a similar build if I looked hard enough.  Perhaps I will look hard enough some day.

Squirrel.

Anyway, what really did it for me was the eventual consumption and leaking of somewhere around a gallon of oil per hundred miles and the subsequent danger of randomly going up in flames at the end. This also got intolerable once the back window started needing to be cleaned multiple times per fill-up to even be usable.

Leaking that much from so many places could really not be a good sign. When the oil starts to leak from many places at once that engine crank case is operating at positive pressure now.  That is a lot of blow-by to be able to overwhelm that huge black  ~20mm PCV valve above on the lower left. That crankcase should have been perfectly balanced.

It still ran fine and was not really at a loss for power yet as long as it stayed cooler. We started to leak onto the manifold though while on the return trip from Minnesota to Ann Arbor, MI. 

When we returned I asked a friend if I could borrow his garage and I dropped that engine without ever cracking it open. I imagine it's probably still..

Now, perhaps I should formulate a plan.

I do believe the oil leaks, and other excess lubricant never cleaned from most parts along with other protective foreign matter which we will get to later, contributed greatly to the preservation of the body.  It has the original battery trays.... so there is that.